Two articles on Nostratic from the New York Times
1. Linguists Debating Deepest Roots of Language (27-6-1995)
2. What We All Spoke When the World was Young (1-2-2000)
Copyright 1995 The New York Times
27 June, 1995, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final
Section C; Page 1; Column 4; Science Desk
2309 words
Linguists Debating Deepest Roots of Language
IN their archaeological
digs through the strata of human language, linguists have long been fascinated
by the seeming similarities between the English words ‘fist’, ‘finger’ and
‘five’. The motif is repeated by the Dutch, who say ‘vuist’, ‘vinger’ and
‘vijf’, and the Germans, who say ‘faust’, ‘finger’ and ‘fünf’. Traces of the
pattern can even be found as far away as the Slavic languages like Russian.
Conceivably, sometime in
the distant past, before these languages split from the mother tongue, there
was a close connection among the words for a hand and its fingers and the
number five. But did the mathematical abstraction come from the word for fist,
or, as some linguists have proposed, was it the other way around? The answer
could provide a window into the development of the ancient mind.
In a paper now being
prepared for publication in a book next year, Dr Alexis Manaster Ramer, a
linguist at Wayne State University in Detroit, argues that the mystery may now
be solved: fist came before five. But more important than his conclusion is the
method by which it was derived.
It is widely accepted that
English, Dutch, German and Russian are each branches of the vast Indo-European
language family, which includes the Germanic, Slavic, Romance, Celtic, Baltic,
Indo-Iranian and other languages – all descendants of more ancient languages
like Greek, Latin and Sanskrit. Digging down another level, linguists have
reconstructed the even earlier tongue from which all these languages are
descended. They call it proto-Indo-European, or PIE for short.
But in a move sure to be
hotly disputed by mainstream linguists, Dr Manaster Ramer contends that to find
the root of the fist-five connection one must look beyond the Indo-European
family and examine two separate language groups: Uralic, which includes
Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian, and Altaic, said to include Turkish and
Mongolian languages. All three families, he contends, contain echoes of a lost
ancient language called Nostratic.
If Dr Manaster Ramer is right,
his discovery will provide ammunition for a small group of linguists who make
the controversial claim that Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic and other language
families like Afro-Asiatic, which includes Arabic and Hebrew, the Kartvelian
languages of the South Caucasus and the Dravidian languages concentrated in
southern India, all are descendants of Nostratic, which was spoken more than
12,000 years ago.
Most language experts
remain highly sceptical of the Nostratic hypothesis, which enjoyed so much
publicity in the late 1980s and early 1990s that it is sometimes described as
the linguists’ version of cold fusion. ‘It would be terrific if it’s true, but
we don’t want to jump to conclusions,’ said Dr Brian Joseph, a linguist at Ohio
State University in Columbus. Dr Joseph and Dr Joe Salmons of Purdue University
in West Lafayette, Indiana, are editing the book, Nostratic: Evidence and
Status (John Benjamins), in which the analysis of the five-fist connection
will appear.
But Dr Joseph believes that
while the Nostratic debate remains as heated as ever, it has reached a higher
level of sophistication, with both sides offering more precise arguments and
careful scholarship. ‘Mainstream linguists who in the past had dismissed
Nostratic are now willing to examine it on an objective and scientific basis,’
he said. While he and Dr Salmons both count themselves as sceptics, they hope
their book will be a milestone in linguistic scholarship. ‘Even if the more
mainstream linguists decide to reject Nostratic,’ Dr Joseph said, ‘at least the
evidence will be laid out in a fair and balanced way.’
It is not that most
linguists find implausible the idea that all languages may ultimately have
derived from an ancient ur-language spoken millenniums ago. After all, analysis
of mitochondrial DNA from the cells of various ethnic groups strongly supports
the notion that all humans come from the same genetic stock. If this small
group of original humans spoke a single language, then all present-day
languages are descended from it. The hypothetical Nostratic is not the
ur-language but might be one of its major branches. However, critics of the
Nostratic hypothesis have long argued that it is unprovable – any similarities
between languages as distant as the Altaic and Indo-European would have been
washed out long ago. They dismiss the parallels unearthed by the Nostraticists
as coincidences.
