Blogging for a theory of language origins

I started Language Continuity in May 2008, that is four years ago. As you know, this blog is about linguistics, and my posts have covered a variety of areas: historical linguistics, Indo-European studies, theoretical linguistics, language origins,... Now, what are the most popular posts so far? Before I answer this question with some statistics, I'd like to offer my own view, because I do have my own favourites. The posts that I really enjoy writing are the ones about Origins of Language. And my favourite one is this: The birth of grammar. Maybe one day I'll use these posts to write a book about my views on language origins. I don't know when, but I think I will. But before writing, there's a lot of reading for me to do. For example, this recently published handbook.

What about my readers' actual preferences? According to Blogger stats, these are the top-three posts of all time, in order of popularity:

The Franco-Iberian refuge
Colin Renfrew. The Anatolian hypothesis
Celtic from the West

Another interesting question: where do my readers come from? In this case, there's a clear winner: the USA. A high percentage of the visits I get are from that country. Let's see the top-five (below you can see a map depicting the global audience for my blog, from Blogger Stats): 1. USA; 2. Spain; 3. Netherlands; 4. United Kingdom; 5. Australia.

Languages, genes and cultures

As you may know, in this blog I have often criticised many aspects of traditional historical linguistics, e.g. the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European (PIE), including the imaginary set of laryngeals (one of my 'favourite' topics indeed) or the generally accepted chronology of IE expansion. I have written many posts criticizing these things, inspired by the work of some authors, like Mario Alinei and Xaverio Ballester, who oppose the traditional assumptions held in mainstream Indo-European (IE) studies. The good news is that now a major scholarly work, led by Francisco Villar, seems to support these ideas!

Francisco Villar is a renowned expert in Indo-European, and also in the languages of Pre-Roman Iberia. As we saw in this post, one of his theories is that the study of ancient toponyms, especially hydronyms, shows that the oldest languages spoken in the Iberian Peninsula were IE. Any other type of language (Basque, Iberian) appeared later (Villar, 2000). In his last research work (Villar et al 2011), carried out in collaboration with Blanca Prósper, Carlos Jordán and María Pilar Fernández Álvarez, he continues his previous research, comparing the linguistic data with the archaeological and genetic evidence that's now available. I will comment on the results in a series of posts, starting with this one. For the moment, I'll try to summarize some of the main points.

In their research, they focus on the ancient hydronyms of Europe and southwest Asia. The choice of material is relevant: hydronyms usually retain signs of archaic linguistic layers. Analysing these toponyms, they identify a series of components that are significantly present in those areas, e.g. *aisko/isko-, *ab-, or *balso-. Not only that: they also demonstrate, using phonological and lexicological criteria, that these components are IE, with no exception.

The aim of the research is to to try to correlate this set of data with the currently available theories of IE origin and expansion into Europe. The novelty is that the authors take into account Alinei's Paleolithic Paradigm  as one of the possible scenarios. Putting together linguistic, archaeological and genetic data, they reach the conclusion that the distribution of these toponyms correlates basically with two main events: the Mesolithic population expansion from the Glacial refugia of southern Europe, and the expansion of agriculture in the Neolithic. Both events involve IE languages. This is important. If the Mesolithic populations that migrated north were already carrying IE languages with them, then  those languages were there already in the Paleolithic. In order words, the Paleolithic Continuity Paradigm (PCP).

Of course, some may think: "Ok, there were IE language in Europe at that early age, but then there was another wave of IE dispersal at the bronze age which brought the IE languages as we know them today and historically". The authors admit this possibility, but also say that it is quite unlikely. As they say, and as I have insisted in this blog many times, there is no evidence of any sort of relevant population movement in the Bronze Age that could even remotely support this theory, usually known as the Kurgan theory.

As I said, I'll publish more posts getting into the details of this important research work. For example, I'll talk about their criticism of some aspects of traditional IE reconstruction, e.g. the reconstruction of PIE phonology. Let's see some excerpts (the highlighting is mine):

(p. 724-725): "Ciertas líneas de investigación han tendido a limitar el sistema vocálico indoeuropeo a dos vocales /e/ y /o/ e incluso a una sola (...). Tal reconstrucción, que no vamos a criticar aquí en detalle, desemboca en sistemas vocálicos irreales, inexistentes en las lenguas del mundo, sea cual sea la familia lingüística en la que busquemos. El testimonio de los arqueo-hidro-topónimos lleva la reconstrucción profunda del vocalismo indoeuropeo por derroteros muy diferentes. En las series vocálicas de nuestras arqueo-raíces la /e/ y la /o/ se manifiestan como variantes triviales y en parte locales de las respectivas formas básicas /i/, /u/ y /a/ (...). De ese modo, el sistema vocálico que se dibuja en el estadio cero es de tres miembros (a, i, u)".

