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Language Evolution

Coframed by Factors as Human Behavioral

or Psychological Universalisms

Dedicated to the University of Zurich,

Peter Endress and Peter Linder, as well as

my beloved family and friends

Copyright of the total file Dr. Owi I. Nandi

Zurich, August 4th 2010

Dr. Owi I. Nandi

© 2nd of November, 2010, Dr. Owi I. Nandi, legal domicile: Switzerland

1.PrefaceMy fascinating journey with languages started, as is natural, in my

earliest childhood when I began to speak the dialect of my mother and

my Swiss grand parents, Bernese Swiss German which is still my most

innate language, that is foremost to me when thinking, dreaming at

night or speaking to close Swiss relatives. The picture in Switzerland

with its four languages and many small dialects was illustrative as to

how on a small geographical background language diversity could arise.

From my Indian father, I started to learn some High German, but

quite soon wanted to know a few words of his Bengali mother tongue -

for instance the word for bird, which is “pākhi”. My father was

enthusiastic to teach me more Bengali and gradually I learned to speak

this language as well. He also used to tell me some English words. For

instance, when he drove his old-fashioned 1960’s car stopping before a

traffic light he said “ready, steady, go!” as the light turned from red

through yellow to green and these were my first English words I learned.

When I attended primary school, my father institutionalised his

Bengali teachings and taught me to speak, write and read in regular

Sunday classes. For me, these tedious hours of learning a distant

language soon became an imposition. He went on to teach me Bengali

until I was 15 and used to convey me a lot of the philosophical

background of Indian thinking. Sometimes he told me: “Although you


look at it as an imposition, I am convinced that someday you will tell me,

Baba, I am very thankful to you for having taught me Bengali!”

As I grew up in the Swiss Cantons of Zurich and mainly Argovia, I

also learned to speak the Eastern dialect of Argovia, which I spoke with

my classmates and always separated from the Bernese dialect. I only

used the Bernese dialect when at home with my mother and younger

brother, Dilip, or with my relatives in Berne, and also when thinking to

myself or dreaming at night. From TV, the school and many

conversations with my father, my High German also improved a lot, as is

commonly the case in the allemanic part of Switzerland.

Aged 12, we started to learn French in Secondary School. We took

French classes for eight years until the end of High School. Afterwards,

we often adventured bicycle tours in France and I could improve this

language even more. I received my best training with the age of 24

when a friend, Anna Belser, and I went to Serre de la Fare in the upper

Loire valley of France, where French environmentalists protested against

the planned construction of several dams on the rivers Loire and Allier.

I cherish these memories of our outdoors camping in the pine tree

shadow, where we met a lot of younger and elder persons from all

around Europe but especially from France. Jean-François Lopès became

a friend of mine, we hiked together along the Loire river, had a lot of fun,

and later exchanged letters and e-mails in French.


From middle Secondary School onwards I learned English, which

gradually became my second best language after German. One of the

first larger books I read in English was Sir Edmund Hillary’s “The True

Story of the First Ascent of Mount Everest” and Mahatma Gandhi’s

Autobiography “The Story of My Experience with Truth”. During my

biology study at the University of Zurich and in the course of my PhD I

read much of scientific literature and significantly improved my English

language skills. Starting from this time onwards, I also wrote scientific

articles in this language and I enjoyed communicating with fellow

scientists all around the world. !One of these publications was

coauthored by the renowned American molecular biologist, Mark W.

Chase, and also together with my dissertation advisor, Peter K. Endress,

was very well received in the community of Systematic Botanists (Nandi,

Chase & Endress, 1998: A combined cladistic analysis of angiosperms

using non-molecular and rbcL characters). I also regularly read American

and English newspapers. Viewing the impressive richness of the English

vocabulary and expressions, it seems to be a lifelong process to improve

this language. As I tested my skills in writing lyrics (I first published a

poem book called “Seesommer” in German in 1998), in 2005 I translated

this book into English with the help of a couple of native speakers,

foremost Mr. Timothy Holman, with the title of the English booklet being

“For an Hour, We Lived from Flowers”. I was very happy to have the help

of people with an English mother tongue.


For six years during my later school time, I also took Latin. The

language was a good stepping-stone for learning other Romanic

languages, later and introduced me to the etymology of languages.

During my high-school time, I got a glimpse of other ancient languages

such as Ancient Greek and Ancient Hebrew. As for Ancient Greek, I now

and then attended the lessons of a part of our class, who also learned

this language in addition to Latin. As for Hebrew, I followed the first

semester, to get an idea of the Hebrew alphabet and some simple

sentences.

I learnt considerably more of the Greek vocabulary by searching

for the etymologies of scientific terms, especially zoological and

botanical terms. Also, I have visited Greece thirteen times for vacations

until now, thus also learning some New Greek.

Because some of my classmates in High School were very eager to

have an insight in many languages, especially old ones, we also had the

opportunity to study Sanskrit with Dr. Karl Scherrer, our Latin teacher.

Starting with the simple proverb “lobhaḥ pāpasya kāraṇam”, which

translates as “greed is the cause of evil”, we gradually improved our

skills. The Sanskrit word roots are tremendously useful for the

understanding of all Indoeuropean languages and for instance later

helped me to learn several Slavic ones, particularly Russian.

At the end of High School I fell in love more seriously for the first

time, and although this love was not reciprocated to the degree I would


have wished for, I was fascinated that N. was fond of reading Russian.

This tantalised me to study the Cyrillian alphabet and the Russian

language. From our home towns library I borrowed some bilingual

Russian-German books. Russian poetry, from the Middle Ages until

Modernity, left a permanent impression upon me and inspired my own

lyrical work. Later on, I even had the courage to read a larger part of

“Crime and punishment” by Fjodor Dostojewski in Russian, a novel that I

had already read twice in English and that had become dear to me.

During my Ph.D. thesis, I was also particularly fond of reading the two

editions of “Systema Angispermorum” by the renowned systematic

botanist Armen Takhtajan in its original language, which is Russian.

This was more or less the level of my language skills at the end of

High School, aged twenty, when I started to get more and more

interested in comparative linguistics and felt the wish to investigate

language universals, if they at all existed.

In this same year, 1986, I started my study in biology at the

University of Zurich. During the first two years, there was an enormous

mass of scientific learning material, which meant a break in my

language learnings. An Arabian colleague, however, from time to time

taught me some Arabic words, which was my first encounter with this

important world language I am now continuing to learn.

In summer of 1989, I spent several weeks in France. One of these

stays was at Taizé in Burgundy, where Christians - mostly young ones -


from all over the world met, prayed and discussed biblical texts. In this

camp, I was assigned to a group together with Erszévet, a beautiful,

brown-haired woman in her early twenties from Hungary, who used to

walk barefoot. I secretely fell in love with this girl and although Erszébet

seemed not to realize this, she made me a friendly present when we

parted. She bestowed upon me a bluebell flower and a printed souvenir

with an image and a Hungarian sentence from St. Exupéry’s ‘The Little

Prince’: ‘One sees well only with the heart. The essential is invisible to

the eyes.’ I was deeply moved by this little gift and it motivated my

Hungarian studies. Afterwards I sometimes attended Hungarian classes

at the Institute for General Language Science, University of Zurich.

Later, I gradually deepened my knowledge of this Finno-Ugric language,

especially when researching for the present publication.

In my mid-twenties, I also gradually learned Italian and Spanish,

both not so difficult to master when already knowing Latin, French and

English. Two other Romanic languages I can understand fluently when

reading them are Rhaeto-Romanic and Portuguese. My Italian improved

considerably when travelling in the Italian speaking part of Switzerland

and in Italy, as when, for instance, when I made a bicycle tour from

Florence to Rome with a Swiss colleague.

As for Spanish, I had already read nature encyclopaedias in this

language during my High School time, but the triggering experience to

get fairly fluent in Spanish was an excursion to Andalusia for three


weeks, together with my girlfriend Shuqing from China, in the first spring

of my Ph.D. work. During this short period around Easter 1992, we had

intense contacts to the local people and it seemed to me to be the

easiest language to learn. Two years later Shuqing and myself parted

and I made the entangling and important acquaintance of my later wife,

Annette. We met at a party of a common friend in Switzerland and one

of the first things we realized that we had in common was that we found

Spanish to be one of the most beautiful languages. At that time, we did

not realise that Annette rather meant the language as spoken in South

America or to be more precise, in Bolivia, while I was fonder of the

Spanish as spoken in Spain. But, nonetheless, this was a very good

ground stone for our growing relationship. Annette had travelled for a

full year through South America, earlier. We frequently practised our

‘Castellano’ when undertaking countless getaways and also at home. In

2001, aged 35 and 34, we visited Tenerife for the first time, this

pulchritudinous Canary island, where her parents by then had bought an

own apartment in Puerto de la Cruz, close to the overwhelming Botanic

Garden in the verdant North of the island. From this year onwards, we

have visited Puerto de la Cruz almost each year and, of course, this

entails an excellent opportunity to practice Spanish.

For Annette, as for me, it is difficult to keep the proficiency level in

Italian and Spanish high at one time, because - from the perspective of a

Swiss German speaker - these languages are so similar.


During the second half of my biology studies, I attended various

language courses at the University of Zurich, including Turkish, Ancient

Lithuanian, Swahili and a grammatical survey of the Kiranti languages

(Kiranti languages are a Himalayan family member of Sino-Tibetan

languages). Although I received a brief introduction to these languages, I

only remained at the beginner level here.

This differed from my experience with Polish, in which I took a two

year course and, as I already mastered some Russian, it was fairly easy

for me to learn another Slavic language.

As I already hinted at before, in late autumn of 1990, I made the

acquaintance of my girlfriend He Shuqing, from Kunming, China. We

were a couple for a little longer than two years and it was a period of

rich experiences. Shuqing taught me much about the Chinese way of

living, starting from cooking, through literature, philosophy, to traditional

Chinese medicine (TCM) and above all, she skilfully introduced me to the

Chinese language. China and Chinese have become important elements

in my future life. I not only attended Chinese courses at the Oriental

seminar of the University, but later in 1996, I also got a job as the head

of Quality control of a company dealing with TCM herbs, a company

owned by a very generous and friendly Swiss TCM doctor, Severin

Bühlmann.

I am now able to identify most of the commonly used Chinese

herbs frequently to the level of varieties and subspecies with the help of


the powerful and sophisticated Chinese Scientific literature. I was also

writing expertises about the pharmacology and toxicology of TCM herbs

and maintaining contacts to friends in the People’s Republic of China

and in Taiwan. I am still studying Chinese, one of the most beautiful and

yet most difficult languages to learn for a foreigner. While I am fairly

proficient in reading scientific articles and books in Chinese, my writing

and speaking still need to be improved. In spite of all these difficulties, I

am still intensely interested in learning this language and in the last two

years, 2006 and 2007, I made tremendous progress. In 2007, I also got

into contact with Dr. Wei Jianing, originally from Ningxia province and

now living in Beijing, a wonderful and true friend, who helps Annette and

me wherever he can. In this first year of our acquaintance, we have

already authored a shared publication in the field of Chemical ecology in

PloS one.

We have almost arrived at the preliminary terminus of my so

fascinating journey with language learning. In these last years since

2005, I have become more proficient in Swedish and Dutch, while

improving some of the already-studied languages. It has also been a

fascinating experience to learn the very aesthetic Arabic scripture and

first words of this important world language. Learning Arabic was also

facilitated by some Arabic loanwords in Bengali, which I already was

familiar of. Lately, I also went a little bit deeper into Basque, Iwrit, and

Japanese. For the next future, I am very curious to understand more of


this latter Semitic world language and to study in more detail its

beautiful alphabet.

These last three years since 2005 were also those in which I

compiled the bulk of the language material presented in the current

book and I am really looking forward to share it with who ever is

interested in comparative linguistics and in languages in general.

Zurich, July 2010,

the author Owi I. Nandi


2. Acknowledgement

My great thankfulness is due to my dear friend and former wife,

Annette, who always encouraged me in this work. I am also

tremendously thankful to my father Nandadulal Nandi for teaching me

Bengali in my childhood, for introducing me into the ancient Indian

wisdom and its interpretations of language and philosophy.

I would like to mention the many linguists, as well, human

molecular geneticists and behavioural biologists in many different

countries who helped me with answers to specific questions: Peter

Underhill of Stanford University, who never hesitated to help me and to

make me aware of important publications in the field of human genetics,

Timothy Usher, a wonderful friend living in Seattle, doing an incredible

work in the field of Andamanese, Papuan and Australian languages,

Georgyi Starostin from Moscow, working also frequently in the US,

Harold Fleming, John Bengtsson, Alexander Militarev, Chris Ehret, Paul

Whitehouse, Merritt Ruhlen, Ene Metspalu, Richard Villems, Rene

Herrera, Thomas Bearth, M. Oppitz and Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, to which

all I am indebted with a lot of thoughts of happiness for their important

help.

I am also highly indebted to Jewgenyi Kirichenko, a wonderful

colleague from Moscow, for reading the manuscript of the current

publication and encouraging this work.


My utmost thanks are also due to Peter Linder, head of the

Institute of Systematic Botany, University of Zurich, Switzerland, who

offered me a working place in this beautiful institution, although this

topic here, contrary to others that I pursued at the same place, was not

linked to Systematic Botany. My thanks are also due to all colleagues at

this institution, though I can not mention all of them: Peter Endress, my

PhD supervisor, Jakob Schneller, Rolf Rutishauser, Edwin Urmi, Elena

Conti, Florian Schiestl, Hans-Rudolf Preisig, the late Karl Kramer, Jurriaan

de Vos, Anita Lendel, Evelin Pfeifer, Gabriele di Salvo, Ed Connor, Serge

Haemmerli, Josephine Maksch, Claudia Winteler, Elena Beneti, Barbara

Seitz, Niklaus Müller, Alex Bernhard and Sara Manafzadeh (who helped

me with Arabic).

I have also to mention the help by Fernando Zúñiga, Tobias Weber

and Karin Ebert, Seminar of General Linguistics, University of Zurich and

the entire staff of this beautiful institute for taking time to discuss

certain specific linguistic topics and giving me access to the impressive

library of the institute, Ulrike Niklas, University of Cologne, Germany,

and Peter Larssen, University of Uppsala, Sweden, for helping me to

eliminate Sanskrit loanwords from the Tamil wordlist and Renate Würsch

of the Oriental Seminar, University of Zurich, Switzerland, for helping me

with the Arabic wordlist.

Thanks are also due to my brother, Dilip Nandi, with whom I

frequently discussed about linguistics of Basque, North-Caucasian,


Finnish, Hebrew, Kartvelian, Quechua, Indo-European and Dravidian and

to Shuqing He, Wei Jianing, Qi Suogen, Shuyuan Wang-Chen and Xiao Lu,

who helped me to learn Chinese and understand more about the

Chinese Culture.

I wish likewise to thank my boss, Severin Buehlmann for his great

interest in this project and his feeling and thoughtful encouragement of

it and Armin Heer, a good friend from Switzerland for his support. Finally,

I would also like to thank some important friends and teachers, as Emil

Stäuble, my high school biology teacher, Karl Scherrer, my high school

old languages teacher, Vladimir Pankin, Finally, I would also like to thank

some important friends and teachers, as Emil Stäuble, my high school

biology teacher, Karl Scherrer, my high school old languages teacher,

Vladimir Pankin, Jewgenji Kirichenko and finally Gregor Siegenthaler,

Tobias Straumann, Urs Christen, Armin Heer, Wolfgang Schuehly and

Franco Hochstrasser, all good friends of the author.


3. Introduction


Human speech is one of the most fascinating realms that can be

studied on Earth. The diversity of languages can almost not be

understood by a single researcher.

