# 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:** 9\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![The\_Flying\_Dutchman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/9fc348/32.png) [@The\_Flying\_Dutchman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Flying_Dutchman)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2006, 3:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-root-tongue-linguistics-and-history/347218/41 "2006-03-10T15:57:50Z")
> [@Wendell Wagner](#): > > 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. Well maybe. I’m responding to your post to remind everyone about the click languages of the bushmen of South Africa which some authorities believe through genetic evidence to be the mother language. See [http://www.leakeyfoundation.org/newsandevents/n4\_x.jsp?id=3324](http://www.leakeyfoundation.org/newsandevents/n4_x.jsp?id=3324) > [@](#): > > But a new genetic study underlines the extreme antiquity of a special group of languages, raising the possibility that their distinctive feature was part of the ancestral human mother tongue. > > They are the click languages of southern Africa However you may still be right > [@](#): > > Most of the surviving click speakers live in southern Africa. But two small populations, the Hadzabe and the Sandawe, live near Lake Eyasi in Tanzania, in eastern Africa ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2006, 4:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-root-tongue-linguistics-and-history/347218/42 "2006-03-10T16:34:13Z")
> [@](#): > > I had always read that “Finnish is conservative”, but I can’t say I remember any of the details supporting that claim. I do seem to remember that its conservative nature is helpfull at determining when certain Swedish loan words entered the language, since once they get in they tend to remain unchanged. That’s really something! It actually goes further back than that. Some Germanic loanwords to Finnish are so old they don’t come from a particular language like Swedish, but from the ancestral Common Germanic. This is going back 2000+ YBP: _pelto_ ‘field’ \< Germanic \*_felthuz_ _kuningas_ ‘king’ \< Germanic \*_kuningaz_ Going even further back, Finno-Ugric shares loans from Iranian, from a time when the ancestors of the Finno-Ugrians and the Iranians were in contact with one another, presumably in the steppes of southern Russia before the Iranians moved southeast and the Finns moved northwest. Example: Finnish _sata_, Hungarian _száz_ ‘hundred’ come from Old Iranian _sata_. (The word for hundred in modern Persian is _sad_). Time depth: maybe 3500 YBP? And this is the amazing thing: Going even further back, there are loans so old they went directly from Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Finno-Ugric. Time depth: 5000 YBP. That this can still be discerned in the modern languages says a lot for their conservatism. **John Mace** , you and I both noticed that Finnish is unusually conservative, but we reached that conclusion by looking at different sets of evidence. This makes the case even stronger. ---
**Author:** ![Excalibre](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/898d66/32.png) [@Excalibre](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Excalibre)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2006, 5:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-root-tongue-linguistics-and-history/347218/43 "2006-03-10T17:13:58Z")
> [@The Flying Dutchman](#): > > Well maybe. I’m responding to your post to remind everyone about the click languages of the bushmen of South Africa which some authorities believe through genetic evidence to be the mother language. > > See [http://www.leakeyfoundation.org/newsandevents/n4\_x.jsp?id=3324](http://www.leakeyfoundation.org/newsandevents/n4_x.jsp?id=3324) > > However you may still be right No. This is incorrect and reflects a vast misunderstanding of linguistics and how it works on the part of whatever “authorities” came up with that. The Khoisan languages are not “old” in any meaningful way - over the long haul, all languages change and over the tens of thousands of years that human language has existed, all languages have certainly become completely unrecognizable from their oldest ancestors. So to call the Khoisan languages old in that respect makes no sense - when you’re looking at the sort of time spans in question, all languages are equally old. If someone is claiming that the Khoisan languages are particularly _conservative_ and thus similar to what they were thousands of years ago, that’s a reasonable claim, although even that would be difficult to support, as there aren’t written records of it. Further, it’s certainly not the case that the Khoisan languages are ancestral to other modern language groups. We _know_ quite a bit about the history of most languages nowadays; it makes little sense to suppose that Khoisan is somehow the ancestor of Indo-European (for instance) because while it’s possible some relation could be shown between them, it would mean that Khoisan and Indo-European are both descendents of the hypothetical Proto-Indo-Khoi family. The Khoisan family is not the same as whatever ancestor of it might hypothetically also be ancestral to other language families. ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2006, 5:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-root-tongue-linguistics-and-history/347218/44 "2006-03-10T17:41:12Z")
