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Proto-Human language

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The term Proto-Human is one of a number of terms sometimes used to designate the hypothetical most recent common ancestor of all the world's spoken languages. It has been used by the linguists Harold Fleming[1] and John Bengtson (2007). There is no generally accepted term for this language among linguists who accept the concept of it. Most treatments of the subject do not include a name for the language under consideration (e.g. Bengtson and Ruhlen 1994). Merritt Ruhlen has recently been using the term Proto-Sapiens. The term Proto-World is sometimes reported to be in use but is in fact rarely used by the advocates of the hypothetical language themselves; this term is more often used by science writers and in popular science accounts about the hypothetical language and is the term for this hypothetical language most familiar to the general public.

Monogenesis

Main article: Monogenesis (linguistics)

A few linguists take a position in favor of the monogenesis of spoken human languages. Other linguists either oppose it or, much more commonly, have never discussed the subject. If monogenesis is correct, then there must be a most recent common ancestor of these languages.

Date

The first concrete attempt to estimate the date of the hypothetical ancestor language was that of Alfredo Trombetti (1922:315), who concluded it was spoken between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago. This estimate agrees well with information proceeding from modern genetics, paleontology, and archeology:

  • Recent discoveries in genetics show that the mitochondrial DNA of all living humans is inherited from a woman who lived less than 200,000 years ago in Africa and the Y chromosomes of all men are inherited from a man who lived about 60,000 years ago, also in Africa (Wells 2007:155-160). (This does not mean that their contemporaries did not contribute to the ancestry of living humans, only that they did not do so in an unbroken sequence of daughters or sons.)
  • The earliest unequivocal evidence for complex human culture comes from the site of Blombos Cave in South Africa, where two pieces of ochre engraved with abstract designs have been found, often considered to be the world's first known art, along with shells pierced for use as jewelry and a complex toolkit including finely crafted bone tools. The ensemble is dated to around 75,000 years ago. It is widely supposed that the presence of complex culture indicates the use of language (Edgar 2008).
  • Bladelets used in tools, traces of red ochre, and evidence of shellfish consumption have more recently been found at a still more ancient site in a cave at Pinnacle Point, South Africa. They are dated to about 164,000 years ago. As Blake Edgar, co-author with Richard Klein of The Dawn of Human Culture, explains (2008):
Earlier hominins subsisted almost entirely on land-based plants and animals. The shellfish, plus the possible use of ocher for red pigment, and an array of tiny stone bladelet tools provide evidence that people living 164,000 years ago had a culture as complex as modern-day hunter-gatherers.

Original homeland

Trombetti guessed that the ancestral language was spoken in India, on account of the high linguistic diversity there (Munda, Dravidian, Indo-Aryan...). More recently, it has emerged from archeological, paleontological, and genetic research that genetically modern humans only left Africa some 50,000 years ago, so it is almost certain that the ancestor language was spoken in some part of Africa.

Characteristics

The relatively few linguists who have discussed the subject disagree on how much can be known of the ancestor language. A conservative position, taken by Lyle Campbell, is that it would have shared the "design features" of known human languages, such as grammar, defined as "fixed or preferred sequences of linguistic elements", and recursion, defined as "clauses embedded in other clauses", but that beyond this nothing can be known of it (Campbell and Poser 2008:391). Less conservative linguists have advanced proposals on the vocabulary and syntax of the ancestor language. There are no serious current proposals on its grammar and phonology.

Vocabulary

A fairly large number of words have been tentatively traced back to the ancestor language, based on the occurrence of similar sound-and-meaning forms in languages across the globe. The best-known such vocabulary list is that of John Bengtson and Merritt Ruhlen (1994), who identify 27 "global etymologies". The following table, adapted from Ruhlen (1994b), lists a selection of these forms.

Language Who? What? Two Water One/Finger Arm-1 Arm-2 Bend/Knee Hair Vagina/Vulva Smell/Nose
Khoisan !kū ma /kam k´´ā //kɔnu //kū ≠hā //gom /ʼū !kwai č’ū
Nilo-Saharan na de ball nki tok kani boko kutu sum buti čona
Niger-Kordofanian nani ni bala engi dike kono boko boŋgo butu
Afro-Asiatic k(w) ma bwVr ak’wa tak ganA bunqe somm put suna
Kartvelian min ma yor rts’q’a ert t’ot’ qe muql toma putʼ sun
Dravidian yāv yā iraṇṭu nīru birelu kaŋ kay meṇḍa pūṭa počču čuṇṭu
Eurasiatic kwi mi pālā akwā tik konV bhāghu(s) bük(ä) punče p’ut’V snā
Dene-Caucasian kwi ma gnyis ʔoχwa tok kan boq pjut tshām putʼi suŋ
Austric o-ko-e m-anu ʔ(m)bar namaw ntoʔ xeen baγa buku śyām betik iǰuŋ
Indo-Pacific mina boula okho dik akan ben buku utu sɨnna
Australian ŋaani minha bula gugu kuman mala pajing buŋku puda mura
Amerind kune mana p’āl akwā dɨk’i kano boko buka summe butie čuna
Source: Ruhlen 1994b:103. The symbol V stands for "a vowel whose precise character is unknown" (ib. 105). Clicking on the symbols in the top line will order the forms alphabetically.

Based on these correspondences, Merritt Ruhlen (1994b:105) lists these roots for the ancestor language:

  • ku = 'who'
  • ma = 'what'
  • pal = 'two'
  • akwa = 'water'
  • tik = 'finger'
  • kanV = 'arm'
  • boko = 'arm'
  • buŋku = 'knee'
  • sum = 'hair'
  • putV = 'vulva'
  • čuna = 'nose, smell'

Many linguists reject the methods used to determine these forms and question the very possibility of tracing language elements so far back into the past. According to Lyle Campbell, "the search for global etymologies is at best a hopeless waste of time, at worst an embarrassment to linguistics as a discipline, unfortunately confusing and misleading to those who might look to linguistics for understanding in this area" (Campbell and Poser 2008:393).

Syntax

In a 2003 paper, Murray Gell-Mann and Merritt Ruhlen argued that the ancestral language had Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) word order. The reason for thinking so is that the world's major language families nearly all reconstruct back to SOV word order in their earliest stages. Their proposal develops an earlier one made by Talmy Givón (1979:271-309).

If this thesis is correct, it would have wide-ranging implications. Since a key article by Joseph Greenberg in 1963, it has been known that SOV word order is commonly associated with a series of other phenomena (Gell-Mann and Ruhlen 2003:3-4). Among these, some of the most important are:

  • Adjectives precede the nouns they modify.
  • Dependent genitives precede the nouns they modify.
  • "Prepositions" are really "postpositions", following the nouns they refer to.

For example, instead of saying The man goes to the river, as in English, Proto-Human speakers would have said Man river to goes.

References

See also

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