As recently as the early
1990s, most evidence for an ancient language relied on work done in the 1960s
by Soviet scholars, who popularised the word Nostratic, meaning ‘our
language’. But now a second wave of research is revitalising the field.
Veterans of the Nostratic programme like Dr Vitaly Shevoroshkin of the
University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and Dr Aaron Dogopolsky of the University
of Haifa in Israel continue to come up with new evidence, as do younger
scholars like Dr Manaster Ramer.
In a book published last
year, The Nostratic Macrofamily: A Study in Distant Linguistic Relationship
(Mouton de Gruyter), two independent scholars, Allan Bomhard and John Kerns,
compiled some 600 Nostratic roots with counterparts (what the linguists call
cognates) in languages said to be descended from Nostratic. On another front,
Dr Joseph Greenberg, a retired Stanford University linguist, is in the midst of
a two-volume study of his own version of the Nostratic hypothesis: Indo-European
and Its Closest Relatives: The Eurasiatic Language Family. Dr Greenberg’s
Eurasiatic overlaps with Nostratic but also includes other languages like
Japanese and Eskimo-Aleut.
In an unpublished
manuscript of yet another forthcoming book, ‘Indo-European and the Nostratic
Hypothesis’, Mr Bomhard concludes that the evidence for the common ancestral
language is ‘massive and persuasive’. ‘As the 20th century draws to a close, it
is simply no longer reasonable to hold to the view that Indo-European is a
language isolate,’ he writes. ‘Indo-European has relatives and these must now
be taken into consideration.’
One of the most vehement
critics of Nostratic, Dr Donald Ringe, a linguist at the University of
Pennsylvania, recently surprised himself by finding statistical evidence that
resemblances between Uralic and Indo-European may indeed be due to more than
chance. Dr Ringe expected his analysis, which will also be published in the
book edited by Dr Joseph and Dr Salmon, to undermine the Nostratic hypothesis.
But Dr Ringe is quick to
point out that a connection between Indo-European and the Uralic languages like
Hungarian and Finnish is the least controversial claim of the Nostraticists. He
remains as dubious as ever that statistically significant connections can be
found between Indo-European and more distant languages.
In a paper called ‘
“Nostratic” and the Factor of Chance,’ published in the current issue of the
journal Diachronica, Dr Ringe examined a list of 205 cognates that the
Russian linguist Vladislav Illich-Svitych found among six language families
commonly said to have descended from Nostratic. He concluded that the
similarities are indistinguishable from those that would have arisen by chance.
As a test of his analytical technique, Dr Ringe applied the same method to two
Indo-European languages, which are known to be related, and found that the
similarities there are indeed statistically significant.
‘It is time to tighten up standards
of evidence in historical linguistics,’ he concluded in his paper. ‘If we
enforce rigour, the truth will enforce itself.’
But some linguists believe
Dr Ringe is misinterpreting his own statistics. Dr Manaster Ramer argues that
Dr Ringe, who has accused the Nostraticists of ‘innumeracy,’ is himself
engaging in ‘pseudomathematics’.
‘To use mathematics in any
science, including linguistics, you have to understand the meaning of the
mathematics and not just learn to manipulate formulas,’ he said. Dr Manaster
Ramer believes that the probability distribution that Dr Ringe found for
Nostratic is exactly what would be expected in languages that split apart long
ago and developed independently. The true test of whether languages are related
is not statistical comparisons, he insists, but the tools of historical
linguistic analysis. If one can find answers in Uralic and Altaic to puzzles in
Indo-European, like the five-fist connection, he says, that strengthens the
argument for an ancestral Nostratic tongue.
Historical linguists start
with two languages they suspect are related, then search for potential cognates
– words like the Italian ‘luce’ (‘light’) and ‘pace’ (‘peace’), which appear in
Spanish as ‘luz’ and ‘paz’. Then, by deriving rules for how sounds mutate over
time, they try to reconstruct the ancient roots.