(p. 726): "al pretender, como se ha hecho tradicionalmente, explicar la supuesta lengua común como un sistema cerrado en sí mismo, sin un origen y un devenir, se ha incurrido en simplificaciones, distorsiones e invenciones tendentes a buscar regularidades artificiales en terreno de la fonética, la morfología y la semántica".

The authors use cautious language, but this is actually a complete demolition of the many aspects of traditional PIE reconstruction, including laryngeals and other inventions.

NOTE (Apr 22, 2012): I have translated the quotes into English. See comments.

References:
- VILLAR, Francisco (2000). Indoeuropeos y No-Indoeuropeos en la Hispania Prerromana. Salamanca, Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca.
- VILLAR, F., B. PRÓSPER, C. JORDÁN, and  M.P. FERNÁNDEZ ÁLVAREZ (2011). Lenguas, genes y culturas en la prehistoria de Europa y Asia suroccidental. Salamanca, Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca.

Language in the dark

We, humans, are a diurnal primate species. Even though our modern life allows us to be more active in the dark hours, it is obvious that our species is adapted to the natural light-dark cycle: we are more active during the day, and sleep at night. This is true for both industrial and pre-industrial societies (Anch et al 1988; Siegmund et al 1998). On the other hand, human adults sleep about eight hours a day, a pattern that is similar to the one observed in chimpanzees, our closest relatives. According to Elaine N. Videan (2005), adult chimpanzees sleep 8.83 hours on average. As for the other primate species, there is a variety of sleeping patterns, depending on the type of adaptation (see table in Videan, 2005:10).

Chimpanzees live in equatorial and tropical Africa, i.e. the place where the first humans developed as a species. The map on the right (source) shows the different distribution of daylight hours in the world depending on the time of year. At the Equator, there is a balance of 12h of daylight and 12h of dark throughout the year, and in the adjoining areas the variation is low. The further we go north or south, the variation is higher. The extreme situation is obviously in the Poles, with either constant day or constant night.

It is difficult to know the sleeping patterns of extinct hominid species. If we think of Neanderthals, who were adapted to cold weather in the northern hemisphere, we might expect some kind of biological adaptation to the new environment. For us, humans the story is quite different, as our adaptation to those habitats is mainly a result of our technical ability (use of fire, clothing, etc.). Millions of humans live today in areas that we were not originally designed to inhabit. Our body and biological rhythm correspond to an equatorial or tropical environment.

Now, what does all this have to do with language? Let's see.

In previous posts, I have suggested that language was born in the context of a complex communication system that already had its own grammar. Maybe it was born as just a complement in an already rich communicative environment, but it certainly developed into something that gained relevance in human societies, as we can see today. Languages are at the centre of any human group, and are perceived as an independent communicative system. How did this happen? Obviously, using oral communication has some advantage of its own, as many authors have pointed out. One of these advantages is the fact that it can be used at night, i.e. in the absence of the whole world of perceptive stimuli and visual references that can be found in daylight. Communicating in the dark requires some additional effort, and it looks like vocal speech might be the best solution to overcome the difficulties.

Now, if you live near the Equator, as our ancestors did, you are possibly not much worried about how you fill your night time hours. There are about twelve of them each day, and you spend most of that time just sleeping. This is how our ancestors experienced life. Communication, including language, evolved in this scenario of balance. There was no special pressure for oral speech to surface as a particularly crucial element. It did evolve, but maybe at a slow pace.

From my Flickr photostream

Let's think of the first humans who ventured north. They occupied vast territories in Eurasia where they had to experience something new: winter days with less than ten hours of daylight. If you live in an environment like this, with endless nights of fourteen or more hours, you necessarily have to do something about it. Your body is not going to change: you will sleep the average eight hours no matter what you do. You won't hibernate either, because your species was not designed for this environment. But you have some tools to overcome the silent night: you can use fire, and you can also use complex communication. In the long dark hours there's only one way to describe the world around you: making language a more sophisticated tool, creating a more elaborate lexicon and more flexible ways of expressing meaning.

Maybe the new conditions found by humans at northern latitudes added new pressures to the development of language. If we look at the languages of the world, we can see an enormous discontinuity. The languages of central and southern Africa look extremely different from the languages of Eurasia. Some examples of these radical differences can be seen in The World Atlas of Language Structures, available online. Fusional languages like the ones in the Indo-European or Afro-Asian groups seem to have taken the concept of language to a degree of formal complexity that is not present in many sub-Saharan languages. A lot of research should be carried out before any solid conclusion may be drawn, and also to avoid overgeneralizations, but I think it is not absurd to hypothesize that Eurasia was an innovative area in terms of language, and that these innovations may have spread to other parts of the world, including Africa. The distribution of day/night hours may have played its role in the accumulation of pressure for these developments to take place.

References:
- Anch, AM et al (1988). Sleep: a Scientific Perspective. Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice Hall.
- Siegmund, R. et al (1998). "Activity monitoring of the inhabitants in Tauwema, a traditional Melanesian village: rest/activity behaviour of Trobriand islanders". In Biological Rhythm Research, 29:49-59. (abstract).
- Videan, E.N. (2005). Sleep and Sleep-Related Behaviors in Chimpanzee. Dissertation.

