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February 2, 2008
How Are New Languages Formed?
While one can often trace the evolution of a given language over long periods of time, individual languages like Hebrew and Aramaic seem to have come into history like Athena, full grown from the head of Zeus. With only a very few ambiguously possible exceptions, even the oldest epigraphic texts are clearly Hebrew, Aramaic or something else. Hebrew and Aramaic have obvious affinities with a large range of Semitic languages and with each other and are closer to some than to others; one is hard put to identify any certain transitions from otherwise known ancient Semitic languages to either Hebrew or Aramaic. One of the problems in understanding the origins of language, particularly ancient languages, is that we seldom have clear examples of transitional languages in the same way and number that biologists have transitional fossil forms supportive of biological evolution. I have generally thought that this lack of evidence was the result of the contingencies of discovery and the perishability of the media on which most Hebrew and Aramaic texts were likely written. I've imagined that if we only had more things like the Gezer Calendar the puzzle of the origins of Hebrew, for example, might be solved. (Not that I think the Gezer Calendar is necessarily written in "proto-Hebrew.")
Quentin Atkinson and four others have just published a "Brevia" (alone with an online set of supporting material and discussion) in this week's Science that may shed light (or additional darkness) on the subject of the origins of languages (subscription required). Their paper, "Languages Evolve in Punctuational Bursts" concludes:
Our results, representing thousands of years of language evolution, identify a general tendency for newly formed sister languages to diverge in their fundamental vocabulary initially at a rapid pace, followed by longer periods of slower and gradual divergence. Punctuational bursts in phonology, morphology, and syntax, or at later times of language contact, may also occur. Linguistic founder effects could cause these rapid changes if newly formed languages emerge in small groups, such as in Austronesian. Alternatively, as the example of American English illustrates, speakers often use language not just as a means of communication but as a tool with social functions, including promoting cohesion and group identity. Punctuational language change may thus reflect a human capacity to rapidly adjust languages at critical times of cultural evolution, such as during the emergence of new and rival groups.
Explaining their results the authors noted,
If lexical divergence is a gradual process that is not affected by the emergence of a new language, then the path length or total distance from the root of the tree to the languages at the tips should be independent of the number of language-splitting events or nodes found along that path. If language-splitting events produce punctuational bursts of evolution, however, we expect to find more total lexical divergence (longer path lengths) along paths through the tree that record more language-splitting events.In each language family, we found significantly more lexical change along paths in which more new languages have emerged, the signature of punctuational evolution. These results take into account the phylogenetic relationships among languages, control for a well-known artifact of phylogenetic reconstruction, and cannot be attributed to borrowing of vocabulary. . . [references deleted]
The authors worked with basic vocabulary items in the Bantu, Indo-European, Austronesian, and Polynesian language families.
John Hawks commenting on the article says,
Anyway, I think the most likely hypothesis for why languages might change quickly at or around their origin is that these times are the most likely to involve relatively small communities of speakers. In this case, different language families might share the feature that most changes occur near the time of language splitting, even though the families have different overall rates of change. That appears to be what the data show. Additionally, the effect of splitting might be less for groups that maintain smaller population sizes in between language splits. If this were true of the Austronesian language family, the data also would be consistent with this prediction.
If the splits that produced Hebrew and Aramaic occurred rapidly and in small communities, it is very possible archaeologists will never, and possibly can never, find any evidence for their early evolution. Hmmmm.
Reference:
Posted by Duane Smith at February 2, 2008 3:38 PM | Read more on Hebrew Bible |
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Comments
If languages like Hebrew can be recognized even in the oldest texts, they must have originated before writing was invented and therefore, their ancestors were never written & no material evidence of them will ever be found.
I will take a look at the Science article from my work computer tomorrow.
Posted by: Aydin at February 3, 2008 6:33 PM
Aydin,
I think (hope) you mean before the people who first spoke the language became literate and not before writing was invented.
Duane
Posted by: Duane at February 3, 2008 7:15 PM
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