So, quick recap: Languages can be genetically related.
This isn’t like human familial relationships where two parents produce children one at
a time but continue to exist themselves.
With languages what happens is the language will expand, either by the people who speak
it spreading out or by outsiders learning the language, and then in different places
they’ll talk more and more differently from each other over time until they can’t understand
each other anymore.
It’s not a perfect analogy, but, when this happens we say that the resulting languages
are “descended” from the original language, called a proto-language, and that they’re
“genetically” related to each other.
We’ve seen this happen in history, with sanskrit branching into the modern Indian
languages or Latin branching into the romance languages.
From these known examples we can figure out what it looks like when a group of languages
are related, and we can then seek to identify those same patterns in other languages and
determine whether or not they’re related too, even if we don’t have any written records
of the parent language.
The method linguists use to do this is called the “comparative method,” and it’s yielded
some cool results, linking together huge groups of languages into giant genetic groups like
Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, Niger-Congo, Austronesian and plenty of others.
But can we go bigger?
Can we group languages into even bigger and bigger groups?
Or, here’s the real question: could linguists prove that all the worlds languages are related
to each other?
Before Latin, before Proto-Indo-European, was there ever a proto-World?
Well, maybe, but the normal comparative method isn’t going to do us any good here.
It works mostly by comparing the vocabularies of languages and looking for regular patterns
between them.
Like, where Spanish has the “ch” sound in its word for a thing, Portuguese will usually
have a “t” sound in its word for that same thing, suggesting that maybe they had
a common ancestor with the “ch” sound and in Portuguese it changed to a “t”
sound.
Or maybe the other way around, this is too little to tell.
Point is, if you find enough of these regular correspondences then at some point you have
to say, ok, this is too much to be a coincidence, these languages are probably related.
Thing is, though, this method works best at short time-scales, when the changes languages
have gone through are the simplest and easiest to figure out.
At longer time-scales the changes start to pile up and get more and more complicated,
and it gets harder and harder to tell if these are actually regular correspondences or if
it’s just a random coincidence.
Not only that, but any time the meanings of words change in addition to how their pronounced
that’s also another piece of evidence lost, and given enough time more and more words
will start to mean different things than they used to.
Because of this, the comparative method can only really show us if languages are related
if they diverged from each other fewer then, like, five-thousand years ago or so, and human
language is way, way older than that.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that there wasn’t a proto-world, though!
Maybe there was, maybe at some point humans started speaking for the first time, creating
the first ever language, and from there it spread out and diversified and diverged until
all the daughter languages were so different that we can’t tell anymore.
Or, maybe not: maybe language was invented multiple times independently, and modern languages
are descended from different first languages.
Thing is, we don’t really know how language first happened.
Like, we’re the only animal on the planet that can really use language.
Gorillas using sign language and Parrots repeating words and phrases is cool, but for reasons
I’ll get into some other time the stuff they do never gets nearly as complicated or
sophisticated as what humans do, no matter how hard we try to train them.
So at some point we must have evolved the ability to speak, but we don’t really know
how that happened.
Did we evolve the physical ability to speak and then the mental capacity for language,
or the other way around, with the mental capacity evolving and then the physical ability?
Who knows!
Did we start speaking immediately after we evolved the ability to speak, or did it take
a while before we invented language?
Who knows.
Did our ability to speak evolve slowly, bit by bit, involving progressively more complicated
systems of communication, or was there some single mutation that suddenly gave us the
ability to use language all at once?
Who knows.
Did language happen when we started using the cries and yelps and grunts and other vocal
signals that Chimpanzees also use to communicate more precisely?
Or maybe we actually evolved sign language first, and only started using our mouthes
when we evolved the necessary equipment in our throats?
Or maybe language is just it’s own, completely separate thing that didn’t develop directly
from anything simpler.
No one has any idea.
And how would they?
You can’t really look at fossils and tell whether or not the creature they used to be
inside of used language, let alone what that language was like.
Maybe eventually neuroscientists and geneticists will piece together exactly what order we
evolved what in, and maybe from that we’ll be able to figure out how language happened,
but for now we’re kind of in the dark, and there’s not much that traditional linguistics
can do to solve any of these problems.
So, as far as I can tell, that ignorance basically leaves us with three possibilities concerning
Proto-World: One: proto-world did in fact exist and all
of the world’s languages are genetically related.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that Proto-World was the first language.
Maybe the most recent common ancestor of all modern languages existed at the same time
as a bunch of other languages, but now all those other languages are extinct.
Or maybe it was the first language ever, but either way, possibility one is that proto-world
was a thing that existed.
Two: proto-world sort of existed.
Like, let’s say language evolved really slowly out of the simpler, non-language forms
of communication our ancestors used.
In-between they would have used some sort of communication that was more sophisticated
than what chimpanzees do but less sophisticated than real language.
Like, maybe they developed some sort of complicated system of vocal signals that signaled for
different stuff but that they couldn’t put together into complex sentences, or maybe
they had some sort of sign-language-like system supplemented by vocal signals.
Maybe names were the first linguistic signs to develop and we used them to get each other’s
attention, or maybe we used singing and nursery-rime-like stuff to socialize with each other and language
developed out of that.
Point is, there’s a lot of possible things that language might have first developed out
of but that wasn’t itself quite language yet.
So, maybe all of the world’s languages are descended from one of those pre-language systems,
in which case there was sort of a proto-world, it just wasn’t technically a language yet.
Three: proto-world didn’t exist at all.
Like, maybe whatever genetic mutations allowed humans to speak spread through the population,
and then, after the fact, language was invented multiple times, and those different initial
languages eventually evolved into different groups of modern languages.
We have no way of knowing which of these three possibilities was what actually happened.
But the idea that proto-world might have existed is really interesting, so, let’s assume
for a second that it did exist.
Can we know anything about it?
Well, besides a few fringe linguists who claim to be able to reconstruct some of it, the
general consensus seems to be: a little bit but not a lot.
Like, until about a hundred thousand years ago all humans lived in Africa, and after
that they spread out across the world, so we can be reasonably sure that it would have
been spoken in Africa sometime earlier than about a hundred thousand years ago.
We also think that humans diverged from chimpanzees around seven million years ago, so unless
that common ancestor could talk and chimpanzees lost the ability to speak, proto-world would
have had to exist sometime after that.
Besides that, well, I mean, we can look at all the languages in the world and ask ourselves
“what do all of these things have in common” and then we can assume that proto-world also
had those traits, but we don’t find a whole lot when we do that.
Like, human languages can be really different from each other, so all you can really say
is, like “it probably had both consonants and vowels, it probably had between ten and
a hundred phonemes, you probably had to use your tongue to speak it,” you know, stuff
like that.
And that’s kind of it.
Beyond that we don’t really know anything about Proto-World and we probably never will,
including whether or not it existed.
I hope you found it kind fun to think about though.
See you soon for more linguistics videos!