Dictada Occitana

Last Saturday I participated in the Trobada Occitana at Burjassot (a town in the Valencia Metropolitan Area). As you can see in the bilingual programme (picture on the right), the event included a series of activities around the Occitan language: a speech, live music in Occitan, and obviously, the Dictada itself, i.e. a dictation where the participants have to show their level of proficiency in Occitan. This type of events are held once a year in many places around the Catalan/Occitan world, and they work as a way of showing support for the Occitan language.

So there we were, ready for the dictation. The singer of the band (Primaël) read out the lyrics of one of his songs (Companh), which were used as the text for the dication. I had hardly ever written any Occitan before, like most of the people there, but the words of the lyrics were easy to understand. Below you can see a photo of the three winners, and the funny thing is that the second from the right is actually ... me!

How is it possible for some Catalan/Valencian speakers like ourselves to be able to understand and write in Occitan at a more or less decent level, without having learnt or practiced any Occitan before? The answer is easy: both languages are closely related. Some authors have gone beyond that idea, proposing that Catalan and Occitan are, grossly speaking, two varieties of the same language. The truth is that centuries of separation, and a series of historical events, particularly the expansion of Spanish and French in the corresponding territories, have created a linguistic scenario that differs strongly from Medieval times. In fact, the number of people who speak Occitan in France is low, and declining, and the language has no official status. However, the idea of an Occitan/Catalan unity is at least a beautiful dream,  a mirage, one that would include a vast area with cities like Bordeaux, Marseille, Clermont-Ferrand, Toulouse, Barcelona or Valencia.

In any case, going to that Occitan dictation was such a cool thing to do! And I even got a prize.

explorer

Can we walk on four legs? We might try to do it, using our legs and arms, but even in that case, are we truly walking on four legs like horses or cats do? In fact, we are not. Our species has evolved towards bipedalism, and our whole body is designed for the upright position. When we try to walk on four legs we are merely imitating what other animals do. That's what it is: an imitation.

In some posts I've talked about the speech faculty and the origins of human language. As I said then, the fundamental change took place in the brain. Our capacity for symbolic thought gave us the grounds to develop our peculiar way of communicating, which makes us different from other known species. I used some examples from the animal world, especially the language used by bees. Now, can we communicate like bees? Can we go back to a stage where communication is not produced the way it is usually produced between humans? Can we communicate in a non-human way, i.e. expressing content without symbolic notions like 'imperative' or 'narrative'? Can we forget about ourselves and try to reach some kind of primeval or animalistic type of communication? The answer, in my opinion, is no. We can of course try to imitate 'animal' communication, as we can also imitate the way a tiger moves, but that's just an imitation. There's no way our brain can be told to work differently in terms of communication or logical thought. We are trapped inside our brains. It is indeed a beautiful cage, but that's what it is. We can only be human. But what does that exactly mean? Let's see.

If you take a look at the Task Manager in your computer, you'll probably notice that there is a program called explorer.exe. At the beginning I thought it was the Internet Explorer application, taking up a lot of my RAM memory, but then I discovered that it is actually an important component of Windows, responsible for controlling how the whole system works. I like this concept of permanent exploration, and I think it applies to the human mind too.

We are all born with a full set of physical features, including our brain, and an inborn impulse to explore the possibilities offered by these features. This exploration starts at birth, and continues to operate throughout our lives, like the explorer.exe file in our computers. There's no way we can exist without having some kind of curiosity about the possibilities that lie within ourselves. It is obvious that the exploratory instinct is more active during childhood, for obvious reasons. However, this exploration is always guided by the other people: our parents, our brothers or sisters, our teachers, and it is modelled to suit the social and communicative networks that we are born into, including language. There's no way to know how a child would develop its inner world without this human environment; in fact, a newborn baby would die in a matter of minutes without the help of other people, as happens to other mammals and other species. Our personal exploration is limited, guided, directed towards a socially efficient network that we necessarily have to belong to. There's no other way. There's no other possible model for us. With the end of childhood, our exploratory instinct falls into a secondary role that is progressively reduced as we get older. But it never really disappears. There's always something inside us that tries to keep on exploring. Some people are particularly keen on developing this inborn utility. They want to create beauty, they want to transcend our ordinary world in unexpected ways, they create art, they make things that are apparently useless, like poems, or a statue, and the incredible thing is that all of us tend to appreciate these exercises of creativity, we like it when an unexpetced connection is found between two words, or two ideas, or a given combination of colours. The concept of beauty itself, or art, shows that there's some part of us that goes beyond the usual codes by which our society is built. We are not just passive agents in a world of solid structures: we are active explorers in a world that must somehow transcend us, that's why we appreciate art, that's why we're so fond of beauty, that's why we cannot be human unless we continue the search or at least admire those whose exploratory efforts fill our own needs.

