Mythfolk_seeking the Mother Tongue

8/3/2019 Mythfolk_seeking the Mother Tongue

1/8

[mythfolk] Seeking the Mother Tongue:

Proto-World and Creoles

T. Peter ParkTue, 15 Aug 2006 19:34:52 -0700

SEEKING THE MOTHER TONGUE:PROTO-WORLD AND CREOLES

By T. Peter Park

Inquiring minds have long wondered about the origins oflanguage, the causes of our world's vast linguistic diversity, and aboutwhether our world's myriad languages might all be derived from a singleoriginal tongue.

In the Biblical Tower of Babel story, human beingsoriginally all spoke the same language until God stopped their attemptto build a tower reaching up to Heaven by making them speak differentlanguages. Thus, the tower's builders could no longer understand eachother or collaborate on their impious project. Herodotus related anEgyptian story about an experiment by King Psamtik I (664-610 B.C.) todetermine the original language. Psamtik had two babies reared inisolation from human contact by a mute shepherd, so that they would notbe "contaminated" by hearing any adult language. Their firstintelligible sound resembled "bekos," the Phrygian word for "bread."Psamtik concluded that Phrygian, an Indo-European language spoken inancient Turkey, was humanity's original tongue. Christian and Jewishwriters in the Middle Ages assumed that God, and Adam and Eve in the

Garden of Eden, spoke Hebrew, the language of the Holy Scriptures.Patriotic scholars in the Renaissance claimed, according to theirnationality, that God, Adam, and Eve had spoken French, German, English,Dutch, or Swedish! 18th and 19th century philosophers and linguists,inspired by the Enlightenment and Darwinism, devised ingenious andseemingly plausible but speculative and unprovable "rational" and"scientific" theories of the origins of language

In exasperated reaction against the endless, inconclusivespeculations of "armchair" theorists relying more on the theories ofHobbes, Locke, Rousseau, or Darwin than on actual linguistic research,late 19th century professional linguists declared a moratorium ontheorizing on the origins of language. As the origin of human speech and

the character of the original language would probably forever remaininsoluble mysteries, speculation on such topics was futile andunscientific. Therefore, papers on the origins of language or theoriginal "mother tongue" would no longer be allowed to be published inlinguistic journals or read at linguistic congresses. The world's manydifferent languages, it was granted, could well be ultimately related,in being probably all descended from the grunts of the same band ofPleistocene ape-men. However, after so many tens or hundreds ofthousands of years of constant change and divergence, this presumabledistant common origin would be forever impossible to trace or prove.This remained the predominant, quasi-official view of linguists throughmost of the 20th century.

However, a few maverick linguists--Wilhelm Schmidt(1869-1954), Alfredo Trombetti (1866-1929). Otto Jespersen (1860-1943),


2/8

Morris Swadesh (1909-1967), Joseph H. Greenberg (1915-2001), VladislavIllich-Svitych (1934-1966), Derek Bickerton (1925-), Merrit Ruhlen(1944-)--challenged this dogma throughout the 20th century. Defying the"official" taboos of the linguistic profession, they dared to speculateabout the origins of language, the ultimate common origin of alllanguages, and the possibility of proving that common origin even now by

the accepted methods of comparative and historical linguistics, tens oreven hundreds of millennia after the original human dispersal (whetherfrom the Near East or Africa). Some, like Jespersen, Swadesh, andBickerton, theorized about the origins of human speech and the probablecharacteristics of the earliest stages of language. Some, like Schmidt,Trombetti, Swadesh, Greenberg, Illych-Svitych, and Ruhlen, amassedevidence for the probable common origin of all languages and attemptedto reconstruct the basic vocabulary of the_Ursprache_, "Mother-Tongue"or "Proto-World."