In actual practice, the
correspondences between related words are usually far more convoluted and
opaque to superficial examination. English and Armenian both are believed to
descend from proto-Indo-European. But it takes a great deal of linguistic
manipulation to show how the Armenian word for two, ‘erku’, is related to its
English counterpart. To add to the confusion, words that seem similar can turn
out to be unrelated. Linguists consider it coincidental that the German word
for ‘awl’ happens to be ‘ahle’, or that the Aztec word for ‘well’ is ‘huel’.
For that matter, the English word ‘ear’, referring to the fleshy flaps on
either side of the head, has been found to be historically unrelated to an
‘ear’ of corn.
There are other mirages
that can create the illusion of a deep historical wellspring. Baby words like
‘papa’ and ‘mama’ are common across languages probably because the labial
consonants – those made with the lips – are among the first that children
learn. Onomatopoeic words like ‘clash’ or ‘meow’ also tend to turn up
independently in unrelated languages. And of course languages borrow words from
one another all the time. A Japanese office worker can log off her ‘konpyuutaa’
and head for ‘Makudonarudo’ to grab a ‘hanbaagaa’ and a steaming cup of ‘hotto
kohii’ for lunch.
To avoid being misled by
such specious similarities, linguists try to concentrate on basic words –
numbers, parts of the body – likely to have been embedded in a language from
the start. As reconstructed by linguistic archaeologists, the ancient
Indo-European word for five was ‘penkwe’, which became ‘pente’ in Greek,
‘quinque’ in Latin and ‘panca’ in Sanskrit. One can immediately see surface
similarities between ‘penkwe’ and the Indo-European roots for fist, ‘pnkwstis’
and finger ‘penkweros’. But though the resonances ring, the source of the
connection has remained obscure.
Finding few clues within
Indo-European itself, Dr Manaster Ramer looked farther afield. Linguists examining
Finnish, Hungarian and Estonian had reconstructed an ancient Uralic root,
‘peyngo’, meaning fist or palm of the hand. And from Turkish, Mongolian and
related languages, linguists had reconstructed the corresponding word in
Altaic: ‘p’aynga’. (The accent is a sign that there were two different p sounds
in the language.)
Working backward from
Uralic and Altaic, Dr Manaster Ramer reconstructed a hypothetical Nostratic
antecedent, ‘payngo’. Then, using what he believed to be the rules by which
Nostratic mutated into proto-Indo-European, he showed how the Nostratic word
for fist could have spawned the Indo-European word for five.
In another attempt to show
that the Indo-European languages descended from Nostratic, Dr Manaster Ramer
analysed the word ‘stink’, which came into English from the hypothetical
Germanic root stinkwan. Linguists find this word interesting because it
appears to have no counterparts in other Indo-European languages. Dr Manaster
Ramer argues that it could have derived from a hypothetical Nostratic word,
‘stunga’.
In his own work, Mr Bomhard
points to evidence that the first-person pronoun ‘me’ and variations like ‘mi’,
‘ma’, ‘mo’ and ‘mea’ appear in PIE and in the reconstructed protolanguages
Kartvelian, Afro-Asiatic, Uralic, Altaic and the extinct language Sumerian. Mr
Bomhard believes that ancestral Indo-Europeans said ‘bor’ for ‘to bore’ or ‘to
pierce’; the Afro-Asiatics said ‘bar’, the Altaics said ‘bur’, the Sumerians
‘bur’, and the Dravidians ‘pur’, while the Uralics said ‘pura’ for borer or
auger. And while Indo-Europeans said ‘pes’ or ‘pos’ for penis, speakers of
Altaic said ‘pusu’ for ‘to squirt out’ or ‘to pour’ and the Sumerians said
‘pes’ not only for sperm and semen but also for descendant, offspring and son.
Most linguists are leery of
reading too much significance into reconstructions that are based on
reconstructions. Are the Nostraticists excavating into the past or building a
house of cards?
‘The bottom line is that
the evidence isn’t good enough,’ Dr Ringe said. ‘In particular, neither
Manaster Ramer nor anyone else has demonstrated that the similarities they’ve
found between the various recognised language families are due to anything
other than chance.’
With such different ideas about
how Nostratic scholarship should proceed, it is unlikely that either Dr Ringe
or Dr Manaster Ramer will come around to the other’s point of view. In the
meantime, linguists watching from the sidelines say there is a huge amount of
work to be done before Nostratic can confidently be verified or rejected.
