Evolution of Human Languages
An
international project on the linguistic prehistory of humanity [Contacts] There are currently about 6,000 languages on Planet Earth
as of 2017, some of them spoken by millions and some by only a few dozen
people. A primary goal of EHL researchers is to provide a detailed
classification of these languages, organizing them into a genealogical tree
similar to the accepted classification of biological species. Since all
representatives of the species Homo sapiens presumably share a common origin,
it would be natural to suppose - although this is a goal yet to be achieved -
that all human languages also go back to some common source. Most existing
classifications, however, do not go beyond some 300-400-language families
that are relatively easy to discern. This restriction has natural reasons:
languages must have been spoken and constantly evolving for at least 40,000
years (and quite probably more), while any two languages separated from a
common source inevitably lose almost all superficially common features after
some 6,000-7,000 years. Nevertheless,
despite widespread skepticism and reluctance to tackle the problem, there are
a number of scholars who believe that these obstacles are not insurmountable.
Research has been going on over the past several decades that appear to
indicate that larger genetic groupings are not only possible, but indeed
quite plausible. It can be shown that most of the world's language families
can be classified into roughly a dozen large groupings, or macro families.
Two sorts of evidence can be used for this purpose: 1) Even a
superficial analysis of the vocabulary of a large number of linguistic
families reveals numerous lexical similarities extending far beyond the
borders of the smaller genetic units. They are frequently restricted to
individual macro families (such as Eurasiatic, Afro Asiatic etc.), but a
significant number of such matches have already been found between the macro
families themselves, pointing to the probability of common origin. 2) Classical
historical linguistics has developed a very powerful tool - the comparative
method - that allows the reconstruction of unattested language stages,
so-called proto-languages. It turns out that whereas modern languages may
vary significantly, protolanguages in various cases tend to be much more
similar to one other. This is the case, e.g., with Indo-European, Uralic and
Altaic: modern English, Finnish, and Turkish may have almost nothing in
common, but their respective ancestors - Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Uralic
and Proto-Altaic - appear to have many more common traits and common
vocabulary. This means that the possibility exists of extending the time
perspective and reconstructing even earlier stages of human language and much
of this research has already been conducted.
Etymological
databases for several macro families are also being compiled, and several of
them - Australian, Eurasiatic (Nostratic) and Afro Asiatic - are already near
completion. Once an etymological database becomes available, it can be used
to significantly simplify the task of searching for lexical cognates and
building up higher level databases. Etymological databases can also be used
(and are being used) for a statistical evaluation of taxonomic correlations.
The number of etymological matches between languages is a good measure of the
distance between them and they can also be employed for evaluating the time
depth of any linguistic family. In fact, so-called lexicostatistics is the
only available tool for absolute linguistic dating and its theoretical
rationale and practical employment is one of the central tasks of the EHL
project. While the
project is concentrated on building up a hierarchical system of etymological
databases, reflecting the hierarchical taxonomy of the linguistic
genealogical tree, it is also concerned with collecting and putting online
primary language wordlists as well as existing etymological sources. The
ideal etymological database system should be able to provide an etymology for
any word in any modern or ancient language, tracing its origin as far as
possible. The participants of the project have provided source wordlists for
poorly explored language families such as Indo-Pacific and Australian, where
most of the comparative work is yet to be done. They have also scanned,
recognized, and converted to database format some of the major existing
etymological dictionaries, such as Pokorny's Indo-European etymological
dictionary. The
ultimate goal of the system of databases described above is to arrive at a
stage when an absolute majority of the world's languages can be reduced to a
minimum number of huge language macro families, which in turn can be traced
back to a Proto-Sapiens stage, should the databases provide sufficient
evidence to support the hypothesis of monogenesis. With the database system
completed, and the basics of the Proto-Sapiens structure established,
we can hope to come into possession of a vital tool for helping us understand
the nature of the origin of language itself. |