Human language is just a convenient social construct that uses a tiny percentage of the possibilities offered by our bodies and minds, a useful tool composed of a finite set of phonemes and lexical items, plus a set of syntactic relationships based on human logic. But there's much more in ourselves, as can be seen in music, in art, in literature, in many aspects of our everyday life. A typical question in books about prehistory is: 'When did art begin?' The answer is usually connected with the appearance of 'artistic' objects in the archaeological record. I see it differently: human art started as soon as a hominid was born with the chance of exploring a complex brain. Art is exploration. Art is the need for exploration.

Illustrations:
Top: Triumph of Venus, Roman mosaic at Bulla Regia, Tunisia.
Bottom: detail from Ara Pacis, in Rome.

Meet the Iberians

The Iberian lynx is a rare sight nowadays. It is actually the most endangered feline species in the world, and the few remaining individuals can only be found in some areas of western Andalusia (south of Spain). They are called Iberian for obvious geographic reasons. The Iberian Peninsula (Spain + Portugal) is named after the term Iberia, used by the Greeks and the Romans to refer to the peoples that they met on the Mediterranean coast. In fact, it was originally the name of a river (Iberos, nowadays Ebro). Through time, Iberia acquired its modern meaning, grossly equivalent to ancient Hispania. But the ethnonym Iberian is also an archaeological term, referring to a given pre-Roman material culture, associated with a language (still undeciphered) that can be read in a series of inscriptions. The meaning of ethnonyms and ancient languages is usually quite inaccurate and often misleading, and the term Iberian is no exception. However, we can be quite certain that around the east and south of Sapin there was a cultural continuum, including inscriptions and characteristic place-names, apart from a given set of settlement structures, that is generally labelled Iberian. In contrast to this, the rest of pre-Roman Spain is thought to be Celtic. Now, let's go back to the rare Iberian lynx: how Iberian is it actually? The territory where it is presently found is not at all the heart of the Iberian world. The Iberian lynx is probably more Tartessian than Iberian. The Tartessians are also quite a mysterious people themselves. For some authors (see e.g. here), they would be connected to the Celts, though this theory is far from being generally accepted.

So where do you have to go if you want to meet the real Iberians? A good place to go is Medierranean Spain, the area where I live. One of my hobbies is to visit the archaeological sites in the Valencia area; I've seen many of them, and I'm planning more tours in the future. The other day, I even had the chance to meet some ancient Iberians! I went to a site in Caudete de las Fuentes, supposed to be the ancient Kelin, a name that has been preserved in coins. Let's see some pictures from that day:

There I was with an Iberian lady who welcomed us in the museum (picture on the left) and listening to some merchants (right), in this beautiful reenactment organized by the University of Valencia. This type of events really helps you get closer to the ancient world. They are not just a show for families or some kind of touristy entertainment. Archaeology is more than just stones or abstractions, archaeology is something that can (or must) be felt, looked at, measured. Let's see another picture:

This is me at Puntal dels Llops (the Hill of Wolves), an Iberian site in Olocau, near Valencia. I went up there last year, and the most impressive thing about it is that, when you look around, you can locate other ancient sites and some relevant geographic features, and this gives you the right perspective. It makes sense. It looks real.

A couple of years ago I started my PhD dissertation, focused on the ancient languages of Britain. Some lines of my research are outlined in my blog, and they obviously include a good deal of arcchaeology. Now, there's a problem here. I haven't been to Britain in many years, and I don't have any direct experience of British archaeology: I haven't visited any of the main sites, which means I don't have a personal perspective of places, distances, the real size and look of ancient artifacts. To put it simple: I haven't touched British past. It is impossible to do research from simple abstractions, or from books. If you do something in life, try to make it real. That's why I think I won't finish my dissertation.

The speech faculty

There's one obvious thing about human language: we speak the way we do because we have the physical capacity to do it. It's hard to imagine a dog or a chimpanzee pronouncing human words with some degree of intelligibility. This fact has led some people to see a correlation between the evolution of our vocal tract and the emergence of language. Their hypothesis would run as follows: "We started to 'speak' when we had the right anatomy to do it". The argument looks convincing at first sight, but I think it's quite weak. Let's see why. First, a video:

This is the Italian soprano Luciana Serra singing an aria from Mozart's The Magic Flute. Wonderful, isn't it? Now, the question is: did we evolve to produce this kind of performance?

In another video (sorry, embedding disabled), we can see an example of throat singing from a region in Central Asia called Tuva. This man is able to produce different types of voices using the overtones created in his throat. It looks incredible, but it's possible. In other words: at least in some of us, if not in the vast majority of us, there is a potential for this kind of thing. If you talk to people who do yoga or meditation, or other sorts of physical or mental exercise, they will often tell you that they have discovered something inside them that they didn't know existed. Humans are full of all kinds of potential, including the vocal ones, but our languages only use a very small portion of these possibilities, disregarding the rest as irrelevant. The principle of economy works here: in fact, learning to pronounce the phonetic repertoire of a language requires great effort, and some people are never completely able to master the whole set. The problem gets much worse when we get older and try to learn a second language. By then, we have lost most of the mental flexibility or predisposition that we had as children and find it really hard to produce or imitate the new sounds. The story is well known, and we can find examples everywhere everyday. I know poeple who have learnt Spanish at extraordinary levels of proficiency but who still have problems pronouncing words like piscina or decisión, or find it hard to distinguish between caro and carro.