‘I think there is a new
appreciation of the level of sophistication one needs to approach the problem,’
said Dr Brent Vine, a Princeton University classicist. ‘So much is now known
about all the different language families involved that no one person can
seriously claim to have the kind of control needed for Nostratic research. What
is really needed is a team effort.’
GRAPHIC: Chart: ‘Say What?’
The six language families
shown as branches on this tree are believed to have originated in the Nostratic
language (tree trunk), one of several major branches of a single hypothetical
ancient ‘mother tongue’ from which all languages are believed to be derived.
Map/Diagram: ‘Modern
Children of Nostratic?’
One scheme of current
language group distribution. (Source: Scientific American)
Copyright
2000 New York Times
1
February 2000
SCIENTIST AT WORK / Joseph H. Greenberg
What We All Spoke When the World Was Young
By
NICHOLAS WADE
In the beginning, there was one people, perhaps no more than 2,000
strong, who had acquired an amazing gift, the faculty for complex language.
Favoured by the blessings of speech, their numbers grew, and from their
cradle in the northeast of Africa, they spread far and wide throughout the
continent. One small band, expert in the making of boats, sailed to Asia, where
some of their descendants turned westward, ousting the Neanderthal people of
Europe and others
east toward Siberia and the Americas.
These epic explorations began some 50,000 years ago and by the time the
whole world was occupied, the one people had become many. Differing in creed,
culture and even appearance, because their hair and skin had adapted to the
world’s many climates in which they now lived, they no longer recognized one
another as the children of one family. Speaking 5,000 languages, they had long
forgotten the ancient mother tongue that had both united and yet dispersed this
little band of cousins to the four corners of the earth.
|
|
|
|
Dr Greenberg has grouped most of the world’s
languages into a small number of clusters based on their similarities. |
So
might read one possible account of human origins as implied by the new evidence
from population genetics and archaeology. But the implication that all languages
are branches of a single tree is a subject on which linguists appear strangely
tongue-tied.
Many
deride attempts to reconstruct the family tree of languages beyond the most
obvious groupings like the Romance languages and Indo-European. Their argument
is that language changes too fast for its roots to be traced back further than
a few thousand years. If any single language ever existed, most linguists say,
it is irretrievably lost.
But
one scholar in particular, Dr Joseph H. Greenberg of Stanford University, has
defied this ardent pessimism. In the course of a long career, he has classified
most of the world’s languages into just a handful of major groups.
Though
it remains unclear how these superfamilies may be related to one another, he
has identified words and concepts that seem common to them all and could be
echoes of a mother tongue.
And
this month, at the age of 84, Dr Greenberg is publishing the first of two
volumes on Eurasiatic, his proposed superfamily that includes a swath of
languages spoken from Portugal to Japan.
Like
the biologist E. O. Wilson, Dr Greenberg is that rare breed of academic, a
synthesiser who derives patterns from the work of many specialists, an exercise
the specialists do not always welcome.
But
though biologists came to acknowledge the pioneering value of Dr Wilson’s work,
linguists have reached no such consensus on that of Dr Greenberg.
Will
he one day be recognised as having done for language what Linnaeus did for
biology, as his Stanford colleague and associate Dr Merritt Ruhlen believes, or
is his work more fit, as one critic has urged, to be ‘shouted down’?
Dr
Greenberg is by no means an outcast from his profession. He is one of the very
few linguists who are members of the National Academy of Sciences, the
country’s most exclusive scientific club. His work on language typology
(universal patterns of word order) is highly regarded. Somewhat puzzlingly, his
fellow linguists generally accept his work on the relationships among African
languages but furiously dispute his ordering of American Indian languages, even
though both classifications were achieved with the same method.
Dr
Greenberg’s work is of considerable interest to population geneticists trying
to reconstruct the path of early human migrations by means of genetic
patterning in different peoples.
Although
genes and languages are not bequeathed in the same way, both proceed in a
series of population splits.