For me as a biologist and linguist it has been a challenge since half

of my lifetime to search for common patterns in a larger part of all

language families. I had the strong feeling that apart from the few

commonly known language universals as ‘mama’ or similar for mother

and some emerging proto-World roots (Bengtson & Ruhlen, 1994), there

could be more very small language particles that could have a wide

distribution and in part be derivable from etho-psychological facial

reactions to emotions or parallel symbolisation of psychological

archetypes. This feeling for more similarities was nurtured by my

ethological knowledge of facial reactions in humans as described by

Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeld (see e.g. Grammer et al., 1988 for the eyebrow-

flash). Human language could have evolved from these facial reactions

to emotions like fear, alert, joy, pleasure, or the feeling of being hurt.

Understanding evolution of modern Homo sapiens has received a

boost by sequencing and comparing human genetic information (see

e.g. Cavalli-Sforza et al., 1994, Cavalli-Sforza & Seielstad, 1997,

Underhill & Kivisild, 2007). Informations on maternal and paternal

descendance can be obtained by sequencing mitochondrial or Y-

chormosome genes, respectively.


According to these molecular studies, modern Homo sapiens has

his cradle land in Africa. A mitochondrial Eve of all humans (Templeton &

Sing, 1993, Horai et al., 1995) should have lived approximately 170’000

years before present in the region of Kenia, Tanzania or Ethiopia. In

2003, bones of the earliest modern human, Homo sapiens, were

unearthed in Ethiopia, about 225 kilometres northeast of the capital

Addis Ababa (Clarke et al., 2003, Blench & Dendo, 2004). They were

dated with radioisotopes at an age of 154’000-160’000 years. The ‘out of

Africa’ hypothesis, based on molecular phylogenetic, osteometric and

archeological material is now generally accepted by the majority of

anthropologists (see e.g. Ke et al., 2001).


The deepest split, among all extant human populations is between

the Khoisan peoples plus some other old sub-Saharan African lineages and

remaining mankind (Behar et al., 2008). Thus, the common root node of

Khoisanid and Non-Khoisanid African language speakers could show us

many traits of the original human language, if we assume that human

speech is at least as old as the origin of modern Homo sapiens.

The facial expressions as reactions to emotions as are found in apes

(Pongidae) and humans (Hominids) seems to be a first step towards very

few linguistic sounds, where these mimic expressions, including the ones

of the lips, the mouth and the tongue could have been standardized into

simple sounds. If this evolution from facial expressions simplified into

linguistic sounds covers the whole process of language origin, then a

similar process could also have arisen several times independently in

mankind. For example the expression for fear as an opening of the

rounded lips being in tension and then widening and exposing the frontal

teeth to the well known ‘Furchtgrinsen’, an established reaction to fear in

mammalian ethology that in humans is accompanied by the ‘uaa’ sound

may give rise to a primitive word like ‘wuah’ as a flexible particle

signifying fear. In fact, as we showed in the current work, languages of a

diverse array of large language phyla possess words that seem to be

derived from this ‘uaa’ sound.

In a similar way, a couple of very primitive linguistic expressions could

have arisen for the most important words in primitive communication.


A still higher evolved strategy, derived after the first words

representing traditionalized facial reactions to emotions already formed a

proto-language, might have been onomatopoetic words (i.e. words that

imitate the sound of an action) or also words where the speech tract

imitates an action. These latter words might form the bulk of the linguistic

concept we tried to infer from our language comparisons. For instance, a

significant portion of all languages studied (spread over many language

phyla again) use the posterior stop-consonants ‘k’ or ‘q’ for words linked to

hurting or hardness. These consonants seem to imitate best the hurting

and hardness of some structures or actions, because ‘k’ or ‘q’ themselves

are the consonants which are the hardest and most hurting (more detailed

information on the psychology and semantistics for many consonants will

be given in further chapters of this book).

In this book we hypothesize that several consonants at the beginning of

words are very constant features for typical semantic fields of words. The

fact that modern languages not all show these patterns of word meanings

derived from the same first consonant of a word, could be explained to a

large degree in that words themselves evolve over the course of the

history of a language. It is a generally known tendency of languages that

vowels can change between dialects (consider for instance Swiss German).

To a lesser degree also the consonants can change during the evolution of

languages, these transformations of consonants is particularly well known

for the Indo-European language family where e.g. ‘equus’ in Latin is

homologous to ‘hippos’ in Greek and ‘ashva’ in Sanskrit (all for ‘horse’).


Such transformations of consonants according to rigid rules however are

also known from all other hitherto reconstructed language families and are

usually typified by comparative linguist as ‘sound correspondances’. These

transformations of vowels and more so, of consonants, seem more likely in

denser populations with advanced cultural evolution, especially writing

and reading. Under these circumstances the words gain an own life

through tradition and are less strictly linked to emotional expressions of

the face.

Another important factor, why certain defined semantic fields could

not be covered in certain languages or language families is inferred by the

variable inventories of vowels and consonants in different languages (see

e.g. Haspelmath et al., 2005). Thus, one or even more than one

consonant, we view as being important for language universalisms, may

be absent in one of the languages which we included in this analysis (e.g.

‘l’ is absent from written Japanese or from Maori). In general however, we

found meaningfully few absences of the consonants or consonant groups

chosen (including the vowel ‘u’ and diphthongs) in the selected languages.

In this way, the overall picture of semantics covered by the different

letters and letter groups, was not distorted by the absence (i.e. the loss) of

consonants or vowels in certain languages.

We would summarize the hypothetical steps of language evolution in

the following way:


1. Motoric reactions in the body to emotions (as seen in many mammals

and birds, but even in lower vertebrates or higher evolved

invertebrates, like cuttlefishes and octopusses)

2. Communication mostly through facial reactions (in selected Pongidae

(apes), especially in Chimpanzees and Bonobos)

3. Formation of primitive linguistic expressions through standardization

of movements in the oral tract such as voice, tongue and lip reactions.

4. Imitation of movements or features by the parts of the oral tract and

standardization of the words gained

5. Formation of a primitive grammar

6. Traditionalization of words and with it possibility to transform vowels

and consonants independently from the emotional background

We hypothesize that language evolution is a continuum beyond the

origin of humans into apes, primates, mammals and vertebrates.

Although animals for a longer time during the 20th century have been

viewed as machine-like by main stream biologists, in the most recent

times biologists are amazed by pre-intelligent and intelligent behaviour

across a wide evolutionary field of animals, including some octopuses

(Hamilton, 1997), Cichlid fishes (Bshary et al., 2002), birds as parrots and

crows (for both see Emery, 2006), rodents as degus (Tokimoto & Okanoya,

2004), lemurs (Santos et al., 2005), monkeys and especially apes

(Tomasello & Call, 1997), dogs, elephants, dolphins and whales, to list only

some of them. The behavioural relatedness of body reactions in mammals

was already outlined by Charles Darwin (1872) in one of his most


important though less known books ‘The expression of emotions in man

and animals’. The cognitive abilities of a species are a prerequisite for the

origin of a language. Thus, together with behavioural reactions of an

individual animal there have to be partner individuals who are able to read

and interpret such a reaction. Such an interpretation of a behavioural

reaction can be instinctive or further evolve into an intelligent

interpretation. Some animals go beyond these abilities with their cognitive

capabilities by managing to learn more abstract audiovisual signs. Thus

dogs have been shown to exceptionally be able to learn more than 200

human words. (Kaminski et al., 2004) In a Grey parrot training methods

have been devised which enabled the bird to use its ability to reproduce

the sounds of human speech in order to acquire a cognitive vocabulary

consisting of vocal labels for several exemplars, actions, numerical

quantities, instances of colour and shape, and functional use of the word

"no" (Pepperberg, 1983). Dolphins, Chimpanzees and Bonobos have been

compellingly shown to master even more difficult tasks in trials testing for

understanding of human verbal or non-verbal communication. All these

examples clearly show that selected animals have highly evolved

cognitive skills that could have further evolved towards a traditionalized

language during the evolution of hominids.

Supporting the views of many earlier linguists and archaeologists

(see e.g. Mithen, !1996), we hypothesize here that the origin of spoken

human language reaches back at least to the origin of modern Homo

sapiens. !This hypothesis is underlined by the fact that all modern human

population possess a language. There is a direct descendance line from


the early populations of modern man to modern Khoisanids (Behar et al.,

2008). Moreover, although the Macrokhoisan language phylum, maybe

along with the Amerindian phylum, shows the least number of common

characters with other language families and languages of our study array,

there is still a sufficiently high number of congruencies to allow the

hypothesis that all human languages evolved from one common proto-

language. This proto-language might have been very simple and have

contained at least words in the semantic fields specified in this study,

which all might point to universal first pulmonary consonants of a word.

These proto-words might have been very short (monosyllabic) as is still

the majority of words in the Makrokhoisan language family (see e.g. the

dictionary compiled by Traill (1994), probably the most extensive study

done for any Khoisan language up to date). First human proto-languages

may well have involved one word sentences of these mentioned short

words (as also hypothesized by Haarman, 2006). Such one-word sentences

are still close to a communication mediated by facial reactions as seen in

some mammalian ancestors of man. This stage of language would still

have been asyntactic (Carstairs-McCarthy, 1999).

Further evidence for the origin of languages reaching at least back

to the emergence of Homo sapiens is delivered by our study of semantic

fields. Thus, the largest number of coherent semantic fields is contained in

words starting with a k-like first consonant and here in the super-field

linked to hurting, sharpness and hardness. These words are closely allied

to the first tools found in the archaeological record of humans, which are

sharpened stone-tools. Likewise we found that these semantic fields for


hurting, sharpness and hardness are the ones with the most universal

representation among the 34 language families and languages studied.

Thus only 4 languages had no matches with a k-like starting consonant in

the semantic field of hurting, 7 languages had no matches in the semantic

field of scratching, all 34 language families and languages had matches in

the important semantic field of cutting, all 34 had matches for the field of

pointed structures, and again all 34 had matches for the field of hardness.

The hypothesis for the origin of human language reaching back to

the emergence of Homo sapiens is further corroborated by the fact that

both Homo sapiens sapiens and Homo sapiens neanderthalensis share the

possession of a hyoid bone, the so-called ‘language-bone’. This small u-

shaped bone is located between the root of the tongue and the larynx and

is connected with the muscles of the jaws, the larynx and the tongue. This

hyoid bone belonging to a skeleton of a Neanderthal was found in Kebara

(Israel) in 1989 and is practically identical in size and form to the language

bone of modern humans (Lewin & Foley, 2004). The forerunner of Homo

sapiens, Homo erectus was not yet endowed with a hyoid bone.

Recently also, Boë et al. (2009) reconstructed the articulation possibilities

of Neanderthals.

Interestingly the presence of a special genetotype of FOXP2, the

genomic key prerequisite for human language has been found only in

Homo sapiens sapiens and in the reconstructed partial genome of a

Neanderthal (Trinkaus, 2007). This adds evidence that the common

ancestor of Homo sapiens sapiens and Homo sapiens neandethalensis was

able to use language.


In summary, there are plenty of indications that human language

could reach much farther back than was previously assumed and should

be located at least at the origin of ancestral Homo sapiens 400’000 years

ago or at the origin of modern Homo sapiens sapiens 200’000 to 170’000

years ago.

Key Words: languages, universalisms, language phyla, Khoisan, Nilo-

Saharan, Niger-Congo, Afro-Asiatic, core Eurasiatic, Dené-Caucasian,

Austric, semantic fields, language psychology, language evolution

4. Material and Methods

The first step of this huge project was laid down by studying many

Indo-European languages as Latin, Greek, German, Swedish, Sanskrit,

Bengali, Russian, Serbo-Croatian and Lithuanian and consulting

etymological dictionaries of the Indo-European language family. Also a few

non-Indo-European languages as Hungarian, Bask, Turkish, Swahili and

Chinese, where chosen to extend the horizon of research. Slowly, a matrix

of common elements to a significant part of languages was built up


starting from the deictic roots (roots linked to pointing and showing),

linked to dental consonants (‘t’ and ‘d’). After consulting dictionaries of

many languages in the institute of linguistics of the University of Zurich as

well as on www.yourdictionary.com on the Internet for several years we

decided to use an Excel-matrix with the following first consonants in the

word: ‘b’ or ‘p’ (two semantic fields), ‘d’ and ‘t’, ‘k’ and ‘q’, ‘l’, ‘m’ and ‘n’,

‘r’, ‘s’ (three semantic fields), ‘u’, ‘v’ and ‘w’. We added a last sheet with

diphthongs in any position of a word for words expressing the number two

or dualisms.

With one exception (diphthongs), we consider here the first

pulmonary consonant of a word to encode the highest information content.

We treated initial ‘h’ as a first consonant but did not view initial glottal

stop ‘ʔ’ as a consonant of its own, as ‘ʔ’ is expressed without being written

in an overwhelming number of languages before a starting vowel and thus

seems to have a negligible informative content. We considered initial

vowels as significantly less information-rich for a meaning of a word, than

pulmonary consonants. Vowels are generally more easily changed than

consonants during language evolution where they often already differ on

the level of dialects (see e.g. different dialects of Swiss German as a good

example). Moreover the anatomical implications and the behavioural skills

for expressing a phoneme are significantly more elaborated for

consonants than for vowels as can also be proven by the earlier use of

vowels than that of consonants in baby language. We treated all non-u

vowels as having a low information content, while we treated ‘u’

separately and similar in information content to a pulmonary consonant,


as the articulation of this vowel involves a conspicuous bending of the

musculi orbicularis ori around the lips and the lips are bent more narrowly

than in any other vowels when pronouncing an ‘u’. Also, in baby language

the formation of an ‘u’ seems to set in later than that of the other basal

human vowels. Moreover if an ‘u’ is followed by another vowel the semi

consonant ‘v’ is produced. While most vowels form diphthongs if followed

by another different vowel, only ‘u’ and ‘i’ form semi consonants in this

case.

The rare vowels ‘ä’, ‘ö’, ‘ü’ found in very few languages of our study

array such as in the 3 Altaic languages (Hungarian, Turkic and the

Mongolian language family), in German, but also partly in the

pronunciation of Chinese words, were treated in the same way as the main

consonants ‘a’, ‘e’, ‘i' and ‘o’.

We considered the non-pulmonary click-sounds (click-consonants) of

the Macrokhosian language family as being not as highly information

loaden as the first pulmonary consonant of a word. As outlined below in

the introductory psychological background part of the semantic field for

‘coughing’, we view these click sounds more as an alerting marker in the

context of hunter gatherer languages than as primarily coding for the

meaning of a word. Thus, the click sounds that often precede the first

pulmonary consonant of word in Khoisan languages were treated similarly

as vowels and disregarded for the first information loaden phoneme.

For 32 of the 33 semantic fields specified in the present study we

applied this general rule of the first pulmonary consonant being the main

information phoneme followed by auxiliary modifying phonemes. In the


33rd semantic field, the one for doubleness and duality, we considered a

diphthong, a succession of a semi consonant and a vowel or more rarely,

in languages with different intonations of vowels, the succession of two

vowels with different intonation, in any position of the word as informative

for forming the main meaning of a ‘semion’, though the great majority of

all these words for doubleness consisted o not more than two syllables.

We tried to include only the core roots in our compilations significantly

minimizing the words where prefixes artificially would cause the inclusion

of an etymon into a semantic field. Likewise we attempted to exclude

loanwords introduced from other languages from the lists for every given

language. Thus we excluded originally French words from Russian, Arabic

words from Turkish (some words of Arabic origin here might still be

present), Sanskrit words form Tamil , Latin or Spanish words from Basque,

Arabic words from Haussa, Latinized words from Hungarian, originally

Chinese words from Japanese, and Spanish words from Quechua and

Guarani. However, due to the ancient inclusion of Romanic roots in

English, we let a very few of these included in this language.

In every semantic field studied, we tried to minimize the amount of

words derived from the evidently very same narrow etymological root in

order to give a better overview over the basic diversity for a defined initial

consonant in a given field.

Subsequently every semantic field, as specified in the outline above,

was searched in dictionaries and/or internet dictionaries. We tried to

include a largest possible diversity of language families as specified on the

comprehensive website of World languages: www.ethnologue.com. But


certainly we wanted to deal with the language families and languages of

higher importance. We included the eight language families with the

highest numbers of languages, plus the language family with the tenth

highest number of members, i.e. the Niger-Congo family with 1514

languages (including the Bantu languages), the Austronesian (1268), the

Trans-New Guinean (564), the Indo-European (449), the Sino-Tibetan

(403), the Afro-Asiatic (375), the Nilo-Saharan (204), the Pama-Nyungan

from Australia (178) and the Austro-Asiatic (169).

