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Language as a Clue to Prehistory

Swammerdami said:
I've noticed that some linguists treat their science almost like plane geometry, with immutable theorems. I'll give two examples.
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Hi @Swammerdami , I have asked my "math friends" if they think that math is (or, maths are, outside of the USA) a symbol-based language, like Mandarin Chinese and other Chinese dialects; and Sanskrit. The math friends had not thought of language questions, and after pondering, agreed that there are examples of different math languages, such as algebra, geometry, calculus, and whatever higher math my friend is surely going to need to leave her kids to learn. That's okay, the 2nd to youngest just became an astrophysicist.

Hi @lpetrich may I also get your opinion on this idea?


At the ends of our chats, we essentially agreed that math gets us to the moon, and language lets us describe everything from the journey to the destination. Do you all agree?

Is it not agreed that the roots of Indo-European can be found in ancient Sanskrit writings?
 
Swammerdami said:
The split between proto-Hittite and IE Proper occurred just before the wheeled wagon was invented.
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That assumes that this invention was epochal; If the wheel was independently invented in a number of different places, at a number of different times, then that statement becomes untenable.

I do agree, however, that archaeological evidence should not be ignored by paelolinguists; If only so that they can avoid re-inventing the wheel.
 
It's not just "the wheel." Wheeled wagons are non-trivial devices, with variations in axles, etc. The invention proceeded in stages. My understanding is that wagons are believed to have suddenly appeared throughout Eastern Europe and neighboring areas. Wooden wheels decay, so the fact that the Afanasievo culture (speaking proto-Tocharian) in Siberia knew of wheeled wagons is inferred from children's clay toys.

The utility of wagons depended on terrain and economy. Having flat terrain and a stock-breeding economy meant that the Indo-Europeans of the Eastern European steppes benefited especially; this helps explain their rising success after the invention.
 
Janice Rael said:
Swammerdami said:
I've noticed that some linguists treat their science almost like plane geometry, with immutable theorems. I'll give two examples.
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Hi @Swammerdami , I have asked my "math friends" if they think that math is (or, maths are, outside of the USA) a symbol-based language, like Mandarin Chinese and other Chinese dialects; and Sanskrit.
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Symbol-based language? What do you mean? Spoken Chinese and spoken Sanskrit are like any other spoken language, like spoken English. Like English dog ~ Sanskrit śvan ~ Mandarin gǒu ~ Cantonese gau2 (phonetic transcriptions for Sanskrit and Chinese)

Writing?  List of writing systems

Sanskrit is written in an alphabet called Devanâgarî. Yes, an alphabet, though more strictly an abugida, where vowels are added on to consonants.

Chinese is written in a logographic system, with one symbol for each word or word part. It's not a pictographic system, with pictures for words, though it started off as one. Present-day Chinese characters are far from their pictographic origins.

Kinds of writing:
  • Pictographic - pictures - emojis
  • Ideographic - ideas or concepts - numerals, mathematics in general
  • Logographic - words or word parts - Chinese characters
  • Alphabet - speech sounds (phonemes) - Greek, Roman, Cyrillic
  • (Alphabet) Abugida - consonants with vowels added on - Devanagari and other South Asian writing systems
  • (Alphabet) Abjad - consonants with vowels usually omitted - Hebrew, Arabic
  • Syllablic - syllables - Japanese hiragana, katakana
Logographic writing can be constructed from alphabets: irregular spelling and abbreviations/acronyms.

The math friends had not thought of language questions, and after pondering, agreed that there are examples of different math languages, such as algebra, geometry, calculus, and whatever higher math my friend is surely going to need to leave her kids to learn. That's okay, the 2nd to youngest just became an astrophysicist.
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Description of mathematics can be though of as a kind of language, and mathematics notation is a kind of ideographic writing.

At the ends of our chats, we essentially agreed that math gets us to the moon, and language lets us describe everything from the journey to the destination. Do you all agree?
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???

Is it not agreed that the roots of Indo-European can be found in ancient Sanskrit writings?
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No, not at all. Sanskrit was a spoken language long before it was written down, and the Vedas were preserved by professional chanters for some centuries before they were written down.

Proto-Indo-European is an ancestor of Sanskrit, just like it is of English.
 
This is amazing work and an insightful, educational reply. Thank you, LP. I have to re-read your post and look some things up; perhaps discuss with a math friend or two. I really am fascinated by this information.
 