‘We
have found a lot of significant correspondences between what he says and what
we see genetically,’ said Dr Luca Cavalli-Sforza, a leading population
geneticist at Stanford. In his view, the majority of linguists are not
interested in the evolution of language. They ‘have attacked Greenberg cruelly,
and I think frankly there is some jealousy behind it because he has been so
successful,’ Dr Cavalli-Sforza said.
In
a windowless office lined with grammars and dictionaries of languages from all
over the world, Joseph Greenberg fishes in the plastic shopping bag that is
serving as his briefcase. He pulls out one of the handwritten notebooks that
are the key to his method of discovering language relationships. Down the left
hand margin is a list of the languages being compared. Along the top are names
of the vocabulary words likely to yield similarities.
His
method, which he calls mass or multilateral comparison, is to compare many
languages simultaneously on the basis of 300 core words in the hope that they
will sort themselves into clusters representative of their historical
development. Many linguists believe such an exercise is futile because words
change too quickly to preserve any ancestry older than 5,000 years or so.
‘They
sell their own subject short,’ Dr Greenberg says. ‘Certain items in language
are extremely stable, like personal pronouns or parts of the human body.’
Born
in Brooklyn in 1915, he was interested in language almost from birth. His
father spoke Yiddish and his mother’s family German. ‘I was brought up to
believe Yiddish was an inferior language because my father’s relatives got
invited to the house as seldom as possible,’ he said. Hebrew school exposed him
to a fourth language. He had a good enough ear that an alternative career as a
professional pianist beckoned.
But
anthropology won out. After doctoral studies at Northwestern, he did fieldwork
on the pagan cults of the Hausa-speaking people of northern Nigeria before
deciding that his true interest lay in linguistics.
At
the time, there was no agreement on the history of African languages. ‘So I
started in a simple-minded way,’ Dr Greenberg said. ‘I took common words in a
number of languages and saw if the languages fell into groups.’ He found that
he could reduce all the continent’s languages first to 14 and later to 4 major
clusters.
In
a 1955 article, he described these as Afro-Asiatic, which includes the Semitic
languages of Arabic and Hebrew, as well as ancient Egyptian, and is spread
across Northern Africa; Nilo-Saharan, a group of languages spoken in Central
Africa and the Sudan; Khoisan, which includes the click languages of the south;
and Niger-Kordofanian, a superfamily that includes everything in between,
including the pervasive Bantu languages.
After
a decade of controversy, Dr Greenberg’s African classification became widely accepted.
‘But then a lot of people said I had gotten the correct results with the wrong
method,’ he said.
Method
is the formal issue that divides Dr Greenberg from his critics. They say that
the only way to prove that a group of languages is related is by establishing
regular rules governing how words change as one language morphs into another.
The
‘p’ sounds in ancestral Indo-European, for example, change predictably into ‘f’
in German and English. Mere similarities between the words in different languages,
like those on which Dr Greenberg relies, fall far short of proof, his critics
say, because the similarities could arise from chance or borrowing.
Because
of the looseness of sound and meaning that Dr Greenberg allows in claiming
similarities, his data ‘do not rise above the level of chance,’ said Dr Sarah
Thomason, a linguist at the University of Michigan.
Dr
Brian D. Joseph of Ohio State University, who studies Nostratic, a proposed
language superfamily similar to Euroasiatic, described Dr Greenberg as ‘a
romantic’ for believing his methods could retrieve long lost languages.
Dr
Lyle Campbell, of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and the author of
a textbook on historical linguistics, said that rigorous proof was necessary
because languages changed so fast, and that Dr Greenberg’s methods were
‘woefully inadequate’.
To
Dr Greenberg and his colleague Dr Ruhlen, the critics’ requirement for
establishing regular rules of sound change defies both common sense and
history. The sound regularities in Indo-European, they say, were not detected
until after the languages had been grouped by inductive methods similar to Dr
Greenberg’s. The insistence on demonstrating sound-change regularities, in
their view, has thwarted any further reconstruction of language families.
‘It’s
a misguided perfectionism that is so perfect they have had no result,’ Dr
Ruhlen said. His and Dr Greenberg’s aim is to establish the probable links from
which the full history of human language can be inferred.