The most difficult task to cover the diversity of languages of a

geographical region and a phylogenetic descendance was encountered in

the Amerindian languages (the native American languages except the

most recent and thus Nostratic Eskimo-Aleut languages and the Na-Dené

languages), but also to a lesser extent in Papua New Guinean and

Australian languages. In all these three regions the coverage of extensive

and exhaustive lexical dictionaries is low, whereas the diversity of

language families still regarded as independent by most linguists is

comparatively high. Moreover, in many Middle and South American native

languages a high number of Spanish loanwords has distorted the

completeness of the original autochthonous vocabulary. Although I

invested a lot of time and energy into this present language project, the

capacity of time I could spend was limited and thus I had to confine myself

to 4 core New World languages from four comparatively larger New World

language families, and to one Papuan New Guinean and one Australian

language each. This coverage might be statistically somewhat low, but still


we think that the study in general contributes a lot of insight into the

universal similarities of human languages.

Another geographical region where the selection of languages did

not cover all language families was the Caucasus region. From the few

earlier language isolates which are known on earth, we included two

prominent and important ones, namely Basque and Ainu.

The densest coverage in terms of phylogenetic affinity in the present

study is reached in Indoeuropean languages. We included 6 Indoeuropean

languages from five important Indoeuropean language subfamilies,

namely the Indoiranian, the Slavic, the Greek, the Italic and the Germanic

subfamilies respectively plus one set of words from the putative

reconstructed Indoeuropean proto-language. This bias of languages

selected can be explained by the importance of many Indoeuropean

languages as tool of understanding and also by my linguistic knowledge

which is overwhelmingly biased in Indoeuropean languages.

We arranged the consonants covered in the third chapter and

likewise in the appendix in the order of the latine alphabet. Thus ‘b’ and

the affiliated voiceless bilabial plosive ‘p’ precede the alveolar stops ‘d’

and ‘t’, the velar and uvular stops ‘k’ and ‘q’, the lateral proximant ‘l’, the

nasals ‘m’, ‘n’, the rhotic ‘r’, the sibilant ‘s’ and finally ‘u’,’ v’ and ‘w’. We

terminated the sequence of semantic fields with the somewhat aberrant

semantic field of doubleness encoded by diphthongs.

As for the ordering of languages, we mainly arranged them according to

the molecular phylogenetic sequence of human populations as outlined by


the studies of Underhill & Kivisild (2007), also taking into account the

earlier cladograms of Cavalli-Sforza et al. (1994).

For all cases where complete language families have been selected

we chose the etymological reconstruction of a word as given in the ToB

project (Tower of Babel, 2005) or, for the Indoeuropean language family as

a whole, by Koebler (2000). These etymological reconstructions can be

distinguished from the other words in that they are preceded by an

asterisk (*). For the Chinese language, with the exception for very few

words, where no reconstruction was available, we chose reconstructed

Preclassic Chinese words (Tower of Babel, 2005, compiled by Sergei

Starostin), the oldest traceable Chinese language form, to assemble

matches for the semantic fields, but in parallel, we also listed the Hanzi

Chinese signs and the modern Mandarin pinyin transcription in order to

assist those familiar with present day Chinese. We listed the examples

given in the text and the appendix according to the number and

conventional Chinese order of strokes.

For Ancient Egyptian, Proto-Semitic, Russian, Ancient Greek,

Sanskrit, Tamil, Khmer, Japanese, and Thai, we used one of the generally

acknowledged Romanised transcriptions. For Chinese (Hanzi), Sanskrit

(Devanagari), Russian (Cyrillic) and Ancient Greek (Greek) we also used

their own original signs or alphabet. The Russian and Ancient Greek lists

are given in the sequence of the Cyrillic and Greek alphabet, respectively.

For languages where tones, lengths or diacritical signs are added on

top or below the vowels, these were added in the examples and lists. For

some languages with no written record, with infrequent Romanisation or


some where etymological reconstructions were given, we gave symbols as

used by the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) for rare consonants and

also some vowels. In the case of some etymologically reconstructed

words, e.g. for !XÓÕ or were we included the Khoisan etymologies, for the

Semitic language family or in the case of the North Caucasian Andian

language family, we used a capitalised ‘V’ as a placeholder for a vowel

that can not be assigned more precisely.

All lists of languages where the Latin alphabet was used in the first

place were ordered in the sequence of this alphabet. For Romanised

languages were special signs or signs of the international phonetical

alphabet were used, the sequence was determined by the order given

‘Sort’ in Excel 2000.

The following 34 language families or individual languages made up

for our strictly defined study array. Some inserted macrophyla, such as

Macro-Khoisan, Eurasiatic or Sino-Caucasian where not regularly counted

and added for more illustration (all from the very important and

monumental ToB project (Tower of Babel, The Evolution of Human

languages project, http://starling.rinet.ru/) on the web).

1. Khoisan, Southern Khoisan,!XÓÕ,

2. Nilo-Saharan, Eastern Sudanic, Nilotic, Nandi,

3. Nilo-Saharan, Central Sudanic, Mbay,

4. Niger-Congo, Bantu, Rundi,

5. Afro-Asiatic, Chadic, Haussa,

6. Afro-Asiatic, Egyptian language branch,


7. Afro-Asiatic, Semitic language family,

8. Basque, a previous language isolate

9. Ainu (an almost language isolate),

10. North Caucasian, Andian language family,

11. Altaic, Uralic, Finno-Ugrian, Hungarian,

12. Altaic, Turkic language family

13. Altaic, Turkic language family, Altaic, Mongolian language family,

14. Japanese language family,

15. Indoeuropean language family as a whole,

16. Indoeuropean, Indo-Iranian, Sanskrit,

17. Indoeuropean, Slavic, Russian, Indoeuropean,

18. Greek, Ancient Greek, Indoeuropean,

19. Italic, Latin, Indoeuropean,

20. Germanic, English, Indoeuropean,

21. Germanic, German,

22. Dravidian, Southern Dravidian, Tamil,

23. Sino-Tibetan, Chinese,

24. Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Papuan, Kâte,

25. Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Malayan,

26. Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Maori,

27. Austro-Asiatic, Mon-Khmer, Khmer language family,

28. Tai-Kadai, Thai,

29. Australian, Pama-Nyungan, Yalarnnga,

30. Eskimo-Aleut, Eskimo, Inupit language family,

31. Algic, Algonquian, Cree,


32. Uto-Aztecan, Papago,

33. Quechuan, Quechua,

34. Tupi, Guarani.

In this whole textbook some few instances of still lacking information

could not be handled. These gaps are marked by exclamation marks (&).

Please take not that in Khoisan languages exclamation marks designate

specific click-sounds.

5. Language phyla of the

World

A range of 6000-6500 individual languages worldwide has been

estimated by Haarman (2006). In a very conservative approach as

followed by Gordon (2005) in the ethnologue, these can be roughly

grouped into 64 macro-groups and affiliations of at least 4 (e.g. Yanomam)

to maximally 1514 single languages (Niger-Congo). Of these 64

conservatively formed phyla, 22 have been chosen for the present survey

(19 of which with more than 10 languages, plus 3 language isolates). Of

the first 25 phyla in terms of single language number, 18 are represented


here. A more modern classification that we would like to propose here

would deal with the following phyla, a sequence very close and clearly

only slightly modified (for Sundaic and Sahaulic, as tentatively discovered

by Timothy Usher) from the one by Sergei Starostin (Tower of Babel,

2005), Joseph Greenberg and Merritt Ruhlen (see www.merrittruhlen.com):

1. Khoisanoid

2. Nilo-Saharan plus maybe Niger-Congo

3. Afro-Asiatic

4. Eurasiatic without the sister group Afro-Asiatic

4a. Dené-Caucasian

4b. core Eurasiatic

4c. Austric

5. Sundaic

6. Sahaulic (including Australian)

7. Amerindian

For researchers of long range language relationships (whose

foremost discoverers are according to our views the late Prof. Sergei

Starostin, without whose work this one would also not have been possible

and whom I admire to any extent, Prof. Joseph Greenberg and Prof. Merritt

Ruhlen), there is a growing number of evidence that the overwhelming

majority of natural human languages, if not all of them, can be grouped

into only a handful of large language macrophyla. The languages chosen

for the current study cover all of these 7 macro-phyla.


Inferring from the sources mentioned above, the most ancestral human

languages are spoken on the African continent.

6. Overview over the

different linguistic phyla

As a landmark overview on putative relatedness and evolution of

nowadays human populations based on mtDNA and Y-chromosome data

consult Underhill & Kivisild (2007).

6.1. The African languagesAs of autumn 2008, due to insufficient funding, still no large general

molecular genetic study of African populations exists (Blench & Dendo,

2004, personal research in Science data bases as Scholar Google). Still, in

the last two years until 2010 some very interesting studies about

potentially very ancient populations in Africa have been published (such as

in a newer important comparison of many ancient African lineages in

Behar et al., 2008). One of the most extensive earlier studies, that of

Cavalli-Sforza et al. (1994), apart from showing the Khoisanids at the base

of all African populations, failed to demonstrate a large congruity of the

language phyla and subphyla with molecular genetic results. The study

grouped linguistically distantly placed populations together. Thus, the

central Tanzanian potential Khoisanid, Sandawe, neighboured

Senegambian Fufulde, Wolof and Serer, the South African Khoisanid, San,


grouped with Afro-Asiatic, Cushitic, Somali from the Horn of Africa, the

North Ethiopian, Kunamana, paired with Niger-Congo, Southeast Bantu

and the Niger-Congo, Bantoid grouped with Afro-Asiatic, Chadic, Haussa

form the savannahs of West Africa.

In the light of newer markers and a more meticulate sampling, a

better understanding of the African human phylogeny could emerge in the

future, although the project is highly time sensitive, due to the much more

extensive migration of individuals in modern times and the concurrent

growing tendencies of admixtures.

In the present absence of any clear molecular phylogeny, we arranged the

African language phyla in the order of Greenberg’s well-known study, ‘the

languages of Africa’ (Greenberg, 1963), which was congruent to our

understanding of a natural sequence of African phyla.

6.1.1. Macrokhoisan language family

As already stated above, a direct descendance line leads from the

early populations of modern Homo sapiens sapiens to the Khoisanids, i.e.

the San peoples (the so-called Bushmen), the Khoikhoi (also written as

Khoi, Khoe or Khwe according to different authors, earlier called

Hottentots) and allied ethnicities. About 30 languages of southern Africa

including 2 languages spoken in Eastern Africa, spoken by the San, the

Khoikhoi and allied ethnicities, are characterized by a repertoire of click

consonants and phonetic accompaniments (Knight et al., 2003). Some

Bantu languages of Southern Africa have click consonants, too, which has


to be viewed as an introduction of these sounds by close geographical

contact to the Khoisan.

A morphological feature which has been conserved from the early modern

human populations to the female San and Khoikhoi is an archaic

anthropological marker the so called steatopygia. Steatopygia is a high

degree of fat accumulation of fat in and around the buttocks, which is an

ecological adaptation to survival in harsh, desert-like environments and

with undulating supply of food (Haarmann, 2006). In modern human

populations, this trait has only been retained in Khoisan, Pygmies and the

inhabitants of the Andaman Islands. The fat deposit is not confined to the

buttock, but extends to the thighs.

According to Knight et al. (2003), the Y-chromosome haplogroup A,

one of the two oldest-diverging Y haplogroups and also the most diverse

one (Y-chromosomes are inherited entirely by patrilineal descent), is

nowadays present in different Khoisanoid populations at relatively high

frequencies. Other Y-chromosome haplogroups found have been formed

by recent admixture of Bantu male lineages E3a. The Khoisanids also dis-

play the most diverse genetic diversity of all human populations in the ma-

trilineally transmitted mitochondrial DNA (Kivisild & Underhill, 2007). Their

anciently inherited, rare mtDNA haplogroups L1d and L1k belong to the

few female lineages on the African continent branching off first in the

cladograms (Behar et al. 2008).

As the Macrokhoisan language assemblage is amongst the oldest

language taxa conserved to date, it is not very homogeneous and it is a

very difficult task to show their overall relationships in term of genealogy. © 2nd of November, 2010, Dr. Owi I. Nandi, legal domicile: Switzerland

In spite of this, the Russian linguist Georgyi Starostin (see Tower of Babel,

2008) completed a very fruitful work to compare these languages. Khoisan

is the smallest phylum of African languages in Greenberg's classification

from number of members (see Greenberg, 1963).

6.1.2. Afro-Asiatic languages

The Afro-Asiatic phylum contains about 375 languages in 6 subphyla:

Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, Egyptian, Omotic and Semitic (Gordon, 2005: the

Ethnologue). About 300 million persons speak Afro-Asiatic languages as of

2008, including 200 million Arabic speakers. The Semitic subphylum is the

only one of this group spoken outside Africa. The highest number and di-

versity of subphyla in a limited geographic area is encountered in Ethiopia

which could also be the cradle land for this important language phylum

(personal hypothesis).

The etymological list of words common to some of the subphyla of

Afro-Asiatic as compiled by Alexander Militarev and Olga Stolbova for the

Tower of Babel project records an amazingly rich lists of 2671 putative

Afro-Asiatic word roots. If this number is compared to the 3178 proto

words reconstructed by Sergei Nikolayev for Indo-European in the same

project, we could conclude that the Afro-Asiatic languages as the Indoeu-

ropean one’s are still quite homogeneous showing a long list of similarities

and would estimate a shorter time horizon for their evolution than e.g. for

Nilo-Saharan or Khoisanid languages.


6.1.3. African Pygmy languages

The term pygmy is used for human populations whose male adult size

of 1.55 meters or less. The African pygmies are a very ancient line in the

evolution of modern Homo sapiens sapiens, whose cultural characteristics

have remained almost unchanged since the late or even middle Pale-

olithic. Being hunter gatherers of the Central African rainforests, they still

stick to the preneolithic lifestyle, Other parts of pigmies were partially dis-

placed or absorbed by agricultural peoples and adopted their Central Su-

danic, Adamawa Ubangian and Bantu languages (Blench & Dendo, 2004).

In terms of mplecular genetics, the pygmy phylogeny is not yet fully re-

solved. Preliminarily the pigmies are divided into three groups (Blench &

Dendo, 2004):

a) the Mbuti - Eastern pygmies

b) the Aka - Western pygmies

c) Pygmoids – all other pygmies including the Cameroon groups, the

Rwandese Twa and those of NW Zaire.

The Mbuti seem to be the most ancestral lineage of pygmies, whereas

the other groups can hardly be distinguished genetically from other Sub-

Saharan populations, which could partly be explained by admixture, if this

is a correct interpretation (Blench & Dendo, 2004).

An important publication in this field however is the one by Cavalli-

Sforza et al. (1994). This study places a gene sequence of Mbuti pygmies

at a very basal position in the phylogenetic tree of modern humans. The

ancestral-most split in this tree is the one between the originally African © 2nd of November, 2010, Dr. Owi I. Nandi, legal domicile: Switzerland

and the non-African populations. Within the African clade the earliest bifur-

cation is between a clade formed by the San (Khoidsanids) plus a popula-

tion from Ethiopia and a clade of other sub-Saharan Africans, where the

Mbuti form the basalmost branch. The grouping of San with Afro-Asiatic

speakers from Ethiopia could point to an original Homo sapiens sapiens

population in Eastern Africa which is in agreement with the oldest skeletal

findings (Clarke et al., 2003). This same hypothesis could be derived from

the two even more basal splits, the one between the San + Ethiopian and

the ‘extended Mbuti group’ and the one between the African clade which

in its origin seems to be an Eastern African clade and the rest of humans

which seem to have migrated out of Africa via two routes, the Sinai root

and the Horn of Africa route (see Macauly et al., 2005), both not far from

the putative cradle land of Homo sapiens sapiens in Eastern Africa. The

most ancient split in the African clade also points to Eastern Africa be-

cause the Mbuti nowadays still live in a region very close to the Great

Lakes region in Eastern Africa.

