The Origin of Homo sapiens Languages

 

The origin of languages is uncertain.

The Tower of Babel in Genesis 11:1–9 explains why the peoples of this world started to speak different languages when at that time there was probably just one language till the people in biblical times tried to build a tower to reach heaven till God broke them apart into confusion.  

According to the story, a united human race speaking a single language and migrating eastward, comes to the land of Shinar. There they agree to build a city and a tower with its top in the sky. Yahweh (God) observing their city and tower, confounds their speech so that they can no longer understand each other, and scatters them around the world.

According to historians the origin of human languages lies so far back in human prehistory. The Homo sapiens to my knowledge arose between 250,000 to 160,000 years ago, and probably primitive Homo language became possible only 120,000 years ago after fire was first discovered by lightning burning bush forests and bushes.

Flint blades burned in fires roughly 300,000 years ago were found near fossils of early but not entirely modern Homo sapiens in Morocco. Fire was used regularly and systematically by early modern humans to heat treat silcrete stone to increase its flake-ability for the purpose of toolmaking approximately 164,000 years ago at the South African site of Pinnacle Point. Evidence of widespread control of fire by anatomically modern humans dates to approximately 125,000 years ago, and probably the origin of human languages started much later although we have no direct historical trace when language started, and neither can comparable processes be observed today. Despite this, the emergence of new sign languages in modern times—Nicaraguan Sign Language, for example may potentially offer insights into the developmental stages and creative processes necessarily involved.  

The time range for the evolution of language or its anatomical prerequisites extends, at least in principle, from the phylogenetic divergence of Homo (2.3 to 2.4 million years ago) from Pan (5 to 6 million years ago) to the emergence of full behavioural modernity some 50,000–150,000 years ago.

Few dispute that Australopithecus probably lacked vocal communication significantly more sophisticated than that of great apes in general, but scholarly opinions vary as to the developments since the appearance of Homo some 2.5 million years ago. Some scholars assume the development of primitive language-like systems (proto-language) as early as Homo habilis, while others place the development of symbolic communication only with Homo erectus (1.8 million years ago) or with Homo heidelbergensis (0.6 million years ago) and the development of language proper with Homo sapiens, currently estimated at less than 200,000 years ago.

Nevertheless. when the Cro-Magnon men painted their colorful animals deep in the caves of the present-day France and Spain 25,000 years ago, what language did the speak? Would you believe that there are scientists who are seriously trying to answer that question?

How can one possibly find out? Ancient people may leave behind bones and their tools and even their art, but they don’t leave behind any records of their language. They’d have to be able to write to do that, and writing was invented only 5,000 years ago.

In a way, though, they do leave records of their languages, because languages aren’t completely independent of one another. There are similarities between, for instance, among such languages as Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Provençal, French, Italian, and perhaps Romanian. They are all called Romance languages, because they are all similar, not only to each other such as Malay and the Indonesian languages, or Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages. But to the old Roman language we call Latin.

This is not a mystery. Latin was once the common language of Western Europe in the days of the Roman Empire. After the fall of that empire and the temporary decline of education and other aspects of civilization, the Latin dialect in different parts of what had been the empire drifted apart and eventually developed into new languages. We can still detect similarities in vocabulary and grammar, however.

Suppose, then, we had only this Romance language, but that Latin had died out so completely that we have no record of it whatsoever. Might it not be possible, then. To go through the various Romance languages, study all the similarities, and construct a common language from which all might have developed? And if one did, might that constructed language not be something like Latin?

If we want to go even further back, there are similarities between Latin and Greek. The ancient Romans recognized this and adapted the more sophisticated grammatical principles that had been used in Greek and applied them to their own language. Must there not have been, then, an older language from the Greek and Latin both developed?

The surprising answer to this question came when the British began to seize control of India in the 1700s. The prime purpose was to engage in trade that would enrich Great Britain, but there naturally were scholars among the British who were interested in Indian civilization for its own sake. Among these was Sir William Jones, who studied an old Indian language, Sanskrit, which like Latin, was no longer in use but had given rise to later variations.

Sanskrit survived in ancient epics and religious writings, however, and as Jones studied it, he found similarities in its vocabulary and grammar to both Greek and Latin. Furthermore, and this was the great surprise, there were similarities to the Teutonic languages, such as Gothic, Old High German, and Old Norse. He even found similarities to Persian and to the Celtic language.

In 1786, he convinced therefore, that there was an “Indo-European” family of language that stretched from Ireland to India and that probably stemmed from a single source. We might imagine that about 7,000 B.C.E. there was an “Indo-European tribe” that lived perhaps in what is now Turkey. It spread outwards in all directions, carrying with it its languages which evolved in different places as groups became isolated from each other. By studying all the similarities, might it not be possible to work up a kind of common language, a “Proto-Indo-European” that might indeed resemble what the original tribe spoke in 7.000 B.C.E?

This is made more possible because in the 1800s the rules for the manner in which language changed with time were worked out by, among others, the Grimm brothers who are better known today for the fairy tales they collected.

There are other language families that are not Indo-European. There is the Semitic group which includes Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic and Assyrian. There is the Hamitic group which includes certain early languages of Egypt, Ethiopia, and North Africa. There is the Ural-Altaic group, which includes Turkish, Hungarian, and Finnish so that if Turkey was the original home of the Indo-Europeans, the vicissitudes of history have arranged to have a non-Indo-European language spoken there today.

Then there are the variety of languages spoken by Native Americans; by black Africans; by the Chinese and in their different dialects, and by people in the Far East and different parts of Southeast Asia.

Chinese is part of the Sino-Tibetan language family, a group of languages that all descend from Proto-Sino-Tibetan. The relationship between Chinese and other Sino-Tibetan languages is an area of active research and controversy, as is the attempt to reconstruct Proto-Sino-Tibetan.

The main difficulty in both of these efforts is that, while there is very good documentation that allows for the reconstruction of the ancient sounds of Chinese, there is no written documentation of the point where Chinese split from the rest of the Sino-Tibetan languages. This is actually a common problem in historical linguistics, a field which often incorporates the comparative method to deduce these sorts of changes. Unfortunately, the use of this technique for Sino-Tibetan languages has not as yet yielded satisfactory results, perhaps because many of the languages that would allow for a more complete reconstruction of Proto-Sino-Tibetan are very poorly documented or understood.

Therefore, despite their affinity, the common ancestry of the Chinese and Tibeto-Burman languages remains an unproven hypothesis. Categorisation of the development of Chinese is a subject of scholarly debate. One of the first systems was devised by the Swedish linguist Bernhard Karlgren in the early 1900s. The system was much revised, but always heavily relied on Karlgren's insights and methods.

Besides the Chinese languages there are also the languages of the Polynesians, the Indonesians and the rising national language of Malaysia, by the Aborigines in Australia, and so on, and on.

There are even languages that have no known connection to any other, such as ancient Sumerian and modern Basque.

If all of these were studied, might it be possible to work out an original language from which we all descended? It would be an enormous task, but to the linguists it would be a fascinating job.

The topic was discussed at a 1969 conference of historical linguistics by Vitaly Schevoroshkia of the University of Michigan who has been doing research on this subject. It would be a useful endeavor too because if we could work out how human language evolved, it is possible we would work out at the same time the migrations and wanderings of the early Homo sapiens.