# Our root tongue; linguistics and history **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [March 6, 2006, 3:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-root-tongue-linguistics-and-history/347218 "2006-03-06T03:56:01Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Bricker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/977dab/32.png) [@Bricker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bricker)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2006, 3:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-root-tongue-linguistics-and-history/347218/1 "2006-03-06T03:56:01Z")
Is there enough consensus about language development to know what language of today is closest to the “original” language of people in the fertile crescent? Or if that’s too much of a stretch, was there an orginal “root” European language as people spread into Europe, and what modern language is closest to that? How far back could I go in my new time machine before I couldn’t be understood by residents of the English isle? If I took my wife, a native Spanish speaker, along for the ride, how far back would we go before she couldn’t be understood in the Iberian peninsula? And who should I bring along to translate for me if my goal is to go as far back in time as I can and still be understood? ---
**Author:** ![astro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/9dc877/32.png) [@astro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/astro)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2006, 4:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-root-tongue-linguistics-and-history/347218/2 "2006-03-06T04:06:34Z")
> [@Bricker](#): > > Is there enough consensus about language development to know what language of today is closest to the “original” language of people in the fertile crescent? Or if that’s too much of a stretch, was there an orginal “root” European language as people spread into Europe, and what modern language is closest to that? > > How far back could I go in my new time machine before I couldn’t be understood by residents of the English isle? If I took my wife, a native Spanish speaker, along for the ride, how far back would we go before she couldn’t be understood in the Iberian peninsula? And who should I bring along to translate for me if my goal is to go as far back in time as I can and still be understood? Related thread [How far back in time could we go with modern English still be understood?](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=200542) ---
**Author:** ![ftg](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ftg/32/2801_2.png) [@ftg](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ftg)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2006, 4:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-root-tongue-linguistics-and-history/347218/3 "2006-03-06T04:46:24Z")
> [@Bricker](#): > > Is there enough consensus about language development to know what language of today is closest to the “original” language of people in the fertile crescent? Or if that’s too much of a stretch, was there an orginal “root” European language as people spread into Europe, and what modern language is closest to that? Note that there were languages from different language families spoken in ancient Mesopotamia. We don’t even know what modern language family Sumerian belongs to (if any). So that is definitely too much of a stretch. There is a _reconstruction_ called Proto-Indoeuropean (PIE). Linguists are very careful to note that PIE is _not_ believed to be the same as any ancestral language. It’s the difference between the real Hamlet and someone playing Hamlet. You are only supposed to get a general feel for the language but not believe it is the actual language. Take a tree. Cut off some branches near the top. Destroy the rest of the tree. Which branch is closest to the root? ---
**Author:** ![astro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/9dc877/32.png) [@astro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/astro)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2006, 4:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-root-tongue-linguistics-and-history/347218/4 "2006-03-06T04:59:44Z")
This discusses some of the problems in making definitive statements about Mesopotamia re culture & language and the complexities involved - [Some Problems for Mesopotamian Archaeology](http://www.sumerian.org/Mesopotamian%20Archaeology.htm) ---
**Author:** ![Triskadecamus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b19c9b/32.png) [@Triskadecamus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Triskadecamus)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2006, 6:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-root-tongue-linguistics-and-history/347218/5 "2006-03-06T06:29:35Z")
Any language which is still spoken on the earth, even if part of an entirely insular, academic, and literate social order is a language only derived from the so called Primal language. In order to be used without change, it would have to be the language of a group which had the exact same environment as the original Mesopotamians, and a very strict oral tradition which controlled how words were used for the entire period. (This does not describe any five thousand year old group of humans) In addition, it is not certain that the original Mesopotamians all spoke the same language. We know that one language eventually dominated, but not whether it did so by replacing, or absorbing the other languages of the region. It is not entirely out of the question that each migrating social group prior to the invention of large civilizations had its own language, and that Proto-indo-european is in fact a developed polyglot, having roots even thousands of years earlier. What is sure is that without written symbology, or at least repetitive oral history, the details