I concede that I refer to Wikipedia a lot because it is often a very helpful starting point. I wouldn't consider it a primary source, however.
  • Pictographic symbol:  Pictogram - pictures
  • Ideographic symbol:  Ideogram - for ideas
  • Logographic symbol:  Logogram - for words or word parts (morphemes)
  •  Syllabary - for syllables
  •  Alphabet - for spoken sounds (phonemes)
    •  Abjad - for consonants with vowels seldom written
    •  Abugida - for consonants with vowels added on to them
    Hebrew is written in abjad fashion, and Arabic in semi-abjad fashion, indicating long vowels but not short vowels or consonant length. Both Hebrew and Arabic can be "pointed" to fully indicate vowels, making them both abugidas, like Amharic and South Asian ones.

    There are some hybrid systems:
    • Logosyllabic: logograms + syllabary -- Japanese, cuneiform, Central American writing
    • Logoalphabetic: logograms + alphabet -- Korean
    • Logoconsonantal: logograms + abjad -- Egyptian
 
Wow, this is all news I can use, so to speak. Thanks again.

I agree that Wikipedia is merely a starting point, and, not always accurate. But Google search results are terrible now.

Logograms, and the last 3 related words you posted, are the words I needed to know. Thanks!
 
Here is some video on some macro-linguistics:
More Austro-Tai Comparisons and Observations on Vowel Correspondences - Alex Smith - SEALS 2021 - YouTube

Based on Papers from the 30th Annual Meeting of SEALS - JSEALS_Special_Publication_8_SEALSXXX.pdf

Some discussion of it: New Evidence for Austro-Tai and Observations on Vowel Correspondences : r/linguistics
pyakf

The case of Austro-Tai beautifully contrasts itself with other attempts to demonstrate so-called "macrofamilies" and long-distance relationships, such as the Brahui-Elamite proposal posted here a few weeks ago. It took no special methods, no relaxation of principles, no lexicostatistics or computational models - there were suspicions, and then when data on Buyang was obtained it suddenly became plain as day. Or rather, something that was clearly beyond coincidence. Not to detract from the credit owed from all the linguists who were and still are systematically working out all of the actual correspondences.

...
Enceladus16_

This is easily one of the most interesting macro-family proposals, and one of the most believable too. Weird how it's talked about so rarely when the evidence is actually quite solid. Very cool to see progress on it.
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I've been reluctant to get into some of the less-documented languages like Etruscan. I've seen it connected with both Eurasiatic/Nostratic and Dene-Caucasian, so it will be harder to assess its affinities without a clearer understanding of both.

But I have found a paper on Hattic, a language spoken some 4,000 years ago near Hattusa, the capital of the Hittite Empire, in north-central Anatolia. The Hittites preserved some magico-religious incantations in Hattic, sometimes with a Hittite translation. That's not much, but it is enough to get some vocabulary and grammar.

An example, from JP Mallory's book "In Search of the Indo-Europeans":
Hattic:
malhip = hu te-ta-h-sul
asah = pi tas-tu-ta-sula
(D)Sulinkatti katti a-ta-niuaas

Hittite:
n = asta assu anda tarneskiddu
idalu = ma = kan anda le tarnai
(D)Sulinkattis-san LUGAL-us anda eszi.

English translation:
Then goodness should he let in,
But evil should he not let in.
(The god) Sulinkatte, the king, sits within.
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The paper: Kafkasya Çalışmaları » Submission » Northwest Caucasian Languages and Hattic [Kuzeybatı Kafkas Dilleri ve Hattice]

Comparing  Hattic language to the  Northwest Caucasian languages - I've also found Viacheslav A. Chirikba's document "Abkhaz-Adyghean (West-Caucasian) Languages" but like other papers at academia.edu Google Scholar links me to a long URL at cloudfront.net - a URL which soon breaks.

Northwest Caucasian contains Abazgi (Abhkaz, Abaza), Circassian (Kabardian (E), Adyghe (W)), and Ubykh.

NWC languages have large numbers of consonants and only two or three vowels. However, these vowels have allophones that depend on which consonants that they follow:
a ~ (labial) o ~ (palatal) e
ë (schwa) ~ (labial) u ~ (palatal) i
Grammar is agglutinative, with verbs having a lot packed into them as prefixes and suffixes and nouns relatively simple.
 
I think this short clip is appropriate for this thread. It's my friend "Niall," the Egyptian translating person. They recorded an audio of what the ancient Egyptian dialect may have sounded like. Click the comments to see the translation from hieroglyphs.

