[Lingtyp] Proto-World explains universals

Wed Jan 22 08:04:07 UTC 2020

Thanks, Jürgen!

I have no views of my own on the probability of the gestural theory of language evolution (or related 'multimodal' theories, which assume a more balanced relationship between phonetic and kinetic articulation); but I don't think that the question is off topic. If the conditions under which (spoken) language emerged were different from the conditions under which it is used today, it wouldn't make much sense to try and infer properties of early linguistic systems through statistical modeling of contemporary systems. In any case I think it is a factor that would have to be taken into consideration in some way (and which is also relevant to the question of linguistis fossils raised by Martin), unless it is visibly and clearly wrong.

Volker

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-----Original Message-----
From: "Bohnemeyer, Juergen" <jb77 at buffalo.edu>
To: Volker Gast <volker.gast at uni-jena.de>
Cc: "lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org" <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Sent: Wed, 22 Jan 2020 1:04
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] Proto-World explains universals

Volker — Although it’s off-topic, let me briefly comment on gestural origin hypotheses. First off, the most concrete and plausible version of such a hypothesis that I can think of would involve stages along the following lines:

1. Communicative use of emblematic gestures, pointing gestures, and iconic gestures.
2. #1 intensifies into something resembling modern home sign systems.
3. Sign languages emerge.
4. Spoken languages emerge as “hands-free” versions of sign languages. 

What’s attractive about this scenario is that we are able to observe transitions similar to the one from #2 to #3 today, so we know that’s something that’s possible.

OTOH the greatest weakness of this story are #1 all by itself and the transition from #3 to #4: 

The problem with #1 is that we have no evidence that any form of gesture evolved independently of language (which of course doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen). There’s in particular (as far as I know) no compelling evidence that nonhuman primates gesture in the wild. They produce something resembling pointing gestures to ask for objects, but it’s not obvious that they point with the primary purpose of directing each other’s attention. (I realize this is somewhat controversial, but my understanding is that the consensus is leaning that way.)

One might argue that the very existence of home sign systems proves that #1 could have emerged in the absence of language. But, actually, we do not have any evidence (again, so far as I know) of home sign systems that emerged in the absence of language. That is to say, wherever present-day home sign systems have evolved, the idea of linguistic communication (including co-speech gesture) was already in the particular community’s meme pool.

As for the transition from Stage 3 to Stage 4, obviously that too has not been observed. But it strikes me that this could be studied experimentally. For example: take two groups of participants who speak non-overlapping sets of languages; teach them a miniature artificial sign language so that one becomes their sole interlanguage, then have them interact with one another and see whether they gradually begin to verbalize the sign language. Of course, whatever the outcome of such an experiment, the participants will already have had the benefit of having the idea of spoken languages plus the (procedural) knowledge of how spoken languages circumvent some of the disadvantages the acoustic medium has over the visual one (especially when it comes to representations of space). 

Just some thoughts on an intriguing topic that has a lot more complexity and conceptual pitfalls to it than might meet the eye! 