of earlier languages cannot be reconstructed. The large social groups that became the infant civilizations of the region became so because they displaced and absorbed other less sophisticated groups of people. These smaller groups might have had their own languages, but those languages were never carried outward to other regions. So, continuing to exist is pretty much the same effect as change in a language. Speaking authentic Proto-Indo-European is not useful, and never has been. There never was such a language in the sense of “those people speak PIE.” Some of them spoke Proto Hitite, some Pre Akkadian, some ancient Babylonian. As their cultures gained and lost influence, their languages became part of, and eventually roots of the larger group of languages. Tris ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2006, 12:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-root-tongue-linguistics-and-history/347218/6 "2006-03-06T12:51:36Z")
More or less, languages change at the same rate. It’s possible that over a few hundred years, you might be able to say that one language has changed less over that period than another, but not over thousands of years, and certainly not over tens of thousands of years. Language has been around for 50,000 to 200,000 years, so the “original language” is so long ago that there’s no way one could say that any modern language is closer to it. It’s too long ago for us to even be able to reconstruct it using standard proto-language reconstruction methods. ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2006, 1:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-root-tongue-linguistics-and-history/347218/7 "2006-03-06T13:35:38Z")
If you want an example of a language that may be closest in structure to PIE, look to Lithuanian, which still retains six or seven cases, three genders, and numerous inflected tenses. For whatever reason, European languages have gone from complex to simple in terms of inflection systems, but I don’t know if this is a universal principle of linguistic evolution or if it’s specifically European. ---
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2006, 1:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-root-tongue-linguistics-and-history/347218/8 "2006-03-06T13:35:49Z")
> [@Triskadecamus](#): > > Speaking authentic Proto-Indo-European is not useful, and never has been. There never was such a language in the sense of “those people speak PIE.” Some of them spoke Proto Hitite, some Pre Akkadian, some ancient Babylonian. As their cultures gained and lost influence, their languages became part of, and eventually roots of the larger group of languages. Huh? Babylonian is a subset of Akkadian. Akkadian is a member of the Semitic language family, not Indo-European. There are certainly mutual influences between members of different language families, but I don’t think it’s accurate to say that a member of one family “becomes part of”, much less a “root of”, members of the other. (Unless you’re talking about events way back before the origin of recognized language families, at which point it’s pretty difficult to reconstruct accurately what language looked like or how it developed.) And yes, AFAIK there possibly was a single “Indo-European” language or group of mutually intelligible dialects at some point. But it wasn’t what is currently reconstructed as “Proto-Indo-European”. To borrow **ftg** ’s analogy, language families are like bushes with groups of ever-more-diverging branches. Reconstructing a “proto-” language is like imagining the bush as a tree: we see only the outermost branches and hypothesize a common trunk that their ancestor branches all originally sprang from. Even if the original bush **did** have a common trunk (or single proto-language) at some point, it almost certainly was very different from the reconstructed one. As for the OP’s question, the modern Indo-European language considered probably closest in many ways to the reconstructed PIE is [Lithuanian](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithuanian_language). However, that doesn’t mean that early IE speakers would have a clue what you were talking about if you stepped out of your time machine speaking modern Lithuanian. (Well, okay, they might understand a few scattered cognates like the word for “no”, but it wouldn’t be actual communication.) ---
**Author:** ![Charlie\_Tan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/charlie_tan/32/12582_2.png) [@Charlie\_Tan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Charlie_Tan)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2006, 2:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-root-tongue-linguistics-and-history/347218/9 "2006-03-06T14:10:31Z")
Regarding Spanish - at least 500 years. [Antonio de Nebrija](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_de_Nebrija) wrote the first grammar in 1492 and in large it formalized the Spanish language, meaning that Spanish this old might be a bit quaint, but still understandable by modern Spanish speakers. This was the first published grammar of any western European language. Said Nebrija to Isabel when she asked what purpose it served: \*Señora, la lengua es el instrumento del Imperio. \* (My lady, the language is the instrument of the empire.) ---