Alfredo Trombetti launched modern attempts to prove thecommon origin of all languages, citing many reconstructed proto-words,with _L'Unit d'origine del linguaggio_ (Bologna: Libreria Treves di

Luigi Beltrami, 1905). In the mid-20th century, Morris Swadesh arguedfor the concept among American linguists, culminating in hisposthumously published _The Origin and Diversification of Language_(Chicago and New York: Aldine-Atherton, 1971). Like Trombetti, Swadeshcited many reconstructed proto-words in numerous articles and in _TheOrigin and Diversification of Language_., broadly similar to Trombetti'sthough often with small differences of detail. In the 1960's, 1970's,and 1980's, the project was continued by Stanford University's JosephGreenberg and Merritt Ruhlen, and by a number of Russian linguistsincluding Vladislav Illich-Svitych, Vitaly Shevoroshkin (now at theUniversity of Michigan), Sergei Starostin, and Aron Dolgopolsky. TheRussian linguists were at first mainly interested in proving a"Nostratic" language phylum or superfamily comprising the Indo-European,Hamito-Semitic, Uralic, Altaic, Japanese-Korean, and Eskimo-Aleutfamilies--but soon expanded this into a search for even broaderworld-wide relationships. Greenberg's protg and disciple Ruhlen, againciting many reconstructed proto-words, summed up these late 20th centuryresearches with two 1994 books: the semi-popular _The Origin ofLanguage: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue _ (New York, etc.:John Wiley & Sons) and the similarly titled but much more technical _Onthe Origin of Languages: Studies in Linguistic Taxonomy_ (StanfordUniversity Press).

Derek Bickerton, a professor of linguistics at the University of Hawaiiwho has spent much of his career studying pidgin and creole languagesthroughout the world, did not offer any reconstructed proto-worlds.However, he discussed the origin of language, and the light shed on itby pidgins and Creoles, in his books_Roots of Language_ (Ann Arbor, MI:Karoma Publishers, 1981) and _Language and Species_ (University ofChicago Press, 1990), and in his 1983 _Scientific American_ article"Creole Languages" (_Scientific American_. Vol. 249, No. 1, July 1983,pp. 116-122). Modern creole languages, Bickerton suggested, haverecreated the probable grammar and syntax of the earliest _ Homo sapiens_ languages, using vocabularies borrowed from those of colonialist ortrader languages like English, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, andArabic.

The Proto-World reconstructions of Trombetti, Swadesh,Shevoroshkin, and Ruhlen differed in some details. Some citedproto-words not listed by some of the others. There also were some

differences in the exact phonetic form reconstructed for someproto-words. Thus, the proto-word for "woman, wife" was variously


3/8

reconstructed as kwen, kuna, kni, or kuanai. Similarly, that for "dog,wolf" was variously reconstructed as kuan, k'ina, k'uyan, kuri, orkuari, that for "know, perceive, think" as ken, kena, kina, gon, or gn,and that for "think, feel, wish" as mena or manu. For the most part,however, there has been considerable broad agreement on manyproto-words, and despite small differences in exact phonetic form ("man,

male, husband" as mano, mno, meno, or mar?) the reconstructions havebeen broadly similar. Short of building a time-machine and going back toEast Africa 70,000 years ago, we will probably never know the EXACTpronunciation of most Proto-World words (was "big, strong" mek, mag, ormaga? )--but we are getting a fairly good idea of their approximateform. Ultimately, it does not matter that much if women were calledkwen, kwena, kni or kuna in Proto-World, if there is an overwhelmingpreponderance of world-wide linguistic evidence that the word wasSOMETHING of that GENERAL sort.

There is now enough of a consensus on the probable basic vocabulary ofProto-World that some writers have even attempted hypothetical shortsentences and "conversations" among the first "Out of Africa" migrants.

Thus, geneticist Steve Olson discussed the linguistic evidence onprehistoric migrations in his chapter "Sprung from a Common Source:Genes and Languages" in _Mapping Human History: Discovering the PastThrough Our Genes_ (Houghton Mifflin, 2002), pp. 137-154. Olson beganthe chapter by discussing (pp. 137-139) the hypothetical Proto-Worldspoken by the first _Homo sapiens_ migrants 65,000 years ago by raftfrom the Horn of Africa across the Red Sea to Asia and ultimatelyAustralia. He wrote (p. 138):


4/8

like kwena, kwina, or kweni. However, if future researchers shouldconclude that something like kuna or kuni is more likely.

