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Me Tarzan, You Jane: Linguistics, Human Migration and Culture
September 15, 2006
Type/Items(s): II Origin and Migrations of Modern Humans, Scientific Sessions
Submitted by: Tatjana Schwabe (ICVolunteers)
Contributors: Moira Cockell (WKD), Viola Krebs (ICVolunteers), Steve Pollard (ICVolunteers)
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The discipline of linguistics is, in part, occupied with finding commonalities between languages in order to group them into families, similar to evolutionary trees. Relationships between language families indicate the relatively recent migration pathways of modern humans, and can be incorporated into a comprehensive migration model supported by Genetics, Archaeology, Palaeontology and other research areas.
Linguistics also investigates features of human language and its use, which could help discern why and how language evolved in modern humans from as early as 100,000-200,000 years ago. |
Linguists studying the distribution of language families today provide information to complement genetic and archaeological studies of human migrations. |
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Dr. Bernard Victorri, a mathematician by training and member of the CNRS-Lattice program set out to explain what linguistics today can and cannot contribute to the study of the origins of modern humans, and how the integration of methodologies and insights from other disciplines could be fruitful for our understanding.
When linguists investigate the migrations of modern humans, they have a plethora of data available -- over 5,000 languages that are currently spoken in the world. The evolution of these languages can be determined in part through careful analysis and comparison of the relationships that exist between them today, and thus the common roots that they share. To achieve this, linguists use a number of methods, in part borrowed from phylogenetic methodologies in biology, to classify and group languages into ever more encompassing families, effectively creating an evolutionary tree of languages. Different forms of data and evidence from each of the methods offer a complementary understanding of the whole picture of our evolution and migration as a species, through the perspective of both the social and natural sciences.
The first step of family grouping is relatively easy to effect, as can be illustrated by looking at the Romance languages of French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese spoken today. Many lexical words, i.e. nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are similar due to a common origin; this type of similarities are termed cognates. In this example, the parent family, or protolanguage, is Latin. It is important to remember the limitations of this method, as features that have been lost from all of the diverging languages cannot be recovered in the protolanguage. For instance, by tracing written records linguists have determined that two grammatical cases in Latin have indeed been lost within this language family.
Protolanguage and language families
Initial protolanguage grouping reduces the data set from 5,000 languages spoken around the world to about 300-400 language families, tracing back 3,000 years of language evolution. Examples are the Bantu language family, which comprises approximately 400 languages over a large part of southern Africa, and the Malayo-Polynesian family, spread in over 1,000 languages from Madagascar to New Zealand and Polynesia. Both of these families indicate the rapid expansion over a large area with subsequent diversification of languages. Linguists can thus make inferences about some aspects of these societies; for instance that the people of the Malayo-Polynesian language family must have been good sailors, having access to outrigger canoes that allowed them to settle islands and coastlands across two oceans.
The second step of grouping language families reveals more ancient language relationships, up to around 6,000 years ago. This is less trivial and involves analysis of sound shifts and formulating laws of phonetic changes, through a careful comparison of all the languages within individual families. Examples of these 'families of families' are the Indo-European, the Niger-Congo or the Austronesian families.
Taking this classification process a logical step further can be equated to finding 'families of families of families'. Linguists today are divided on whether it is possible to go further towards establishing the human protolanguage; the original 'mother tongue'. Bernard Victorri suggests that the technological revolution occurring in linguistics research will allow this to happen. Once qualities, features and lexical words of the diverse languages are entered into a global database, more accurate data will be available for the first and second steps of family grouping. This will enable researchers to draw conclusions about yet more ancient commonalities, as far back as 10-15,000 years ago.
Theory on why humans developed language
There is another area of historical linguistics, which looks at a period of 100,000-200,000 years ago and the question as to why modern humans developed language. Many animals, including our closest relatives among the great apes, show sophisticated forms of communication that allow and enhance certain social behaviours, for example hunting in a coordinated manner. What sets human languages apart is that they all contain certain advanced features, such as a syntactic structure, aspecto-temporal markers, modal markers and polysemy. Why and how did these features evolve, when basic forms of communication and society are possible without them?
Two of the many possibilities that can be explored through the humanities and linguistics in particular are argumentation and narration. These aspects of communication are crucial to the evolution of culture and social laws. Argumentation allows the articulation of an abstract idea and the concept of truth and causation. Narration can convey the history of the tribe, create myths and bring social laws into being, which allow society to succeed. Bernard Victorri has drawn the conclusion that language and culture are implicit to each other, and humanity is embodied by language.
Historical linguistics putting forward sustantiated theories rather than proofs
Bernard Victorri pointed out that historical linguistics can not provide proofs. Rather, it yields certain types of evidence and puts forward substantiated theories, which inspire and are reinforced by research from other disciplines. An example is Greenberg's Amerind hypothesis of three language families in the Americas, which has led to genetic analysis and the finding that members of these families indeed share distinct genetic markers. Linguistics can thus provide an important contribution, because genes and languages reproduce and evolve in different ways and show two independent traces of the history of human migration.
In addition to the cooperation between historical linguistics and migration genetics, several other opportunities for collaboration between the natural and social sciences were highlighted during the discussion. The analogous concept in microbiology, of horizontal gene transfer leading to evolutionary networks rather than trees for bacteria, was used to point out that the tree-like relationships we can discern within language evolution are still a reductionist simplification of the complex network-like relationships that probably also exist between languages. B. Victorri agreed, mentioning as an example, the Balkans, where many unrelated languages coexist in close proximity and borrow heavily from each other.
The history of languages as a bridge between social and natural sciences
Another example where theories from the social and natural sciences share similar themes was highlighted through a question: Why do languages change? Practically speaking, the evolution of different languages and dialects is unnecessary, with all languages in the world being equally efficient at facilitating communication. One of the more culturally oriented answers to this question is that groups of people feel the need to distinguish their language from that used by other generations, societies or cultures. This occurs in addition to differences in the environmental influence of language: for instance the northern Inuit having no word to express the concept of 'leaf' as highlighted by Ian Hacking in this morning's session.
Importantly, changes in language appear to be entirely random, at least within our current understanding. This point ties in with a point made by the previous speaker, biologist Svante Pääbo who explained that genetic evolution through gene mutation is also largely random. The important aspect in researching our genetic evolution is discovering which mutations have been positively selected. In the same way, gaining insight into the way that languages evolve can help us to broaden our understanding of our origins.
As one delegate pointed out, human migration is a particularly good example where several scientific disciplines, such as linguistics, genetics and archaeology have provided data from independent sources to support and strengthen a unified theory. The simple act of explaining the process of interdisciplinary collaboration to others in a jargon-free manner may bring about the realisation that its basic logic is unlikely to be restricted to these few disciplines. This remarkable illustration of consilliance should encourage greater collaboration between the sciences in answering fundamental questions about who we are, where we come from and what we will do with the future that lies in our hands. |
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