The odd absence of statistics also leaves in limbo a set of even more ambitious, exciting, and controversial hypotheses about language families and the prehistoric peoplings of continents that they would represent. Greenberg and his associate Merritt Ruhlen are joined by a school of Russian linguists (Sergei Starostin, Aharon Dogopolsky, Vitaly Shevoroshkin, and Vladislav Illich-Svitych) who lump languages aggressively and seek to reconstruct the very ancient language that would have been the progenitor of each lump. They discern similarities among the proto-languages of Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, Dravidian, Altaic, Uralic, and Eskimo-Aleut, as well as the orphans Japanese and Korean and a few miscellaneous language groups, reflecting a common ancestor proto-proto-language they call Nostratic. For example, the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European word for mulberry, mor, is similar to Proto-Altaic mü@@@@ “berry,” Proto-Uralic marja “berry,” and Proto-Kartvelian (Georgian) marcaw “strawberry.” The Nostraticists would have them all evolve from the hypothetical Nostratic root marja. Similarly, Proto-Indo-European melg “to milk” resembles Proto-Uralic malge “breast” and Arabic mlg “to suckle.” Nostratic would have been spoken by a hunter-gatherer population, for there are no names of domesticated species among the 1,600 words the linguists claim to have reconstructed. The Nostratic hunter-gatherers would have occupied all of Europe, northern Africa, and northern, northeastern, western, and southern Asia, perhaps 15,000 years ago, from an origin in the Middle East.
And various lumpers from this school have suggested other audacious superphyla and super-superphyla. One comprises Amerind and Nostratic. Another, Sino-Caucasian, comprises Sino-Tibetan, Caucasian, and maybe Basque and Na-Dene. Lumping the lumps, Starostin has suggested that Sino-Caucasian can be connected to Amerind-Nostratic, forming a proto-proto-proto language that has been called SCAN, covering continental Eurasia and the Americas. Austric would embrace Austronesian, Austro-Asiatic, and various minor languages in China and Thailand. In Africa, some see similarities between Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan that warrant a Congo-Saharan group. If one were to accept all of these mergers—and some are barely distinguishable from wishful thinking—all human languages would fall into only six groups: SCAN in Eurasia, the Americas, and northern Africa; Khoisan and Congo-Saharan in sub-Saharan Africa; Austric in Southeast Asia and the Indian and Pacific Oceans; Australian; and New Guinean.
Ancestral stocks of this geographic magnitude would have to correspond to the major expansions of the human species, and Cavalli-Sforza and Ruhlen have argued that they do. Cavalli-Sforza examined minor variations in the genes of hundreds of people representing a full spectrum of racial and ethnic groups. He claims that by lumping together sets of people who have similar genes, and then lumping the lumps, a genetic family tree of humankind can be constructed. The first bifurcation splits the sub-Saharan Africans off from everyone else. The adjoining branch in turn splits into two, one embracing Europeans, northeast Asians (including Japanese and Koreans), and American Indians, the other containing southeast Asians and Pacific Islanders on one sub-branch, and aboriginal Australians and New Guineans on another. The correspondences with the hypothetical language superphyla are reasonably clear, though not perfect. One interesting parallel is that what most people think of as the Mongoloid or Oriental race on the basis of superficial facial features and skin coloring may have no biological reality. In Cavalli-Sforza’s genetic family tree, northeast Asians such as Siberians, Japanese, and Koreans are more similar to Europeans than to southeast Asians such as Chinese and Thai. Strikingly, this non-obvious racial grouping corresponds to the non-obvious linguistic grouping of Japanese, Korean, and Altaic with Indo-European in Nostratic, separate from the Sino-Tibetan family in which Chinese is found.
The branches of the hypothetical genetic/linguistic family tree can be taken to depict the history of Homo sapiens sapiens, from the African population in which mitochondrial Eve was thought to evolve 200,000 years ago, to the migrations out of Africa 100,000 years ago through the Middle East to Europe and Asia, and from there, in the past 50,000 years, to Australia, the islands of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and the Americas. Unfortunately, the genetic and migrational family trees are almost as controversial as the linguistic one, and any part of this interesting story could unravel in the next few years.
A correlation between language families and human genetic groupings does not, by the way, mean that there are genes that make it easier for some kinds of people to learn some kinds of languages. This folk myth is pervasive, like the claim of some French speakers that only those with Gallic blood can truly master the gender system, or the insistence of my Hebrew teacher that the assimilated Jewish students in his college classes innately outperformed their Gentile classmates. As far as the language instinct is concerned, the correlation between genes and languages is a coincidence. People store genes in their gonads and pass them to their children through their genitals; they store grammars in their brains and pass them to their children through their mouths. Gonads and brains are attached to each other in bodies, so when bodies move, genes and grammars move together. That is the only reason that geneticists find any correlation between the two. We know that the connection is easily severed, thanks to the genetic experiments called immigration and conquest, in which children get their grammars from the brains of people other than their parents. Needless to say, the children of immigrants learn a language, even one separated from their parents’ language by the deepest historical roots, without any disadvantage compared to age-mates who come from long lineages of the language’s speakers. Correlations between genes and languages are thus so crude that they are measurable only at the level of superphyla and aboriginal races. In the past few centuries, colonization and immigration have completely scrambled the original correlations between the superphyla and the inhabitants of the different continents; native English speakers, to take the most obvious example, include virtually every racial subgroup on earth. Well before that, Europeans interbred with their neighbors and conquered each other often enough that there is almost no correlation between genes and language families within Europe (though the ancestors of the non-Indo-European Lapps, Maltese, and Basques left a few genetic mementos). For similar reasons, well-accepted language phyla can contain strange genetic bedfellows, like the black Ethiopians and white Arabs in the Afro-Asiatic phylum, and the white Lapps and Oriental Samoyeds in Uralic.