 
Author Ayla Bozkurt Applebaum compared the word forms for 193 meanings in all five present or recent NWC langs, using Turkish as an outgroup. In Abazgi, Abkhaz and Abaza were very close (4.7% different), and in Circassian, Kabardian and Adyghe were very close (2.7% different), but Abazgi, Circassian, and Ubykh were about equally far apart, and much farther apart than the members of Abazgi and Circassian.

Turkish was a good outgroup; all 5 of these langs had about 98% - 99% difference with that one, 1% - 2% resemblance.

Differences between the NWC subgroupings: Abazgi - Circassian: 77%, Abazgi - Ubykh: 63%, Circassian - Ubykh: 53%.

Turning to Hattic, only 13 of these meanings had available word forms. Distances from Abazgi: 79% (differences 9, 10), Circassian: 60% (differences 7, 8), Ubykh: 83% (difference 10), Turkish 100% (difference 13).

So one finds the speakers of Proto-NWC split up into speakers of ancestors of Abazgi, Circassian, Ubykh, and Hattic, with Hattic speakers moving from the northwestern Caucasus Mountains to northern Anatolia.
 
Lexical Matches between Sumerian and Hurro-Urartian: Possible Historical Scenarios - Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative

 Sumerian language SE Iraq, 2900 BCE - 1700 BCE, survived as a highbrow and religious language to 100 CE. It and Ancient Egyptian are the two languages with the oldest written records.

The  Hurro-Urartian languages include Hurrian, SE Anatolia / NW Iraq, 2300 - 1000 BCE, and Urartian, E Anatolia, 900 - 585 BCE

Author Alexei Kassian considers two proposals, Igor Diakonoff's Munda (Austroasiatic) hypothesis and John Bengtson's Dene-Caucasian hypothesis. For Sumerian-Munda, the best matches he finds are "fish" - Sum. ku, kua (ku6) ~ Proto-Munda *qa and for "I" - Sum. nge ~ Munda *ing. For Sumerian-DC, the best matches he finds are "I" Sum. nge ~ SC *ngV, "meant" Sum. uzhu ~ Yen. *ise ~ ST *s'a

Out of a 110-word Swadesh-list variant, he found 65 words represented in both Sumerian and Hurrian, because there is too little of Urartian to work with.

He first considers the probability of coincidence, by doing a scramble test. The number of coincidences peaks at 2, and the chance of getting 6 or more coincidences is 2.1%. With 5 or more, it's 6.9%. The difference is whether or not one counts Sumerian sheng ~ Hurrian isena "rain" as a match. But not only consonants but also vowels match in some cases, and AK tried again with more fine-grained consonants. He found 0.36% and 1.6%.

Turning to borrowing,
The general rule says that, among lexical items, cultural vocabulary is always borrowed first, whereas basic vocabulary is generally more resistant to borrowing (Thomason & Kaufman 1988: 74-76; Thomason 2001: 70-71). More precisely, this maxim is complied with in all cases where the sociolinguistic history of relevant peoples and languages is known to us.
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The Swadesh list is often considered a sort of core list, though AK concedes doubts about items like "seed" and "person, human being". Yet he considers the Leipzig-Jakarta list to be based on poor statistics.
If a language has foreign items in its Swadesh wordlist, this language is bound to have borrowings from the same source in other parts of basic vocabulary, and especially a great number of loanwords of the same origin in its cultural vocabulary (cf., e.g., modern English lexified by French and Scandinavian, or various Lezgian languages lexified by Azerbaijani). This is not the case of Sumerian–Hurro–Urartian contacts, because there are virtually no candidates for lexical or grammatical borrowings between these languages besides the six (of five) discussed Swadesh words.
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Furthermore, the cognates that he identifies are in the more stable part of the Swadesh list.

He rejects common ancestry as involving going back too far in time, about 12,000 BCE. But that's about right for the origin of agriculture in the Middle East and its later spread.

He then settles on partial language shift, Hurrian as sort of half-Sumerian or Sumerian as sort of half-Hurrian, from Sumerians moving into Hurrian territory or Hurrians moving into Sumerian territory.
 
Alexei Kassian referred to some of his previous publications,
  • 2010 “Hattic as a Sino-Caucasian language.” Ugarit-Forschungen 41, 309-447.
  • 2011 “Hurro-Urartian from the lexicostatistical viewpoint.” Ugarit-Forschungen 42, 383-451.
Ugarit-Forschungen (UF) – Ugarit-Verlag — Buch- und Medienhandel GmbH - "Ugarit Researches" in German.
The site has a popup menu where one can select German, English, Spanish, French Italian, Hebrew, Arabic, and Chinese, with the other languages being autotranslated from German. One can even get a popup window showing the German original and "Rate this translation. Your feedback will be used to help improve Google Translate" in English for all of these versions.