**Author:** ![Polycarp](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/82dd89/32.png) [@Polycarp](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Polycarp)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2006, 2:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-root-tongue-linguistics-and-history/347218/10 "2006-03-06T14:27:06Z")
**Bricker** asked specifically about the ancient Middle East, apparently under the misapprehension that most modern languages spread from there. The problem lies in the fact that when one discusses language, one is looking at a large number of language phylums. Conventional wisdom is that there is no clear evidence of any interrelationship between those phylums, though hypotheses identifying their relationship have been advanced. Modern Europe is dominated by Indo-European languages, the sole exceptions being Basque, Hungarian, Finnish, Turkish, Estonian, and a number of minority-group languages spoken in European Russia. These fall into several families such as Germanic, Romance, Slavic, etc. Also in this group are the Iranic group including modern Iranian and Tadzhik, and the Indo-Aryan group spoken in much of India and Pakistan along with the neighboring countries. Another completely separate phylum is one traditionally called “Hamito-Semitic” but now more commonly known as “Afro-Asiatic,” of which Semitic is the key family for purposes of this discussion. In addition, tongues like Basque, Japanese, and the Siberian tongue Kamchadal are considered _language isolates_, with no identifiable relatives. Now, to look at the Middle East about 1900 B.C.E. First, the majority culture in southern Iraq spoke Sumerian, a language isolate now extinct and with no known relatives. The area to the east, in coastal Iran, spoke Elamite, another language isolate. North of the Sumerian area in Iraq was spoken Akkadian, of which Babylonian and Assyrian were dialects. This was a Semitic language. Another group of Semitic languages included Ugaritic, Phoenician, Hebrew, Aramaic, Amorite, Moabite, and related tongues. These were spoken in the Western Fertile Crescent, roughly Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria Of these, only Hebrew and Aramaic survive, with Hebrew artificially preserved by Israel and Aramaic on the verge of extinction. Old dialects of Arabic existed at this time but were confined to the central part of the Arabian peninsula. And “South Arabian” languages were widespread across present Yemen and neighboring areas in both Arabia and East Africa, with relatively small surviving groups still speaking them in Arabia and Ethiopia. Ancient Egyptians spoke, not surprisingly, Ancient Egyptian, part of a distinct family within Afro-Asiatic. It survived until relatively modern times as a spoken language, though replaced by Arabic for the most part in the later first millennium C.E. Ancient Greek and its sister language Phrygian occupied the Greek peninsula and islands and parts of the Aegean coast of Anatolia (modern Turkey). The majority of what is now Turkey, however, spoke languages belonging to the now-extinct Anatolian family of Indo-European, including Hittite, Lycian, Lydian, and related tongues. Two other languages, Hurrian and Urartuan, were spoken east of the Anatolian group, and may have been sister languages in that group or isolates; the evidence is very unclear. They were replaced eventually by Armenian, a separate family in the Indo-European group, which was actually significantly more widespread than its present usage area before the 20th Century. Elamite was fairly early replaced by Old Persian, which coalesced with Avestan, spoken north and east of the Persian homeland in the southwestern Iranian mountains, to produce modern Iranian and related tongues. The modern state of affairs, in which most Iranians speak Iranian, most Turks speak Turkish, and most other Middle Easterners speak Arabic, dates from the spread of Islam, carrying Arabic with it, in 600-900 C.E. and the invasions of the Seljuk and other Turkish peoples in 1000-1500 C.E. This omits a lot of detail, but it gives a good rough summary of what is generally known about Middle Eastern language history. In general, it can be said that almost nowhere in the Middle East is there an area of land where people today speak a descendant of what was spoken in that place in Abraham’s day, with continuity of that language in that place straight through nearly 4000 years of history. ---
**Author:** ![Sevastopol](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/cdc98d/32.png) [@Sevastopol](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sevastopol)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2006, 2:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-root-tongue-linguistics-and-history/347218/11 "2006-03-06T14:33:49Z")
I always thought Japanese was related to the Finno-Ugric group? Let’s see what Mr Google has to say. ---
**Author:** ![Sailboat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sailboat/32/461_2.png) [@Sailboat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sailboat)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2006, 2:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-root-tongue-linguistics-and-history/347218/12 "2006-03-06T14:35:54Z")
> [@Bricker](#): > > Is there enough consensus about language development to know what language of today is closest to the “original” language of people in the fertile crescent? Why is the Fertile Crescent your root tongue? Didn’t people speak some language long before humans moved into that area? Did you come from the Fertile Crescent from Africa in some way more meaningful than coming from Europe to America? It’s my (possibly misinformed) impression that Proto-Indo-European is believed to have been spread by chariot conquerors, generally suppressing and wiping out many “native” languages as it spread. Note that such language replacement need not involve the murder of the speakers of the replaced languages; enslavement, displacement, and even one language becoming dominant because it’s useful for trade are possibilities. Sailboat ---
**Author:** ![Bricker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/977dab/32.png) [@Bricker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bricker)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2006, 2:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-root-tongue-linguistics-and-history/347218/13 "2006-03-06T14:44:34Z")
It’s amazing and gratifying to realize how very little I know about this subject… amazing that even my Fertile Crescent assumption was way off base, and not gratifying because I know nothing, but because so many people who post here DO know enough to give very detailed and enlightening answers. Thanks very much. ---
