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Ask a linguist - Message details
Subject: The World's Oldest Language - Again
Question:
Given Spencer Wells' work with the migrations of man 50,000 years ago in Africa (as illustrated in his book ''The Journey of Man''), is it not likely that the world's oldest language is simply that of the world's oldest tribe of persons, the South African aboriginal tribe known as the San? The clicking and other sounds of this language may be the sounds of our most ancient ancestors before they populated the rest of the world? The language of the San exists today in South Africa, and sounds like no other language in the world (with the exception of Australian aboriginal tribes which are descended directly from the earliest ancestors of the San).




Reply:
> Given Spencer Wells' work with the migrations of man 50,000 years ago
> in Africa (as illustrated in his book ''The Journey of Man''),

I advise you not to get too carried away with these suddenly trendy genetic
reconstructions of human prehistory. Genetics is not so simple, and the
use of differing techniques and of differing genes leads to differing
results.

> is it not
> likely that the world's oldest language

There is no such thing as ''the world's oldest language''. The very notion
is incoherent. If language A is ''older'' than English, then where did
English come from? Did it simply pop into existence from nothing? Was
there a first generation of English-speakers? Did they manage to learn a
language that didn't exist?

A few special cases aside, no language is older than any other.

> is simply that of the world's
> oldest tribe of persons, the South African aboriginal tribe known as
> the San?

The San are no ''older'' than anybody else. If you think they are, then
where do you think your ancestors were located when the ancestral San first
set foot on earth? Do you think your ancestors simply popped into
existence one rainy Tuesday afternoon? ;-)

*Everybody on earth* is directly descended from the first human population.
That includes you as well as the San. They are no older than your family.

And all the languages on earth are directly descended from the first remote
beginnings of human speech. No language is older than any other.

> The clicking and other sounds of this language may be the
> sounds of our most ancient ancestors before they populated the rest of
> the world?

This is a popular idea among non-linguists, but there is no evidence to
support it, and there is good evidence against it.

Lots of languages have unusual speech sounds. Some Amazonian languages
have terrifyingly complex sounds which almost make clicks look humdrum by
comparison. Even the European language Czech has a famously strange and
difficult consonant, the fricative trill. There is no reason to get
excited about clicks. Clicks are just speech sounds, and they are easier
to make than some of those other noises.

It is noteworthy that neither San children nor any other children babble in
clicks. All children everywhere babble in simple speech sounds like [m],
[b], [t] and [k], ands we may be confident that these were the speech
sounds of the first human languages. Clicks, like all the other more
complicated and unusual speech sounds, evolved later in the languages
possessing them -- probably much later.

> The language of the San exists today in South Africa, and
> sounds like no other language in the world

What a language ''sounds like'' is of no importance. For example, Portuguese
is closely related to Spanish, and the two languages are mutually
comprehensible to some extent. But Portuguese sounds nothing like Spanish:
it sounds like Russian.

> (with the exception of
> Australian aboriginal tribes

Not so. The click languages of southern Africa sound nothing like
Australian languages.

> which are descended directly from the
> earliest ancestors of the San).

But the earliest ancestors of the San were the first human beings, and all
the people on earth are descended directly from those first human beings.
There is nothing special about the Australians.

If you mean to suggest that there exists a special link between the San and
the Australians, I'm afraid this is nonsense. What are you reading?

Larry Trask
larryt@sussex.ac.uk





Reply From: Larry Trask    click here to access email
Date: Oct-17-2003
Other Replies:
  1. Re: The World's Oldest Language - Again Elizabeth J. Pyatt    (Oct-16-2003)
  2. Re: The World's Oldest Language - Again Geoff Sampson    (Oct-17-2003)
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