Paleolinguistics
Encyclopedia
Paleolinguistics is a term used by some linguists for the study of the distant human past by linguistic
means. For most historical linguists
there is no separate field of paleolinguistics. Those who use the term are generally advocates of hypotheses not generally accepted by mainstream historical linguists, a group colloquially referred to as "long-rangers".
The controversial hypotheses in question fall into two categories. Some of them involve the application of standard historical linguistic methodology in ways that raise doubts as to the validity of the hypothesis. A good example of this sort is the Moscow school of Nostraticists, founded by Vladislav Illich-Svitych
and including Aharon Dolgopolsky
, Sergei Starostin
, and Vitaly Shevoroshkin
, who have argued for the existence of Nostratic, a language family including the Indo-European
, Afro-Asiatic
, Altaic
, Dravidian
, and Kartvelian language families and sometimes other languages. They have established regular phonological correspondences, observed morphological similarities, and reconstructed a proto-language in accordance with the accepted methodology. Nostratic is not generally accepted because critics have doubts about the specifics of the correspondences and reconstruction.
Other hypotheses are controversial because the methods used to support them are considered by mainstream historical linguists to be invalid in principle. Into this category fall proposals based on mass lexical comparison
, a technique in which
relationships are considered to be established by the presentation of sets of words dubbed etymologies in which the forms are perceived as resembling each other in sound and meaning, without establishing phonological correspondences or carrying out a reconstruction.
Prominent examples are the work of Joseph Greenberg
and Merritt Ruhlen
.
Many linguists regard this method as unable to distinguish chance similarities from those that must be due to a historical connection and unable to distinguish similarities due to common descent from those due to language contact.
Some others who may be considered 'paleolinguists' due to their advocacy of controversial, deep hypotheses are:
John Bengtson
, Knut Bergsland
, Derek Bickerton
, Václav Blažek
, Robert Caldwell
, Matthias Castrén
, Björn Collinder
, Albert Cuny
, Igor Diakonov
, Vladimir Dybo
, Harold Fleming
, Eugene Helimski
, Otto Jespersen
, Frederik Kortlandt
, Samuel E. Martin, Roy Andrew Miller
, Hermann Möller
, Susumu Ōno
, Holger Pedersen
, Alexis Manaster Ramer
, G.J. Ramstedt
, Rasmus Rask
, Jochem Schindler
, Wilhelm Schmidt
, Georgiy Starostin
, Morris Swadesh
, Henry Sweet, Vilhelm Thomsen
, Vladimir N. Toporov, Alfredo Trombetti
, C.C. Uhlenbeck.
An entirely different point of view underlies Mario Alinei
's Paleolithic Continuity Theory
, which is based on the doctrine of polygenism
rather than that of monogenesis
.
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
means. For most historical linguists
Historical linguistics
Historical linguistics is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:* to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages...
there is no separate field of paleolinguistics. Those who use the term are generally advocates of hypotheses not generally accepted by mainstream historical linguists, a group colloquially referred to as "long-rangers".
The controversial hypotheses in question fall into two categories. Some of them involve the application of standard historical linguistic methodology in ways that raise doubts as to the validity of the hypothesis. A good example of this sort is the Moscow school of Nostraticists, founded by Vladislav Illich-Svitych
Vladislav Illich-Svitych
Vladislav Markovich Illich-Svitych was a Russian linguist and accentologist, also a founding father of comparative Nostratic linguistics.Of Ukrainian descent, he was born in Kiev but later moved to work in Moscow. He resuscitated the long-forgotten Nostratic hypothesis, originally expounded by...
and including Aharon Dolgopolsky
Aharon Dolgopolsky
Aharon Dolgopolsky is a Russian-born Israeli comparative linguist and one of the modern founders of comparative Nostratic linguistics.Born in Moscow, he arrived at the long-forgotten Nostratic hypothesis in the 1960s, at around the same time but independently of Vladislav Illich-Svitych...
, Sergei Starostin
Sergei Starostin
Dr. Sergei Anatolyevich Starostin was a Russian historical linguist and scholar, best known for his work with hypothetical proto-languages, including his work on the reconstruction of the Proto-Borean language, the controversial theory of Altaic languages and the formulation of the Dené–Caucasian...