Children are not born speaking a language. They are born with the mental ability to see the logic of human communication, and during the learning process they have to explore the vocal possibilities offered by their own bodies. But it is only some of these vocal possibilities, in fact a finite set of vowel and consonant sounds (plus suprasegmental elements), that are selected and promoted in each case.

Let's imagine another hominid species with a poorer repertoire of possible vocalizations. Even if their imagianry IPA chart were ten times smaller than ours,  they would still have at their disposal a considerable amount of elements to choose from. It's not just what you have but how you exploit the potential that you have. It comes as an obvious conclusion that other hominid species could very well have developed verbal language even if their vocal tract was quite different from ours. The only requisite is that they had the kind of logical thought that leads to human communication.

Some people say language is what makes us human. I think language is just a secondary factor in a much wider scenario: the one created by our minds. Maybe that's why there are so many people doing yoga, or experimenting with sounds or trying to break communicative barriers. They want to break away from the boundaries of finite sets. They want to get a sample of a more global type of human interaction.

Or just to have fun:

Grammar as an app

With or without the use of words, human communication has a syntax of its own, i.e. we can use all kinds of communicative tools (face gestures, calls, whistles, clicks, facial gestures, etc.) to create meaning: to tell a story, to refer to the present or past, to talk about possession, to point to an agent in the story, to urge the others to do something, to present information as a finished event, to describe an action that is happening simultaneously, to negate, to exclamate, to express admiration, doubt, prohibition, permission, lack of obligation, possibility, certainty, uncertainty. We have a brain endowed with the ability to generate these contrastive meanings and we use communicative elements accordingly.

Many different scenarios have been proposed for the emergence of human language. In one of them, it is thought that at the beginning there were a series of words that were used without a particular syntax. I think this idea is wrong. Words were born in a context that was already meaningful in terms of communication, or syntax. From the very start, their meaning was connected to their function.

I am aware that the term syntax is traditionally used as one of the main parts of grammar, alongside morphology and semantics. This traditional meaning should not be confused with the one I have described above.

On the other hand, I define grammar as the application of our logical thought to a specific subset of communicative elements: the verbal ones.

The gramamrs of the various human languages bear strong similarities with each other, and this peculiarity has led some people to think that there is some kind of universal grammar from which subsequent ones would have generated. I think this idea is completely absurd. The similarities arise from two main factors:

1) all human languages and their grammars are based on the logical structure and symbolic possiblities of the human brain, which are to be understood as universal.

2) grammars do not emerge in complete isolation: there is a high degree of convergence between them.

Another aspect to consider is the role of our speech capacity, i.e. our capacity to produce sounds. I'll be talking about this in a forthcoming post.

More on Paleolithic proto-Indo-European

They don't usually do it, but sometimes they do, especially when they have to face apparently inexplicable phenomena like the emergence of some language groups (Indo-European, Afro-Asian, etc.) and their mysterious, even transcontinental dispersals at prehistoric times. It is then that some archaeologists feel the need to tackle the issue of ancient languages and devise their own theories. In the field of Indo-European studies, for example, the list is already quite long: Gordon Childe, Marjia Gimbutas (Kurgan theory), James Mallory, Colin Renfrew (Anatolian Hypothesis), Marcel Otte (Paleolithic Continuity), David Anthony, and many others. The debate is still alive, and it involves a number of archaeologists. Let's see an interesting example that I recently found:

Gamble et al (2005: 209; the highlighting is mine): "the most fruitful avenue for advocates of the cognitive origins synthesis to pursue might be the arrival of a proto-Indo-European dialect in southwestern Europe with the Badegoulian ATU2, in the refugium phase, and its subsequent codispersal with the Magdalenian ATU2 into western and northern Europe. It seems unlikely, however, that historical linguists who were not prepared to journey with Renfrew back to the early Neolithic would welcome the concept of a Late Glacial dispersal of Indo-European languages in western Europe."

Sounds like the Paleolithic Continuity hypothesis, doesn't it?

As we can see in the abstract, the authors of the article, among them two notorious British archaeologists (Clive Gamble and Paul Pettitt), criticise the role of historical linguistics and genetics in the debate and also the validity of what they call 'agriculturalist thinking', which was born in the work of Gordon Childe and continued by Colin Renfrew and other archaeologists. Let's see an excerpt from the abstract:

"This article presents the initial results from the S2AGES database of calibrated radiocarbon estimates from western Europe in the period 25,000-10,000 years ago. Our aim is to present a population history of this sub-continental region by providing a chronologically-secure framework for the interpretation of data from genetics and archaeology. (...) We conclude that only archaeology can currently provide the framework for population history and the evaluation of genetic data. Finally, if progress is to be made in the new interdisciplinary field of population history then both disciplines need to refrain from inappropriate agricultural thinking that fosters distorting models of European prehistory, and they should also pay less, if any, attention to historical linguistics."

