Lingthusiasm Episode 45: Tracing languages back before recorded history

Language is much older than writing. But audio and visual cues from sounds and signs don’t leave physical traces the way writing does. So when linguists want to figure out how people talked before history started being recorded, we need to engage in some careful detective work, by comparing two or more similar, known languages to (potentially!) reconstruct a hypothetical common ancestor.  

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about these prehistoric languages that historical linguists have reconstructed, known as proto-languages. We dive into some of our favourite proto-languages (Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Algonquian, Proto-Pama-Nyungan, and Proto-Bantu), look at their characteristic grammatical signatures, and explain what we can and can’t know about the people who spoke them based on their vocabularies. 

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here

Announcements:

We are delighted to announce the winners of the 2020 LingComm Grants. Here are the project titles for the 4 grantees, and there’s more information about each project on the LingComm website, as well as two honourable mentions. We’re very excited to share more with you as they develop.

The Black Language Podcast (Anansa Benbow)

Nonbinary Linguistics youtube channel (Nina Lorence-Ganong)

Jazicharnica (Јазичарница) blog (Nina Tunteva and Viktorija Blazheska)

War of Words podcast (Juana de los Santos; Angela Makeviciuz; Antonella Moschetti; Néstor Bermúdez)

We had over 75 applications from around the world and we'd like to thank all applicants for making the job of deciding extremely difficult! 

This month’s bonus episode is about doing linguistics with kids! Child language acquisition is a perennial source of entertainment for the linguistically-inclined – and so is helping any young people in your life develop an interest in linguistics. In this episode, we talk about some of our favourite things to observe about how kids are learning language as well as linguistically-relevant books for children, middle grade, and young adult. Support Lingthusiasm on Patreon to get access to this and 39 other bonus episodes, and to chat with fellow lingthusiasts in the Lingthusiasm patron Discord.

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

Shadowscent book 2 - Crown of Smoke - is out now!

We discussed Lauren’s experience of creating a conlang for the book in Episode 37: Smell words, both real and imagined

Proto-Indo-European homeland and surviving vocab

Proto-Indo-European lexicon

Proto-Algonquian

Algonquian Linguistic Atlas

Pama-Nyungan languages

Pama-Nyungan database

Australian Aboriginal languages

Proto-Bantu

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

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Lingthusiasm is on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production manager is Liz McCullough, and our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

As a side-note to my earlier post, the proto-world list is actually more interesting than Zompist would have you believe. If you only look at the starred (reconstructed) words, you'll see a very interesting sequence of:

*[m]-[l]-[velar/uvular]

The issue with this is that the vowels are entirely random. And that the Proto-languages all existed at varyingly estimated timeframes. Even if they all existed at the same time, how could they be so closely related? They're incredibly far physical distances apart. There would be no close contact between them, meaning that language drift would happen fairly quickly. Especially since these were illiterate cultures with no pressure on language preservation. You would have to assume that language actually came into existence as the parent (maybe, maybe grand-parent) of these languages. The oldest date given is possibly 7000BC, but the development of language proper is probably somewhere near 70,000 to 50,000 years old. The times done seem to add up.