Moving from the highly speculative to the borderline flaky, Shevoroshkin, Ruhlen, and others have been trying to reconstruct words ancestral to the six superphyla—the vocabulary of the language of African Eve, “Proto-World.” Ruhlen has posited 31 roots, such as tik “one” which would have evolved into Proto-Indo-European deik “to point” and then Latin digit “finger,” Nilo-Saharan dik “one,” Eskimo tik “index finger,” Kede tong “arm,” Proto-Afro-Asiatic tak “one,” and Proto-Austro-Asiatic ktig “arm or hand.” Though I am willing to be patient with Nostratic and similar hypotheses pending the work of a good statistician with a free afternoon, I find the Proto-World hypothesis especially suspect. (Comparative linguists are speechless.) It is not that I doubt that language evolved only once, one of the assumptions behind the search for the ultimate mother tongue. It’s just that one can trace words back only so far. It is like the man who claimed to be selling Abraham Lincoln’s ax—he explained that over the years the head had to be replaced twice and the handle three times. Most linguists believe that after 10,000 years no traces of a language remain in its descendants. This makes it extremely doubtful that anyone will find extant traces of the most recent ancestor of all contemporary languages, or that that ancestor would in turn retain traces of the language of the first modern humans, who lived some 200,000 years ago.
This chapter must end on a sad and urgent more. Languages are perpetuated by the children who learn them. When linguists see a language spoken only by adults, they know it is doomed. By this reasoning, they warn of an impending tragedy in the history of humankind. The linguist Michael Krauss estim
ates that 150 North American Indian languages, about 80% of the existing ones, are moribund. Elsewhere, his counts are equally grim: 40 moribund languages (90% of the existing ones) in Alaska and northern Siberia, 160 (23%) in Central and South America, 45 (70%) in Russia, 225 (90%) in Australia, perhaps 3,000 (50%) worldwide. Only about 600 languages are reasonably safe by dint of the sheer number of their speakers, say, a minimum of 100,000 (though this does not guarantee even short-term survival), and this optimistic assumption still suggests that between 3,600 and 5,400 languages, as many as 90% of the world’s total, are threatened with extinction in the next century.
The wide-scale extinction of languages is reminiscent of the current (though less severe) wide-scale extinction of plant and animal species. The causes overlap. Languages disappear by the destruction of the habitats of their speakers, as well as by genocide, forced assimilation and assimilatory education, demographic submersion, and bombardment by electronic media, which Krauss calls “cultural nerve gas.” Aside from halting the more repressive social and political causes of cultural annihilation, we can forestall some linguistic extinctions by developing pedagogical materials, literature, and television in the indigenous language. Other extinctions can be mitigated by preserving grammars, lexicons, texts, and recorded speech samples with the help of archives and faculty positions for native speakers. In some cases, like Hebrew in the twentieth century, the continued ceremonial use of a language together with preserved documents can be sufficient to revive it, given the will.
Just as we cannot reasonably hope to preserve every species on earth, we cannot preserve every language, and perhaps should not. The moral and practical issues are complex. Linguistic differences can be a source of lethal divisiveness, and if a generation chooses to switch to a language of the mainstream that promises them economic and social advancement, does some outside group have the right to coerce them not to on the grounds that it finds the idea of them keeping the old language pleasing? But such complexities aside, when 3,000-odd languages are moribund, we can be sure that many of the deaths are unwanted and preventable.
Why should people care about endangered languages? For linguistics and the sciences of mind and brain that encompass it, linguistic diversity shows us the scope and limits of the language instinct. Just think of the distorted picture we would have if only English were available for study! For anthropology and human evolutionary biology, languages trace the history and geography of the species, and the extinction of a language (say, Ainu, formerly spoken in Japan by a mysterious Caucasoid people) can be like the burning of a library of historical documents or the extinction of the last species in a phylum. But the reasons are not just scientific. As Krauss writes, “Any language is a supreme achievement of a uniquely human collective genius, as divine and endless a mystery as a living organism.” A language is a medium from which a culture’s verse, literature, and song can never be extricated. We are in danger of losing treasures ranging from Yiddish, with far more words for “simpleton” than the Eskimos were reputed to have for “snow,” to Damin, a ceremonial variant of the Australian language Lardil, which has a unique 200-word vocabulary that is learnable in a day but that can express the full range of concepts in everyday speech. As the linguist Ken Hale has put it, “The loss of a language is part of the more general loss being suffered by the world, the loss of diversity in all things.”
