#proto-language

Proto-Human is a language that I've been thinking about for a while. I analysed a few proto-languages (such as Proto-Uralic or Proto-Indo-European) and I've began to notice a possible pattern.

For example, Proto-Sino-Tibetan *hu and Proto-Indo-European *h₁su, both meaning "good", clearly have some relation to each other, with P.I.E adding the 's' to the word being a possible concept.

Proto-Uralic *roć and Proto-Indo-European *dos draw more similarities than you may think they do; they both mean "bad", they start with a trill and end with a sound from the [t͡sʲ] ~ [s] sound range, indicating a possible /sʲ ~ ɕ/ sound in the proto-word, and regarding the trill part, both /r/ and /d/ have been seen often diverging from /t/, which might be the origin of both of these sounds in the word.

Opinion

One of the most pressing issues in linguistic research is the so-called universals of language, elements or characteristics present in all natural languages, even those that have never had contact with each other nor have common ancestry. One of the foundations of science is precisely the possibility of finding general laws that govern all particular objects in a given domain. That all matter is made of atoms is a fundamental principle of physics; that all living beings reproduce is a universal of biology, and so on. In language, universal facts are those such as: all languages have a grammar; all are composed of words; every linguistic sign has a signifier and a signified.

But there are even more general facts, such as the observation that verbal language itself is universal: there is no people who preferentially communicates through a code other than words (such as whistles, gestures, touches). In other words, the very prevalence of verbal language is a universal and defining feature of the human species. So far, there is no doubt that it is a mechanism with biological roots: at some point in the evolution of the species, articulated verbal language emerged as a biological function beneficial to survival, which has since been transmitted genetically. This means that linguistic aptitude is somehow inscribed in our genes — which does not, of course, mean that the languages ​​we speak are genetically inherited: obviously, this is learning. By the way, Daniel L. Everett, in the book How Language Began: The Story of Humanity’s Greatest Invention, disputes the genetic character of linguistic aptitude, arguing that the gift of speech is a learned skill.

But the most basic structural characteristics of languages, added to the cognitive apparatus underlying them at a deeper level, suggest that every language develops and evolves according to a pattern that is not cultural but neurological. It’s like saying that each language is a different software, but they all run on the same operating system and on the same hardware. This thesis, called linguistic innatism, was defended above all by Chomsky and the generativists and is gaining more and more strength with current studies in neuroscience and cognitive science.

But there is a difficult problem with regard to linguistic universals: vocabulary. It has long been known that certain words from the most primitive lexicon of languages, such as the terms for ‘father’ and ‘mother’, look remarkably similar, even in languages distant in time and space, languages that have never had contact with each other or demonstrate any trace of kinship. The presence of a phonetic element p or t (and its variants f, b and d) in those words corresponding to ‘father’ and m or n in those corresponding to ‘mother’ (see table below) suggests that these terms came from pre-linguistic childhood communication itself (babies in the pre-linguistic phase babble things like pa, ta, ma, mama in front of their parents or asking to be breastfed) and, therefore, would be the result of genetic programming.

But the reconstruction of undocumented dead languages by comparing documented languages led American linguist Merrit Ruhlen to the hypothesis that there would have been a proto-language, or mother of all languages, which he called proto-sapiens (one of the reconstructed words in this language would be tik ‘finger’). That is, according to the theory that became known, in a somewhat derogatory way, as the “tower of Babel”, all natural languages existing today would be remotely descended from a first language, spoken in Africa at the time of the emergence of the current human species, Homo sapiens (about 200,000 years ago). Although very controversial, this theory has many adherents and cannot be completely rejected.

The question then arises: do the words for ‘father’ and ‘mother’ look alike in most known languages because they are in our genetic code or because they have common ancestors in the proto-language? Is it biological or cultural heritage? In which cases was there transmission by loan and therefore linguistic contact and in which cases not? Linguistics today has no sure answers to these questions, but it is working hard to reach some conclusions within the next few years. And given the speed with which the mass extinction of languages has taken place over the last century, this is a race against time.

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Yeah, see here’s the thing with this. It’s very simple. If you’re talking about creating a naturalistic conlang or a family of conlangs, there’s two ways to go about:

Create a proto-language and evolve up to your daughter languages (the ones you’ll actually be using).

Create your daughter languages and try to reconstruct a proto-language.