‘The
ultimate goal,’ Dr Greenberg said in concluding his 1987 book Language in
the Americas (Stanford University Press), ‘is a comprehensive
classification of what is very likely a single language family. The
implications of such a classification for the origin and history of our species
would, of course, be very great.’
Because
the Americas have been inhabited only recently, at least as compared with
Africa, it would be surprising to find a larger number of language groups, and
Dr Greenberg decided there were only three, even though other linguists posit
100 or so independent stocks.
Amerind
is the vast superfamily to which, in his view, most native languages of North
and South America belong.
The
other two clusters are Na-Dene, a group of languages spoken mostly in Alaska
and northeast Canada, and Eskimo-Aleut, spoken across northern Alaska and
Canada.
One
striking feature that unites the Amerindian languages of both Americas, in Dr
Greenberg’s view, is the use of words starting in ‘n’ to mean I/mine/we/ours
and words beginning in ‘m’ to mean thou/thine/you/ yours. Not every language
shows this pattern, but almost every Amerindian language family has one or more
languages that have it, suggesting that all are derived from an original
language in which first and second person pronouns started this way.
In
the course of classifying the languages of the Americas, Dr Greenberg realised
that their major families were related to languages on the Eurasian continent,
as would be expected if the Americas had been inhabited by people migrating
through Siberia. Na-Dene, for example, is related to an isolated Siberian
language known as Ket.
To
help with the American classification, Dr Greenberg started making lists of
words in languages of the Eurasian land mass, particularly personal pronouns
and interrogative pronouns.
‘I
began to see when I lined these up that there is a whole group of languages
through northern Asia. I must have noticed this 20 years ago. But I realised
what scorn the idea would provoke and put off detailed study of it until I had
finished the American languages book,’ he said.
Thirteen
years later, Dr Greenberg has now classified most of the languages of Europe
and Asia into the superfamily he calls Eurasiatic. Its seven living components
are Indo-European (examples are English, Russian, Greek, Iranian, Hindi);
Uralic (Hungarian, Finnish); Altaic (Turkish, Mongolian); the
Korean-Japanese-Ainu group; Eskimo-Aleut; and two Siberian families known as
Gilyak and Chukotian.
His
concept of Eurasiatic was derived independently but overlaps with the proposed
Nostratic superfamily, the theory of which has been developed in the last 30
years by Russian linguists.
At
first sight it may seem hard to believe that languages as different as English
and Japanese, say, share any commonalities. But in his new book on the grammar
of Eurasiatic (a second volume on vocabulary is in progress), Dr Greenberg has
found many elements that he argues knit the major Eurasian language families
into a single group.
Words
beginning in ‘m’, for example, are found in every Eurasiatic family to
designate the first person (English: me; Finnish: minÃa;
proto-Altaic: min; Old Japanese: mi). Every branch of Eurasiatic,
Dr Greenberg says, uses n-words to designate a negative, from the no/not
of English to the -nai ending that makes Japanese verbs negative.
Every
branch uses ‘k’ sounds to indicate a question. In Indo-European, many Latin
interrogatives begin qu-, as in quid pro quo. In Finnish, -ko is
added to a verb to indicate a question. In Japanese the same role is played by
-ka. The word for ‘who?’ is kim in Turkish, kin in Aleut.
If
Dr Greenberg’s Eurasiatic proposal is at first no more favourably received than
his Amerindian classification, he will not be surprised.
‘A
fair part of my publications is just polemics,’ he says, with an air of
resignation.
Meanwhile,
Dr Ruhlen believes that if the Eurasiatic grouping is accepted, the world’s
5,000 languages can be seen to fall into just 12 superfamilies.
How
these in turn might be related to a single mother tongue remains to be seen.
But several years ago, Dr Greenberg identified a possible global etymology
derived from the universal human habit of holding up a single finger to denote
one.
In
the Nilo-Saharan languages the word tok, tek or dik means
one.
The
stem tik means finger in Amerind, one in Sino-Tibetan, ‘index finger’ in
Eskimo and ‘middle finger’ in Aleut.
And
an Indo-European stem deik, meaning to point, is the origin of daktulos,
digitus, and doigt – Greek, Latin and French for finger – as well as
the English word digital.
No
one has pointed more clearly at the one language than Joseph Greenberg.