#120 
by Steviepinhead » Mar 10, 2010 8:15 pm
I admit that I have NOT read all pages of this interesting thread, but only indulged in a sampling. The "isolate" (in the sense of "unrooted") vs. mother-tongue discussion may thus well be moot, for all I know.
In my sampling, however, I did not see much in the way of a realistic discussion of where a given population of language-capable speakers is supposed to have "come from."
Just as in the biological evolution and speciation of populations, all populations of language-capable persons descend from some earlier population, who descend from some still earlier population, etc. ....
Thus there are no "isolate" populations, though of course there can be "isolated" populations. Every population of humans "connects up" to every other population of humans through common ancestry. The indigenous australians or polynesians or aztecs or fuegians did not just suddenly appear in those far-flung places, isolated from the rest of humanity. They migrated there from some previously-settled place.
The spread of humanity from a common source in Africa has been pretty well documented, not just through linguistic and cultural comparisons, but via increasingly fine-grained physical anthropological, dental, blood group, protein marker, mitochondrial DNA, nuclear DNA, SNP analysis, etc.
The Australians were in southeast asia before they were in Australia, and before that spread out of Africa. The bulk of native americans likely also came up along the western Pacific coasts out of southeast asia, up along the northwest Pacific coast (possible affinities to the indigenous Ainu populations of Hokkaido and the Sakhalins...), and thence across land bridges or coastwise island-hopping -- if, as seems increasingly likely, the migration preceded the end of the last Ice Age -- down the west coast of the Americas. The Polynesians also originate in southeast asia. Various eurasian and european populations spread up through the mideast and then took various paths west or east or north into various parts of europe and asia. The Na-Denes may have spread widely across mid-latitude eurasia before spreading across the Bering strait into northwestern North America and thence down the coast and intermountain west as far as the Southwest U.S. The Aleut-Inuit came from northern Eurasia and spread eastward across the arctic and subarctic in the past few thousand years...
While we are learning more detail all the time, the general outlines are in most cases now pretty clear. Certainly room remains for lots of arguments about the developing details, but it is at least not impossible to identify a population (by physical markers) which could conceivably have entered into the mid-latitudes of eurasia at a relatively early date, somewhere in the vicinity of the Caucasus, hypothetically, and then spread west as far as, say, Basque country and east as far as Na-Dene territory in NW North America.
This doesn't mean that Basque, certain vanishing Caucasian languages, and the Na-Dene languages -- or the populations who now speak those languages -- are long-lost cousins (but "closer" than they are to the populations within which they now find themselves embedded). But it's potentially a testable premise.
Thus, there's an ambiguity to what has been termed an "isolate" language. Maybe its a language that arose "in situ," without any antecedent which would connect it, however distantly, to other languages/language families -- like Athena springing forth from the brow of Zeus. But, more likely, it's an "isolate" only because those far-past connections to other languages are simply separated by too much time, and too many intermediate "extinct" groups of speakers, for us to reconstruct the connections.
There are inherent limitations to how far "back" we can rewind the tape of language common ancestry (assuming that there is a common ancestry of most/all languages) -- it becomes more and more difficult to distinguish homologous cognates from randomly-similar "convergences" of sound or structure the further back you go into the past. And the many sparsely-recorded (a few dozen entries in some strange personal orthology in some missionary's journal) and rapidly-vanishing languages don't help: the "fossil record" is quickly eroding away, and the "molecular genetic" data on the remaining extant languages is in many cases very scanty.
But it's one thing to say that the connections can no longer, as a pragmatic matter, be reconstructed, and another thing to say that there never were any connections (even if the latter statement is restricted to just a few "isolated" cases).
It does sometimes happen that an almost completely "new" language springs up (though still with discernible borrowings of vocabulary and syntax from predecessors), in quasi-"Lord of the Flies" scenarios, where speakers of many different languages are thrown together willy-nilly (slaves -- or even traders or colonizers -- brought from disparate linguistic backgounds, with no predominant common language, who first generate a "pidgin," and then, in subsequent generations produce a fuller, more-flexible, and more "grammatical" creole, which then evolves into a complete and freestanding language).
And one can even imagine scenarios, like the fertilized-egg-carrying mother bird being storm-blown to an ocean island, where a language arises in a strange new place with very few surviving adult speakers of the language of origin, leaving subsequent generations to expand upon a very impoverished sketch of a native language...though it's hard to make this work with few or no competent adults and a raft-load of pre-linguistic infants.
Finally, if one goes back far enough into the evolution of anatomically-modern humans, one could suppose a spread of populations just on the physical verge of language -- the genetic and neuromuscular hardware is all in place, and primitive gestural and pre-grammatical communicating systems are in place, but syntactical, grammatical language has not yet emerged in the parent population -- who then become physically "isolated" in various far-flung locales prior to then undergoing separate/independent "language emergence" events...
While I suppose something like that could not be ruled out in every case of some small and early founding population of otherwise-anatomically modern humans launching out from Africa, it seems to me increasingly unlikely given the reconstruction of the history of human migration (in which peripheral subpopulations on the "gust front" of the wave of settlement can all be physically linked back to earlier populations with less-derived physical markers) and the archaeology of human symbolic representation. Previously confined to European cave-painting and the like, the cultural markers of symbolic thinking can now be traced back into Africa at times which, in all likelihood, well precede the outward wave of population migration.
Thus, the evidence seems to me to support a scenario where anatomically-modern humans in Africa had already achieved language before spreading to the far corners of the earth. Those spreading subpopulations would already be speaking descendant languages, just as they carried descendant genomes. The !San languages of Africa would be just as derived from the languages spoken by the parental African population as would be Polynesian or Amerind or Na-Dene or Afroasiatic or Austronesian or Indo-European languages.
Communities of language speakers are descended from previous communities of language speakers, just as subpopulations of humans are descended from previous parental populations of humans.
We should be no more astonished at the variety of languages, about the "splitting" and "sub-splitting" of a language clade, than we are by the variety of species in the biosphere, or by the variety of hair and eye and skin colors and other physical markers which identify derived subpopulations at the same time as they unite humans in common ancestry.
Last edited by
Steviepinhead on Mar 10, 2010 8:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Yeah he isn't taken too seriously in science these days, not even in linguistics. I think after scientists spent years on a wild goose chase searching for his "Language Acquisition Device" and "Universal Grammar" they sort of gave up on him. Now he just writes books about politics I think.
Where do you live? Just so I know where on this planet I can rant about Chomsky all I want without getting excommunicated 
