Our root tongue; linguistics and history

Factual Questions
21

I think the other questions have been pretty well answered.

This question is a bit confusing. Are you assuming that some modern language might be closely related to all languages sometime in the distant past, or are you asking where you might go and find speakers of some language that is similar to a modern language? If the former, you’d be out of luck-- there is no such language.

If the latter, you might go to Scandanavia with a native Icelandic speaker. They could probably converse fairly well with someone from 1,000 years ago in either Denmark, Norway or Sweden (along the coast). In fact, they might do better than you would in England 1,000 years ago (Old English being fairly close to Old Norse). Finnish is also very consevative, so you could probably travel back in time quite a ways and have your Finnish friend tanslate for you (if you were in the land of the Finns or maybe even the land of the Estonians).

22

I would also imagine that a well-educated Chinese person might do well. Not that Chinese has remained unchanged for any long period, but learning about classic lit in China requires, essentially, literacy in Classical Chinese. And at least some aspects of pronunciation are taught in order to permit poetry to be read. I imagine that would at least be a head up - just like a scholar of Old English lit would do better than the rest of us, except there’s a lot more such scholars among the Chinese.

23

But if we’re allowed to bring scholars, then let’s bring someone who knows Classical Greek or Biblical Aramaic. I supsect that we know a lot more about the spoken langauges of ancient Europe and the M.E. than we know about Chinese. (And by “we” I mean any scholar, including those of Ancient Chinese languages.)

24

The earliest known proto-civilizations in the world were in Anatolia, at Çatalhöyük and Hacılar. The earliest known language spoken in Anatolia was Hattic.

The indigenous Hattic language is known through tablets kept in the royal Hittite library. The Hittites were Indo-European-speaking invaders, who probably entered Anatolia from Thrace, and they adopted some of the indigenous Hattic religious traditions. (But Hittite religion was mainly adopted from their neighbors in the land of Urartu to the southeast, who spoke the unrelated Hurrian language.)

There’s been a tentative relationship suggested between Hattic and the Northwest Caucasian language family, whose known members in the present day include Adyghe (also known as Circassian) and Abkhaz. I posted the following paragraph at Wiki talk:

Over at Ian Hodder’s Çatalhöyük web site, the discussion boards got into the question of what language might have been spoken at Çatalhöyük. Obviously, we don’t have anything to go on, so all we have is sheer educated guesswork at best. But some have speculated that it might have been Hattic, or rather the ancestor of Hattic, or else another language in the same family as Hattic. The only basis for this is the fact that Hattic is just the earliest known language of Anatolia. There could easily have been other languages, which we’ll never know, which died out unrecorded during the 3,000 years in between the end of population at Çatalhöyük and the attestation of Hattic. The area where Hattic was spoken, say around the easternmost bend of the Halys, was about 250 miles (400 km) to the northeast of Çatalhöyük. Not too far away. For prehistory fans who are into Anatolia, Hattic would be a great language to learn, being the only linguistic link to pre-Indo-European Anatolia, however tenuous. Too bad we know so little about it.

There is no way we can ever know the language spoken by the world’s first proto-civilized people at Çatalhöyük. But the hypothesis that it was Hattic (or rather the ancestor of Hattic), or a related language, is the best we can do. That and 50,000 liras will get you a cup of kahve.

25

Fair enough. Knowledge of the pronunciation of Ancient Chinese is rudimentary at best. But scholars of such things are not as tiny a minority in China as they are elsewhere - it’s not only the few history geeks who know that sort of thing over there.

26

Extra-nitty nitpick: Turkey lopped off some zeros (again). You’ll only need a couple lira these days for coffee.

27

Speaking of currency, it was invented in Anatolia, in the country of Lydia on the Aegean coast in the 7th century BCE. This was a time when Greek civilization was just beginning to emerge from its Dark Ages and cultural innovations from Anatolia and elsewhere in the Middle East (like the alphabet) were being picked up by Greeks who already had colonies in Ionia on the Aegean coast of Anatolia.

28

While I have heard Lithuanian cited as some sort of “closest ancestor” to proto-Indo-European, there’s plenty of languages in Europe (namely, all the Slavic languages) that fulfill the second part of your sentence (many cases, multiple genders, extensive verb system). Polish, for instance, has seven cases and three genders, plus all sorts of verb weirdness. (Slovene even has an extra number in addition to singular and plural: the dual. I don’t know if this was a feature of PIE, but I’ve always thought that was pretty cool.)

29

Yes. Proto-IE had the dual, which survived in Sanskrit, Classical Greek, and I guess Slovene and that’s about it. Modern Indo-Aryan and Greek don’t have it any more.

Lithuanian preserved Proto-IE pitch accent, which again survived in Sanskrit and Classical Greek, but has disappeared in their modern descendants.

30

It also survives in Sorbian and Scottish Gaelic.

31

Cool. But isn’t Sorbian dying out, or dead already? (It was a West Slavic language most closely related to Polish, spoken in eastern Germany.) Something about Balto-Slavic preserving those very old features. The theory I heard about Lithuanian retaining such conservatism is they lived in the forests where few other peoples traveled… until the Teutonic Knights started invading.

The British scholar Martin Lings wrote a fascinating study titled “Symbolism of the Luminaries in Old Lithuanian Songs,” hypothesizing that the conservatism of the Lithuanian language went along with the oldest folk songs about the sun and moon that remained unchanged for possibly thousands of years. That the old songs, by preserving the older language, also preserved the pagan ideas of ancient Lithuanians even after they went Christian. Lings showed how cosmic symbolism in Lithuanian folk songs corresponded with similar themes in Vedic Sanskrit.

