Mother Tongue 23 - the most recent one that ASLIP has published, as of this writing.
It has some retrospectives about Merritt Ruhlen, and an update that he wrote for his book "The Origin of Language" back in 2009. Like
What I would most like to rewrite today is my inadequate discussion in Chapter 1 of the difference between the origin of Language—the language faculty, the ability to speak—and the origin of those languages which now exist. These are entirely different questions, though even today they are still constantly confused.
He has a section on it on the evolution of word order, specifically the unmarked or default order of the subject, verb, and object of a simple sentence with a transitive verb. Much like what he wrote in this paper:
The origin and evolution of word order | PNAS He wrote it with Murray Gell-Mann, a physicist who became a historical linguist. So I decided to check that paper's work.
There are six possible ones, and the most common orders are SVO and SOV, with VSO being next, and then VOS, and very rarely, OSV and OVS.
Subject–verb–object word order and
Subject–object–verb word order and
Verb–subject–object word order and
Verb–object–subject word order and
Object–subject–verb word order and
Object–verb–subject word order
Let's start with Indo-European. English is obviously SVO, and that is common in IE. But many other IE langs are SOV, including the older langs, and it is reconstructed for the protolanguage. Likewise, Uralic has some SVO members, but it is ancestrally SOV. Looking at Altaic, Turkic, Mongolian, Tungusic, Korean, and Japanese are all SOV, making Altaic SOV, Turning to the rest of Eurasiatic, Yukaghir, Chukchi-Kamchatkan, Nivkh/Gilyak, and Eskimo-Aleut are all SOV, making Eurasiatic SOV. The rest of Nostratic, Kartvelian and Dravidian, are both SOV, making Nostratic SOV, at least Nostratic without Afrasian.
Turning to Dene-Caucasian, Basque, North Caucasian, Burushaski, Yeniseian, most of Sino-Tibetan, and Na-Dene are all SOV. A notable ST exception is the Sinitic or Chinese languages, which are SVO. So Dene-Caucasian is SOV.
Afroasiatic is a difficult case. Omotic is SOV, Cushitic is SOV or VSO, Chadic is VSO or SVO, Berber is VSO, Egyptian is VSO, and Semitic is ancestrally VSO, though some members have become SVO or SOV. So unlike MR and MGM, I'll put a big fat question mark in front of AA.
Turning to Austric, Proto-Austronesian was VSO or VOS, Kra-Dai is SVO, Austroasiatic: Mon-Khmer SVO and Munda SOV, Hmong-Mien/Miao-Yao SVO. So Austric is likely SVO or VSO.
Turning to Joseph Greenberg's New-World lumping, Amerind, it has all six orders, though MR concludes that it is ancestrally SOV. That makes Borean SOV, though I consider that conclusion weak.
New Guinean languages (Indo-Pacific) are mostly SOV, but Australian ones have all six orders, and like Amerind, MR concludes that Australian was also originally SOV. So Ex-African, as it might be called, was SOV (MR) or uncertain (me).
Turning to Africa itself, Nilo-Saharan is a motley Greenbergian group that has SOV, SVO, and VSO in it, but MR considers it originally SOV. Niger-Congo is mostly SVO except for Mande, which is SOV, and MR argues that NC was originally SOV. Thus, Congo-Saharan, their combined grouping, is in MR's estimate, SOV, and in mine, doubtful.
Since the first split of humanity was into north-central and southern African populations, and since the former one is the ancestor of the ex-African ones, from MR's arguments, Proto-North-Central-Africa was SOV, while I find that conclusion doubtful.
The southern African population is now represented by Khoisan speakers, and Khoisan is a mixture of SOV and SVO.
So while MR concludes that Proto-World was SOV, I think that we have no way of telling from what its descendants were like. In fact, in some of his argumentation, MR seemed to be trying to force that conclusion, or at least to show that ancestral SOV was possible. But that's not a demonstration of ancestral SOV. It's not like Nostratic and Dene-Caucasian being SOV or like Austronesian being VSO/VOS.