We also seem to be on the threshold of reconstructing thegrammar and syntax as well as the basic vocabulary of Proto-World, if weaccept University of Hawaii linguist Derek Bickerton's conclusions about

Creole languages. The first out-of-Africa migrants probably spoke alanguage very similar in grammar and syntax to modern creoles. In moderntimes, Bickerton has pointed out, creoles have developed in variousparts of the world, chiefly in colonial and plantation settings, out ofpidgins. A pidgin is a sort of proto-language or crude formlessmakeshift language invented by adults who are native speakers ofdifferent languages in order to communicate between themselves. This hashistorically happened mostly in colonial or trading situations. Pidginshave no set grammar, stringing words together haphazardly in a crude,baby-talk-like "me Tarzan you Jane," "me Ugg, me big hunter, me hit youhead, you die" fashion.

A creole language, as described by Bickerton, is a new

language developed when the children of pidgin speakers in a colony oron a plantation acquire a language based on their parents' pidgin andthat being spoken around them by the children of other pidgin speakers.The creole has a definite standardized grammar, invented entirely by thefirst generation of children who learned pidgin as native speakers fromtheir parents and playmates. It is now a real language, with regulargrammatical rules. All the creole speakers use the same grammaticalrules, which are not traceable to the grammars of any of the nativelanguages spoken by their parents (pidgin speakers). They are not, heargues, derived from the grammar and syntax of Chinese or any Afrcan orMelanesian languages, as popularly believed. Moreover, Bickerton hasnoted, creoles throughout the world have virtually the same grammaticalrules--which coincide with the grammatical "mistakes" most commonly madeby small children learning to speak their own "regular" languages!Creoles seem to spontaneously recapitulate the probable historicallyvery earliest stages in the evolution of the world's languages out ofProto-World. and thus give a strong clue to what the grammar and syntaxof Proto-World must probably have been like.

These Creoles, Bickerton finds,, all have essentially the exactsame grammar and syntax, regardless of whether their vocabularies arebased mainly on English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, or Arabic,and whether their speakers are mainly of African, Asian, or PacificIslander descent. Substantially the same grammar and syntax, he finds,are found in Hawaiian Creole English (spoken by Hawaiian laborers ofvariously native Hawaiian, Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, andPortuguese origin), Haitian Creole French, Papiamentu (a Spanish- andPortuguese-based Creole of Curaao, Aruba, and Bonaire in theCaribbean), Sranan (an English- and Dutch-based Creole of Surinam, theformer Dutch Guyana), Saramaccan (an English-based Creole spoken by theso-called "Bush Negroes" of the Guyanas), Jamaican Creole English, Krio(Caribbean Creole French), Runion Creole French, Seychelles CreoleFrench, Senegal Kriol (West Africa), Tok Pisin (New Guinea "Pidgin"English), Crioulo (a Portuguese Creole), etc.

Bickerton's Creole researches, he believes, have shown thatthe close similarities in Creole grammar and syntax in the Americas,Africa, the Far East, and the Pacific can not be explained by theuniversal influence on all these Creole languages of any one particularplantation-laborer language like Yoruba (in the Americas) or Chinese (in

and around the Pacific). Likewise, Bickerton is very skeptical of anysuggestion that most or all modern Creoles are descended from any one


5/8

particular Portuguese Creole language spoken in Portuguese-run Africanplantations and trading posts in the 17th century, and subsequentlyspread all over the world with frequent vocabulary replacements fromEnglish, French, Spanish, Dutch, and even Arabic. He cites historicalreasons why such theories are highly unlikely. No, he believes Creolepatterns of grammar and syntax are so very similar throughout the whole

world because they express a neurologically hard-wired human"bioprogram" that all children spontaneously express before beingconditioned by parents and teachers into following the biologicallycounter-intuitive particular ethnic or tribal grammatical rules ofEnglish, French, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, Swahili, Chinese,Japanese, or Tagalog. It's a "bioprogram," too, that Bickerton feels wasexpressed in the earliest languages of the very first members of our ownbiological species, _ Homo sapiens_. In other words, though Bickertonnever used the term, he evidently felt that Proto-World had a grammarand syntax closely resembling that of modern Creoles. However, if thedevelopmental psychologist David S. Moore is correct in _The DependentGene: The Fallacy of "Nature" Vs. "Nurture" _ ((New York: W.H. Freeman,2001), it may be a mistake to talk about a "linguistics bioprogram," or

about language being biologically "hard-wired," as Bickerton does.

