what do you think of this? (i read it a couple of month ago in the NYT).
Biological Dig for Language Roots NICHOLAS WADE Once upon a time, there were very few human languages and perhaps only one, and if so, all of the 6,000 or so languages spoken round the world today must be descended from it.
If that family tree of human language could be reconstructed and its branching points dated, a wonderful new window would be opened onto the human past. Yet according to historical linguists, the chances of drawing up such a tree are virtually nil and those who suppose otherwise are chasing a tiresome delusion.
Genealogy of language
Languages change so fast, say linguists, that their genealogies can be traced back only a few thousand years at best before the signal dissolves completely into noise. The linguists? problem has recently attracted biologists who have developed sophisticated mathematical tools for drawing up family trees of genes and species. Because the same problems crop up in both gene trees and language trees, they are confident that their tools will work with languages, too.
Indo-European family
The biologists? latest foray onto the linguists? turf is a reconstruction of the Indo-European family of languages by Dr Russell D Gray, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. The family includes extinct languages like Hittite of ancient Turkey, and Tokharian, once spoken in Central Asia, as well as the Indian languages and Iranian in one major branch and all European languages except Basque in another.
Gray?s results, published in November in Nature with his colleague Quentin Atkinson, have major implications, if correct, for archaeology as well as for linguistics. The shape of his tree is unsurprising -- it arranges the Indo-European languages in much the same way as linguists do, using conventional methods of comparison. But the dates he puts on the tree are radically older.
Gray?s calculations show that the ancestral tongue known as proto-Indo-European existed some 8,700 years ago (give or take 1,200 years), making it considerably older than linguists have assumed is likely. The age of proto-Indo-European bears on a longstanding archaeological dispute. Some researchers, following the lead of Dr Marija Gimbutas, who died in 1994, believe that the Indo-European languages were spread by warriors moving from their homeland in the Russian steppes, north of the Black and Caspian Seas, some time after 6,000 years ago.
Rival theories
A rival theory, proposed by Dr Colin Renfrew of the University of Cambridge, holds that the Indo-Europeans were the first farmers who lived in ancient Turkey and that their language expanded not by conquest but with the spread of agriculture some 10,000 to 8,000 years ago. Gray?s date, if accepted, would support the Renfrew position.
Several linguists said Gray?s tree was the right shape, but added that it told them nothing fresh, and that his dates were way off. In the biologists? camp, however, there is a feeling that the linguists do not yet fully understand how well the new techniques sidestep the pitfalls of the older method. The lack of novelty in Gray?s tree of Indo-European languages is its best feature, biologists say, because it validates the method he used to construct it.
Cognates for the word wheel exist in many branches of the Indo-European family tree, and linguists are confident that they can reconstruct the ancestral word in proto-Indo-European. It is, they say, ?k?ek?los,? the presumed forebear of words like ?chakras,? meaning wheel or circle in Sanskrit, ?kuklos,?" meaning wheel or circle in Greek, as well as the English word ?wheel.?
Proto-Indo European
The earliest wheels appear in the archaeological record around 5,500 years ago. So the proto-Indo-European language could not have started to split into its daughter tongues much before that date, some linguists argue.
If the wheel was invented after the split, each language would have a different or borrowed word for it. The dates on the earliest branches of Gray?s tree are some 2,000 years earlier than the dates arrived at by linguistic paleontology.
Since ?wheel? is shared by Tocharian, Greek, Sanskrit and Germanic, Bill Darden, an expert on Indo-European linguistic history at the University of Chicago, says there is no evidence for wheels before the fourth millennium BC, then having Tokharian split off 7,900 years ago and Balto-Slavic at 6,500 years ago are way out of line.
Gray, however, defends his dates, and says the daughter languages of proto-Indo-European were not necessarily the word for wheel but the word ?k?el,? meaning ?to rotate,? from which each language may independently have derived its word for wheel.
If so, the speakers of proto-Indo-European could have lived long before the invention of the wheel. Gray based his tree on the Dyen list, a set of Indo-European words judged by linguists to be cognates, and he anchored the tree to 14 known historical dates for splits between Indo-European languages. Many of the Dyen list cognates are marked uncertain, so Gray was able to test whether omission of the doubtful cognates made any difference (it did not).
He also tested many other possible assumptions, but none of them produced an age for proto-Indo-European anywhere near the date of 6,000 years ago favoured by linguists.
This is why our results should be taken seriously by both linguists and anyone else interested in the origin of the Indo-European languages," he wrote, in a recent reply to his critics.