**Author:** ![Sevastopol](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/cdc98d/32.png) [@Sevastopol](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sevastopol)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2006, 2:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-root-tongue-linguistics-and-history/347218/14 "2006-03-06T14:56:02Z")
How far back in time on the British Isles? Well, it depends. ‘Old English’ which pre-dates the Norman conquest, appears unintelligible to the modern ear and eye. By contrast, travel in parts of Scotland today and you’d be dumbfounded. But try reading _The Battle of Maldon_ or _Beowulf_ out loud in the original and don’t be surprised if it starts to trip off the tongue in a familiar way after a few verses. ---
**Author:** ![Bricker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/977dab/32.png) [@Bricker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bricker)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2006, 3:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-root-tongue-linguistics-and-history/347218/15 "2006-03-06T15:22:25Z")
> [@Sevastopol](#): > > But try reading _The Battle of Maldon_ or _Beowulf_ out loud in the original and don’t be surprised if it starts to trip off the tongue in a familiar way after a few verses. I know _The Canterbury Tales_ prologue in what I think is Middle English, and I’m pretty sure if need be, I could make myself understood enough to get by if everyone spoke like that. Is there an on-line resource where I might hear how _Beowulf_ sounds if read in the original? ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2006, 3:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-root-tongue-linguistics-and-history/347218/16 "2006-03-06T15:37:56Z")
[Here](http://home.earthlink.net/~ahunter03/Stuff/Language/) is one set of language tree diagrams. There’s no consensus on the accuracy of these things, though, especially as you go farther back. These particular diagrams go way back farther than _Beowulf_, btw. ---
**Author:** ![carterba](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/85e7bf/32.png) [@carterba](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/carterba)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2006, 4:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-root-tongue-linguistics-and-history/347218/17 "2006-03-06T16:48:30Z")
Old English is different enough from modern English that you have to approach it initially as if it were a foreign language. It has noun cases and genders, for instance, which we obviously don’t use anymore. But once you understand how vowel sounds have changed over time and get used to pronouncing every letter, it starts to become a lot easier to read. There are quite a few words in Old English that we still use today, we just pronounce them differently and use them with somewhat different (though related) meanings. Beowulf is pretty difficult, IMO, but there are other Old English writings that are relatively easy. [Here’s a guide to Old English pronunciation.](http://www.kami.demon.co.uk/gesithas/OEsteps/pronounc.html). [Here’re some audio files of someone reading excerpts from Beowulf.](http://www.engl.virginia.edu/OE/Beowulf.Readings/Beowulf.Readings.html) ---
**Author:** ![Tamerlane](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tamerlane/32/7602_2.png) [@Tamerlane](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tamerlane)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2006, 5:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-root-tongue-linguistics-and-history/347218/18 "2006-03-06T17:29:50Z")
> [@Polycarp](#): > > The area to the east, in coastal Iran, spoke Elamite, another language isolate. Apparently there has been some attempt to link Elamite with the Dravidian family of labguages. Wiki: > **[Elamo-Dravidian languages](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elamo-Dravidian_languages)** > > The Elamo-Dravidian language family is a hypothesised language family that links the Dravidian languages of India to the extinct Elamite language of ancient Elam (present-day southwestern Iran). Linguist David McAlpin has been a chief proponent of the Elamo-Dravidian hypothesis. The hypothesis has gained attention in academic circles, but has been subject to serious criticism by linguists, and remains only one of several scenarios for the origins of the Dravidian languages.\[note 1\] Elamite is Th... I mention this only because I heard it on this board first ( from **Johanna** I think ) and I find the idea kind of neat :). - Tamerlane ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2006, 10:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-root-tongue-linguistics-and-history/347218/19 "2006-03-06T22:49:24Z")
I missed the reference to the “Fertile Crescent” in my first reading of the OP. Human language certainly did not originate in the Middle East. It originated, like the human species itself, in Africa, presumably East Africa. Sevastopol writes: \> I always thought Japanese was related to the Finno-Ugric group? At present, the best guess is that if it’s related, it’s quite distantly related. There’s a language family called Uralic, whose branches are Finno-Ugric, Samoyedic, and Yugaghir. There’s a family called Altaic, whose branches are Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic. These families are all just barely at the level at which we can discern relationship, and some people doubt that the branches of these families are really related. Japanese and Korean are usually each considered their own language families, related to no other language. Some people think that Uralic, Altaic, Japanese, and Korean are all part of a super-family, but if so it’s really just beyond the distance of relationship at which we can discern relationship. So it’s plausible that these language families are related, but it’s certainly not been proved. ---
