Re: glossogenesis (was: Indo-European question)

Replying to Vasily Chernov, Andreas Johansson wrote:
> I think that the term "Proto-World" implies that we're
> talking about a language stage BEFORE any branching
> etc had taken place. But apart from that terminological bit,
> I think you're probably right, but it does still not really
> address the question whether inflection etc has been around
> as long as content morphemes*. Despite Ray's and others'
> posts, I still find it rather natural to assume that things like
> number, tense and mood haven't been arround quite as long
> as nouns and verbs. After-all, you won't need, say, tense
> until you've introduced verbs.
>
> *Is "content morpheme" a correct English terms? I refer,
> basically, to noun, verb etc stems as opposed to affixes for
> additional information like case, tense and number.
I basically agree with you (Andreas) as well as with Vasily.

As I've indicated in my other posts on this thread, I believe
that the "Proto-World" period is from 150,000 years ago
(when our subspecies, homo sapiens sapiens, emerged) to
40,000 years ago (when our bands began forming tribes,
so that each such alliance of bands could exclude all other
bands from its territory -- one effect of which was that a
tribe's bands associated only with each other and hence
could develop a language that only those bands shared).

But language could not have originated with our subspecies:
The seasonally migratory lifestyle of our subspecies --
which required getting high-calorie foods when and where
they became available -- would not have been possible
without language, and it wasn't basically different from how
other homonids had been living since 600,000 years ago.

The archeological evidence does indicate that our seasonally
migratory bands of 50 to 150 people were 2 or 3 times as
large as other homonid bands, so we must have been more
efficient practitioners of that lifestyle than they were, so our
language ability must have been greater than theirs.  But it
needn't have been much greater.  (Even old homo erectus
managed to withstand our competition in some parts of
southern Asia until at least 30,000 years ago.)

I won't guess at what limitations existed in the language of
other homonids, but I will say this about our own language's
nature before we underwent tribalization: The issue of
whether we used only "content morphemes" doesn't matter,
because several "content morphemes" can implicitly convey
"things like number, tense and mood" (so long as sentence
structure isn't terribly complex).  For example, a verb
meaning "to want" conveys a sense of future tense -- relative
to whichever time frame a sentence may be in -- and a time
frame can be established by "content morphemes" such as
"next day" (tomorrow) or "last day" (yesterday).

Tribalization just insured that you'd spend your life talking
only with people who knew and used all the same linguistic
tricks as you, and hence that a tribe could develop a much
more complex language than had previously been practical.

-- Tommie