6.1.4. Nilo-Saharan phylum

The Nilo-Saharan languages seem to form the oldest non-Khoisanid

languages of Africa (Blench & Dendo, 2004), as the original Pygmy lan-

guages have not been conserved but were replaced by neighbouring Nilo-

Saharan and Niger-Congo family languages. Currently the most intriguing

complexity of the populations speaking Nilo-Saharan languages has not

yet been matched with by any molecular genetic study, as in many studies


only one or two, often related, groups have been sampled. If at all com-

mon original traits of Nilo-Saharan speakers can be demonstrated, these

populations might well form the second branch of non Khoisanids humans

following the pygmies.

Nilo-Saharan languages form an own largely independent phylum

spread over 17 nations, mainly of the Northern half of Africa, reaching Al-

geria and Mali in the northwest, Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of

Congo in the south and Sudan and Tanzania in the east, excluding the

Horn of Africa. The total population size of Nilo-Saharan speakers is far

smaller than the one of Afro-Asiatic or Niger-Congo speakers (see e.g. Gor-

don, 2005).

We place here the Nilo-Saharian languages as the second phylum of

our language array, because the diversity of languages within this phylum

is higher than in the Indo-European phylum and also than in the Niger-

Congo phylum. Thus, we assume that the age of this phylum is higher than

that of the other non Khoisan African phyla.

The two Nilo-Saharan languages chosen for this study are Nandi,

from the Eastern Sudanic languages and Mbay from the Central Sudanic

languages.

6.1.5. Niger-Congo languages

The Niger-Congo phylum is the largest on the world in terms of num-

ber of languages. 1514 different languages are part of this group. The phy-

lum is also the largest in Africa in terms of number of speakers and geo-© 2nd of November, 2010, Dr. Owi I. Nandi, legal domicile: Switzerland

graphical area. Niger-Congo languages are mainly spoken in sub-Saharan

Africa.

Two features present in many Niger-Congo languages are the forma-

tion of a noun class system and the use of vowel tones of two to three con-

trastive levels. Noun classes are also known from Nilo-Saharan languages

and some Papuan languages (Blench and Dendo, 2004), whereas tones in

African languages also occur in some Nilo-Saharan and in the Chadic,

Cushitic and Omotic subphyla of Afro-Asiatic languages. This could be an

indication that Niger-Congo languages are remotely related to Nilo-Saha-

ran languages and could even be subsumized in a single phylum, as has

been proposed by some newer researchers (Gregersen, 1972 or Blench,

1995). The Nilo-Saharans languages being closely related to Niger-Congo

languages is also by the results published by Cavalli-Sforza et al. (1994),

but any attempt to substantiate this hypothesis should be based on metic-

ulous cognate tables of the families known in Nilo-Saharan and the ones in

Niger-Congo including some languages on the African continent that hith-

erto are still isolates.

6.2. Non-African language macrophylum

6.3. Boreo-Indo-Pacific macrophylumBased on the current, though still hypothetical understanding of

uniparental haplogroup genetics, some important researchers (Macaulay

et al., 2005) assume that most of the extant human genetic diversity of

the autochthonous populations outside Africa is derived through a singular © 2nd of November, 2010, Dr. Owi I. Nandi, legal domicile: Switzerland

out of Africa migration event that occurred close before 65'000 and 60’000

years BP through the so-called Southern route.

6.4.a. Borean (Eurasiatic-Amerinidian plus Austro-Dené)

6.4.b. Eurasiatic-Amerindian superphylumThe Eurasiatic superphylum modified here after Greenberg (2000

and 2002) comprises some important families of the Nostratic phylum,

thus Indoeuropean, Uralic-Yukaghir and Macro-Altaic (Japanese, Korean,

Tungusic, Turkic and Mongolian) plus some phyla that seem slightly more

distantly related to them as Gilyak (Nivkh) from Easternmost Siberia,

Chukotko-Kamchatkan, Eskimo-Aleut and Etruscan. Amerindian is sister to

this whole clade according to Greenberg (2000). The exact relationships

within this large phylum should still be worked out more thoroughly.

In our preliminary outline sister to this Eurasiatic-Amerindian

superphylum are Kartvelian, Dravidian and Afro-Asiatic.

The Eurasiatic-Amerindian superphylum putatively could have

originated after the out of Africa population had split into two major

branches being Indo-Pacific-Austric-Dené-Caucasian and Dravido-

Kartvelian-Eurasiatic-Amerindian after branching off of Dravidian and

Kartvelian, thus having spread from the Indian subcontinent towards

Central Asia around 22’000 BP.

6.4.1. Amerinidan languages

The hypothesis that the native languages are grouped into only


three phyla is among the most prominent theories of the renowned

linguist Joseph Greenberg. In fact, this hypothesis also cannot be objected

by human molecular genetic data, the three main groups being

Amerindian, Na-Dené and Eskimo-Aleut.

The Amerindian settlement of the Americas seems to have

originated around 17’000 BP by an immigration event from Eastern Siberia

across the Bering Street towards Western North America shortly after the

Last Glacial Maximum, when there was a continuous land bridge between

Eurasia and North America (Volodko et al., 2008). After settling in

Northwestern North America, this population seems to have had a

standstill of the expansion for some time and then rapidly have moved

down the whole American double continent, most probably along the

Pacific coastline until the Southern tip of South America within only around

1000 years.

This rapid expansion into a hitherto unsettled continent is also

reflected by the difficulty to resolve the genetic and linguistic relationships

within the Amerindian clade.

The Amerindian language phyla have been grouped recently by

Greenberg & Ruhlen (2007). The authors add evidence to the still strongly

disputed correctness of the Amerindian language phylum by exploring 910

potential etymological roots in different Amerindian language families.

To attain a more detailed and natural picture of the individual

Amerindian language families more data on the individual languages has

to be collected and thorough etymologies for each family have to be

attempted (T. Usher, personal communication, September 2008).


Given the only preliminary status of Amerindian etymology it seems

too early to assess the position of Amerindian relative to the Eurasian

languages. Taking into account the significant independence of the

Amerindian languages, this phylum seems to be deeply nested within the

Eurasian clade.

Molecular genetic data indicate that the closest extant relatives of

Amerindians are to be searched in Central Southern Siberia (Starikovskaya

et al., 2005).

The second oldest lineage of American languages is the Na-Dené that is

most likely part of the Dené-Caucasian language super-phylum, whereas

the youngest American phylum, the Eskimo-Aleut seems to be nested

within the Eurasiatic one.

The cause of the presence of mitochondrial haplogroup X2a in some

Eastern North American Indian tribes is still not fully understood and raises

the question whether a part of the Native American gene pool is derived

from Western Eurasian populations. However, the Old World X2b, X2c,

X2d, X2e and X2f lineages as they are from each other, indicating an early

origin "likely at the very beginning of their expansion and spread from the

Near East" (Reidla et al., 2003)

6.5. Indoeuropean languages

Of the many interesting Euroasiatic language families we would like

to discuss here exemplarily the Indoeuropean family, because it is one

containing many important World languages such as English, Spanish,

French, Russian, Latin, Italian, German, Portuguese, Dutch, Hindi, Farsi


and others. Indoeuropean nowadays seems safely placed within Eurasiatic

languages possibly closest related to Uralic-Yukaghir (see e.g. Čop, 1972).

A lot of synapomorphic cognates (in the context of Borean

languages) have also been constructed to other languages families such

as Altaic, Kartvelian, Afro-Asiatic or Dravidian.

The relatedness of languages later coined in the Indoeuropean

family was hypothesized based on the similarities of Sanskrit to ancient

European languages by the famous linguist Sir William Jones in the late

18th century AD, which was one of the first recognition of language

descendance from a putative common ancestry.

Nowadays, the etymological reconstruction of all the branches of

Indoeuropean is the most extensive of all language families in the world.

Indoeuropean, as a branch of Eurasiatic is not one of the oldest language

families. The first split-up of recorded Indoeuropean languages, thus

between the Anatolian (including e.g. Hittite and Luvian) and the

remaining Indoeuropean languages is probably not older than 6000 years,

although the common history of the language family as a whole can easily

be double as old.

The molecular genetic background of the ancestral Indoeuropeans is

still being elucidated, as also the search for the closest outgroups and the

internal structure of Indoeuropean are still difficult to disentangle.

Indoeuropean and particularly the very conservative Vedic Sanskrit

with a tremendous record of highly conserved syllable roots can serve as a

powerful exemplar in searching for Proto-World linguistic roots. This

present study also originated from the knowledge of Indoeuropean word


roots such as those found in the Germanic, Indo-Iranian, Italic, Slavic or

Greek language subfamilies.

6.6. Austro-Dené superphylumThe construction of an Austro-Dené superphylum including the

Austric plus the Dené-Caucasian language phylum is at the moment still

purely hypothetical and from the linguistic point of view based on the

findings of some long range linguists that some Sino-Tibetan languages

might have far cognates in rather basal Austric language families.

6.6.1. Austric languages

The concept of an Austric superphylum comprising Tai-Kadai (Daic),

Miao-Yao (Hmong-Mien), Austronesian, Austro-Asiatic and putatively also

Nihali, a very isolated language from Western India and Ainu languages is

still disputed to some extent. Still, the preliminary etymological database

by Ilya Peiros and Sergei Starostin (Tower of Babel, 2005) offers ample

evidence of even bysillabic roots common to several and sometimes all of

these 4 language phyla.

According to the present still somewhat inclomplete data from

human molecular genetics, an old hidden phylogenetic relationship of the

populations speaking languages of the putative Austric superphylum,

cannot be ruled out.


The split between Austro-Asiatic languages and the rest of the

Austric languages seems to be the deepest within this superphylum minus

the very basal branches formed by Ainu and Nihali, which seemed to have

originated even before this split. Austro-Asiatic in itself has not yet been

reconstructed as thoroughly as other language phyla (e.g. Nostratic or

Dené-Caucasian; Timothy Usher, personal communication, September

2008). Despite that, the etymologies known so far show that the different

branches of Austro-Asiatic, such as the Indian Munda languages, the

Southeast-Asian Khmer languages, the Malayan Aslian languages, the

Katuic, the Monic, the Vietic, the Pearic, the Palaungic, the Khmu and the

Thai languages are consistently very similar (Georgyi Starostin, personal

communication, September 2008), a quite old age for the whole language

phylum should be assumed based on the molecular genetic data gained

from Austro-Asiatic speakers. Both mtDNA (with a comparatively high

number of branches directly derived from the out of Africa haplogroup M,

such as, M2b and Y-chromosome data point to an ancient origin of the

Indian branches of this language family. Judging from mitochondrial data

the radiation of South Asian Austro-Asiatic speakers seems to have started

soon after the out-of-Africa migration event at around 50’000 BP (Reddy et

al., 2007). The South Indian populations of this very old Indian language

phylum seem to be slightly older than the North-East Indian ones and the

latter older than the South-East-Asian ones. For instance, mtDNA

haplogroup M31a is represented in many old tribes of the South Asian

subcontinent, thus in Greater Andamanese and Lodha, Chenchu and

Lambadi tribal groups. Similar conclusions as from mtDNA data can also


be drawn from Y chromosome data (Reddy et al., 2007). The distribution of

haplogroup M31a also indicates a potential relationship of the Austric

superphylum with the Palaeo-Sundic one. Such a relationship was also

hypothesized by the comparison of some Andamanese languages (such as

Jarawa and Onge) with some Austronesian ones by Blevins (2007).

This work might compare two language families that are not

immediately most closely related to each other. Still the amount of

cognates shared between these two language taxa clearly goes beyond

the number expected based on general proto-World cognates.

Other populations of the Austro-Asiatic phylum that are very old

based on molecular genetic data are the Orang Asli, an ancestral human

group of the Malaysian peninsula.

Another very important branch of the Austric superphylum is the

Austronesian one. The oldest Austronesian languages and the greatest

diversity of subphyla is now a day’s encountered on the island of Taiwan

(Trejaut et al., 2005) Inferring from molecular genetic data, the

Austronesian populations on Taiwan seem to have originated in

Southeastern China, thus in closer proximity to other populations speaking

Austric languages such as the Austro-Asiatic speakers, the Tai-Kadai

speakers and the Hmong-Mhnien speakers. Li et al. (2008) comparing Y-

chromosome data showed that the most ancestral Eastern Asian

anatomically modern humans can be found on the island of Hainan. This

region is close to other language phyla that seem to be the closest

outgroups of Austric, the Paleo-Sundic (with e.g. Andamanese), the

Sahaulic (with e.g. Papuan languages), the Dené-Caucasian (with e.g.


Sino-Tibetan languages) and somewhat more distantly the Eurasiatic (with

e.g. Dravidian languages). It thus seems that the Austric superphylum can

most parsimoniously be traced back to a putative fast radiation close to

the Indian subcontinent after the Southern route out of Africa migration

that occurred approximately 70’000 BP.

The Austronesian languages form a fairly homogenous phylum of

languages that share a reasonably high number of cognates. Due to the

population of hundreds of split islands in the Oceanic Pacific more than

1200 languages build up this phlyum (Gordon, 2005). This fragmentation

into small populations, though going mainly back to recent prehistoric

events (3500 years, Friedlaender et al., 2005) produced more language

diversity than would have to be estimated in other world regions (e.g. in

African Khoisan languages) within the same time-frame.

6.6.2. Ainu languageAncestrally, the Ainu were distributed through the islands of Japan

until at least Sakhalin in the North (nowadays belonging to Russia), on the

Kurile islands, the Northern Japanese island of Hokkaido until Northern

Honshu although some investigators believe that their population reached

the southern tip of Kamchatka in the North and the whole island of Honshu

the South.

Nowadays, only a very small population speaking Ainu is left on the

southern and eastern coast of Hokkaido. Until recently, linguists were not

able to find any close relative of the Ainu language, thus it is treated as an

isolate (Ethnologue, 2005). However, Bengtson (2006) could ingeniously © 2nd of November, 2010, Dr. Owi I. Nandi, legal domicile: Switzerland

demonstrate that Ainu and also the very isolated language Nihali from

India (Bengtson Internet article retrieved in February 2009 from

http://jdbengt.net/articles.htm) seem to form very ancient branches of the

Greater Austric superphylum. For Ainu this relationship is also possible

inferred from the population genetic data.

Morphological evidence has placed the Ainu in close affinity to the

Neolithic Jomon people of the Japanese archipelago (Yamaguchi, 1982,

Hanihara, 1991). Genetically, the Ainu represent a very ancient line as

well. A close connection to the prehistoric Jomon people has also been

suggested by the analysis of mitochondrial DNA from ancient Jomon bones

and mtDNA from Ainu individuals (Horai et al., 1989, 1991). Tajima et al.

(2004) investigated the paternal and maternal gene pools of the Ainu and

found 25 mtDNA sequence types and three Y-haplogroups, respectively. Of

the 25 maternal sequence types, eleven are uniquely found in Ainu, while

the remaining 14 are widely distributed among other North Eastern and

South Eastern Asian populations. The Ainu gene pool is also most notable

due to the presence of the Y-chromosome haplogroup D (M174). The DE

haplogroup according to one hypothesis could have originated in North

Eastern Africa around 50’000 years BP in a secondary migration

movement out of Africa. It has split into an E group that spread to Europe

and Africa and a D group which rapidly expanded along the coastline of

India and Asia to Northern Asia. Haplogroup D seems to have become

extinct and replaced in large parts of its original distribution, but has

survived in Tibet, on the Andaman Islands and in the Ainu. This very

ancient connection of the Ainu to the Andaman population underlines its


antiquity. A connection to very ancient populations having moved out of

Africa is also indicated by some physiological characteristics of the Ainu as

their curly scalp hair and their deep seated eyes.

The longstanding independent evolution of the Ainu is also reflected by

the almost isolate position of their language.

