So, quick recap: Languages can be genetically
related. This isn’t like human familial relationships
where two parents produce children one at a time but continue to exist themselves. With languages what happens is the language
will expand, either by the people who speak it spreading out or by outsiders learning
the language, and then in different places they’ll talk more and more differently from
each other over time until they can’t understand each other anymore. It’s not a perfect analogy, but, when this
happens we say that the resulting languages are “descended” from the original language,
called a proto-language, and that they’re “genetically” related to each other. We’ve seen this happen in history, with
sanskrit branching into the modern Indian languages or Latin branching into the romance
languages. From these known examples we can figure out
what it looks like when a group of languages are related, and we can then seek to identify
those same patterns in other languages and determine whether or not they’re related
too, even if we don’t have any written records of the parent language. The method linguists use to do this is called
the “comparative method,” and it’s yielded some cool results, linking together huge groups
of languages into giant genetic groups like Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, Niger-Congo,
Austronesian and plenty of others. But can we go bigger? Can we group languages into even bigger and
bigger groups? Or, here’s the real question: could linguists
prove that all the worlds languages are related to each other? Before Latin, before Proto-Indo-European,
was there ever a proto-World? Well, maybe, but the normal comparative method
isn’t going to do us any good here. It works mostly by comparing the vocabularies
of languages and looking for regular patterns between them. Like, where Spanish has the “ch” sound
in its word for a thing, Portuguese will usually have a “t” sound in its word for that
same thing, suggesting that maybe they had a common ancestor with the “ch” sound
and in Portuguese it changed to a “t” sound. Or maybe the other way around, this is too
little to tell. Point is, if you find enough of these regular
correspondences then at some point you have to say, ok, this is too much to be a coincidence,
these languages are probably related. Thing is, though, this method works best at
short time-scales, when the changes languages have gone through are the simplest and easiest
to figure out. At longer time-scales the changes start to
pile up and get more and more complicated, and it gets harder and harder to tell if these
are actually regular correspondences or if it’s just a random coincidence. Not only that, but any time the meanings of
words change in addition to how their pronounced that’s also another piece of evidence lost,
and given enough time more and more words will start to mean different things than they
used to. Because of this, the comparative method can
only really show us if languages are related if they diverged from each other fewer then,
like, five-thousand years ago or so, and human language is way, way older than that. This doesn’t necessarily mean that there
wasn’t a proto-world, though! Maybe there was, maybe at some point humans
started speaking for the first time, creating the first ever language, and from there it
spread out and diversified and diverged until all the daughter languages were so different
that we can’t tell anymore. Or, maybe not: maybe language was invented
multiple times independently, and modern languages are descended from different first languages. Thing is, we don’t really know how language
first happened. Like, we’re the only animal on the planet
that can really use language. Gorillas using sign language and Parrots repeating
words and phrases is cool, but for reasons I’ll get into some other time the stuff
they do never gets nearly as complicated or sophisticated as what humans do, no matter
how hard we try to train them. So at some point we must have evolved the
ability to speak, but we don’t really know how that happened. Did we evolve the physical ability to speak
and then the mental capacity for language, or the other way around, with the mental capacity
evolving and then the physical ability? Who knows! Did we start speaking immediately after we
evolved the ability to speak, or did it take a while before we invented language? Who knows. Did our ability to speak evolve slowly, bit
by bit, involving progressively more complicated systems of communication, or was there some
single mutation that suddenly gave us the ability to use language all at once? Who knows. Did language happen when we started using
the cries and yelps and grunts and other vocal signals that Chimpanzees also use to communicate
more precisely? Or maybe we actually evolved sign language
first, and only started using our mouthes when we evolved the necessary equipment in
our throats? Or maybe language is just it’s own, completely
separate thing that didn’t develop directly from anything simpler. No one has any idea. And how would they? You can’t really look at fossils and tell
whether or not the creature they used to be inside of used language, let alone what that
language was like. Maybe eventually neuroscientists and geneticists
will piece together exactly what order we evolved what in, and maybe from that we’ll
be able to figure out how language happened, but for now we’re kind of in the dark, and
there’s not much that traditional linguistics can do to solve any of these problems. So, as far as I can tell, that ignorance basically
leaves us with three possibilities concerning Proto-World:
One: proto-world did in fact exist and all of the world’s languages are genetically
related. This doesn’t necessarily mean that Proto-World
was the first language. Maybe the most recent common ancestor of all
modern languages existed at the same time as a bunch of other languages, but now all
those other languages are extinct. Or maybe it was the first language ever, but
either way, possibility one is that proto-world was a thing that existed. Two: proto-world sort of existed. Like, let’s say language evolved really
slowly out of the simpler, non-language forms of communication our ancestors used. In-between they would have used some sort
of communication that was more sophisticated than what chimpanzees do but less sophisticated
than real language. Like, maybe they developed some sort of complicated
system of vocal signals that signaled for different stuff but that they couldn’t put
together into complex sentences, or maybe they had some sort of sign-language-like system
supplemented by vocal signals. Maybe names were the first linguistic signs
to develop and we used them to get each other’s attention, or maybe we used singing and nursery-rime-like
stuff to socialize with each other and language developed out of that. Point is, there’s a lot of possible things
that language might have first developed out of but that wasn’t itself quite language
yet. So, maybe all of the world’s languages are
descended from one of those pre-language systems, in which case there was sort of a proto-world,
it just wasn’t technically a language yet. Three: proto-world didn’t exist at all. Like, maybe whatever genetic mutations allowed
humans to speak spread through the population, and then, after the fact, language was invented
multiple times, and those different initial languages eventually evolved into different
groups of modern languages. We have no way of knowing which of these three
possibilities was what actually happened. But the idea that proto-world might have existed
is really interesting, so, let’s assume for a second that it did exist. Can we know anything about it? Well, besides a few fringe linguists who claim
to be able to reconstruct some of it, the general consensus seems to be: a little bit
but not a lot. Like, until about a hundred thousand years
ago all humans lived in Africa, and after that they spread out across the world, so
we can be reasonably sure that it would have been spoken in Africa sometime earlier than
about a hundred thousand years ago. We also think that humans diverged from chimpanzees
around seven million years ago, so unless that common ancestor could talk and chimpanzees
lost the ability to speak, proto-world would have had to exist sometime after that. Besides that, well, I mean, we can look at
all the languages in the world and ask ourselves “what do all of these things have in common”
and then we can assume that proto-world also had those traits, but we don’t find a whole
lot when we do that. Like, human languages can be really different
from each other, so all you can really say is, like “it probably had both consonants
and vowels, it probably had between ten and a hundred phonemes, you probably had to use
your tongue to speak it,” you know, stuff like that. And that’s kind of it. Beyond that we don’t really know anything
about Proto-World and we probably never will, including whether or not it existed. I hope you found it kind fun to think about
though. See you soon for more linguistics videos!