, and Vitaly Shevoroshkin
Vitaly Shevoroshkin
Vitaly Victorovich Shevoroshkin, Russ. Виталий Викторович Шеворошкин, is an American linguist of Russian origin, specializing in the study of ancient Mediterranean languages. In the 1960s he tried to decipher Carian inscriptions and proved that their language belonged to Anatolian languages. In...
, who have argued for the existence of Nostratic, a language family including the Indo-European
Indo-European languages
The Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred related languages and dialects, including most major current languages of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and South Asia and also historically predominant in Anatolia...
, Afro-Asiatic
Afro-Asiatic languages
The Afroasiatic languages , also known as Hamito-Semitic, constitute one of the world's largest language families, with about 375 living languages...
, Altaic
Altaic languages
Altaic is a proposed language family that includes the Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, and Japonic language families and the Korean language isolate. These languages are spoken in a wide arc stretching from northeast Asia through Central Asia to Anatolia and eastern Europe...
, Dravidian
Elamo-Dravidian languages
The Elamo-Dravidian languages are a hypothesised language family which links the living or proto Dravidian languages of India to the extinct Elamite language of ancient Elam . Linguist David McAlpin has been a chief proponent of the Elamo-Dravidian Hypothesis...
, and Kartvelian language families and sometimes other languages. They have established regular phonological correspondences, observed morphological similarities, and reconstructed a proto-language in accordance with the accepted methodology. Nostratic is not generally accepted because critics have doubts about the specifics of the correspondences and reconstruction.
Other hypotheses are controversial because the methods used to support them are considered by mainstream historical linguists to be invalid in principle. Into this category fall proposals based on mass lexical comparison
Mass lexical comparison
Mass comparison is a method developed by Joseph Greenberg to determine the level of genetic relatedness between languages. It is now usually called multilateral comparison...
, a technique in which
relationships are considered to be established by the presentation of sets of words dubbed etymologies in which the forms are perceived as resembling each other in sound and meaning, without establishing phonological correspondences or carrying out a reconstruction.
Prominent examples are the work of Joseph Greenberg
Joseph Greenberg
Joseph Harold Greenberg was a prominent and controversial American linguist, principally known for his work in two areas, linguistic typology and the genetic classification of languages.- Early life and career :...
and Merritt Ruhlen
Merritt Ruhlen
Merritt Ruhlen is an American linguist known for his work on the classification of languages and what this reveals about the origin and evolution of modern humans. Amongst other linguists, Ruhlen's work is recognized as standing outside the mainstream of comparative-historical linguistics...
.
Many linguists regard this method as unable to distinguish chance similarities from those that must be due to a historical connection and unable to distinguish similarities due to common descent from those due to language contact.
Some others who may be considered 'paleolinguists' due to their advocacy of controversial, deep hypotheses are:
John Bengtson
John Bengtson
John D. Bengtson is a historical and anthropological linguist. He is a past president and currently a vice-president of the Association for the Study of Language in Prehistory, and has served as editor of the journal Mother Tongue...
, Knut Bergsland
Knut Bergsland
Knut Bergsland was a Norwegian linguist. Working as a professor at the University of Oslo from 1947 to 1981, he did groundbreaking research in Uralic and Eskimo–Aleut languages.-Career:...
, Derek Bickerton
Derek Bickerton
Derek Bickerton is a linguist and Professor Emeritus at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. Based on his work in creole languages in Guyana and Hawaii, he has proposed that the features of creole languages provide powerful insights into the development of language both by individuals and as a...
, Václav Blažek
Václav Blažek
Václav Blažek is a historical linguist. He is a professor at Masaryk University and also teaches at the University of West Bohemia ....
, Robert Caldwell
Robert Caldwell
Bishop Robert Caldwell was an Evangelist missionary and linguist, who academically established the Dravidian family of languages. He served as Assistant Bishop of Tirunelveli from 1877. He was described in The Hindu as a 'pioneering champion of the downtrodden' and an 'avant-garde social reformer'...
, Matthias Castrén
Matthias Castrén
Matthias Alexander Castrén was a Finnish ethnologist and philologist.Castrén was born at Tervola, in Northern Finland, on the 20th of November...