I'm afraid I agree with them.

References:
- Gamble, Clive, W. Davies, P. Pettitt, L. Hazelwood & M. Richards (2005). "The archaeological and genetic foundations of the European population during the Late Glacial: Implications for 'Agricultural Thinking'. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 15:2, 193-223.

Picture:
- Magdalenian art. Lascaux (France).

From vocalizations to grammar

In previous posts I have expressed some of my thoughts about the origins of 'language' and 'grammar', especially in connection with the wider concept of 'human communication'. Now it's time to put these ideas in order. As I see it, the story of 'human language' can be described as a three-stage process.

At Stage I, our ancestors used a variety of signals, e.g. vocalizations, screams, hand or facial gestures, tongue clicks, whistling, etc. to refer to situations that were relevant to them, e.g. the possibility of danger or the discovery of food sources. This is the kind of communication that we can see in many animal species, with a varying degree of sophistication.

At Stage II, hominids started to use these communicative strategies in a more complex way. An utterance, a gesture, is no longer a simple reference to a given event, but also the expression of how we are presenting the information. Are we describing things? Are we narrating an action? Are we telling the others to do something? In a previous post I offered a complete explanation of these new contrasting elements and their relevance for human communication, using as an example what I would like to call the bee paradox.

At Stage III, some of the communicative elements described above, particularly those involving vocal utterances, undergo a further process of reinterpretation that we may call grammaticalization. They are no longer, or not only, used as a symbol of the real world (objects, actions) but rather as functional units that help construct the message, expressing abstract notions of the kind grammarians are familiar with: tense, aspect, number, case, etc. In fact, this process is the one that eventually gave birth to what we usually call a 'grammar'. It must be said that developments that took place at Stage III do not cancel those of Stage II: human communication is a complex phenomenon that involves both the 'grammars' of spoken language and the endless possibilities of gestures and exo-grammatical utterances (that's a nice word I've just invented...).

The transition from Stage I to Stage II is crucial, because it involves the emergence of symbolic thought, and it must necessarily be connected with other examples of complex reasoning, like our ability to make tools. Obviously, we are talking about things that happened millions of years ago, and that have eventually detached hominid species from any other animal species on earth. The fundamental change took place in the brain. The 'revolution' is in the way you encode the information. Maybe those ancient hominids did not have the anatomical ability to produce something resembling speech, but they did have the mental ability to use communication in this new way (Stage II). Let's remember: what we are dealing with here is communication, not 'language' or 'grammar'.

In both transitions, from I to II and from II to III, we are also concerned with a more specific problem: how a particular communicative element, i.e. vocal output, attained increasing prominence through time, eventually becoming the central element in our communication system. Let's go back to the beginning (Stage I). A group of hominids uses a repertoire of signals, including simple vocalizations in the form of syllables. Let's imagine one of these vocalizations, `wak`, with the following meaning: "danger, a bear". The utterance of 'wak' was probably accompanied by a series of gestures indicating the proximity of the danger or urging others to hide from it. But we can also imagine the the syllable itself was susceptible of being produced in a variety of ways, using intonation. This is something that is still an essential part of our communication system: there are dozens of meanings or shades of meanings that can be conveyed by modifying the way we produce a given utterance, without changing the words. We can say 'table', 'table!' or 'table?' depending on the occasion, and we can express doubt, surprise, fear alarm or happiness by just changing the intonation. We can also give information about the size of an object or animal. All these expressive tools were already available to those hominids, not only 'available' as an option but maybe inseparably attached to the vocalizations. Being born as a simple alarm call, the segment 'wak' was already provided with an intonation component that could be modified afterwards. Those utterances were not the neutral words that we find in dictionaries, or the boring sequences spoken by robots or the monotonous talk of some formal situations. They were full of colour. They were alive.

Another little resource that those hominids could use with 'wak' was repetition. Saying 'wakwak', for example, could imply a series of additional meanings, especially because the possibilities for intonation were now bigger, including the use of stress. What we have here, in any case, is not just a single segment ('wak') with a single meaning, but a multiple way of using this element with a variety of situational meanings. How some of these variable vocalizations became grammatical elements at a later stage is difficult to determine, but we can try to imagine possible examples, like this one: the segment 'wak' with rising intonation could be associated with an action like 'go away because there's a bear'. Maybe at one point it started to be used with the meaning 'go somewhere else' even if there wasn't a bear in sight, and later on it was added to other segments as an indication of movement.