Best — Juergen

> On Jan 21, 2020, at 9:52 AM, Volker Gast <volker.gast at uni-jena.de> wrote:
> 
> Martin (and others),
> I wonder how popular the gestural theory of language evolution is among typologists and evolutionary linguists (generativists probably reject it). If the phonetic channel was secondary at the beginning, the constraints may well have been very different, and may have shifted as vocalizations gained more and more weight, becoming the primary carrier of information. (I don't have access to the Bickel/Nichols paper that you mention, perhaps they address that question.)
> 
> Volker
> Am 21.01.2020 um 15:29 schrieb Haspelmath, Martin:
>> Many thanks, Michael, for making it so concrete! I had been aware of the Givón-Newmeyer idea (1979/2000) that SOV was the original clause order, which seems to have been taken up by Gell-Mann & Ruhlen and a few others more recently.
>> 
>> But that was not a claim of a current universal tendency being influenced by Proto-World (or a founder population), because there is no clear evidence for a universal (S)OV tendency. OV languages are the majority, but VO order is well represented on all continents (https://wals.info/feature/83A; though less so among genera and top-level families than among languages).
>> 
>> It is certainly a possibility that the relatively few human languages that were spoken 50 kya were more uniform than the languages spoken today, but is there any reason to think that this was actually the case? Around that time, most parts of Africa, and all of southern Eurasia plus Indonesia and Sahul are known to have been inhabited (see a nice map here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_first_human_settlements). Why would the few languages spoken at that time have been more similar to each other than they are now? Many people think that languages existed 150 kya or earlier, and there were other Homo groups (Denisovans, Neanderthals, and probably others) that may well have had languages as well.
>> 
>> And yes, it may be that the rate of change was somehow lower in earlier times (even though people did of course move around, have contact with other groups, replace them, etc., just as they are now), but it however slow the change has been, it has led to great differences between languages (both grammatically and lexically), while at the same time, many grammatical types recur in different continents. And for all we know, lexical forms are more stable than grammatical types, so if there were any very early retentions, we would expect them in superstable words.
>> 
>> Bickel & Nichols (2020) do not seem to find specific structural features associated with hunter-gatherer languages, and they conclude:
>> "Until such relations [between food procurement types and linguistic types] are demonstrated, typological generalizations drawn from modern languages can be assumed to be valid for all of the history and prehistory of language... frequencies and distributions, but not principles or defaults or constraints, have changed since the Paleolithic." (2020: 73)
>> However, my question was about *universals*: So what kinds of logically possible language types are there that might have NOT developed because there was not enough time, or because change was too slow over the last 50 kya? If the earliest languages had [OV ~ case ~ suffixing morphology], then this is precisely the kind of type that is not greatly overrepresented today (as noted above). There are surprisingly many OV languages lacking object marking (Sinnemäki 2010), and there are good functional reasons for more object marking in these languages than would be expected by chance.
>> 
>> What I was looking for was claims that clear universal tendencies (e.g. that all languages have demonstratives, or that all languages with subject indexing use it with action predicates) were inherited from an earlier much smaller population ("Proto-World", or some bottleneck population), and that the non-existing types have simply not developed because there was not enough time. In other words, I was looking for concrete claims (not just a vague possibility) which would imply that, in order to assess universal probabilities, we must also take into account the effect of incomplete diversification from the original founding language(s), in addition to the well-established skewing effects of genealogy and geography.
>> 
>> Best,
>> Martin
>> 
>> ******************
>> 
>> Bickel, Balthasar & Nichols, Johanna. 2020. Linguistic typology and hunter-gatherer languages. In Güldemann, Tom & McConvell, Patrick & Rhodes, Richard A. (eds.), The language of hunter-gatherers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
>> https://books.google.de/books?hl=de&lr=&id=cm_IDwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA67&ots=CvnierJexx&sig=4zxJc2tKUt7T8uqmZBSUQTxIPwo
>> Sinnemäki, Kaius. 2010. Word order in zero-marking languages. Studies in Language 34(4). 869–912. (doi:10.1075/sl.34.4.04sin)
>> 
>> On 20.01.20 22:45, Michael Cysouw wrote:
>>> Whatever/When “Proto-World” was, it surely had a founder-effect in the sense that the original population of speakers was small, and whatever language-structures these people starting using were surely just a small selection of the many different possibilities that human language can have. Then, in the first tens of thousands of years that human language was around, the number of languages and the population of speakers for each language remained small. So there was a lot of possibility of founder effects here too.
>>> 
>>> Just to put things in perspective:
>>> 
>>> - immediately post-glacial (10kya) the total worldwide human population was in the order of 1-10 million
>>> - even today the median number of speakers per language is in the order of 10-100 thousand speakers
>>> - taking upper (10M humans) and lower (10K speakers per language) estimates for an upper boundary, this means that 10kya there were maximally 1000 languages, possibly much less.
>>> - Estimates for human populations before the last glacial maximum are much less clear (but see e.g. Atkinson/Gray/Drummund 2008), but 100kya we are probably talking more about 10K humans in total, i.e. just a handful of different languages. By 50kya there are probably still clearly less than 50K humans in total in the worlds, i.e. a few dozens of languages.
>>> 
>>> In my opinion there is intriguing (though surely not conclusive) evidence that the few languages that started it all off would show rather different typological profiles as a sample of today’s languages (e.g. the citations by Harald, or hidden in some of my own work Cysouw 2002; Cysouw/Comrie 2012;2013). Some possibilities that might be considered for EHLS (“early human language structures”) are: much less fixed order, OV-type order (when fixed order is used), possibly some verbal morphology (with case only coming later?), no tone, no voicing oppositions.
>>> 
>>> It is even more difficult to speculate whether correlations between linguistic characteristics are also influenced by these early processes, i.e. are contemporary correlations between linguistic types an effect of founder effects? My guess is that most typological correlations are *not* influenced by EHLS. However, the contemporary statistical correlations between [OV ~ case ~ suffixing morphology] might be an example of such an effect of early human language structures.
>>> 
>>> Given the small number of humans and the small number of languages, my guess would also be that the rate of language change would have been much smaller for most of the history of human languages. There was simply not much pressure to introduce much change (less contact, less need for social separation, in total less interactions because simply fewer people).
>>> 
>>> What seems rather clear is that the development of languages with more than 1M speakers is recent (I would guess that there were no languages with more than 1M speakers before the last glacial maximum), and that the development of such large speaker communities has had a profound impact on the typological profile of these languages.
>>> 
>>> best
>>> Michael
>>> 
>>> =========
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Quentin D. Atkinson, Russell D. Gray, Alexei J. Drummond (2008). mtDNA Variation Predicts Population Size in Humans and Reveals a Major Southern Asian Chapter in Human Prehistory. Molecular Biology and Evolution, Volume 25, Issue 2, Pages 468–474, 
>>> https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msm277
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Cysouw, Michael & Bernard Comrie. 2013. Some observations on typological features of hunter-gatherer languages. In Balthasar Bickel, Lenore A. Grenoble, David A. Peterson & Alan Timberlake (eds.), Language Typology and Historical Contingency, 383-394. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
>>> 
>>> Comrie, Bernard & Michael Cysouw. 2012. New Guinea through the eyes of WALS. Language and Linguistics in Melanesia 30. 65-95.
>>> 
>>> Cysouw, Michael. 2002. Interpreting typological clusters. Linguistic Typology 6(1). 69-93. 
>>> 
>>> 
>> 
>> -- 
>> Martin Haspelmath (
>> haspelmath at shh.mpg.de
>> )
>> Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
>> Kahlaische Strasse 10
>> D-07745 Jena  
>> &
>> Leipzig University
>> Institut fuer Anglistik 
>> IPF 141199
>> D-04081 Leipzig  
>> 
>> 
>> 
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