**Author:** ![Excalibre](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/898d66/32.png) [@Excalibre](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Excalibre)\ **Post date:** [March 7, 2006, 12:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-root-tongue-linguistics-and-history/347218/20 "2006-03-07T00:16:11Z")
> [@The Gaspode](#): > > Regarding Spanish - at least 500 years. > > [Antonio de Nebrija](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_de_Nebrija) wrote the first grammar in 1492 and in large it formalized the Spanish language, meaning that Spanish this old might be a bit quaint, but still understandable by modern Spanish speakers. This was the first published grammar of any western European language. Said Nebrija to Isabel when she asked what purpose it served: \*Señora, la lengua es el instrumento del Imperio. \* (My lady, the language is the instrument of the empire.) The Spanish of 500 years ago is easily readable to a modern Spanish speaker; Nebrija indeed is perfectly comprehensible to me. But I wonder how much pronunciation would affect things - modern Spanish has discarded a ton of fricatives that were present in Nebrija’s time - for instance, that \ in his name would be pronounced like the \ in “usually”. I wonder how far back you could go before differences in pronunciation started becoming extremely problematic. Of course, the Castilian language didn’t even really develop until somewhere around the 11th century; I doubt many Spanish speakers could go back and understand the dialect of Romance spoken in Christian Iberia before that. And most of Spain’s territory at the time was controlled by Muslims; the Christians in Moorish Spain spoke a Romance language (Mozarabic) very Arabic-influenced and probably not mutually comprehensible with Castilian. The Castilian-speaking territory of Spain was rather small up until, say, the 1200s, so pick your spot in Iberia carefully when you set up your time machine. > [@Sevastopol](#): > > I always thought Japanese was related to the Finno-Ugric group? > > Let’s see what Mr Google has to say. Mr. Google says a lot of things. The trouble is that there’s a lot of nonsense masquerading as fact. Japanese is a member of a very small language family, the Japonic languages, which also include the Ryukyuan languages (like Okinawan). Those are certainly dissimilar enough from Japanese to merit consideration as separate languages, but for political reasons they haven’t always been regarded that way. There is a hypothesized language family called Altaic, including the Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic languages. Tungusic is spoken in Siberia, and Mongolic and Turkic are only commonly known among laypeople for their most important members (Mongolian and Turkish, respectively.) The existence of an Altaic family is itself controversial, and as far as I can tell has been losing some ground of late. There’s certainly major similarities between Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic, but mush of that might be related to long periods of interaction between different people rather than common linguistic descent. Now, _some_ people tentatively link either Korean, Japonic, or both to the Altaic family. This is an _extremely_ questionable hypothesis - plausible, yes, but the evidence simply is not there. Others link the Altaic and Fino-Ugric (or Uralic) families into a single macrofamily, and this is called the Ural-Altaic Hypothesis. There’s not a whole lot of evidence for it, frankly - the languages have certain similarities (most notably, complex case systems, agglutinative tendencies, and some vowel harmony) but again those could easily have arisen by chance (since they’re not rare features in language) or by mutual contact. And my understanding is that examination of the Fino-Ugric languages suggests that only a few of them show vowel harmony, which would suggest that it’s not a trait in the language’s genetic lineage but rather something absorbed from contact with other languages. Suggesting that Japanese is related to Uralic means that you’re accepting a LOT of hypotheses as true - the Altaic hypothesis, the Ural-Altaic hypothesis, and the hypothetical link between Japonic and Ural-Altaic. None of those things are implausible, but none are well-enough supported by the evidence for it to be safe to say that any of them - let alone all of them (as your claim requires) - are true. For some reason, very tentative ideas like this often seem to be repeated as gospel among those who don’t know much about linguistics. But any link between Japanese and Finnish is very old and very faint, and certainly not accepted as proven fact by any significant number of linguists. > [@AHunter3](#): > > Here is one set of language tree diagrams. There’s no consensus on the accuracy of these things, though, especially as you go farther back. > > These particular diagrams go way back farther than Beowulf, btw. It’s not just that we’re not certain they’re accurate. These (beyond the level of widely-accepted phyla like Indo-European and Sino-Tibetan and so forth) represent pet theories of particular historical linguists. In many cases, the people pushing them are not using accepted methods to reconstruct linguistic history; it’s better to say that these are hypotheses - there’s simply nowhere near enough evidence to suggest that they’re anything more than that. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-root-tongue-linguistics-and-history/347218.md?page=2)