Hard words, by Philip E.

Ross
a review

The following article presents a series of theories concerning the origins and the ways of
evolution of our spoken languages. It is also a way of showing that the language we speak will
always be in a constant changing process, a process that will develop along with people, who,
ironically, do not notice them. However, it is fortunate to know that there are researchers all over
the world who want to find out the entire truth which will hopefully enlighten people.
Although, there is a disagreement between Radical linguists and Traditionalist, the former
believe that language can be traced all the way to the Stone Ages. In fact, there is also a record of
the first word ever spoken and by the research and knowledge of Ruhlen Merritt, that word being
tik, which stands for the English toe and the Latin digit. Even though the circumstances in which
the word toe came to be the first word arent known, the linguist also refuses to estimate a date
on that root, even though there have been genetic evidence that, it goes back to 700.000 years.
Hearing echoes of ancient voices is one of the beliefs of a small group of radical researchers, to
which Ruhlen belongs. However, the idea of tracing all existing languages to a single source, to a
language long forgotten, is truly interesting, and it would be an evolutionary discovery to find
that one language brought all people together. But others, with more objective views, trace
languages back to 12.000 to 15.000 years ago, before the development of agriculture.
The idea of language sharing the same roots determined Allain C. Wilson, Mark Stonking and
Rebecca L. Cann of the University of Berkely to make the Eve hypothesis, which consists in
comparing samples of D.N.A. to trace the entire human population back to a woman in Africa
150.000 years ago. The theory is a contradiction with the nuclear origin of language, but like any
other idea, the monogenesis of languages cannot be easily proven. For nearly two centuries,
scholars have been trying to accurately group language into families, and some even had only
one language member, a good example, a language which is spoken in the present in the Spanish
and French Pyrenes is Basque. Surprisingly, most families have languages with the same
ancestor as a common point, and it is believed by most linguists that the protolanguages have
been spoken 7000 years ago.
The history of languages is indeed extremely vast, but compared to the whole truth, what is
already known is not enough to cover the real facts and entire language roots and linguists have a
hard time discovering it. But fortunately, researches do not give up their need to know the truth,
and so, nearly 30 years ago, Russian linguists Vladislav Illych-Svitych and Aaron B Bolgopolsky
traced the origin of languages back to 12000 year old in the Neolithic age. That way, they could
link 6 languages families and they found an ancestor called the Nostratic, that way transmitting
the cultural heritage of three quarters of humankind.
In the Language in the Americans by Joseph H. Greenberg of Stanford University, languages in
the 1950s were compared, being in the end, classified in 3 groups. His work brought some
opposition from linguists such as Lyle Campbell and traditional comparative linguists who said
that Greenbergs work should be shouted down. As a counterargument, historians agree that
4000 years ago Indo-Europeans has been fragmented into two categories Anatolia and Tocharian.
Many languages in the Middle Ages, such as Germanic, Italic, Celtic, Baltic, Slavic Albanian,
Greek, Armenian, Iranian and Indic have been changed by farmers, merchants and missionaries
people who had to move around a lot. This way it can be believed that a language can never have
a strict number of words or a strict way of speaking it. As long as people who move around in
different countries, a first way to be understood is to speak their own language and then adapt to
the setting, without noticing that they have been making a whole new language.
In the 16
th
and 17
th
century, theologians tried to figure out the language that was spoken, before
the confusion of tongues at Babel, arriving at the conclusion that it was the biblical Hebrew. One
of the greatest achievements was the argument of Sir William Jones in 1786, seeing that Sanskrit,
Greek and Latin cannot be examined without believing that they come from the same source,
which is probably no longer existent.
One of the many researchers, there was Jacob Grimm, who noticed a system of different sounds
that are in some languages English: father, German: vater. These minor sound differences point
out the fact that Europeans languages are linked in a way or another. There is a strong belief that
two languages can be genetically related even without having the same ancestor. Through the
studies of the meaning of words, researchers discovered some historical facts of how the Indo-
Europeans lived. Therefore, soviet linguists point out that the words of domesticated animals or
crops mean that the cultures were most likely agricultural, meaning that there is a word for every
single practical thing in a humans life. Usually, languages were known by the supremacy of
horsemen who imposed their languages by force. But another known way of sharing languages
was through farmers, who often moved away from their birthplace, this way, spreading
languages in 1500 years. That way, through reconstruction, many languages were made, and
many more disappeared. Traditional linguists agree with the method and Ferdinand de Saussure,
a French linguist, argues that the Indo-Europeans languages were descended from a system of
long forgotten consonants, theory which is proven right, later in the 1920s. Nostraticians claim to
have the same theories with traditional linguists, but all evidence is proven in a dictionary of
Nostratic roots. However, there are some differences which are quite interesting. Knowing that
Nostratic has many words of plants that are not for cultivation or names of animals that are not
differentiated between wild or domestic, it is assumed that speakers of Nostratic were hunter
gatherer. However, it is unacceptable for traditional linguists, that Nostracists take shortcuts but
accepting cognates words from different languages, although they are defending themselves by
minimizing the resemblance through complex sounds. Many arguments and counterarguments
were shared between the nostraticists and the Indo-Europeanists. Also, it was assumed that
Nostraticists were bending rules, playing very fast and loose with the semantic content, and
words such as wolf and dog were being differentiated by only a single consonant (kujina/qujina).
But, there was a group which was worse than the Nostracists. Greenberg would entirely break
the rules and not even bother to reconstruct the roots. Not only did he work with large groups but
also managed to group families of languages into three categories (Eskimo-Alent for the Pacific
Northwest, Na-Dene and Navaho for southern and Amerind).
The first two were accepted but he later was criticized. But even so, Greenberg was still
convinced that his methods were practical and some scientists agreed with him. Greenbergs
theory regarding the Native Americans was that they immigrated in there discrete waves over the
land bridge that once connected Siberia and Alaska. Many researchers agreed with his hypothesis.
Cavalla-Storza said that the learned language depends on where the person is born. His research
went even further when he published a study finding correlations between the frequency with
which certain genes appear in populations and the families of languages that those populations
speak. Even though there were some cases where that detail of the linguistic families and genes
didnt match, Cavalli Storza can explain that each represents a replacement of the other, giving
Hungary as an example.
The theory of Mitochondrial Eve has been researched by Allan Wilson and his colleagues. From
the very start, it was known that Mitochondrial Eve had to be a woman in Africa because of the
genetic diversity. Any information that Greenberg brought to this research was not appreciated,
because it was believed that his ideas existed from the very beginning.
In the end, no matter the conflicts, there is no denying that absence of language places the human
being at the same level as an animal. But, fortunately, there was always the need of sharing,
exchanging objects and later on ideas, cultures and that contributes to the evolution of human
nature no matter how far away the past is.



Questions:
1. What are the evolutionary theories of Romanian linguists concerning the origin of
language?
2. What are the theories concerning the situation in which the word tik got to be the very
first word ever expressed?
3. Aside from Mitochondrial-Eve, what other theories are there concerning the origins of
language? Which of them are most likely to be proven?