The anthropologist Marija Gimbutas said when she was a little girl in Lithuania, traces of the pagan religion were still surviving in pockets. There are reports that paganism was practiced in Lithuania as late as the 18th century, but as Gimbutas’s recollections hint, there may not be an end date. Currently, of course, the pagan revival in Lithuania is in full swing.

Tamerlane, the Elamite-Dravidian connection has been called into doubt recently, but I agree it sounds very neat to me too. I researched certain shared cultural themes that could be traced from Dravidian India through ancient Afghanistan and Baluchistan to Elam. I would very much like for Elamite and Dravidian to be related, but I fear there isn’t enough information available to say for sure.

I’m glad you pointed that out. I would nominate Finnish as the linguistic conservatism champion of the world.

When I studied Proto-Uralic, I discovered that Finnish resembles the proto-language more than any other Uralic language. Finnish has changed the least from Proto-Uralic, and we’re looking at a time depth of 6000 YBP. When I looked at the reconstructions of Nostratic by Vladimir Illich-Svitych, I noticed a stronger resemblance between Nostratic and Uralic than any of the other families that hypothetically went into this macrofamily. I know Nostratic is controversial, but just suppose for a moment it has the claimed time depth of 10000 YBP. Finnish seems to be more similar to that than any other language I have looked at.

Actually, I have some poetry in Mozarabic from the 14th century, written in the Arabic script called aljamiado. Try this for comprehension with modern Spanish:

Loamiento ad Allah, el alto yex i berdadero,
onrrado i konplido, xeñor dereytero,
franko i poderoxo, ordenador xertero.

Loamiento a Allah, el alto es, y verdadero,
onrado y complido, señor dereytero,
franco y poderoso, ordenador certero.

I’m no expert on Spanish, but that looks like pretty good comprehensibility to me!

32

After what I just wrote about Finnish, Nostratic, and time depth, I demanded of myself: “Cite?” OK, this text written by Illich-Svitych in reconstructed Nostratic is an example of how I noticed an uncanny number of close resemblances to Finnish.

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Ith...ostraticist.htm
The best redaction I can type of those weird characters he used:

KelHä we.tei ‘a.Kun kähla
.kalai palhA-.kA na wetä
s’a da ’a-.kA ’eja ’älä
ja-.ko pele .tuba wete

Meaning:

Language is a ford through the river of time
It leads us to the dwelling of the dead
But he cannot arrive there
Who fears deep water.

*.KelHä ‘tongue’ > Finnish kieli ‘tongue’, Mongolian kel ‘tongue’
*kähla ‘ford’ > Finnish kahla- ‘ford’
*ja-.ko relative pronoun ‘who’ > Finnish joka ‘who’
*pele ‘fear’ > Finnish pelä- fear’, Proto-Indo-European *per-
*wete ‘water’ > Finnish vesi, stem vet-; also IE **wed-/wet- English: water, wet; Greek: hudor, hudr-, ‘water’; Russian: voda, ‘water’.

All I’m saying is, in this short text, as well as in other lexical materials, I found strikingly more close resemblances to modern Finnish than to any other language. I know this isn’t much to speculate on. It’s just an impression I got, for what it’s worth.

33

There are still around 50,000 speakers of it, though almost no monoglot speakers, and it’s still in daily use in some small towns. Probably it will eventually be replaced by German, but for now it’s hanging on to life.

34

Some really cool information, Johanna! While I’m inclined to tentatively accept the Nostratic hypothesis, I think as a GQ topic we would need to stress that it is nowhere as certain as the relationships of the various Indo-European families – very much a hypothetical construct with some supporting evidence. (And I very much enjoyed reading the Mozarabic!)

Addressing a few previous points here:

Sorbian is still very much alive, though spoken by a quite small population. The University of Leipzig English-language Internet site indicates that about 70,000 people speak it. Histories of Scandinavia indicate conflict between the early Danes and/or the Geats with the “Wends,” the Slavic Sorbian-speaking people, far more widespread before the Dark Ages Drang Nach Osten of the Germanic peoples.

Catalhoyuk is, as you noted, a very old settlement; the March/April 1998 issue of Archaeology (pp. 43-47) indicates its occupancy at roughly 9000-5000 YBP (7000-3000 BC). However, there are no inscriptions found at the site, and it’s debatable whether the artifacts would in fact tie it to the Hattic culture that later flourished in the area. The oldest cultures we can be certain of the linguistic affinities of would remain the Sumerian and pre-dynastic Egyptian, with Shang-period Chinese arguable but nowhere as definite. Catalhoyuk is definitely in the running for “earliest city” (though Dolne Vestonice far precedes it) but AFAIK cannot be clearly tied to the later Hattic and Hurrian cultures.

35

Roughly how many languages are live, are spoken today by people in real (non-purely-academic) settings?

36

Most estimates seem to be somewhere around 6,000. Though many are spoken by small populations, or are combined to older people.

From other examples of Mozarabic I’ve seen, that looks atypical. Perhaps it’s a matter of sampling error, though - much of the Mozarabic poetry I’ve seen used far more Arabic vocabulary.

37

Ethnologue, which can be found at the following site:

says that there are 6,912 living languages at the moment. Ethnologue is an extreme splitter though. It lists things as being separate languages that most linguists would say are just highly differentiated dialects of a single language. This is one of the problems in trying to answer the question “How many languages are currently in existence?”, that it’s quite a bit harder than you might think to distinguish between a language and a dialect. Another problem is that languages are constantly dying because there are no more speakers of them. It’s estimated that somewhere between once every two weeks and once a month another language dies.

38

Well, they’re not too extreme as they do list quite a few things as dialects under their parent language.

39

I never knew what I never knew, as the saying goes.

Thanks to everyone who has providided expertise thus far. Your education of me has been edifying indeed.

40

Interesting. 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.