That was no problem, because I can copy text into online autotranslators like Google Translate and Bing Translator if need be.

But there is a BIG problem. All of the issues of that journal are only in print, not online, and I'm not going to spend $134 or $138 just to get one paper.
 
I searched online, and Alexei Kassian has them at academia.edu -- I found their parent pages, so their URL's ought to be good.

Hattic as a Sino-Caucasian language [UF 41, 2009–2010] | Alexei S . Kassian - Academia.edu
2.4.1 Hattic cannot be directly compared with WCauc. due to the fundamental difference in root structure. Grammatical Hatt.–WCauc. isoglosses are also rather weak.

2.4.2 Indeed, Hattic possesses a number of monoconsonantal roots which can be compared with WCauc. data, but in almost all these cases proposed WCauc. roots have reliable NCauc. cognates, therefore such comparisons cannot prove an exclusive Hattic–WCauc. relationship.
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Hurro-Urartian from the lexicostatistical viewpoint [UF 42, 2010–2011] | Alexei S . Kassian - Academia.edu
... a fact important for future discussion is that any pair of languages conventionally assumed to be ge- netically related at a reasonable time depth possesses a significant number of etymological matches with identical meanings between their basic and, most im- portantly, core vocabularies summarized as the Swadesh wordlist.
(footnote)
More precisely : neither I myself nor any of my colleagues from the Moscow school are aware of even a single reliable exception from this phenomenological rule.
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Then what HU might be close to.
Using data collected in the Global Lexicostatistical Database and the Tower of Babel projects, I have compared the HU list to the forms that can be recon- structed with the same Swadesh semantics for some linguistic families of the Old World, namely: Indo-European, Kartvelian, Uralic, Altaic, Dravidian, Semitic, Egyptian, Chadic, Berber, Cushitic and Omotic. The actual result nears zero. Indeed, some HU roots show a certain phonetic similarity to forms of other linguistic families, but these cases are too scanty and dispersed and look probabilistically conditioned.
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Often one or two words.

Out of the 110 Swadesh meanings that were used, Hurrian has known words for 65 of them, and Urartian 22, with 15 or 16 cognates for the two.

Compared to all these others, there are several cognates across Dene-Caucasian, with the same meaning: Yeniseian 7, North Caucasian 6, Sino-Tibetan 3, Burushaski 2, and with DC cognates, NC 9, Yen 8, ST 6, Bur 3, Basque 1
  • East: Sino-Tibetan, Na-Dene
  • West-Central
    • Central: Yeniseian, Burushaski
    • West: North Caucasian, Basque
So HU is closest to West-Central DC. AK tries to go further, arguing that HU is closest to Yeniseian, but that seems like like small-number statistics, because HU is about equally close to Yen and NC.

AK also notes 3 words shared by HU and the Nakh langs of Northeast Caucasian: ((Chechen, Ingush), Batsbi) where Batsbi ~ Bats. Yes, Chechen of Chechnya. But IMO he reads too much into that. It may be a case of accidental survival; are there similar isolated cognates in other NC branches?

So it seems like a good case for the West-Central Dene-Caucasian affinity of Hurro-Urartian.
 
Some good links:

ABKHAZ-ADYGHEAN (WEST-CAUCASIAN) LANGUAGES | Viacheslav Chirikba - Academia.edu

The Relation of Proto-West Caucasian to Hattic. | Viacheslav Chirikba - Academia.edu
Finding that Hattic grammar was much like NW Caucasian grammar, with lots of prefixes and only a few suffixes, unlike NE Caucasian and Hurro-Urartian.

Hattic and NWC have only a few noun cases, and their verbs can have lots of prefixes, including subject and object persons, verb mood, ... . They also distinguish between centrifugal and centripetal meanings of verbs: being outside and being inside. Outside: NWC ë (schwa) ~ Hattic u (can be ë). Inside: NWC, Hattic a. Compounding was important in Hattic, like in NWC. Also, in Hattic and NWC, multiple objects of possession are often expressed with the singular form.