6.7. Dené-Caucasian languages

The first results leading towards the construction of a Dené-Cau-

casian superphylum were published in the early 20th century by various

notable language researchers. In 1984 (see Starostin, 1984), the well-

known Russian linguist Sergei Starostin (also extensively cited in this sur-

vey as the main author of the Tower of Babel project) added firmer evi-

dence that North-Caucasian (Caucasian languages without the Kartvelian

one’s), Yenisseian and Sino-Tibetan (also called Tibeto-Burmese) lan-

guages are related to each other on the basis of strict linguistical methods

proposing regular phonological correspondences, reconstruction of ety-

mologies and glottochronology (Starostin 1984, Starostin, 1991). Niko-

layev added the North American Indian Na-Dené languages (Nikolayev,

1991), while Bengtson later included Basque and Burushaski in this phy-

lum (Bengtson, 1996, Bengtson, 1997). Prominent most recent proponents

of a Dené-Caucasian phylum include Ruhlen (see e.g. Ruhlen, 1997) and

Bengtson (see e.g. Bengtson, 2008).

Starostin compiled an impressive list of 1361 etymological reconstructions

of words that compellingly or tentatively are similar in several if not all


branches included in his Sino-Caucasian phylum (i.e. the North Caucasian,

the Sino-Tibetan, the Yenisseian, the Burushaski and the Basque sub-

phyla). Additional evidence for the validity of a Dené-Caucasian phylum

can be seen in similarities of the verb morphology, of noun class pre- and

infixes, and of pronominal morphemes (Bengtson, 2008).

The relationships between the different languages of putative Dené-Cau-

casian seem to be remote. Based on comparisons to the similarities of

other language families as the Afro-Asiatic or the Indoeuropean, the high

genetic heterogeneity of the speakers of Na-Dené languages (see e.g. Ru-

bicz et al., 2002) and the antiquity of some language subphyla in this phy-

lum as e.g. Basque (see below), we would estimate the age of a common

ancestor of all Dené-Caucasian languages to be around 40’000 years BP

and thus significantly older than the 10’700 years assumed by Starostin

(Tower of Babel, 2006).

6.7.1. North Caucasian languages

The Caucasus area plays an important role as a geographical refuge

region for hominid populations that moved out of Africa as the distance to

the Sinai is within reach and the inaccessible mountains may have func-

tioned as a cul-de-sac off these migration streams. Thus, Homo erectus

skeletal findings from Dmanisi, Eastern Georgia, document that this ho-

minid species was already present in the Caucasus region in the upper-

most Pliocene or lowermost Pleistocene around 1.8 to 1.6 million years

ago (Gabunia & Vekua, 1995) and thus represents one of the oldest ho-

minid findings outside Africa, excavated to date.© 2nd of November, 2010, Dr. Owi I. Nandi, legal domicile: Switzerland

Judging from the high genetic and linguistic diversity of the Cauca-

sus region, the settlement by anatomically modern humans could also

have taken place in a very remote time even prior to their migration into

Europe. This hypothesis can be substantiated on the one hand by the pres-

ence of two language phyla that may be as old or older but considerably

richer in number of languages than the Basque phylum, the North Cau-

casian and the South Caucasian (Kartvelian) phylum. The North Caucasian

phylum (member of putative a Dené-Caucasian macrophylum including

among other also the Basque languages, see above) is grouped into 2 sub-

phyla (the ethnologue, brittanica online), the East Caucasian, also called

Northeast-Caucasian or Nakho-Dagestanian (with the Avar-Andic, the

Tsezic, the Lak, the Dargi, the Lezgic, the Khinalugh and the Nakh lan-

guage families) and the West Caucasian, also called Northwest-Caucasian

or Abkhazo-Adyghian (with the Ubyx, the Abkhaz-Adyghe and the Circas-

sian language families).

The South Caucasian (also called Kartvelian) languages form a small

phylum including Georgian and have no closer connections to the North

Caucasian languages (Dilip Nandi, personal communication, 2008, and

Tower of Babel, 2006). Nowadays, they are included as a basal branch in

the Nostratic superphylum (see under this term). As already stated above,

the presence of at least two virtually independent ancient language phyla

restricted in distribution to the Caucasus, is a strong argument for the

great antiquity of the Caucasian populations. The linguistic diversity of the

comparatively small Caucasus region thus is among the highest in the


world in terms of language number density, but even more so in terms lan-

guage phyla density.

Three more language phyla are present in the Caucasus, the Indoeu-

ropean, with Armenian and Ossetian as prominent members, the Altaic,

with Turk languages among which also Azerbaijani and one Semitic lan-

guage, the Assyrian Neo-Aramaic Aisor.

On the basis of human molecular genetics, the Caucasus region has

been shown to contain most Western Eurasiatic mitochondrial and Y-

chromosome haplogroups (Nasidze et al., 2004) and to be intermediate

between the characters of the European and the Western Asian

populations (Nasidze et al., 2004). More detailed publications to the

molecular genetic situation of this geographical region are in work

(Richard Villems and Rene Herrera, personal communication, autumn

2008). The diversity of the Caucasus matrilinear and patrilinear DNA

haplogroups is slightly smaller than in Western Asia but higher than in

Europe. This again points to the deep time depth of presence of

anatomically modern humans in the Caucasus, which might have been

reached a couple of thousand years after the assumed out of Africa

migration of modern Homo sapiens. This would put the settlement of this

region by anatomically modern humans at about 50’000 BP, as a rough

estimate.

6.7.2. Basque (autochthonous Basque language name: Euskara)


According to the ethnologue (Gordon, 2005) the 3 languages in the

Basque family are closely related to each other and spoken in North Cen-

tral Spain and Southwestern France in the region of the Pyrenees. These

languages have survived as the only non-Indoeuropean and non-Uralic lan-

guages of Western and Central Europe. Another Vasconic language which

was spoken in South-Western France until the Roman period but could

even have survived until the Middle-Ages is Aquitanian. Toponymy and

other linguistic sources indicate that Aquitanian was very close related to

Basque. Other than that, the most convincing, but distant similarities of

Basque can be recognized with some other Dené-Caucasian languages.

These similarities can be seen in some grammatical and lexical characters

(Dilip Nandi, personal communication, 2003, Bengtson, 2008). Thus, the

Basque language family has been included in the Dené-Caucasian macro-

phylum by various modern linguists (see above).

Genetically, the Basque population can also be demonstrated to

have the most ancestral phylogeny of all extant Europeans other than per-

haps the population from the Caucasus, due to their possession and the

sequence diversity of the rare mtDNA subhaplogroup U8a (Gonzalez et al.,

2006). The authors examined a large sample of autochthonous unrelated

Spanish Basques. Based on the U8a data, Gonzalez et al. (2006) conclude

that the Basques have lived continuously in their country since the Pale-

olithic (since 28 ± 9 Ky) and that the U8a founders reached this region

from an ‘out of Africa’ migration event after a short stay in Western Asia

through Europe and not from North Africa through the street of Gibraltar.

MtDNA results also support interglacial expansions of Basques from a


Franco-Cantabrian refuge area into Central Europe. Although the Basques

have traces of direct descendance of the prehistoric ‘Cro-Magnon-popula-

tion’ of Europe which is also reflected by a high overall distinctness

against neighboring populations (see e.g. García et al., 2004), their diverse

and not yet fully analyzed gene pool definitely ascertains that like in many

continental populations the Basques have also suffered migration and ge-

netic drift effects throughout their long history (Gonzalez et al., 2006).

On the paternal descendance side, slightly modified but comparable

conclusions about the age of the Basque population and their interglacial

peopling of Europe can be drawn (Alonso et al., 2005).

On the basis of mixed genomic loci analysis a pre-Neolithic, poten-

tially very old connection can be seen to Caucasus populations, the Near

Easterns and the Afro-Asiatic Berber of Norhtern Africa (Piazza, 1988). The

nearer link to the Caucasus populations could indicate a validness of the

Dené-Caucasian theory (see above) and puts the origin of this phylum far

back into the Paleolithic. The link to the Near East, but especially also to

the Berbers in Northern Africa could indicate that Dené-Caucasian might

have a connection to Afro-Asiatic, with a time of split far remote in the Pa-

leolithic.

The heterogeneity of the Basque gene pool moreover suggests that

under certain circumstances the linguistic characters of a population might

be more conservative than the overall genetic features, and that the ge-

netic history of a population need complex investigations, possibly includ-

ing linguistic evidence, in order to give an accurate picture. Some of the

preliminary simplified cladograms of the European phylogeny depicted in © 2nd of November, 2010, Dr. Owi I. Nandi, legal domicile: Switzerland

Cavalli-Sforza et al. (1994) seem not fully accurate in the appreciation of

the archaicness of the Basque population.

6.7.3. Sino-Tibetan languages

Since the works of Sergei Starostin (see Tower of Babel 2005,

section on Sino-Tibetan, compiled by Sergei Starostin, 2005) the

relationships of Sino-Tibetan and hence also the important languages

Chinese, Cantonese, Tibetan and Burmese have become clearer. To our

view, there remains little doubt that these languages belong to the Sino-

Caucasian (also termed Dené-Caucasian) language phylum, together with

Basque, the North Caucasian languages, Burushahski, Yenissean, and the

North American Na-Dené languages and maybe also some other North

American language families as Salishan.

For foreigners it is a very laboursome and difficult task to learn the

beautiful culture language Chinese. Our theory offers a concept for

Sinologists or other students of Chinese to deduce some important

vocabulary parts from a psychologically caused framework and tracking

additional words via the phoneme changes that seem to have occurred

from proto-World etymology through total Non-African etymology, Sino-

Caucasian etymology, Sino-Tibetan etymology to Preclassic Ancient

Chinese and Modern Chinese Mandarin or Cantonese.

During the evolution of Chinese a resimplification of phonemes to

monosyllabic phonems with only few possibilities of syllable endings has

occurred (still some more syllable endings are possible in Cantonese, that

is more archaic than Mandarin in this respect). The Chinese language is © 2nd of November, 2010, Dr. Owi I. Nandi, legal domicile: Switzerland

also known to be difficult to learn for foreigners due to the presence of 4

tones plus a neutral tone that render less ambiguity to the single syllables

by adding an additional layer of information content.

According to Van Driem (2001) the Tibeto-Burman languages are

divided up into the Brahmaputran, the Southern Tibeto-Burman, the Sino-

Bodic (including the Sinitic, the Bodish Himalayis (where Tibetan belongs

to), the Kirantic, the Tamangic and several isolate branches) and a number

of high-ranking language isolates (among which, the Nepal Bhasa). The

Chinese branch in itself is made up of Mandarin, Wu (with Shanghaiese

dialect being a member of Wu), Cantonese, Min, Xiang, Hakka and Gan.

Many of the Himalayan Tibeto-Burman peoples seem to have

immigrated from further North, for instance the region of today’s Chinese

Gansu province. This is for instance supported by the oral traditions of

some of these populations (M. Oppitz, personal communication, January

2009).

6.8. Paleo-Sundic

During a crucial timeframe in the population of Southeast-Asia by

anatomically modern humans (i.e. around 50’000 BP) during the latest ice-

age period due to the lowering of the global oceanic sea levels a peninsula

has been formed in Southeastern Asia that is commonly termed as

Sundaland by paleogeographers. During this period of time the Andaman

islands where connected to the Malay Peninsula. Likewise a portion of

Western Papua New Guinea was connected to this peninsula. The most

ancient populations of anatomically modern humans in this area, the


Andamanese, the Orang Asli, the Phillipinian Negritos and the Birdshead

New Guinean, but also potentially the Kusunda people of Nepal share

common genetic traits (preliminary personal communication) by belonging

to a similar stratum of very ancestral populations that evolved only

minimally from the hypothesized ancestral out-of Africa population. Also,

the languages of some of these populations, most probably are related

(i.e. Kusunda, Greater Andamanese and maybe ancestral Orang Asli).

Much of the modern work of comparison of these languages and

reconstructing the individual language families is being done by Timothy

Usher, who also coined the term of Paleo-Sundic languages. Usher

(personal communication October to December 2008), based on his data

also clearly divided the former Indo-Pacific languages (including the

Greater Andamanese, the Papuan, the Australian and the Tasmanian

language families according to a hypothesis by Greenberg (1971) into two

groups, the Paleo-Sundic and the Sahaulic, the Sahaulic languages

including Papuan languages East of Bird’s head, Australian languages and

Tasmanian.

Usher considers is at premature to search for connections between

the Paleo-Sundic and the Sahaulic phyla, because he argues that first

many of the individual languages families should have to be

reconstructed, which includes a huge effort in manpower, and then more

thorough cognate and sound comparisons will be possible. The same

according to him holds true for the comparison of Sundaic, Sahaulic and

Austro-Asiatic.


He also argues that according his preliminary comparisons between

the Sundic and the Sahaulic language families the finding of cognates

seems not to be easy. The only better cognates that are certainly known

up to date seem to be the pronoun correspondences as outlines in the

publication of Whitehouse et al. 2004, on the affiliation of Kusunda.

Given the fact that still only scanty reconstructions of any of the

language families of either the palaeo-Sundic or the Sahaulic phylum exist,

the potential cognates among personal pronouns may point to an old

common ancestry of these two phyla. As similar tendencies of

fragmentation and isolation of evolved languages as in the case of the

younger Austronesian languages seem to exist, we would expect that

there is also a comparable though possibly not as pronounced tendency of

rapid language evolution in the putative Indo-Pacific (Sundaic plus

Sahaulic) superphylum (compare also to the chapter Austric languages).

Thus the low number of cognates between Sundaic and Sahaulic

languages can be expected. However, some not yet fully consistently

working authors in the sense of Timothy Usher list more cognates between

e.g. Andamanese and Papuan, Australian and Papuan languages. Even if a

large part of these potential cognates should turn out to have been

reconstructed erroneously, there is a probability that some of the

similarities arose from a common remote ancestry between the two

branches of the putative Indo-Pacific superphylum.

Based on comparisons to molecular genetic data, the split between

Sundaic and Sahaulic would have to reach back to the postulated period of

rapid migration of anatomically modern humans along the coast of the In-


dian Ocean during a few thousand years after the out of Africa migration

event at about 65’000 BP. Often an age of between 55’000 and 40’000

years of the Ausrtralian and Papuan human populations is estimated

(Friedlaender et al., 2005) . Thus, the split between the two most ancestral

groups of the Indo-Pacific superphylum could reach back to the time just

before 55’000 BP.

The age of the Andamanese population is estimated to fall roughly

into this timeframe (Endicott et al., 2003).

The deepest split in the Andamanese language family is between

Ongoid and Core Andamanese (Modified terms according to Usher;

personal communication, October 2008). Usher has put together an

impressive dataset for the reconstruction of Proto-Andamanese (Usher,

unpublished data).

The Kusunda people of Nepal both from the linguistic as well as from

the unpublished molecular genetic data (personal communication) seem

to be loosely related to other Sundaic population, such as the

Andamanese.

6.9. Sahaulic languagesThe languages of Papua New Guinea east of the main part of

Birdshead, the Australian and the Tasmanian languages seem to form an

own Sahaulic language family with a considerable number of potential

cognates (Usher, personal comm., September to December 2008). As

Usher points out, still great efforts have to be made to reconstruct all of

the individual language families in order to establish sound © 2nd of November, 2010, Dr. Owi I. Nandi, legal domicile: Switzerland

correspondences, to reconstruct a Sahaulic etymology and compare this

phylum to other language phyla.

Although the reconstruction of an Australian language subphylum

has long been a very difficult task, in recent years there is growing

evidence for the existence of such a subphylum (Usher, unpublished data).

In this study, we included Kate, a Papuan, Trans New Guinean language, a

Pama-Nguyan reconstruction as well as the Pama-Nguyan language

Yalarannga from the Sahaulic phylum.

Australian languages seem to share important cognates in the highly

conserved and rarely borrowed basal vocabulary (e.g. words for low

numerals and pronouns) with the Eurasiatic Dravidian language family.

