Re: glossogenesis (was: Indo-European question)

On Fri, 22 Jun 2001 Vasiliy Chernov wrote:
> About the isolating nature of Proto-World... there is an
> objection against it which for some reason I've never heard
> clearly formulated while it appears quite natural to myself.
> [snip]
> Now, the last "next-to-human" stage wasn't shorter than
> the "real human" one. That is, it lasted longer than all the
> linguistic evolution since neolithic times that has produced
> whole macrofamilies of quite diverse langs.
> [snip]
> So I don't see why Proto-World couldn't be a nightmare
> blend of incorporation, apophony, some weird role
> assignment system and whatnot. It had enough time to
> develop all this even if it was an isolating lang at some stage
> earlier than the "next-to-human" one.
>
> What do you folks think of the above? -- Basilius
Thanks for being quite clear about the time frame that you have
in mind for "Proto-World" language -- namely, that you mean
language as spoken before neolithic times began. (Neolithic
times began approximately 40,000 years ago.)

There's plenty evidence that the neolithic revolution -- with its
myriad technological innovations and population explosion --
wasn't due to any biological change in our species, and that
our brains have almost certainly been capable of  all linguistic
tricks ever since our subspecies -- homo sapiens sapiens --
began (about 150,000 years ago). So I basically agree with
your reasoning.  But I'd augment it, as follows:

A big change in our lifestyle began about 40,000 years ago,
and directly caused the neolithic revolution.  Until then, our
largest social unit was the band: A band consisted of from
50 to 150 people, who lived together and followed a yearly
circuit of migration to gather food sources.  They had to,
because no locality could feed so many people year-round,
and because different foods became plentiful at different
localities at different times of the year.

Where and when a particular food was particularly plentiful,
several bands could exploit it together.  And if too many
bands converged on it (so that it couldn't feed them all well),
some of those bands could seek out alternative localities to
gather food at during that season in future years.  So, as our
population gradually increased (before 40,000 years ago),
we gradually spread into all the areas of eastern Africa and
southern Asia where this sort of lifestyle could support us.

But, by 40,000 years ago, we had populated eastern Africa
and southern Asia densely enough so that our bands could
no longer easily find under-exploited seasonal food sources,
so bands began to form alliances to bar unallied bands from
exploiting "their" food sources.  Those alliances were what
we call "tribes".  All people continued to live in bands of
of 50 to 150 people, and to migrate seasonally as separate
bands.  But a tribe's bands intermarried only with each other
because the only other bands which a band's people could
meet up with (at the food sources that they jointly exploited)
were their allied bands within such a tribe, since no other
bands were allowed to exploit those particular food sources.

A band's people had always needed to communicate with
members of other bands that they met up with at the various
food sources that they visited in their seasonal migrations.
And, before tribes formed, each band shared some food
sources with other bands that shared other food sources
with more-distant bands that shared still other food sources
with still more-distant bands, throughout all the territory our
subspecies occupied.  So we couldn't have spoken distinct
languages before tribes formed: We could only have
spoken a language that varied slightly and gradually within
any span of a couple hundred miles (though it may well
have varied too much across any thousand-mile span to
be readily recognizable as the "same" language).

Tribalization changed that: Since each member of a tribe
spent his whole life speaking only with other members of
his tribe, each tribe could develop a language of its own.
And such a language could be wonderfully complex,
because its speakers didn't have to talk with people whose
linguistic tricks were slightly different (but different enough
to create confusion if one tried to express a thought in a
fairly complex manner).

-- Tommie

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