Linguists seek a time when we spoke as one
A controversial research project is trying to trace all human language to a common root.
from the July 19, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
"That time limit is totally wrong," says John Bengtson, vice president of the Association for the Study of Language in Prehistory in Cambridge, Mass. "Languages that have been separated 8,000 years get down to a low percentage of common words. However, that low percentage seems to be very stable."
And there begins EHL's approach. Within languages, linguists think that because certain words – including the pronoun "we" and the number "one" – form the basis of a functional language, they are much less likely to change or be lost. EHL linguists begin by comparing this "basic lexicon." They include "words that are thoroughly essential and must have been in human language before significant cultural advances were made," writes EHL team member George Starostin, a linguist at the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow, in an e-mail.
Using this method, EHL has grouped all the world's languages into 12 linguistic superfamilies. They've tentatively grouped four of these superfamilies, which include languages of Eurasia, North Africa, and some Pacific islands (and maybe languages of the Americas as well) into one super-superfamily dubbed "Borean." An ancestor to a large share of today's languages, Borean was spoken some 16,000 years ago when glaciers covered much of Europe and North America, they say.
EHL linguists use several methods. One – the most controversial, but not the most widely used, says Starostin – involves matching words and meanings across languages. For example, Ruhlen and Bengtson have noticed that a word roughly corresponding to "water," which they render in proto-sapiens as "AQWA," appears in many languages. In Latin it's "aqua"; in Japanese, "aka" means "bilge water"; in Chechen, meanwhile, "aq" means "to suck"; in an African Kung dialect, "kau" means "to rain"; and in Central American Yucatec, "uk" means "to be thirsty."
But critics look at etymologies like these and see only problems. They're too loose with meanings and sounds, they say. And too many alternate explanations exist: Maybe the word was borrowed from one language and spread to the others. Perhaps it's onomatopoetic, a word that sounds like what it is. ("Cock-a-doodle-doo" is an onomatopoetic word that appears in similar form in many languages, but that doesn't prove relation.) Finally, the shorter the word – in some of the languages, just one syllable rather than two or three – the greater the possibility of a chance match.
"You've presented this list of words, but it looks like you can explain these lists in several different ways," says Lyle Campbell, a professor of linguistics at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. "Their data is really easy to challenge, and it's really easy to find words that are similar to one another across languages."
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