Regardless of the merits of Bickerton's haed-wired linguisticbioprogram hypothesis, he has pinpointed some interesting similaritiesbetween Creoles of different geographical areas and derived fromdifferent "normal" base languages. Here are some of the main grammaticaland syntactic features of Creoles, as described by Bickerton in his 1981book _The Roots of Language_ and his July 1983 _Scientific American_article "Creole Languages":

In Creole, according to Bickerton, a grammatically neutralmarker or particle for number can be employed on a noun in order toavoid specifying number: "I stay go da store for buy shirt" ("I am goingto the store to buy a shirt") Moreover, in Creole as described byBickerton, the addition of a definite or indefinite article to "shirt"changes the meaning of the sentence. In saying "I stay go da store forbuy one shirt," the Creole speaker asserts that the shirt is a specificone; in the sentence "I stay go da store for buy da shirt," the speakerfurther presupposes that the listener is already familiar with the shirtthe speaker is going to buy (the object discussed is known/familiar tothe listener). This closely parallels the standard English opposition of"a~an" versus "the," or the standard French contrast of "un~une" versus"le~la."

In place of English past tense, usually marked in "-ed," inCreole there is a tense Bickerton calls the anterior tense. In HawaiianCreole, it is marked with "bin" for older speakers and with "wen" foryounger speakers. The anterior tense is somewhat like English "pastperfect": "had walked" in English is "bin walk" in Hawaiian Creole, and"walked" in English is simply "walk" in Creole.

In order to distinguish irreal ("irrealis"), hypothetical,possible, or future actions or processes, English employs theconditional or the future tense. In Creole all such irreal ("irrealis")circumstances are expressed by the [Hawaiian Creole] particle "go,"which is placed before the main verb and marks what linguists callmodality. For example, the sentence "If I had a car, I would drive home"is rendered in [Hawaiian] Creole as "If I bin get car, I go drive home."

There is also, Bickerton adds, a Creole auxiliary verb that

marks what linguists call "aspect." It too is placed before the mainverb and indicates that the action expressed by the verb is


6/8

nonpunctual--i.e., repeated, habitual, continuing, or incomplete. It isexpressed by"stay" in Hawaiian Creole. If the particle "stay" isomitted, the action is understood to be completed or non-repetitive.

In English, Bickerton points out, there is nostraightforward way to distinguish between purposes that have been

accomplished from those that have not. The sentence "John went toHonolulu to see Mary" does not specify whether or not John actually sawMary. In Creole grammar the ambiguity must be resolved. If John sawMary, and the Creole speaker knows that John saw Mary, the speaker mustsay, "John bin go Honolulu, go see Mary." If John did not see Mary, orif the speaker does not know whether John saw Mary, the speaker must say"John bin go Honolulu for see Mary." The grammatical disrinction betweenpurposes accomplished and unaccomplished, absent in English, is found inall Creoles.

The distinction in Hawaiian Creole between singular, plural,and neutral number is also made in all other Creole languages, accordingto Bickerton.

In all other Creole languages, likewise, there are 3invariant particles that act as auxiliary verbs--for anterior tense,nonpunctual aspect, and irreal modality--and play the role that "bin"[anterior], "go" [irrealis] and "stay" [nonpunctual] play in HawaiianCreole. In Haitian Creole, for instance, t marks the anterior tense ofthe verb, av~ava marks irreal modality, and ap marks the aspect of theverb as nonpunctual.

In all Creoles, the particle for tense [anterior tense]precedes the particle for modality [irreal modality], and the particlefor modality precedes the particle for aspect [nonpunctual aspect]. Thisorder is identical in Creoles all over the world.