Baby Born Talking—Describes Heaven
On May 21, 1985, a periodical called the Sun ran these intriguing headlines:
John Wayne Liked to Play with Dolls
Prince Charles’ Blood Is Sold for $10,000
by Dishonest Docs
Family Haunted by Ghost of Turkey
They Ate for Christmas
BABY BORN TALKING—DESCRIBES HEAVEN
Incredible proof of reincarnation
The last headline caught my eye—it seemed like the ultimate demonstration that language is innate. According to the article,
Life in heaven is grand, a baby told an astounded obstetrical team seconds after birth. Tiny Naomi Montefusco literally came into the world singing the praises of God’s firmament. The miracle so shocked the delivery room team, one nurse ran screaming down the hall. “Heaven is a beautiful place, so warm and so serene,” Naomi said. “Why did you bring me here?” Among the witnesses was mother Theresa Montefusco, 18, who delivered the child under local anesthetic…“I distinctly heard her describe heaven as a place where no one has to work, eat, worry about clothing, or do anything but sing God’s praises. I tried to get off the delivery table to kneel down and pray, but the nurses wouldn’t let me.”
Scientists, of course, cannot take such reports at face value; any important finding must be replicated. A replication of the Corsican miracle, this time from Taranto, Italy, occurred on October 31, 1989, when the Sun (a strong believer in recycling) ran the headline “BABY BORN TALKING—DESCRIBES HEAVEN. Infant’s words prove reincarnation exists.” A related discovery was reported on May 29, 1990: “BABY SPEAKS AND SAYS: I’M THE REINCARNATION OF NATALIE WOOD.” Then, on September 29, 1992, a second replication, reported in the same words as the original. And on June 8, 1993, the clincher: “AMAZING 2-HEADED BABY IS PROOF OF REINCARNATION. ONE HEAD SPEAKS ENGLISH—THE OTHER ANCIENT LATIN.”
Why do stories like Naomi’s occur only in fiction, never in fact? Most children do not begin to talk until they are a year old, do not combine words until they are one and a half, and do not converse in fluent grammatical sentences until they are two or three. What is going on in those years? Should we ask why it takes children so long? Or is a three-year-old’s ability to describe earth as miraculous as a newborn’s ability to describe heaven?
All infants come into the world with linguistic skills. We know this because of the ingenious experimental technique (discussed in Chapter 3) in which a baby is presented with one signal over and over to the point of boredom, and then the signal is changed; if the baby perks up, he or she must be able to tell the difference. Since ears don’t move the way eyes do, the psychologists Peter Eimas and Peter Jusczyk devised a different way to see what a one-month-old finds interesting. They put a switch inside a rubber nipple and hooked up the switch to a tape recorder, so that when the baby sucked, the tape played. As the tape droned on with ba ba ba ba…, the infants showed their boredom by sucking more slowly. But when the syllables changed to pa pa pa…, the infants began to suck more vigorously, to hear more syllables. Moreover, they were using the sixth sense, speech perception, rather than just hearing the syllables as raw sound: two ba’s that differed acoustically from each other as much as a ba differs from a pa, but that are both heard as ba by adults, did not revive the infants’ interest. And infants must be recovering phonemes, like b, from the syllables they are smeared across. Like adults, they hear the same stretch of sound as a b if it appears in a short syllable and as a w if it appears in a long syllable.
Infants come equipped with these skills; they do not learn them by listening to their parents’ speech. Kikuyu and Spanish infants discriminate English ba’s and pa’s, which are not used in Kikuyu or Spanish and which their parents cannot tell apart. English-learning infants under the age of six months distinguish phonemes used in Czech, Hindi, and Inslekampx (a Native American language), but English-speaking adults cannot, even with five hundred trials of training or a year of university coursework. Adult ears can tell the sounds apart, though, when the consonants are stripped from the syllables and presented alone as chirpy sounds; they just cannot tell them apart as phonemes.
The Sun article is a bit sketchy on the details, but we can surmise that because Naomi was understood, she must have spoken in Italian, not Proto-World or Ancient Latin. Other infants may enter the world with some knowledge of their mother’s language, too. The psychologists Jacques Mehler and Peter Jusczyk have shown that four-day-old French babies suck harder to hear French than Russian, and pick up their sucking more when a tape changes from Russian to French than from French to Russian. This is
not an incredible proof of reincarnation; the melody of mothers’ speech carries through their bodies and is audible in the womb. The babies still prefer French when the speech is electronically filtered so that the consonant and vowel sounds are muffled and only the melody comes through. But they are indifferent when the tapes are played backwards, which preserves the vowels and some of the consonants but distorts the melody. Nor does the effect prove the inherent beauty of the French language: non-French infants do not prefer French, and French infants do not distinguish Italian from English. The infants must have learned something about the prosody of French (its melody, stress, and timing) in the womb, or in their first days out of it.