This would indicate that all non-African World language families share a

common ancestry and the deepest split within these non-African

languages according to our preliminary data seems to occur between Indo-

Pacific-Austric-Sino-Caucasian superphylum and the remaining Eurasiatic

superphylum (see language list order at the beginning of this chapter 6).

Any relationship of Sahaulic or Sundaic to Austric has still to be

evaluated more thouroughly (Timothy Usher, personal communications).

As a final statement in this chapter of language phyla, based on

assumptions of highest parsimony likelihoood, we would like to raise the

important hypothesis that contrary to prior assumptions the nowadays

language phyla reach back far further and still to a very high percentage

reflect the phylogeny of modern human populations, as for instance

outlined in Underhill & Kivisild (2007).


7. Results for different semantic

fields 7.1. Semantic fields for the consonant pair ‘b’ and ‘p’

7.1.1. Semantic field: ‘Father’

7.1.1.1. Psychological background

While it is widely accepted that the term ‘mama’, ‘ama’,’ma’ or more

rarely ‘anne’ or similar, is almost a language-universal for ‘mother’, the

linguistic background of the words for father seem to be more

heterogeneous. It is known that apart from vowels the nasal consonants

‘m’ and ‘n’ are mostly among the very first ones that babies are able to

form (Papoušek, 1994). In baby-language, ‘mama’ is one of the first words

or proto-words, which an infant can express (roughly beginning at the age

of around 5 months according to Papoušek, 1994, probably the best

authority for the overlooked topic of ontogeny of human baby language).

As the mother is the first and most important person in the surrounding of

an infant, always trying to fulfil the needs of her baby, it seems natural

that one of these first expressed consonants is associated with the term

for mother, milk and breast (we will deal in further detail with the

psychological background of words beginning with ‘m’, later). In many

languages it can be seen, that apart from the baby-word for ‘mother’,

there also exists a more derived adult word for ‘mother’ (as seen e.g. in

German ‘Mama’ vs. ‘Mutter’; in a large number of other languages a

similar pairing exists). This pairing of a baby-language word and a more © 2nd of November, 2010, Dr. Owi I. Nandi, legal domicile: Switzerland

derived and complicated adult language word is also found in the terms

for ‘father’. In our research across human language families, we found that

the word or one word for ‘father’ is very frequently associated with the

first consonant ‘b’ and more rarely with the first consonant ‘p’ (words as

‘baba’, ‘abu’, ‘apa’ or similar). Yet, there are languages where no words

starting with the first consonant ‘b’ or ‘p’ are mentioned in the

dictionaries.

As for the psychological background of the consonant ‘b’ associated

with the baby-word for father, it seems to be natural to have the parent

part with breasts giving the first food for the infant with the consonant that

can be formed while having a feeling of satisfaction during the process of

suckling at mother’s breast, while another bilabial consonant slightly more

difficult to express is assigned to the parent more distant in the awareness

of the baby and offering no possibility to suckle milk.

We also noted that in languages where no primary word for ‘father’

could be found starting with the bilabials ‘b’ or ‘p’, often a word starting

with the dentals ‘d’ or ‘t’ is present alternatively or additionally (even the

very ancestral Khosian languages already have examples of words starting

with ‘b’ or ‘p’ (see above), as well as at least one example of a word

starting with ‘t’. Thus Proto-Sandawe has ‘*tata’. Other languages having

words starting with ‘d’ or ‘t’ include Ancient Egyptian, ‘aita’ in Bask, ‘dad’

in English, ‘отец’ in Russian or ‘ottâwimaw’ in Cree).


7.1.2. Semantic field: ‘Words for evil things or with negative

connotation’


From human facial expressions, it can be observed that to voice a

disesteem, a feeling with a very negative connotation, the use of a short,

high-toned plosive remaining at the same vocal height, the plosive

frequently being a bilabial one (‘b’ or ‘p’) can be found tentatively

subuniversally . From this very deep-rooted behavioural pattern we might

find a lot of basic words for evil things and/or with negative connotation

starting with bilabial plosives in different languages. This is also a classical

context where these negative words not only might stem form older words

starting with the same consonants, but also on the background of the

mentioned behavioural pattern, de novo converge towards words starting

with ‘b’ or ‘p’. We may give here the example of the English interjection

‘pooh!’ signifying a multifold expression of disdain, the etymon seeming to

be a newly formed word on just this background of the facial voicing of

disesteem. In many languages such as in Eurasiatic, Nostratic, Uralic,

Hungarian and in Nilo-Saharan, Nandi, we found a rich array of such

negative expressions starting with a bilabial plosive.

7.2. Semantic fields for the consonant pair ‘d’ and ‘t’

7.2.1. Semantic field: ‘Words for pointing to, showing and

direction’



To form the dental or alveolar stops ‘d’ and ‘t’ the pointed tongue tip

points towards the front teeth, the incisors, or towards the alveolar ridge

thus imitating an outstretched index finger showing towards an object. In

this way, the dental consonant pair in many languages is used to form

demonstrative pronouns, to indicate directional words like ‘here’, ‘there’,

‘to’, ‘towards’ or directional verbs like ‘to show’, ‘to demonstrate’, ‘to point

to’, but partly also suffixes of verbs indicating a direction or location and

the words for the main human body parts used for showing directions

which are the index finger, the fingers in general or the hand.

A further semantic subfield which in a larger number of language

families seems linked to pointing is the one of the 2nd personal pronoun

singular (‘you, thou’) where we also directly address and point towards a

partner. This particular personal pronoun is likewise often formed by ‘d’ or

‘t’.

In our survey we included the dental stops ‘d’ and ‘t’ as well as the

aspirated dental (as expressed in the English ‘th’) but not the retroflex

stops, for the search of words belonging to this semantic field. These

retroflex stops occur in some languages, e.g. from the Indian

subcontinant. Interestingly, all the languages researched had at least one

match for this semantic field, a larger part of them having around 12-16

matches. This further corroborates the partial universalism of the coding

for pointing by the first pulmonary consonants ‘d’ and ‘t’.

By forming the consonants ‘d’ or ‘t’ the tongue hits towards a

comparatively small spot a the teeth or alveoli, respectively thus forming

the smallest and most precise articulation of all phonetic units used for


speech. This precision is a very good adaptive attribute for an action as

counting, where very distinct entities are summed up. When not using

numerals to count, humans can also count numbers by e.g. summing up

strokes and assigning to them a numeral later. Such an action is

frequently and easily accompanied by a dental or alveolar stop sound (‘d’

or ‘t’) for each count. This behavioral psychological pattern could well

already have existed in early Homo sapiens sapiens and thus could be

found across a wide array of language families and languages. As the

semantic field of ‘counting’ is a narrow one with not many similar words

per language, we found only a low number of matches per language (if at

all there were matches). The number of matches in this semantic field thus

were significantly lower than e.g in the one for ‘pointing to, direction’ just

above.

When spitting, we take spittle to the tip of the tongue and eject it

form the mouth. This movement is accompanied by a dental voiceless

plosive (‘t’), rarely also by a dental voiced plosive (‘d’). Words for spitting

beginning with ‘t’ thus are onomatopoetic. This semantic field again is

very narrow. Thus we find only a small number of matches per language.

7.3.0. General introduction for these phonems

The consonants ‘k’ and ‘q’ are specifically interesting on a

psychological/behavioral background as they are a manyfold source in the

starting positions of words for the occupation of ‘semantic fields’. The

velar and uvular regions are especially vulnerable and sensitive to contact

and pain. This sensitivity to pain becomes most obvious when this region

is inflamed during a sore throat. Thus 7 of the 15 semantic fields can


directly or more often indirectly be traced back to the sensation of pain.

The logical interrelationship between some of the semantic fields as

defined here, e.g. between ‘hurting’ and ‘cutting’ can be demonstrated by

double meanings of etyma strarting with a ‘k’. Thus Preclassic Old Chinese

‘khǝk’, Modern Mandarin ‘kè’(‘刻’) has the meaning of ‘to injure’ along with

the one for ‘to cut, to engrave’. Another example of the relatedness of to

semantic fileds under the consonant ‘k’ can be given by Sahaulic, Papuan,

Kâte ‘kikitâc nukac’ meaning both ‘to sting violently’ and ‘to

itch’(connection of the field for ‘hurting’ with the field for ‘itching’) or

Proto-Turkic ‘*Kɨč-‘ that signifies both ‘to scrape, to scratch’ and ‘to

itch’(connection of the field for ‘scratching’ with the field for ‘itching’).

Moreover the velar and uvular voiceless stops produce also an

intense feeling of occlusion and nearness of the tongue’s back with the

entrance of the throat. These phonemes thus are also a good way to

signify nearness/closeness again mainfested by one semantic field.

The closure of the throat’s entrance also leads to 3 semantic fields

linked to the throat.

The velar region is also rich in sensations for bitterness and acidity

again a semantic field occupied by these phonemes.

As the two phonemes ‘k’ and ‘q’ are articulated deep back in the oral

cavity they are also ideal for codifying words of the semantic field for

‘cavity’.

Last but not least the ‘k’-like sounds somewhat like the click-sounds of the

Khoisan-languages are also good markers for alerting attentiveness. This


alert for attentiveness is one of the key characteristics of the semantic

field for ‘searching and questioning’ which we added at the end of our list.

7.3.1. Semantic field: ‘Hurting’


One of the most immediate outcomes of the k-like consonants is

their effect of hurting of the mucous membranes, as already stated above.

A large number of the languages and language families studied thus have

one or slightly more matches for this semantic field. We included in these

matches also words for painful stinging insects and for diseases causing

pain. ‘Hurting’ is a rather narrow semantic field, thus the highest numbers

of matches were 8 for the reconstructed Indoeuropean language family as

well as for Algonqian Cree and 7 for the Narrow Bantu language Rundi.

7.3.1. Semantic field: ‘scratching’


‘Scratching’ is also a semantic field which is quite directly addressed

by the k-like consonants, as it is linked to a painful feeling (prior semantic

field) when applied to the own body with some force and also because it

has to be effected by the means of hard objects, as stones, horns ot

metals. The link of the words for scratching with hurting and hardness

(stones) might indicate that these common patterns can be traced back to

the stone ages (palaeolithic period) as for one rough guess.

All but 4 languages of the studied language array have a lower to lower

middle number of matches, the semantic field being of lower middle

richness.


Cutting, slicing and tearing, as also scratching, are done with hard,

sharp objects and even more would hurt if applied to the own body. This

again corresponds to the results of the velar stop ‘k’ and the uvular stop

‘q’ which is a hard and hurting feeling. The close connection of the

semantic fields for ‘hurting’ and ‘cutting, breaking’ is also exemplified by

the Sanskrit word ‘kṣan’ (कषन) for ‘to hurt, to harm, to wound, to break’,

where both semantic fields are included in one single Sanskrit word.

This semantic field, being one of the larger one’s, we here below

gave 3 examples per language and as usual listed all the examples for the

languages with the highest numbers of matches. Besides the central part

of the semantic field being the action of cutting, slicing and tearing, words

also included where the one’s for ‘knife’, ‘to break’, ‘to chop’, ‘the skin’

and ‘the bark’. The latter two words seemingly also enter this semantic

field because the bark of a tree can only be obtained by cutting off and

tearing off this outer layer of a trunk. This goes similarly also with the skin

of an animal.

Most interstingly, with no exception, all 34 languages and language

families of our study have at least one match, mostly even more than 4

matches for this semantic field. We hypothesize here that the

transformation of words for cutting, slicing and tearing with k-like

consonants as the first consonant of a word can be traced back to the

origin of human speech, which could be estimated at the emergence of

Homo sapiens sapiens before around 160’000 years in Eastern Africa or

even to an earlier time in the emergence of the genus Homo. At the

former point in time but much earlier and also for a still long period


afterwards, silex stone tools were used for cutting and chopping, a key

innovative action in human evolution used for the construction of hunting

weapons, for cutting meat, for obtaining leather tools, for designing

wooden instruments, such as logboats and for peeling off barks from trees.

Compellingly, also the words for the semantic field of hard structures,

where the words for stone and rock are included in our study, are formed

with k or q in the overwhelming majority of the languages in our language

array.

Itching and tickling both provoke scratching of the responsible

patches on the skin and therefore seem to be closely linked to the

semantic field of scratching. We already showed that scratching itself is

intimately interwoven with the fields for hurting as ell as hard and pointed

structures, which we supposed to be directly linked to one main

psychological consequence of speaking out a k-like consonant. Thus also

itching and tickling are linked to the k-like consonants.

The semantic field dealt with in this paragraph is again rather small,

6 matches in the Turkic language family being the largest number of

examples we could sample. Besides of the core concepts of to itch and to

tickle, we also included words for arthropods (bugs) intimately linked to

itching or tickling for human beings. Interestingly 28 out of 34 languages

and language families have at least 1 match for this semantic field, which

demonstrates the tentatively universal presence of k-like starting

consonants for words linked to itching and tickling.

7.3.1. Semantic fields for the consonant pair ‘k’

and ‘q’: ‘pointed structures’



Pointed hard objects from their archetypical background cause pain

when touched swiftly and thus are very close in their concept to hurting.

We defined hurting as one of the most immediate semantic fields for k-like

consonants (see above). This feeling of pain caused by pointed structures

is also transposed to larger objects, like mountains, although these would

only be painful if they were smaller. The words given below include

pointed body parts as the knee, a tooth, a nail, a claw, the elbow, the

head, the skull and the horn, as well as particularly pointed objects e.g. a

needle, a thorn or an iron arrowhead. Words for thorny bushes or trees like

the acacia can also be included in this semantic field. The field is further

extended by edges, corners and sharp tools as sickles.

Interestingly all 34 languages and language families in our study

array had matches for this semantic field, many of them even fairly high

numbers (Khoisan, Southern Khoisan, !XÓÕ, being the only language with

only 2 matches). This illustrates that the field of pointed structures is

comparatively rich: the highest number of matches was 22 in the Inupit

language family.

7.3.1. Semantic fields for the consonant pair ‘k’ or

‘q’: ‘hard structures’


The k-like consonants produce the most pronounced feeling of

hardness because they are articulated against the soft structures of the

velum or the uvular region where mainy nerve endings are exposed to


give a feeling of slight pain. This painful and hard feeling thus again is the

force linking the present semantic field to the velar and uvular stops.

Forcefully rubbing against coarse surfaces causes a slightly painful

sensation. Thus, this is another semantic field linked to the very basic

concept of pain connected to the k-like consonants.

This is a rather small semantic field. All but one language have less

than 5 matches. Tai-Kadai, Thai language has 5 matches thus showing the

highest number in our array. 8 languages have not one single match,

indicating that the link of coarseness to a painful feeling is not as close as

it was for other semantic fields treated above (e.g. cutting or the field of

pointed structures).

The semantic field of hitting was placed between those 7 fields

directly or indirectly linked to the feeling of hurting and the one of

closeness. Both of these concepts play a role in the effects of hitting. On

the one hand pain is caused by hitting a person, on the other hand hitting

is directly associated with the collision and hence closeness of two objects

or persons. For the reason why the concept of closeness is linked to k-like

starting consonants please refer to the next semantic field. The

association of pain and the k-like consonants has already been elucidated

above.

With these close links to two important basic putative causes for

words starting with k-like consonants, not surprisingly all 34 languages of

our array studied have at least 1 match for this semantic field.

The field is of medium size as most languages show more than 2

matches. Reconstructed Proto-Indoeuropean has the greatest number of


matches (14), whereas the truly New World languages (Cree, Papago,

Quechua and Guarani) have low numbers of matches (the last 3 languages

show only a single match). This could be an indication that grammar and

lexical characteristics of pronounciation have evolved furthest away in the

truly New world languages. This is also in accordance to the well-known

molecular studies of the human genetic polymorphism (see e.g. Cavalli-

Sforza et al., 1994), where the indigenous American populations have

evolved the farthest away from the putative African ancestors of modern

Homo sapiens and hence also show the highest homogenity in gene

diversity of all human populations.

