Walter L. Wagner said:
What I've also found interesting in linguistics is that the Indo-European languages all use suffixes on nouns, verbs, and adjectives to change meanings. I.e., singular or plural, gender, case, etc. are all at the end of the word.
In some African languages (Swahili, for example, which I studied somewhat), those determinations come at the beginning of the word (as an insert), so you know immediately, without having to wait to the end of the word.
In oriental languages, I believe there are no 'endings' or 'beginnings', though I'm not very studied yet in that area of knowledge.
Perhaps you know more about this than I, as well.
I know virtually nothing about the various language groups of the Amerindian tribes.
So, was there ever a 'first' language used by the first true humans? Or were there already several languages? We can trace to an "Adam" or an "Eve" from which all people alive today have as common ancestors (circa 150,000 years ago?), but they were in a matrix of many others - so were there several languages already then in existence?
Until the last years of the 20th Century, there was a brick wall in linguistics. It was acknowledged as impossible to track the history of any language family beyond about 10,000BCE. That was just around the dawn of the Neolithic Era, meaning that we couldn't trace the origins of language back into the hunter-gatherer days. The reason was that 12,000 years seemed to be enough time for absolutely everything in a language to change beyond recognition. Inflected languages (i.e. the verb endings you mentioned) become agglutinative (shoving words together like Chinese or, to a large extent, German). Entire vocabularies are replaced. Syntax transforms into some new pattern with no discernable relation.
[BTW, regarding the Asian languages...Chinese has no inflections and does not even have the concepts of tense, number, etc. If it's important to make it clear that the dog ate the carrot yesterday you just say "yesterday." Japanese, on the other hand, is a nightmare of inflections. The verb endings even reflect the social status of the speaker relative to the listener, and women and men have two different paradigms.]
Then massively parallel computing entered the scene. As in many avenues of research, we had reached the limits of the ability of bigger disk drives, more memory, and faster processing speeds to solve advanced problems in linguistic analysis. But more processors operating on different fragments of the problem were the key--compare this to chess, in which a hundred processors working in tandem beat Gary Kasparov.
The brick wall came down like the ending on the Pink Floyd album. Well maybe not in 3 minutes 42 seconds or whatever.
But after months of brute-force comparisons, the massively parallel processor group did what no humans could have done: discovered complex arrays of phonetic shifts and grammatical evolutions going back so far that... well I won't give away the ending just yet.
Out of the couple of thousand human languages that are available for study, each with a vocabulary of more than ten thousand words, the reward for all this work is something on the order of fifty words in all the European and Asian languages that have common ancestors. A few body parts, a couple of numerals, a pronoun or two, an animal... etc. I've seen the word lists and now that they're written down they're not all that remarkable. Considering that Russian
pyat, Latin
quinque and English
five are all absolutely the same word, there's nothing on these lists that defies our understanding of the ability of spoken sounds to undergo regular shifts over the millennia. It's just that there are so few of them, we could never have found them by ourselves.
We think that some words are immutable, that they stay with us forever. Pronouns, numbers, the most common everyday words. Yet English
very,
use, and
question are Norman French borrowings. The Japanese use Chinese numerals for counting. Urban Brazilians have lost the universal Latin second-person informal pronoun
tu and replaced it with
voce, a contraction of "your grace." You begin to understand that when we said an entire language can turn over in 12,000 years, we weren't exaggerating.
To expect to find fifty words that hadn't changed in quite a bit longer was counterintuitive. But to actually
find them... well that took a computer, as they say.
Anyway, the Indo-European, Finno-Ugro-Ural-Altaic, Afro-Asiatic, Sino-Tibetan, and all the other languages spoken throughout Eurasia and North Africa are now a single superfamily. Linguists, clever scholars with millions of words at their disposal, gave it the pedestrian name of Eurasiatic.
I don't know how far back this pushes the origin. I can't find a website with the dates, which are surely controversial anyway, but I think the branching into the "Caucasoid" and "Mongoloid" peoples that account for the entire population of the region goes back at least 40,000 years.
The computers are still chugging away at the rest of the world's languages. Since the indigenous New World people started migrating from east-central Asia no earlier than 25,000 years ago, it's a no-brainer that their languages are in our superfamily, even though the MPPs haven't yet improved on the three-family model derived in the 1980s. (The Eskimo-Aleuts, the Indians of what is now the eastern USA and eastern Canada, and everybody else.)
I think the Australians, who made landfall about 60,000 years ago, are still a bit of an enigma. And the Polynesians, whose DNA apparently identifies them as descendants of both Australians and eastern Asians.
But the big question mark is Africa. So far there are no conclusive pointers to indicate a relationship between what is shaping up to be a single Sub-Saharan African superfamily and the Eurasiatic. But there are inconclusive hints.
You, and possibly I, will live to see the question answered. It would be the answer to a lot of questions. The biggest one is: Why did modern humans (Homo sapiens) suddenly migrate out of Africa some 80,000 years ago? Did something happen that gave them the desire? Did something happen that gave them the ability? Or both?
What if it was language? What if language arose while we were still in Africa? That would certainly have been a quantum jump in the nature of human society. It kind of makes agriculture, industry, and computers--the three "Paradigm Shifts"--look like trifles. We could suddenly communicate
a lot better than the other animals. Think more complicated thoughts. Make and execute more elaborate plans. Pass more important lore on to our descendants.
Maybe... Imagine, plan, and execute a multi-generation journey into a whole new world with completely different climates, food sources, topography, predators, and adventures?
If it turns out that we learned to talk before we left Africa, it wraps human prehistory up into a nice, elegant little package.