The story I have described here is by no means a unique event. It is based on the process that led to language as is known to the only hominid species that has survived: our own, but it may have had other developments in other hominid species. The important thing, as I have said before, is the emergence of logical thought and the ability to establish contrasts. The rest of the story may have taken all kinds of forms. Humans, for example, have built communicative systems which focus extensively on the spoken medium, exploiting some of the possibilities of their own vocal tract in order to produce contrasting sounds; in some cases, as in tonal languages, intonation is also used as a contrastive element. Other hominid species may have focused on different communicative aspects, or they may have developed vocal languages similar to our own. It's true that, at present, we are the only hominid species on the planet, but we should try to avoid the mistake of thinking that all that went before us was a process that was necessarily going in one direction.

Making sense of archaeology

In the last couple of centuries archaeologists have accumulated a massive amount of knowledge about ancient humanity. All over the world, thousands of sites have been dug out and their remains carefully analysed, classified and dated. The techniques used in this endeavour are in constant development, which means all concepts and ideas that are proposed about the archaeological finds are challenged by new, more elaborate proposals. Archaeology has become a highly specialized field, with every single site requiring the processing of an enormous amount of data. The task of comparing all this information and drawing pertinent conclusions about the prehistory of a given area is just daunting. Now, how do archaeologists make sense of this vast amount of knowledge? I can think of at least two practical ways.

One of them is the use of a series of metaphors or theoretical concepts, such as 'Neolithic', 'Iron Age' or 'Mesolithic', around which the information is organized in more or less coherent ways. Needless to say, these concepts are rather inaccurate, even misleading in some cases, but in general they're practical tools that allow scientific debate in archaeology. On the other hand, they're really useful in order to construct a discourse that can be understood outside the sphere of specialized archaeology.

Another essential, and obvious, method is the creation of hypotheses. By organizing the available archaeological evidence around a given explanatory framework, archaeologists can find relevant connections between different sets of materials and draw the corresponding conclusions. In this blog we have already seen some examples of archaeological hypotheses at work, e.g. the one proposed by Marija Gimbutas, and later developed by other archaeologists like Mallory or Anthony, about the origins of the supposed Proto-Indo-European (PIE) people. These authors have devoted a great deal of scientific expertise and effort in order to develop their ideas about PIE homeland and chronology, which incidentally I find quite erroneous. There have been other attempts at trying to make sense of the Indo-European group of languages from an archaeological perspective, like Renfrew's Anatolian Hypothesis and Alinei's Paleolithic Continuity Paradigm (PCP). The problem with all these attempts is that they have to deal with a remarkably extensive amount of data, covering geographical areas that encompass various continents, which makes it really difficult to avoid all kinds of possible flaws. However, these wide-ranging hypotheses can help inspire some more local research based on a more limited set of data. A recent example of this is the proposal of a distinctive archaeological zone in the Atlantic façade of western Europe, with a deep redefinition of concepts such as 'Celt'. One century ago, the term 'Celt' was used as an archaeological metaphor by people who were honestly trying to make sense of some material cultures of Central Europe. Now we are witnessing a gradual change in which the word 'Celt' is used in a different context and with different implications. Celticity is no longer the result of some unlikely migration from Central Europe to the West but more likely the consequence of local developments that started at a much earlier date.

We could ask ourselves if there are other geographical areas in Europe susceptible of being understood as an archaeological continuum with linguistic implications, like the Atlantic Façade. In my opinion, a good candidate could be the Germanic-speaking area of Northern Europe. Mario Alinei was the first to propose this archaeological-linguistic continuum (see here), whose formation would have started as early as the Mesolithic, when the ice-cap started to recede. The Maglemose culture, identified primarily from a series of sites in Denmark, would be one of the earliest examples of a material culture shared in this northern European territory, at a time when the British Isles and the continent were still united by great expanses of land that are now under water (see map on the right; source: Wikipedia). Following this line of thought, Xaverio Ballester proposed an interesting hypothesis about the origins of English (see reference to article below). The idea is quite coherent and deserves serious attention. In fact, what is required is the kind of scientific effort that has guided the work of many archaeologists until the present. Without a deep analysis of the archaeological data carried out by specialists, not to mention the contribution of population genetics and other additional sciences, it will be impossible to make any further step in the direction of proving the validity of the theory. Will any archaeologist volunteer? I hope so.

References:
- Alinei, Mario (2000). Origini delle Lingue d'Europa II. Continuità dal Mesolitico al''Età del Ferro nelle Principali Aree Etnolinguistiche. Bologna: Il Mulino.
- Ballester, Xaverio (2005). "The first Germanic origin of the English language". In Quaderni di Semantica, XXVI, 29-41.
- Oppenheimer, Stephen (2006). Origins of the British. London: Constable and Robinson.

Languages on horseback

I have just finished reading David Anthony's book The Horse, the Wheel and Language (2007), a book that I mentioned briefly in a post some time ago.