This ninth semantic field for k-like initial consonants is the first one

that has no connection to the feeling of pain. By articulating velar or

uvular stops, an intense closing of a comparatively large region in the

posterior oral cavitiy exterior to the throat is produced. The intensity of

this closure as measured by the muscle tensions involved is only

paralleled by the voiceless bilabial stop ‘p’, but here the region of the

closure (lips) is smaller than it is for velar or uvular stops. Moreover the

closure in bilabial stops is not as near to the origin of the voice, the vocals

chords as it is in velar or uvular stops. Altogether we conclude that the

psychological concept of closing and nearness is linguistically best

represented by the articulation of k-like consonants.

As described in the previous semantic field, the velar and uvular

stops intensly close the posterior part of the oral cavity. The articulation

area of these consonants thus is close to the larynx and the vocal chords.

Moreover, during the articulation of the velar or uvuluar stops an air


pressure is built up in the larynx and the throat, which is a good marker for

linguistically pointing to this body part. The action of coughing is also

mainly vocalized in the throat and thus can be included within this same

semantic field.

Interestingly also the linguistic analogue of the laryngal voicing of

mainy birds like crows, cuckoos and chicken seem to be linked to this

semantic field. Thus, we found in 21 out of 34 language families or

individual languages, these being: Nandi, Mbay, Old Egyptian, Proto-

Semitic, Andian, Proto-Turkic, Mongolian, Japanese, Proto-Indoeuropean,

Sanskrit, Russian, Ancient Greek, Latin, English, German, Tamil, Preclassic

Chinese, Maori, Yalarnnga, Inupit and Papago words of large birds starting

with ‘k’ or ‘q’.

All 34 languages with the exception of Quechua have at least one

match for this entire semantic field, indicating a comparatively close

referential link of k-like consonants to the semantic field of coughing and

larynx. The field is medium in size. The largest number of matches occurs

in Tamil (10), Mbay and English (9 each).

Khoisan, Southern Khoisan,!XÓÕ has ‘!qhaa’ for ‘coughing and

expectorate’, where the initial alveolar click again is not part of a linguistic

movement pattern imitating coughing or expectoration. This corroborates

our hypothesis that the click sounds in the Macrokhoisan language family

are mostly not part of the sounds analoging the effectof a semantic field,

but might be markers to catch the attention of speech partners in an

ecological setting of hunterers and gatherers. Hunters and gatherers are

frequently distant to each other during their main activity and moreover


should not loudly vocalise while hunting. Moreover hunting and gathering

seems to be linked to settings where sentences remain short, grammar

simple and speech in general not very wordy. Click consonants in this

enevironment might be a welcome alternative to catch attention to loud

shouting. This might also be a reason why most click sounds appear alone

at the very beginning of words. A difficult break in the word articulation

flow would be a further explanation of the rareness of click sounds within

words.

There is a close logical link between crying out and the throat, were

the loud sounds origine. Thus as for the previous, the use of k-like

consonants for this semantic field can be explained by their psychological

connection to the throat (for more details about this alliance please

consult the explanations of the last field).

The sufficient expression of shouting by very simple words starting with ‘k’

can be exemplified by a Nilo-Saharan language in our study array (Mbay),

but also by a Niger-Kongo language (Rundi) and by an Afro-Asiatic (Ancient

Egyptian). All three language families, Nilo-Saharan, Niger-Congo and Afro-

Asiatic are estimated to represent very old strata of languages. The

antiquity of these language families is also supported by phylogenetic

trees of modern human populations, were the speakers of all three

language groups arise close to the root of modern Homo sapiens sapiens.

The three language families represent all Non-Khoisan autochthonous

languages of the African continent. Thus Mbay has ‘káa’ for ‘noise of

something’ and ‘kōo’ for ‘to shout, to yell, to cry out’, while Rundi has ‘ku’

for ‘loud cry’ and Ancient Egyptian has ‘k:’ for ‘to call’ and ‘ky’ for ‘to cry


out’. The structural simplicity of these words is unparalleled by the

matches in languages of more nested populations in the ecolutionary tree.

Moreover, also Macro-Khoisan !XÓÕ has two comaparatively simple words

for this semantic field i.e. ‘kxʔāa’ for ‘to cry, to sound’ and ‘|qʔun’ for ‘to

make a noise (at)’, the split of Khoisan plus some other old sub-Saharan

African lineages and the main Non-Khoisan African population being the

most ancestral one as shown in the study by Behar et al. (2008).

Exemplified by this semantic field, our findings seem to indicate that

in the most ancient language strata of the world the initial first pulmonary

consonant of a word plus a minor specifying terminal element are

sufficient in defining a comparatively basal and primitive meaning like

crying out. This once again seems to corroborate the central theory of our

language study that appoints the highest information content in

psychologically basal (archetypic) semantic fields to this initial first

pulmonary consonant.

The obstinacy with which the k-like starting consonants of putative

ancestral linguistic expressions for ‘shouting, crying out’ have been

maintained through the linguistic tree is shown by the fact that the

overwhelming majority of languages in our array, including the most

nested ones, have at least one match for this semantic field. The only

language where no such match could be found is Australian, Pama-

Nyungan, Yalarnnga.

Again, we hypothesize that conservation of an initial k-like

consonant, made more easy because of this intimate psychological

guideline described above, is one part of the story, while reversals to a ‘k’


or ‘q’ fostered by the same psychological guideline might explain further

cases.

The semantic field of ‘crying out’ is small to upper medium in its

extension, 9, 10 and 11 matches representing the highest score, while

also a significant part of the languages has only 1 to 3 matches.

7.3.1. Semantic field: ‘crackling’


The reason for some conservatism of this semantic field could rely in

an onomatopoietic nearness of the signal bearing and characterising hard

sounds during crackling that, according to our hypothesis, are best

represented by k-like sounds.

7.3.1. Semantic field: ‘sour or bitter taste or the

palate’


The bitter or sour tastes are noteably evoked also in the palate, the place

where k-like sounds are produced in a locationally analogous, and likewise,

slightly unpleasant way. This psychological similarity of immediate vs.

linguistically derived sense-percerption could explain the high

conservatism of words in this semantic field across language families.

7.3.1. Semantic field: ‘hollow structures’


When pronouncing k-like consonants, a hollow vocal sound linked to

the vowel series au or ou resounds that might be archetypically linked to

the concept of a cave or a hollow space.

7.3. Semantic field: ‘words linked to questionning’



‘Questioning’ is usually asking for immediate response. We

interprete the high incidence of words for the concept of

‘questioning’ starting with k-like consonants, often even with a

sequence of ‘kw’ or ‘qu’ in the evocation of alertness, that

predisposes for quick answers by a plosive (thus similar to our

hypothetical interpretation of Khoisan click sounds). ‘K’-like plosives

might be preferred, because the concept of ‘searching’ or

‘questionning’ after the need of a visual response, also has to

encode for the questioner his being in the status of searching.

‘Searching’ as such is a process of traing to find orientation in the

surroundings, which is a partially homologous action, as the one for

assessing ‘wideness’ (the semantic field of wideness is discussed

below under initial ‘u’, ‘v’ or ‘w’).

Because of the importance of the ‘v’-like consonant after the

initial plosive, the plosive is constrained into ‘k’ because this

sequence is an easy one to pronounce.

The lateral proximant ‘l’ is not as universally present as starting

pulmonary consonant in the languages studied here as are the bilabial

stops ‘b’ and ‘p’, the alveolar stops ‘d’ and ‘t’ the velar or uvular stops ‘k’

and ‘q’. As many as 8 languages in our representation lack autochthonic ‘l’

and one more, !XÓÕ, has only very few words with a first pulmonary

consonant ‘l ‘.


7.5.1. Semantic field: ‘being loose’


The lateral proximant ‘l’ is produced by the tongue that is only

loosely and motionlessly held at the alveolae. This slackness of the tongue

seems to be translated into the psychological concept of slackness and

looseness. The prolonged duration of such a status is also expressed by

the slightly continued position of the tongue in the lateral region of the

alveolae while articulating the liquid ‘l’.

In the semantic field of ‘slackness, loosenes’ we also included the meaning

of softness, suppleness, pliability and sogginess, because soft objects do

not require rigidity to be deformed and softness thus is conceptually close

to the former two meanings. Vicinity of concepts also applies for ‘loosenes’

and ‘leaving’, ‘falling apart’ or ‘losing’. The distance involved in left and

lost things translates into a looseness, which demonstrates the affiliation

between these two semantic subfields.

This semantic field is linked to the foregoing one in that ‘sloppines’

involves a slack and unmotivated state. Here again the lateral proximant

‘l’ expresses an indulgeing behaviour, which is symbolized by the unrigid

and flexible nature of the tongue when articulating this consonant.

All 24 languages of our study array with a regular representation of

‘l’ as the first consonant of a word have matches for this semantic field.

The field is medium-sized to large, 11 languages having more than 8

matches. Particularly high numbers of matches are found in the Germanic

languages of our study, English (16) and German (13), Altaic, Turkic

language family, but also Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Malayan has


14, Indoeuropean, Slavic, Russian as well as Afro-Asiatic, Chadic, Haussa

have 12 matches. Again, the 4 true New World languages, Algic,

Algonquian, Cree, Uto-Aztecan, Papago, Quechuan, Quechua and Tupi,

Guarani, as a group, stand apart from the Old World languages. 2 of these

languages do not have autochthonous ‘l’ at all (Cree and Guarani), 1 has

‘l’ only very rarely as as first consonant in a word (Papago) and 1 has only

a single match (Quechua). We again view this particularity in true New

World languages as a cause of their long radiation away from the putative

common root of languages, which most likely lay in Africa, although the

number of these true American languages included for comparison should

be higher to confirm this hypothesis.


This is another semantic field linked to the one for ‘slackness’ (see

above). Lameness involves absence of muscular strength, which is also

the case temporarly in a state of slackness. The lateral proximant ‘l’ again

encodes for an unrigid status and a status extended in time (whereas in

the field of slackness the status was mainly extended in space), as ‘l’ is a

liquid consonant, which has a prolonged duration. This second

characteristic of prolonged duration will also be found in two semantic

fields further on (the one for ‘flowing’ and the one for ‘shining’, which both

also are peculiarly continuous actions in time and space).

7.5.1. Semantic field: ‘tongue’


If the tongue is slightly prolonged to be exposed between the teeth,

which are then enclosing its distal third, the resulting consonant when


voicing is an ‘l’. Interestingly, we even find a representation of this

behaviour in Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Papuan, Kâte, where ‘lang

kazo’ means ‘to show the tongue to somebody’ (kazo is an auxilliary verb

in Kâte). But the tongue is also better, longer and more motionlessly

visible than in any other consonant when producing the standard lateral

proximant ‘l’. While producing the standard ‘l’, the tongue is somewhat

extended in the mouth and also it is raised in its full length, a mimicking of

its presentation to an observer. Thus an ‘l’ very well codes for the word

‘tongue’ as well as for main activities of the tongue as licking or lapping,

speaking and tasting. All these latter activities are exemplified in several

languages of our study array. Besides the frequency of the semantic

subfield of licking in more or less independent language families there is

also a rich representation of the subfield of language in these examples

below. The closeness of the term for tongue and language si highlighted

by languages as the Semitic language family, where ‘*liš(š)ān-’ means

both ’the tongue’ and ’the language’ at the same time. The same holds

true for Indoeuropean, Italic, Latine ’lingua’.

Again, most of the 24 languages with a regular representation of ’l’

as the first pulmonary consonant of a word have matches for this semantic

field, only 4 of these languages (Nandi, Hungarian, the Mongolian

language family and Tamil) have no matches. Interestingly even Khoisan,

Southern Khoisan,!XÓÕ has 1 match, although ’l’ is very rare §in Khoisan

languages.

The semantic field of ’the tongue’ initiated with ’l’ is a narrow one,

most languages only showing 1 to 3 matches. The highest number of


matches of our representation is found in the Semitic language family (6

matches). For Turkic language family 5 matches were sampled.

‘Flowing’ is a continuous smooth movement of liquids which is

compellingly encoded by the continuous and smooth liquid ‘l’. This

semantic field is also remotely linked to the first one in ‘l’ (looseness,

softness) as is illustrated by Afro-Asiatic, Semitic language family

‘*lada/un-’ for ‘be soft or wet’, where both meanings are combined in one

word.

We also included general tems for liquids in this semantic field, such

as the words for oil, water, to swim, to spill, to dribble, the swamp, to

wash, the resin and the blood.

Again, all but two of the 24 languages with a regular representation

of ‘l’ as the first pulmonary consonant of a word have matches for this

field, Tamil and Inupit being the only language with this feature without

match. §Khoisan.

The field is medium-sized to large, as 13 languages have 5 or more

matches. §Turkic. All lndoeuropean languages of our study array,

reconstructed Proto-Indoeuropean, Indo-Iranian, Sanskrit, Slavic, Russian,

Greek, Ancient Greek, Italic, Latin and Germanic English and German have

between 4 and 8 matches. The African languages from all 4 large

Greenbergian language families (see Greenberg, 1963), Khoisan, Nilo-

Saharan, Niger-Congo and Afro-Asiatic have low numbers of matches, as is

also the case for the core New World languages plus Eskimo-Aleut, Inupit.

Interestingly, Sino-Tibetan, Chinese which we traced back to the first

reconstructable language of the Han people, Preclassic Chinese, has the


highest number of matches (13), while this ‘l’ of the preclassic language is

in no case preserved in Modern Mandarin. Also, Austronesian, Malayo-

Polynesian, Malayan has a comparatively high number of matches (12).

7.5.1. Semantic field: ‘glossiness, brilliance’


As for the last semantic field which was the one for ‘flowing’ the one

of ‘brilliance, shining’ describes a continuous flow. In the case of the last

field it was the flow of water or more generally liquids whereas here it is

the flow of light.

Again, such a continuously flowing state is best encoded by the continuous

liquid ‘l’.

As for the last semantic field only 2 of the 24 languages with a

regular representation of ‘l’ as the first pulmonary consonant of a word

have no matches, in this case, the African languages Nilo-Saharan, Central

Sudanic, Mbay and Afro-Asiatic, Chadic, Haussa. Contrary to the situation

of the last field Khoisan, Southern Khoisan,!XÓÕ having only a very limited

number of words with the first pulmonary consonant being ‘l’ has no

match either.

The delimitation of the semantic field is very natural with the

exception of some slightly surprising meanings which were included

among which the adjective ‘white’. White things are more intensely

luminous and shining than objects in any other colour. This is the reason

why we think that the inclusion of ‘whit’ into this semantic field makes

sense. We here gave 3 examples of languages with a starting consonant ‘l’

for the partial or exclusive meaning of ‘white’: Nilo-Saharan, Eastern


Sudanic, Nilotic has ‘lel’ for ‘white, bright’, Afro-Asiatic, Semitic language

family has ‘*lVban-’ for ‘white’ and Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian,

Malayan has ‘lepak’ for ‘very white, fair’. In the case of Nandi and

Malayan, the meaning of white is compellingly accompanied by another

meaning linked to brightness and shining.

The present semantic field is small to middle-sized, some Indoeuropean

languages with 9 or 10 represntations and interestingly Nandi with 8

representations having thte highest number of matches.

We put this semantic field at the end of the fields encoded by the

liquid ‘l’ as it is indirectly linked to all three superfields explained above,

the one of looseness, the one of the tongue and the one of continuity and

liquidity. When praising, the tongue is a central organ. The tongue is

loosened and slack in a continuous joyul feeling, as is also expressed in

the well known Hebrew expression accompanying praising, which is

‘halleluja’. In the latter word the ‘l’ is lengthened by its appearance as a

double consonant at the first consonant position of the word, but also

redoubled in that it shows up again in the next syllable, which both

highlights its importance as a coding consonant for the semion of praising.