No Creole language distinguishes questions and statements onthe basis of word order alone--the difference between questions andstatements is marked by intonation alone in Creoles

The distinction between "stative" versus "nonsttative"verbs is an important one in all Creoles, according to Bickerton.Stative verbs, he explains, are verbs such as "like," "want," and"love," which cannot form the nonpunctual aspect. In English, forexample, we cannot add "-ing" to a finite stative verb. The base form ofthe verb refers to the present for stative verbs and to the past fornonstative verbs. The base form of the verb refers to the present forstative verbs and to the past for nonstative verbs. The anterior tenseis roughly equivalent to the English past tense for stative verbs and tothe English past perfect tense for nonstative verbs. The irreal modeincludes the English future, conditional, and subjunctive. In all theCreole languages the anterior particle precedes irreal particle, and theirreal particle precedes the nonpunctual particle . In Hawaiian Creole,however, "He bin go walk" has come to mean "He walked" instead of "Hewould have walked," and the forms "He bin stay walk," "He go stay walk,"and "He bin go stay walk," although they were widespread before WorldWar II, are now almost extinct because of the growing influence inHawaii of standard American English. No marker of continuing action canbe employed with stative verbs in Creoles, Bickerton observes.

For example, he notes, children learning English acquire thesuffix "-ing," which expresses duration, at a very early age. Even

before the age of 2 many children say things such as "I sitting highchair," where the verb expresses a continuing action. One would expect


7/8

that as soon as the suffix ["-ing"] was acquired it would be applied toevery possible verb, just as the suffix "-s" that marks the Englishplural is frequently overgeneralized to nouns such as "foot" and "sheep."

One would therefore expect children to utter ungrammaticalsentences such as "I liking Mommy" and "I wanting candy." Remarkably,

Bickerton notes, such errors are almost never heard. Children, he pointsout, seem to know implicitly that English verbs such as "like" and"want," which are called stative verbs, cannot be marked by the suffix"-ing" to indicate duration. The distinction between stative andnonstative verbs is fundamental to Creole languages, however, and nomarker of continuing action can be employed with a stative verb inCreoles, either, he believes.

The distinction between specific and nonspecific referenceis an important one in Creole languages, according to Bickerton.. InEnglish, the distinction can be subtle, but young children nonethelessacquire it with ease, he notes. For example, the sentence "John hasnever read a book," which makes nonspecific reference to the noun

"book," can be completed by the phrase "and he never will read a book";it cannot be completed by the phrase "and he never will read the book."Similarly, the sentence "John read a book yesterday," in which aspecific book is presupposed, can be completed by the phrase "and heenjoyed the book"; it cannot be completed by the phrase "and he enjoyeda book." Children as young as 3 years were able to make suchdistinctions correctly about 90% of the time, Bickerton notes. Thisseems to suggest, I think, that the _Homo sapiens_ "Proto-World" or_Ursprache_ of 60,000 or 70,000 or 100,000 years probably possessed adefinite article comparable to English the, French le, la, les, Spanishel, la, los, las, German der, die, das, Greek ho, ha, to, hoi, etc.,Arabic el, Hebrew ha, and Mayan le--even though languages like Latin,Sanskrit, Russian, Finnish, Estonian, Chinese, Japanese, andMalay/Indonesian lack(ed) it.

When a feature of the local language matches the structureof Creole, Bickerton observes, children avoid making errors that wouldotherwise seem quite natural. For example, children learning Englishacquire the suffix "-ing," which expresses duration, at a very earlyage. Even before the age of 2 many children say things such as "Isitting high chair," where the verb expresses a continuing action. Onewould expect that as soon as the suffix ["-ing"] was acquired it wouldbe applied to every possible verb, just as the suffix "-s" that marksthe English plural is frequently overgeneralized to nouns such as "foot"and "sheep." It now appears that intrinsic child grammar and Creolelanguages may have much in common, Bickerton feels.

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Yahoo! Groups Links

To visit your group on the web, go to:


8/8

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mythfolk/

To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:[EMAIL PROTECTED]

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:

http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/

Source http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg00676.html
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mythfolk/http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mythfolk/http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/

Documents

Mythfolk_seeking the Mother Tongue