Phonology can be difficult to determine for Hattic, but it likely had some NWC-like features like labialized consonants: kw, tw, and the like.
The mentioned typological affinities between Hattic and West Caucasian aer too numerous to be ignored, and they ni fact symbolise the existence of a common Hattic-West Caucasian structural type (which is in contradiction with the opinion about Hattic expressed by Kammenhuber 451: "What we so far have, differs from any of the presently known language types"). What is more significant, the structural affinities between Hattic and West Caucasian are supported by quite a substantial number of material correspondences, both in grammatical elements and in the lexicon.
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Then comparison of grammatical affixes, verbs, nouns, and adjectives.
 
 Sumerian language - Sumerian has been linked with oodles of language families: Uralic, Turkic, Dravidian, Sino-Tibetan, Hurro-Urartian, Austroasiatic, Eurasiatic/Nostratic, Dene-Caucasian, ...


 Sun Language Theory - a crackpot theory invented in Turkey in the 1930's that states that humanity's original language was an ancestral Turkic language. These early people invented it as part of their worship of the Sun, thus the name.

Not surprisingly, it has lots of goropian etymologies, after how  Johannes Goropius Becanus tried to derive other languages from the Brabantic dialect of Dutch.

Let's look at the central object of that theory, Sun - Wiktionary, the free dictionary and Appendix:Swadesh lists - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

The only words that look much like Turkish Güneş are other Turkic words, all descended from Proto-Turkic *kün. I thought of listing words for this entity, but I lost patience very quickly.

While most Indo-European words are descended from *seHwel- ~ *sâwel- Uralic varies like crazy, with Finnish Aurinko, Hungarian Nap, ... and reconstructed Proto-Uralic *jelä (not from Finnish or Hungarian, of course!). Chinese Taiyang means "big bright thing" and was borrowed into Korean and Japanese, and Indonesian Matahari means "eye of day".

I couldn't resist this curiosity: the Ojibwe word for "Moon" is dibik-giizis "Night Sun" - dibik: night, giizis: Sun
 
 Father tongue hypothesis
The father tongue hypothesis proposes the idea that humans tend to speak their father's language. The hypothesis is based on a 1997 proposal that linguistic affiliation correlates more closely with Y-chromosomal variation than with mitochondrial DNA variation. ... Focusing on prehistoric language shift in already settled areas, examples worldwide show that as little as 10–20% of prehistoric male immigration can (but need not) cause a language switch, indicating an elite imposition such as may have happened with the appearance of the first farmers or metalworkers in the Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Ages.
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Here are some examples of "Father Tongue":
  • Y: R1a1 - Indo-European into Europe and India
  • Y: L - Elamo-Dravidian
  • Y: O2a - Austroasiatic
  • (Mainly male-based) - expansion of Chinese into southern China
  • (Some Y haplogroups?) - Niger-Congo, including Bantu
  • E1b1b - Afroasiatic
There are exceptions, like Balti speakers in Pakistan, and Hungarians.
 
Hm, I wonder how the Father Tongue hypothesis may relate to the Hebrew language 🤔 since Judaism is considered to be matrilineal.

LP, is there any mention of Judaism in any of the available Father Tongue material?

It doesn't make much sense to me, because so much of English language and education about English came from or was taught with the Bible, for a long time.

Does this Father Tongue hypothesis address the language used prior to, or outside of (separate from) Hebrew?

I don't know Hebrew at all. I have a question 🤔 but maybe not here (it's hyperspecific).

Thanks, LP. I'd like to know how I should think about your posts and the information you provide here. I need a little more content so I can frame it better and slot the new info into my brain 🧠 grooves (perhaps).
 
The possible link between Munda and Sumerian seems very interesting.

And what was the language of the ancient Harappan (Indus Valley) Civilization? Some conjecture it to be "para-Munda" (which I take to mean a sibling to Munda). How strong were the links between the Sumerian and Harappan Civilizations?

Burushaski has also been proposed as the Harappan language. Given the Buru-Caucasian-Basque hypothesis, this would give sibling languages for three late Neolithic cultures: Harappan, early Anatolian, Cardial Ware.

(Dravidian is the obvious candidate for the Harappan language, but I think this has been rejected by scholars, no?)
 
That's still an open question:  Harappan language -- its writing:  Indus script -- possible survival of its words:  Substratum in Vedic Sanskrit

Dravidian and Munda are still the main hypotheses for the Harappan language among known language families. Some Sanskrit substrate words can be traced to Dravidian and Munda and Burushaski, but many of them lack any recognizable source.

As to the writing, I've seen the theory that it is not true written language, intended to map onto spoken language, but titles and label signs and the like. Most Harappan inscriptions are short, averaging at around 5 characters, with the maximum being 34 characters long. No bilingual inscriptions are known.
 
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