, Björn Collinder
Björn Collinder
Björn Collinder was a Swedish linguist. His name is sometimes spelled "Bjorn Collinder" in English-language contexts.Collinder was born in Sundsvall, Sweden....
, Albert Cuny
Albert Cuny
Albert Cuny was a French linguist known for his attempts to establish phonological correspondences between the Indo-European and Semitic languages and for his contributions to the laryngeal theory....
, Igor Diakonov
Igor Diakonov
Igor Mikhailovich Diakonov was a Russian historian, linguist, and translator and a renowned expert in the Ancient Near East and its languages....
, Vladimir Dybo
Vladimir Dybo
Vladimir Antonovich Dybo is a Russian linguist whose areas of research include the Slavic languages, Indo-European, Nostratic, and Nilo-Saharan....
, Harold Fleming
Harold C. Fleming
Harold Crane Fleming is an American anthropologist and historical linguist, specializing in the cultures and languages of the Horn of Africa. As an adherent of the Four Field School of American anthropology, he stresses the integration of physical anthropology, linguistics, archaeology, and...
, Eugene Helimski
Eugene Helimski
Eugene Arnoľdovič Helimski — a Russian linguist , Doctor of Philosophy , Professor...
, Otto Jespersen
Otto Jespersen
Jens Otto Harry Jespersen or Otto Jespersen was a Danish linguist who specialized in the grammar of the English language.He was born in Randers in northern Jutland and attended Copenhagen University, earning degrees in English, French, and Latin...
, Frederik Kortlandt
Frederik Kortlandt
Frederik Herman Henri Kortlandt is a professor of descriptive and comparative linguistics at Leiden University in the Netherlands. He is an expert on Baltic and Slavic languages, the Indo-European languages in general, and Proto-Indo-European, though he has also published studies of languages in...
, Samuel E. Martin, Roy Andrew Miller
Roy Andrew Miller
Roy Andrew Miller is a linguist notable for his advocacy of Korean and Japanese as members of the Altaic group of languages....
, Hermann Möller
Hermann Möller
Hermann Möller was a Danish linguist noted for his work in favor of a genetic relationship between the Indo-European and Semitic language families and his version of the laryngeal theory....
, Susumu Ōno
Susumu Ono
was a Tokyo-born linguist, specializing in the early history of the Japanese language Kokugogaku. He graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1943, where he studied under Shinkichi Hashimoto...
, Holger Pedersen
Holger Pedersen (linguist)
Holger Pedersen was a Danish linguist who made significant contributions to language science and wrote about 30 authoritative works concerning several languages....
, Alexis Manaster Ramer
Alexis Manaster Ramer
Alexis Manaster Ramer is a Polish-born American linguist .He has published extensively on syntactic typology Alexis Manaster Ramer (born 1956) is a Polish-born American linguist (PhD 1981, University of Chicago).He has published extensively on syntactic typology Alexis Manaster Ramer (born 1956)...
, G.J. Ramstedt
Gustaf John Ramstedt
Gustaf John Ramstedt was a Swedish-speaking Finnish linguist and diplomat.-Biography:Ramstedt was born in Ekenäs in Southern Finland....
, Rasmus Rask
Rasmus Christian Rask
Rasmus Rask was a Danish scholar and philologist.-Biography:...
, Jochem Schindler
Jochem Schindler
Jochem Schindler was an Austrian Indo-Europeanist. In spite of his comparatively thin bibliography, he made important contributions, in particular to the theory of Proto-Indo-European language nominal inflection and ablaut.-References:*Eichner Compositiones Indogermanicae in memoriam Jochem...
, Wilhelm Schmidt
Wilhelm Schmidt
Wilhelm Schmidt was an Austrian linguist, anthropologist, and ethnologist.Wilhelm Schmidt was born in Hörde, Germany in 1868. He entered the Society of the Divine Word in 1890 and was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest in 1892. He studied linguistics at the universities of Berlin and...
, Georgiy Starostin
Georgiy Starostin
Georgiy Sergeevich Starostin is a Russian linguistics researcher at the Center of Comparative Studies at the Russian State University for the Humanities, and a participant at the Santa Fe Institute's Evolution of Human Languages project...