One of these is easy (the first one), and the other is hard (the second one). One of these gets you a daughter language quickly (the second one), and other takes a long time (the first one). So you have to make your choice. Do you want the daughter language that you’re actually going to use right away, or do you want to have maximal flexibility when it comes to building out your language family? Most conlangers choose option 2. The result is daughter languages that don’t really have any historical depth, or fake historical depth (i.e. it’s there when it happens to work out, but when it doesn’t, it’s swept under the rug).

Now if you’ve gone the second route, there’s no real roadmap to getting a perfect result when reconstructing a proto-language, but it’s very simple to get a result. Just do all the same stuff you would ordinarily: Try to create an earlier sound system that evolved into your modern sound system, try to come up with some sort of grammar that produced your modern grammar, etc. There’s no guide for how to do this, because, essentially, you’re not supposed to. It’s also insanely difficult. Like say you just came up with some tense suffixes. You can go back and figure out words that those suffixes evolved from, but in so doing, you’ll be creating the grammar of the earlier language, which will have to exist the way you’re creating it. This may prove problematic when you go to other parts of the language and create other elements that have to exist a certain way and they’re in direct conflict. And at that point you’re stuck, unless you can figure out some even more convoluted reason for the contradictory parts to not be contradictory. It’s much easier to just have the grammar and move forward from it, but it requires planning and foresight.

What you’ll probably need to do in your situation is try to flesh out your proto-language before doing anything with the new daughter languages you’re hoping to create. That will help make the new daughters easier to create. You can also just totally ignore it and create something that feels right for you. Another option is to treat your existing language as the proto-language. So let’s say at year 0, there was X language. By year 1000, it had evolved into Y. Then two groups that spoke Y in your universe went to different areas. In one area, Y pretty much stayed the same, but in the other area it became Z. This way you can ignore the actual proto state (X) and just work with what you have.

As a final note, it’s much easier to start with a daughter and go back and create a proto-language if you’re not married to the current state of your daughter language. This way if you hit an inconsistency, you just change your daughter language. That can be tough, though, if you’ve already generated place names, etc. that your D&D group considers canon. In effect, you’ve “published” the language, because it has a group of users who expect it to be in some state N so long as they’re still in the same relative place and time (this is basically like my situation, where once it’s appeared on a show, it’s canon and I can’t change it). If you’re still in the planning stages of your campaign, though, consider relaxing your grip on the daughter language and being open to change. This will actually make it a lot easier to create your proto-language, and then when it’s done, you’ll be totally free to create other languages from it.

This, for interest’s sake, is the phonemic inventory of my starting proto-language. There are some odd gaps in the consonant inventory, I know—in defense of my nasals, /n/ > [m] in labial environments. /k’/ is an odd straggler I know—not really sure if I even need it, as it becomes /q/ with no real effect from its ejectiveness. I think (?) my original thinking is that there was a full set of ejective stops, of which the bilabial and dental went to voiced consonants (or else they went to voiceless and pushed the old voiceless to voiced? I can’t really remember). 

There’s also a full set of labialized and palatized consonants which include all consonants except /r/, /l/, /w/, and /j/.

Some months ago, I decided to throw away my then-main conworld, which began as a rip-off of Zompist’s Almea (if not in shape, at least in spirit) and whose conlangs I never really involved myself in (actually, I was way more involved in Old Greedian, whose setting I didn’t create, and Ɣu, which is a true personal language ; only Worbon, spoken by isolated islanders, has any substantial work attached to it). I started again from scratch, with a different concept in mind (dieselpunk), and with the ultimate goal of telling the sort of stories I like. So, I drew a partial map, political boundaries and all, and began my writing. Quickly, it became apparent that at this early stage, I had the opportunity to create a realistic linguistic landscape (that, and I couldn’t wait anymore to play with language families).

I started to create the proto-languages of the two I knew shall be more useful to me (the first because its languages encompass the country I draw emphasis to, the second because it’s the cultural equivalent of Indo-European in that world). The starting point would have been 4000 years before the “current year”, when the second ones’ exiled speakers would have come to the shore of the continent.

So! I just saw someone mention something about people who believe all languages descended from Latin. I find it hard to believe that anyone could actually think that, but hey. It's not my place to judge.

It is my place, however, to give you a quick intro to historical and comparative linguistics!