First of all, I'd like to say that David Anthony is an eminent archaeologist with vast knowledge about the prehistory of the Eurasian steppes, and more concretely about the archaeology of human societies in connection with horse domestication, an area which is vital in our understanding of Eneolithic and Bronze-age societies. He has written extensively about this issue and has also developed an innovative technique to date the use of domesticated horses by analysing bit wear in their bones. I'm sure his ideas about the subject are valuable and must be taken into account in any serious research in that field. Now, what's the problem? The problem arises when Anthony tries to fit all these data into a comprehensive explanation of the genesis and transcontinental expansion of Indo-European (IE) languages. This is when his scientific writing becomes fantasy.

Anthony bases his archaeological voyage on a series of linguistic facts which he accepts as irrefutable. We have talked about these things profusely in this blog (the traditional concept of proto-language, the use of linguistic paleontology, etc.) and we have seen how these ideas can easily be challenged. Anthony, however, takes them for granted. In his view, there is a Proto-Indo-European (PIE) people to be found somewhere, with its own language and even institutions. (p. 89): "that language [PIE] is a guide to the thoughts, concerns and material culture of real people who lived in a definite region between about 4500 and 2500 BC". In this respect, he follows Gimbutas' and Mallory's ideas, which we have extensively talked about (and criticised) in the blog. The novelty is that Anthony uses horse domestication and later developments as the use of chariots, as the main factors in the expansion of Proto-Indo-Europeans and their languages.

In his book, Anthony analyses one by one all the prehistoric cultures of the Pontic-Caspian region. He presents them in the framework of his own preconceptions, at times establishing simple correlations between culture, people and language. Pastoralist societies become PIE societies endowed with a remarkable capacity of expanding and subduing other human groups. (p. 343): "Wealth, military power, and a more productive herding system probably brought prestige and power to the identities associated with Proto-IndoEuropean dialects after 3300 BCE. The guest-host institution extended the protections of oath-bound obligations to new social groups. An Indo-European-speaking patron could accept and integrate outsiders as clients without shaming them or assigning them permanently to submissive roles, as long as they conducted the sacrifices properly. Praise poetry at public feasts encouraged patrons to be generous, and validated the language of the songs as a vehicle for communicating with the gods who regulated everything. All these factors taken together suggest that the spread of Proto-Indo-European probably was more like a franchising operation than an invasion. Although the initial penetration of a new region (or "market" in the franchising metaphor) often involved an actual migration from the steppes and military confrontations, once it began to reproduce new patron-client agreements (franchises) its connection to the original steppe immigrants became genetically remote, whereas the myths, rituals, and institutions that maintained the system were reproduced down the generations."

Franchises, military power, migratory movements... It is obvious that all of Anthony's metaphors and hypotheses can be doubted or found completely wrong. He talks about (literally) hundreds of prehistoric societies, and maks all kinds of assumptions about their language, social customs or expansive moods. One theory leads to another, in a process that can only be described as accumulative conjecture, or plain fantasy. First it is horse domestication, then the use of chariots, with the addition of a myriad of complementary elements. Aided by these extraordinary tools, PIE people started their incredible story of success. First, with the detachment of Anatolyans, then, with the emergence of proto-Slavic, proto-Germanic and proto-Italic in central-eastern Europe as off-shoots of the Pontic steppe developments, finally the expansion of proto-Indo-Aryan in the BMAC area. Let's see an example (p. 367): "The many thousands of Yamnaya kurgans in eastern Hungary suggest a more continuous occupation of the landscape by a larger population of immigrants, one that could have acquired power and prestige partly just through its numerical weight. This regional group could have spawned both pre-Italic and pre-Celtic. Bell Beaker sites of the Csepel type around Budapest, west of the Yamnaya settlement region, are dated about 2800-2600 BCE. They could have been a bridge between Yamnaya on their east and Austria/Southern Germany to their west, through which Yamnaya dialects spread from Hungary into Austria and Bavaria, where they later developed into Proto-Celtic".

The author finishes his analysis at this point, sometime at the Bronze age, with all the IE proto-languages ready for action. Their incredible run of good luck lasts centuries, millennia. In the vast poker game of prehistory Indo-Europeans seem to have the winning hand at all times!

Obviously, Anthony is not the only researcher who has felt the temptation to offer a comprehensive explanation of IE origins and expansion. Like Mallory and Gimbutas, he does so from an archaeological perspecitve, and as I said before many of the things they said might be useful and coherent, at least at a minor, less ambitious level. A similar type of analysis, enriched with population genetics data, is to be found in other authors, such as Mario Alinei. Reading his volumes about the linguistic prehistory of Europe I often felt a bit lost in the never-ending tales of prehistoric societies that follow one another. His theories are possibly quite imperfect and need a lot of refining, and in some cases must probably be rejected, but there is an important difference between Alinei and the more traditional authors such as Anthony or Mallory: his approach offers a more logical framework to understand language events through time.

Note on illustrations: on the left, The Large Blue Horses, a painting by Franz Marc.