Linguists Delve Many Millenia Into Past to Find Man’s Mother Tongue

LOS ANGELES —  If this renegade group of linguists could board a time machine, they probably would press the accelerator to the floor--moving backward through the ages to a time before Sanskrit, English, Punjabi or Japanese.

Hurtling back to a remote part of the past before people ever learned to farm, past the era when humans first used fire to a period 100,000 years ago.

That is the time they think they will find the critical evidence, the seedlings that produced all of the world’s languages, something they like to call the Mother Tongue of Man.

Such a discovery, this group of mostly Soviet and East European researchers believe, would prove what is called the monogenesis of language, the evolution of the spoken word from a single tongue.

But while even these scientists think the 100,000-year mark could eventually prove to be too deep in the remote past, they have made headway in reconstructing hundreds of words they believe were spoken 15,000 to 30,000 years ago.

Historical linguist Vitaly Shevoroshkin of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor sees a host of applications for biology and anthropology in the work he and his colleagues in the Soviet Union have done.

For one, the evolution of language not only shows “how some words have become petrified,” by not changing much over time but also how people have migrated around the world.

Yet he laments the work has generated little interest in the West.

To hear Shevoroshkin tell it, only a handful of Americans are interested in learning the words spoken by early Homo sapiens sapiens, the prehistoric humans whom paleobiologists believe first appeared 100,000 years ago and are the direct ancestors of modern people.

Shevoroshkin theorizes that it is possible to pinpoint at least a few original words of man, elements from a language that served as the progenitor for all of those ever spoken on Earth.

“We would like to reconstruct the proto-proto-proto language, if you will, the Mother Tongue.

“A proto language means a language family like Indo-European. If you say proto-proto that’s an ancestor of a family, not everybody accepts that idea especially people in the West.

“But when you say proto-proto-proto, that’s something completely different. Perhaps we may not find the mother tongue, the language of the world, maybe we can go back only 30,000 years.

“There is a big gap between people speaking some type of language 30,000 years ago and one spoken 100,000 years ago. That is a very big gap and we don’t know how to fill it.”

As part of his quest, however, Shevoroshkin hopes to find the links that tie the world’s languages together and link them to the past.

To this end, he is building on the work of Soviet linguists Sergei Starostin, Vladislav Marakovic Illic-Svityc and Aaron Dolgopolsky who more than 20 years ago tediously reconstructed a language spoken 15,000 years ago they call Nostratic, which means “our language.”

Shevoroshkin said 1,000 words of Nostratic have been reconstructed by analysis of common elements from languages he and other scholars believe grew out of the ancient tongue.

Nostratic, they believe, gave rise to the Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, Kartvelian, Euralic, Dravidian, Altaic and Eskimo-Aleutian language families. Hence, making Nostratic a superfamily of languages, or as Shevoroshkin would put it--a proto-proto language.

His hope is to continue on to the proto-proto-proto stage, if he can find the clues that will link him to the remote past.

Language is unique to the human species, Shevoroshkin said, and one of the primary characteristics like upright walking and a highly evolved brain that set humans apart from their cousin primates, the Great Apes.

He believes by way of a technique called deep reconstruction, he can tap into the vocabularies of ancient humans, seeking first those elements that exist in every language in the world--first and second person pronouns and names for parts of the body.

Such studies produced one of the startling findings in Nostratic, he said.

By studying the word for “eye” in many languages, Soviet researchers were able to surmise what the word was in Nostratic.

“In English, the word is eye. But in German it is auge, very similar. In old Russian it is oko and in Nostratic we believe it was huka.”

Words for nature also lend themselves to historic analysis, he said, emphasizing that because there was no agriculture before 10,000 years ago there are no words for domesticated animals other than dog.

Nostratic scholars have been able to trace that noun among others, he said.

But even Shevoroshkin admits this is an arduous task and acknowledges that many historical linguists doubt he can delve too deeply into the remote past to find a language before Nostratic.

Stanford University linguistic anthropologist Joseph Greenberg, who has developed a technique called mass comparisons for analyzing various languages, is one who questions how well Shevoroshkin will do.

Greenberg, himself interested in the evolution of the various languages of the world, prefers not to seek the vocabularies of early humankind but to classify Earth’s myriad tongues past and present.

His work produced the classification of African languages in the 1950s, the groupings generally accepted by linguists today.

Greenberg would not call the efforts of Shevoroshkin and his co-investigators futile but allowed the exercise could prove tedious.

“There’s enough to show that all human languages have a common origin,” said Greenberg. “I think the really interesting part comes in constructing a family tree (of languages).”

But the problem with family trees, Shevoroshkin said, is that it is easy to leave out vast groups of languages and never show how one is related to another.

“Linguists divide languages into several families such as Uralic, Indo-European or Afro-Asiatic, and so on. They usually say they are not related and if they are there is no proof.

“It is our intention to find the proof and to go beyond that,” Shevoroshkin said of his endeavor.

“People in this area usually talk about relationships and that makes little sense to me,” offered Greenberg.

But linguist Merritt Ruhlen, formerly of Stanford, acknowledged recently in the journal Science that Shevoroshkin probably is right, that there is an ancient link tying the world’s languages to a common tongue.