So, if I’m understanding folks correctly, no scholar has a decent idea of what any language sounded like more than two millennia ago? There’s nobody that could translate for me if I got moved back to ancient Egypt, Sumeria, or Babylon? Daniel ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2006, 5:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-root-tongue-linguistics-and-history/347218/45 "2006-03-10T17:52:10Z")
Let me put it this way. I’m a fan of fringe linguistics. I admit it: I love the radical hotheads who cast all caution to the winds and lump hypothetical macrofamilies like Sino-Basque-Caucasian with Na-Dene to make gargantuan hypermacrofamilies like Dene-Caucasian. Pretty much every language family in the world has been lumped by fanatics like Dolgopolsky or Greenberg into one macrofamily or another. It’s great fun. But there is one outlier family that no macrofamily has taken in… and that lone family is Khoisan. Oh sure, Shevoroshkin swept up all languages without exception into Proto-World, so Khoisan isn’t altogether left out. But at levels lower than World and above conventional families, Khoisan just doesn’t fit. Cladographically, that would mean Khoisan was the first family to separate from Proto-World after about 200,000 BP, which I think was the time-depth estimate by UC Berkeley linguist Johanna Nichols (America’s only expert on the Chechen language). So at the first separation there were two groups: !. Khoisan. 2. Everybody else. This actually correlates with the global genetic survey by Luigi Cavalli-Sforza, which showed that the DNA of people who speak Khoisan languages is less similar to the DNA of the rest of the world than any other population. This suggests that the Khoisan speakers were the first distinct population to form from the rest of humanity, the longest established as a distinct group. Therefore all the less likely to be ancestors of other groups. ---
**Author:** ![Excalibre](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/898d66/32.png) [@Excalibre](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Excalibre)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2006, 5:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-root-tongue-linguistics-and-history/347218/46 "2006-03-10T17:56:28Z")
> [@Johanna](#): > > Let me put it this way. I’m a fan of fringe linguistics. I admit it: I love the radical hotheads who cast all caution to the winds and lump hypothetical macrofamilies like Sino-Basque-Caucasian with Na-Dene to make gargantuan hypermacrofamilies like Dene-Caucasian. Pretty much every language family in the world has been lumped by fanatics like Dolgopolsky or Greenberg into one macrofamily or another. It’s great fun. > > But there is one outlier family that no macrofamily has taken in… and that lone family is Khoisan. > > Oh sure, Shevoroshkin swept up all languages without exception into Proto-World, so Khoisan isn’t altogether left out. But at levels lower than World and above conventional families, Khoisan just doesn’t fit. Cladographically, that would mean Khoisan was the first family to separate from Proto-World after about 200,000 BP, which I think was the time-depth estimate by UC Berkeley linguist Johanna Nichols (America’s only expert on the Chechen language). So at the first separation there were two groups: !. Khoisan. 2. Everybody else. > > This actually correlates with the global genetic survey by Luigi Cavalli-Sforza, which showed that the DNA of people who speak Khoisan languages is less similar to the DNA of the rest of the world than any other population. This suggests that the Khoisan speakers were the first distinct population to form from the rest of humanity, the longest established as a distinct group. Therefore all the less likely to be ancestors of other groups. Now _that_ makes some good sense, and might potentially go towards explaining the unique sounds present in Khoisan. > [@Left Hand of Dorkness](#): > > So, if I’m understanding folks correctly, no scholar has a decent idea of what any language sounded like more than two millennia ago? There’s nobody that could translate for me if I got moved back to ancient Egypt, Sumeria, or Babylon? > > Daniel I don’t know much in the specifics, but I do know that Egyptian has been fairly well deciphered, but we simply don’t know what vowels most words used, which means they’re written without vowels or with ones established only through convention. That’s a pretty good signal of how much we don’t know about its pronunciation. ---
