Folium: Do All Languages Derive from a Single Common Ancestor via Slate
Folium: Do All Languages Derive from a Single Common Ancestor via Slate
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Have you ever wondered what the first language on the earth was? We may never know because of the rate at which languages change and mutate on a constant basis. Gretchen McCulloch writes to educate us on the subject of Verner’s law and how languages change. Verner’s law, stated by Karl Verner in 1875, describes a historical sound change in the Proto-Germanic language whereby voiceless fricatives immediately following an unstressed syllable in the same word, underwent voicing and became the fricatives. Or a simplified way to state that law is essentially that Proto-Germanic non-initial voiceless fricatives in voiced environments became voiced when the previous syllable was unstressed. For example, both the /th-/ and the /-d/ of English third are descended from Proto-Germanic voiceless /*th/, but the second was voiced by Verner’s Law.
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(Ed: If we’ve lost you by now, enjoy a video… It helps!)
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Currently, there are around 6,000 different languages spoken on the earth. There are statistical techniques to analyse the rate at which words and dialects mutate, and it has been calculated that it would have taken at least 100,000 years for a single language to have diversified. That would take us back to the middle of the Stone Age, around the time that Homo sapiens first emerged as a species. It’s possible that earlier human species such as Homo heidelbergensis 600,000 years ago or even Homo habilis 2.3 million years ago had language which really makes you think, what could have their language sounded like?
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I believe it interesting that it is not simply how there came to be multiple languages but rather how we determine which modern languages are related without the benefit of a time machine. Gretchen says that in order to do so, historical linguists compare large numbers of words in different languages, looking for similarities that can’t be explained by other factors, such as onomatopoeia for example, the word for cat is something like “miao” in several languages, which seems pretty obvious.
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Some ancestors of English are Latin, Greek, Russian. Hindi as well as many other languages spoken in Europe and India. Did you know that all of the words that start with [al-] stem from Arabic? Similarities in languages come from a variety of backgrounds. There are many solid evidences of common ancestry. For example, compare the English words father, foot, far, and five with the Ancient Greek words meaning the same thing: pater, podos, per and pente. The English terms all begin with an /f/ sound while the Ancient Greek ones start with a /p/ sound.
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Gretchen points out that when you piece together a whole series of systematic parallels like this across several languages, you can begin figuring out what the common ancestor. There have been several attempts to trace the family tree of our languages and find ancestral vocabulary and grammar. Maybe you can take part in the search for “ancestral words” that add piece of evidence or to the puzzle. We all have descended from a culture or a language that we should continue to search and constantly be apart of. Gretchen encourages everyone to look for clues on ancient words and languages and you just might find a connection you never could.
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Julie Martin
LEAF Editor & Contributor
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