, Morris Swadesh
Morris Swadesh
Morris Swadesh was an influential and controversial American linguist. In his work, he applied basic concepts in historical linguistics to the Indigenous languages of the Americas...
, Henry Sweet, Vilhelm Thomsen
Vilhelm Thomsen
Vilhelm Ludwig Peter Thomsen was a Danish linguist. In 1893, he deciphered the Turkish Orkhon inscriptions in advance of his rival, Wilhelm Radloff...
, Vladimir N. Toporov, Alfredo Trombetti
Alfredo Trombetti
Alfredo Trombetti was an Italian linguist active in the early 20th century.He was born in Bologna on January 16, 1866 and died in Venice on July 5, 1929.Trombetti was a professor at the University of Bologna...
, C.C. Uhlenbeck.
An entirely different point of view underlies Mario Alinei
Mario Alinei
Mario Alinei is Professor Emeritus at the University of Utrecht, where he taught from 1959 to 1987, currently living in Impruneta, Italy. He is founder and editor of Quaderni di semantica, a journal of theoretical and applied semantics...
's Paleolithic Continuity Theory
Paleolithic Continuity Theory
The Paleolithic Continuity Theory , since 2010 relabelled as the Paleolithic Continuity Paradigm , is a hypothesis suggesting that the Proto-Indo-European language can be traced back to the Upper Paleolithic, several millennia earlier than the Chalcolithic or at the most Neolithic estimates in other...
, which is based on the doctrine of polygenism
Polygenism
Polygenism is a theory of human origins positing that the human races are of different lineages . This is opposite to the idea of monogenism, which posits a single origin of humanity.- Origins :...
rather than that of monogenesis
Monogenesis
Monogenism is the theory of human origins which posits a single origin for all human races. For the belief that all humans are descended from Adam, see Polygenism.Monogenesis may refer to:* Recent African origin of modern humans...
.
Sources
- Blažek, V., et al. 2001. Paleolinguistics: The State of the Art and Science (Festschrift for Roger W. Wescott). Mother Tongue 6: 29-94.
- Campbell, Lyle. (1997). American Indian languages: The historical linguistics of Native America. New York: Oxford University PressOxford University PressOxford University Press is the largest university press in the world. It is a department of the University of Oxford and is governed by a group of 15 academics appointed by the Vice-Chancellor known as the Delegates of the Press. They are headed by the Secretary to the Delegates, who serves as...
. ISBN 0-19-509427-1. - Hegedűs, I., et al. (Ed.) 1997. Indo-European, Nostratic, and Beyond (Festschrift for Vitalij V. Shevoroshkin). Washington, DC: Institute for the Study of Man.
- Hock, Hans Henrich & Joseph, Brian D. (1996). Language History, Language Change, and Language Relationship: An Introduction to Historical and Comparative Linguistics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
- Matisoff, James. (1990) On Megalocomparison. Language, 66. 109-20
- Poser, William J. and Lyle Campbell (1992). Indo-european practice and historical methodology, Proceedings of the Eighteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, pp. 214–236.
- Renfrew, Colin, and Daniel Nettle. (Ed.) 1999. Nostratic: Examining a Linguistic Macrofamily. Cambridge, UK: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.
- Ringe, Donald. (1992). "On calculating the factor of chance in language comparison". American Philosophical Society, Transactions, 82 (1), 1-110.
- Ruhlen, Merritt. 1994. The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue. NewYork: John Wiley & Sons.
- Shevoroshkin, V. (Ed.) 1992. Nostratic, Dene-Caucasian, Austric and Amerind. Bochum: Brockmeyer.
- Swadesh, Morris. 1971. The Origin and Diversification of Language. Ed. by Joel Sherzer. Chicago/New York: Aldine Atherton.
See also
- Superfamily (linguistics)
- Mass lexical comparisonMass lexical comparisonMass comparison is a method developed by Joseph Greenberg to determine the level of genetic relatedness between languages. It is now usually called multilateral comparison...
- Proto-World languageProto-World languageThe Proto-Human language is the hypothetical most recent common ancestor of all the world's languages.The concept of "Proto-Human" presupposes monogenesis of all recorded spoken human languages....
- Origins of language