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2006, 5:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-root-tongue-linguistics-and-history/347218/47 "2006-03-10T17:57:09Z")
> [@LHoD](#): > > So, if I’m understanding folks correctly, no scholar has a decent idea of what any language sounded like more than two millennia ago? There’s nobody that could translate for me if I got moved back to ancient Egypt, Sumeria, or Babylon? That might be stating it too broadly. Vedic Sanskrit liturgical texts, for example, have been preserved orally for at least three thousand years, accompanied for most of that time by ancillary “orthophonic” compositions that helped the officiants recite them in the traditional way. Of course, that doesn’t guarantee that the pronunciation didn’t change at all during that time, but it definitely greatly retarded the pace of change. So you could indeed probably get a “decent idea” of what Vedic Sanskrit liturgy sounded like over two millennia ago by listening to a traditionally-trained priest recite it now. For ancient Egypt, Sumer, or Babylon there isn’t any continuous oral tradition surviving to the present. But **if** you could read and write the written form of the language, and **if** you could find a scribe or other literate person when you stepped out of your time machine, and **if** you had brought some facsimile texts and writing materials with you (I bet the ancient Egyptians would really love mechanical pencils! :)), **then** I bet it wouldn’t take long at all for the scribe to teach you the correct pronunciation of the words. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2006, 6:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-root-tongue-linguistics-and-history/347218/48 "2006-03-10T18:37:31Z")
> [@Johanna](#): > > That’s really something! It actually goes further back than that. Some Germanic loanwords to Finnish are so old they don’t come from a particular language like Swedish, but from the ancestral Common Germanic. This is going back 2000+ YBP: > _pelto_ ‘field’ \< Germanic \*_felthuz_ > _kuningas_ ‘king’ \< Germanic \*_kuningaz_ Wow. Finnish uses “_kuningas_”? Even today? > [@](#): > > **John Mace** , you and I both noticed that Finnish is unusually conservative, but we reached that conclusion by looking at different sets of evidence. This makes the case even stronger. Just to be clear, you’ve got much more hands on knowledge than I do. I’ve read a lot about languages and linguistics, but I haven’t done any work myself. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2006, 1:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-root-tongue-linguistics-and-history/347218/49 "2006-03-11T01:08:38Z")
**kimstu** , the vowels in Central Indo-Aryan have been remarkably stable over thousands of years. In modern Hindi, the system of vowel phonemes is identical with that of Vedic. A couple of exceptions: the vocalic ॡ /l/ and ऋ, ॠ /r/ of Vedic did not survive into modern Hindi, except in learned Sanskrit loanword (_tatsama_) vocabulary. And then their pronunciation has changed. These vowels degraded early on, and were probably already altered in the Classical Sanskrit period. They were replaced by the CV syllables [li] and [ri] in North Indian pronunciation of Sanskrit, [lu] and [ru] in South Indian. Reconstruction of Vedic phonology by historical-comparative linguistics shows that their original pronunciation was as pure syllabic sounds, like the r in Serbo-Croatian _Srp_. These sounds have been reconstructed for Proto-European, for which their attestation in Serbo-Croatian and Vedic is evidence. Also, the sounds of the diphthongs /ai/ and /au/ have shifted in modern standard Hindi of Delhi and become pure vowels. In some regional dialects their original diphthongal quality has survived. Regional accents like this are likely to affect the pronunciation of the Hindi-speaking Brahmin chanting the Vedas, as contrasted with say a Telugu speaker. Those caveats aside, I think you’re right that the original Vedic pronunciation, which is at least three thousand years old, has been continuously preserved and is still currently being spoken. It’s the only pronunciation of an ancient language that has been kept alive by living tradition and not reconstructed (as in the case of Egyptian or Latin) or replaced (as in the case of Katharevousa, which used Classical Greek spoken with Modern Greek pronunciation, or Modern Hebrew). [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-root-tongue-linguistics-and-history/347218.md?page=2)