When scientists say that little is known about the origin of language one may be pardoned to think that scientists are being modest. In reality it is actually a hyperbole. Close to nothing is known about the origin of language. Our ancestors must have communicated. We just have no clue how.
Conventional science believed that modern humans descended from Homo sapiens who sprang into existence in Africa about 150,000 years ago and developed modern human like behavior around 50,000 years ago. Nevertheless, clues about language can only be traced as far back as 9,000 years, and then this only includes the languages of the Indo-European family of which English is one. This huge interval has recently been made greater by DNA findings that concluded that humans might not only not be descended solely from the Homo sapiens species, but be much older than previously thought. In fact, modern humans may be as old as 400,000 years and possibly more.
Into this conundrum comes a biologist from the University of Auckland in New Zealand who decided to apply to historical linguistics the sophisticated statistical and mathematical models used to build a genetic tree based on DNA sequences. Quentin D. Atkinson used the simplest elements of language, phonemes, to trace common sequences.
Phonemes are consonants, vowels and tones and it is found that the further a language is from click sounds, the fewer phonemes it has. It is also known that the greater the number of people who speak a language, the more phonemes it will have. Thus, a click sounding language with a wide number of speakers should show a larger number of phonemes.
Some of the clues that phonemes give us attest to the antiquity of African languages as click sounds are a very ancient feature of human language. An extreme example of a click-using language is that of the Kalahari Desert Bushmen in Southwest Africa. However, the serial founder effect that Dr Atkinson wanted to find in language remains under question.
A serial founder effect occurs in biology as smaller groups break away, a reduction in genetic diversity occurs. Dr Atkinson wanted to mirror this effect in language by finding fewer phonemes in languages spoken by people who had migrated further away from Africa.
The results, however, were to a large effect inconclusive. From a starting point of over 100 phonemes in the click-using languages of Africa, Dr Atkinson found results as different as 45 phonemes in English and 13 in Hawaiian. Because if the pace of migration slows down the build-up of diversity kicks in, only in isolated communities like Hawaii, which works as a migratory end of the line, did the loss of phonemes persist. Places where different communities remained close enough to stay in touch loss of phoneme diversity was quickly overruled.
Still, Dr Atkinson’s work is ground-breaking and promising. As Mark Pagel, a biologist at the University of Reading in the UK, pointed out it shows that language “retains a signal of its ancestry over tens of thousands of years”. It also showed the Indo-European language tree to be much older than historical linguists had estimated. Together with another biologist at the University of Auckland, Russell Gray, Dr Atkinson has reconstructed the tree of Indo-European languages with a DNA tree-drawing method called Bayesian phylogeny. In the future, much about humanity’s early history could be unravelled by analyzing its use of language.
Posted 05.I.2014
The Less Obvious Angle 