7.4. Semantic fields for the alveolar nasal ‘n’.

7.4.1. Semantic field: ‘possession’


The liquid ‘n’ is psychologically and also linguistically very close to

the liquid ‘m’, as can also be observed in their tentatively interchangeable

use in baby language. The first baby phonems apart of vowels are mostly

‘m’ and ‘n’, where ‘m’ generally is used more frequently. This liquid pair in © 2nd of November, 2010, Dr. Owi I. Nandi, legal domicile: Switzerland

baby language stands for the mother term but also signals the need for

milk or later general food. ‘M’ and ‘n’ are very simple consonants to

articulate. An ‘m’ can be articulated by vibrating the vocal cords while

having the lips and thus the mouth closed, while an ‘n’ is produced in a

slightly more difficult way by somewhat opening the mouth and putting

the tip of the tongue to the §alveoli. The sound of ‘m’ is also produced by a

baby when voicing while being breast fead by the mother. Thus the basic

psychological concept encoded by ‘m’, but also in a slightly modified and

less proximate way by the alveolar liquid ‘n’ is that of the closest helpful

person, that of food and that of pleasure, the latter being also linked to the

one of self identity and might.

The last three semions, the one of ‘pleasure’, the one of ‘self

identity’ and the one of ‘might’ are also key components of the concept of

possession. Possession leads to a pleasant feeling, to a higher self value

and a more objectivated self feeling and to influence and might.

We can’t fully explain why in most languages studied, the alveolar

liquid ‘n’ seems to outcompete the bilabial liquid ‘m’ as primary coding

agent for possession. But this feature could be explained by the fact that

possession is more distantly linked to pleasure than more proximate

semantic fields as the one for mother or the one for might and thus is also

encoded by a modified liquid.

The search for consonants ‘n’ encoding possession was the most

difficult one of our study fields, followed by the search for duality. The

reason for this on the one hand is given by the relative narrowness of this

semantic field of possession, but more so by the fact that possession in a


large number of languages is encoded by suffixes or by infixes of

pronouns, nouns, verbs or complicated grammatical expressions. Some of

these codings for possession especially in more synthetic languages need

a particularly extended knowledge of a language grammar which in some

cases might well have been beyond the capacities I had for this study.

This coverage of the meaning of possession by suffixes and infixes is

not limited to the synthetical end of language types (for the distinction

between synthetism and analytism of language see Greenberg, 1960 and

Krupa, 1965). Greenberg defined an index of synthetism (m/w) by

counting the number of morphemes (m) per word (w), where morphemes

are separate significance entities as the word stem or the grammatical

infixes or suffixes. Languages with an synthetism index of higher than 2,0

are defined as synthetic by Greenberg, wheras these with an index below

2,0 are defined as analytic. Good examples for analytical languages

(following a presentation by Haarmann, 2003) are Vietnamesian (1,06),

New Persian (1,52) and New English (1,68), while even Hungarian with an

index of 1,91 is still defined as analytical language. Some of the most

synthetic languages are found in the North American Indian languages,

but also in Eskimo (3,72) in Sanskrit (2,59), Swahili (2,55), Ancient Persian

(2,41) and Finnish (2,22).

In spite of these difficulties, we found 22 out of the 33 languages or

language families of our study array with at least one match for this

semantic field. Interestingly the matches are distributed over a amazingly

broad spectrum of quasi independent language taxa above individual

language level, as 14 of the 22 taxa had matches (these being the Nilo-


Saharan, the Afro-Asiatic, the Basque, the Altaic, the Japanese, the

Indoeuropean, the Tamil, the Papuan, the Malayo-Polynesian, the

Australian, the Eskimo-Aleut, the Algic, the Uto-Aztecan, the Quechuan

and the Tupi taxon, respectively).

The semantic field of possession is a small one, which however must

partly be seen as an outcome of the incomplete coverage because of our

confined searching capacities. In most languages we found only 1 to 2

matches. Still, we found a higher number of matches, and the only ones

beyond 2, in Maori (8) and Ancient Egyptian (4).

The easiness for a loss of carrying an ‘n’ as a possessive encoding

marker is demonstrated in the case of Indoeuropean languages where the

Proto-language is believed to have at least one match, as is the case for

Latin, English and German, but Sanskrit, Russian and Ancient Greek have

no matches.

7.5. Semantic fields for the bilabial nasal ‘m’.

7.5.1. Semantic field: ‘mother’


The bilabial liquid ‘m’ is among the first few consonants if not the

first one undoubtedly expressed by babies and it seems to be the simplest

consonant to be articulated, as only the vocal chords have to be voiced,

whereas the mouth and hence the lips remain relaxedly closed. The

closest person nurturing and caring for the baby is without any doubt the

mother. One of the baby’s most immediate needs in the early months is

the one of being nurtured. In this time feeding a baby is synonymous with

giving the mother’s breasts to the infant. Thus for a baby the words for


wishing to suckle, for mother and for breast are almost the same and

expressed by words like ‘emem’ or more rarely ‘enen’, where the liquids

‘m’ and ‘n’, which according to our findings in many instances are very

close in their psychological backgrounds are the first, reduplicated and

only consonants of these two primordial expressions or words. The

consonant ‘m’ being most directly and intimately interwoven with the

concept of mother, suckling and breast is also substantiated by the fact

that a baby while suckling at the mother’s breast when voicing naturally

articulates an ‘m’.

It has generally been accepted by linguists for a long time that the

baby term for mother is one of the best candidates to be a language

universal, as most languages of the earth know a word very close and

derived from a baby word like ‘mama’. This coverage is even more

complete when the rarer version like containing ‘n’ is included, as some

languages have words like ‘anne’ for mother (e.g. Tamil).

In our language array, North Caucasian, Andian language family and

Tupi, Guarani are the only two languages and language phyla where we

did not know of a word having ‘m’ as the first pulmonary consonant for the

semantic field of mother. Still, with a better knowledge of the two

languages it seems possible that here also a baby word matching our

criterion could be found.

As already indicated above, we included several terms related to the

concept of mother into this semantic field, such as the terms for suckling,

breast, milk, pregnancy and words intimately related to pregnancy, birth,

to lactate, udder, woman and female. Some of the language examples


given below demonstrate the closeness of these more narrow concepts

with words signifying both breast and milk (as e.g. Nilo-Saharan, Central

Sudanic, Mbay has ‘mbàa’ for ‘the breast, the milk’ and Australian, Pama-

Nyungan, Yalarnnga has ‘mimi’ for ‘the breast, the milk’), mother and

woman’s breast (e.g. Afro-Asiatic, Chadic, Haussa has ‘mama’ for ‘mother,

woman's breast’), milk and to suck (e.g. Afro-Asiatic, Egyptian language

branch has ‘mhr’ for ‘the milk, to suck’), the bosom and the udder (e.g.

Ancient Egyptian has ‘mnd’ for ‘the bosom, the udder’), breast and to suck

(e.g. Altaic, Mongolian language family has ‘*meke’ for ‘female breast, to

suck, to move jaws’) or breast, milk and to suckle in one (e.g. Eskimo-

Aleut, Eskimo, Inupit language family has ‘*(a )mama-’ for ‘the milk; to

suckle; the breast; the udder; tasty’ and Eskimo-Aleut, Eskimo, Inupit

language family has 6 matches, ‘*(a )mama-’ for ‘the milk; to suckle; the

breast; the udder; tasty’).

The semantic field of mother is of medium size, many languages

having 4 to 7 matches. The languages with the highest number of matches

of our array (7) are Ancient Egyptian, English and Australian, Pama-

Nyungan, Yalarnnga.

7.1.1. Semantic field: ‘pleasant feeling’


This semantic field is linked to the previous one in that the need for

the mother, for food and the activity of suckling are for a baby, but even

later in life are very intimately connected to the satisfaction of pleasure

and well-being. That said, this and the last semantic field are very archaic

and archetypic in human ontogeny, psychology and putatively also in


language evolution. It is not surprising that the universality and the size of

this semantic field can be compared to some large and consistent fields

characterized by starting with k-like consonants (e.g. the one for cutting

and §). All language phyla and all languages of our study have two or more

matches, many of them even show a large number of matches.

Even Khoisan, Southern Khoisan,!XÓÕ has 2 matches, although the

consonant ‘m’ is not abundant in Khoisan languages. We consider this

scarcity of the consonant ‘m’ in Khoisan languages as an autapomorphy

for this very distinct language phylum (a character having evolved in a

certain group from a different plesiomorphic ancestral state), as the

placeholders of the other 3 African language phyla have a rich

representation of ‘m’.

By the way, an overwhelmingly large percentage of the World’s

languages use the most archaic consonant ‘m’ (personal experience). Lack

of the consonant ‘m’ in a language has to be considered as a clearly

apomorphic loss.

As already mentioned, this semantic field is particularly large, including

words linked to desire and pleasure (comprising appreciation, wishing,

longing, loving and sexuality), eating or drinking, sweet, starchy or fatty

foods, sweetness and tastefulness, esthetic feeling and beauty

(comprising words for young women and for flowers), friendship, precious

things (comprising precious metals and ornaments), donating, peace and

rest and laughing or smiling. A further very prominent and very central

semantic subfield which we included into this large one is the field linked

to the first person, i.e. words like ‘me’, ‘for me’, ‘mine’ and ‘myself’. Many


of these words can be found in the extended Excel sheets in the appendix,

but examples are also given in the text below. For instance, Nilo-Saharan,

Central Sudanic, Mbay, has simple ‘m’ for ‘me, my (oblique, suffix),

Indoeuropean language family as a whole has ‘*me-’ for ‘me’ (this root for

words pertaining to the first person can be found in countless languages of

this phylum), Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Maori has ‘māku’ for ‘for

me’ and Eskimo-Aleut, Eskimo, Inupit language family has ‘*ǝ'mi- ’ for ‘refl.

pron. oneself’. These exemplaric words in the semantic subfield of ‘linked

to the first person singular’ are all very short, consisting rarely solely of an

‘m’ or of one to two syllables. This indicates a very close connection

between the information content of the bilabial nasal ‘m’ and the semantic

subfield of ‘myself’.

But there seems to be an ever closer connection of the expression

‘mmm’ (see e.g. Nilo-Saharan, Central Sudanic, Mbay, ‘mmm’ for ‘well!’)

to the feeling of pleasure, which forms the epicenter of the semantic field

described in this paragraph. The expression ‘mmm’ for the feeling of

pleasure could even be seen as a similar universal in humans as the eye-

brow flash. The universality of this archaic emotional expression seems to

be the cause for the origin and perseverance of words starting with the

first pulmonary consonant m coding for pleasure, but also motherhood in

human languages.

The language with the highest number of matches for this semantic

field in our study array is Nandi (29 matches).

7.1.1. Semantic field: ‘importance’



The semantic field of importance is linked to the last one of pleasure.

Importance and might, especially for a species with social hierarchies, are

linked to a pleasant feeling of oneself, thus involving two very central

subfields of the last semantic field (the one for pleasure and the one for

‘selfness, first person’.

Again, a large majority of all languages of our survey have matches,

only North Caucasian, Andian language family, as compiled by § in the

Tower of Babel project and Khoisan, Southern Khoisan,!XÓÕ standing

apart. The lack in the North Caucasian phylum could also be caused by an

unsufficient coverage of etymological roots in this compilation due to the

great complexity of Andian languages.

The near complete presence of terms for importance starting with

the consonant ‘m’ in the chosen language array indicates an intimate

closeness between the articulation of an ‘m’ and the coding for this

semantic field, as was already the case in the last two fields.

The field, as delimited here is upper medium in its size, many

languages having 4 to 9 matches. The highest number of matches is found

in Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Malayan (12 matches).

The field as defined here comprises the meanings of might,

importance, health, strength and high rank, largeness in number, size or

value and the one of pride.

7.1.1. Semantic field: ‘thinking or meaning’


The affiliation of the nasal bilabial ‘m’ with the field of thinking and

meaning was found inductively starting from Indoeuropean languages as


Sanskrit. Explanations of this link are somewhat difficult, as thinking is one

of the most abstract terms encountered in our list of semantic fields.

We assume here that there is a link between the concept of thinking

and the feeling of oneself, the self-recognition. Thus, the field of thinking

should be connected to the subfield of words linked to the first person

singular, which we viewed to be one of the most direct one’s (see above)

in the large semantic field of pleasure. A further cofactor for the bilabial

nasal ‘m’ coding the concept of thinking could be seen the comparatively

strong vibrations in the whole head when articulating this consonant.

Possibly already archaic humans might have viewed the head as the

center of thinking and thus a consonant vibrating this body part could

linguistically code for thinking.

The coverage of languages with matches for this semantic field is

again wide, as only 3 language phyla or languages have no matches. One

of these languages is Khoisan, Southern Khoisan, !XÓÕ, which we already

have mentioned to be putatively apomorphically poor in the consonant

‘m’. Two languages, Basque and Ainu also lack matches.

The field of thinking is a rather upper medium in size as many

languages have between 3 and 7 matches. The largest number of matches

is found in Proto-Indoeuropean (16 matches) and in Austronesian, Malayo-

Polynesian, Maori (10 matches).

The field includes various mental activities linked to thinking as

learning, studying, investigating, planning, recognizing, guessing,

remembering, commanding, surveying, assessing, trusting and knowing,

but also abstract concepts as the idea, the intelligence, the mind and the


memory, body parts as the head and the brain and persons linked to

thinking as the teacher, the expert and even the man (as seen in Proto-

Indoeuropean ‘*monus’ for ‘the man’).

7.6. Semantic fields for the rhotic often alveolar thrill ‘r’.

7.6.1. Semantic field: ‘actions or subjects full of energy’


The rhotic consonant ‘r’ requires the most energy of all consonants if

articulated in the alveolar position. It is also one of the most difficult

letters to be pronounced, which might be a reason, why it is absent form

many languages (see §, but also in Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian,

Papuan, Kâte and Algic, Algonquian, Cree, in our language array), or is

pronounced differently in some other. Thus, some languages as e.g.

French, but also individual speakers of many other languages or dialects

articulate the ‘r’ in a guttural position. In other languages such as

Japanese ‘r’ and ‘l’ are pronounced almost in the same way. Still different

languages such as English, pronounce the ‘r’ as a retroflex. This

pronounciation of ‘r’ is also partially found in some languages of the Indian

subcontinent such as Bengali or Tamil. In standard Mandarin Chinese the

‘r’ is pronounced as§.

We regard the rhotic pronounciation of ‘r’ as the most ancestral one,

as it is found § in many African languages (Bearth, personal

communication, 2008) but also in many other languages of deep time

depth such as in Basque. In Basque and Iberian Spanish by the way, the

pronounciation of ‘r’ is even more energetic than in most other languages.


As the putatively archaic rhotic alveolar ‘r’ is associated with a high

energy demand, it seems natural that words starting with the fist

pulmonary consonant ‘r’ partly code for highly energy loaden activities or

actors.

Thus, all but one languages (Papago, §Xoo) of our survey that have an ‘r’

have matches for the semantic field of energy loaden words.

The coding for energetic activities and actors by the consonant ‘r’ is

also substantiated by the use of simple expressions and morphems,

entirely or almost entirely consisting of an 'r’. Thus, shepherds aritculate

‘rrrr!’ or similar to drive animals ahead. This driving activity is very

energetic. Shepherding as an activitiy for anatomically modern humans

goes back to the early Neolithic (Cavalli-Sforza et al., 1994), as pastoral

nomadism began after the domestication of selected herbivore mammals.

Other, very simple expressions or morphems in ‘r’ are e.g. Ainu ‘re’

for ‘causative suffix’, North Caucasian, Andian language family ‘*-r-’ for

‘frequentative’, Altaic, Turkic language family ‘*ur’ for ‘the growth, the

excrescence’, Proto-Indoeuropean ‘*er-’ for ‘set in motion, move’,

Indoeuropean, Indo-Iranian, ‘ṛ’ (ऋ) for ‘to move, raise, excite, rise, hasten’,

Indoeuropean, Italic, Latin verbal suffix ‘-re’ for ‘doing’ and nominal suffix

‘-or’ for ‘the agent’, and Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Maori ‘rā’ for

‘sun, solar’, all examples demonstrating words, loaden with energy.

The semantic field of energetic activities and actors is a large one. We

found a total of 15 languages with 9 or more matches. The highest number

of matches was found in English (34 matches) and Proto-Indoeuropean (28

matches), followed by Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Maori (20


matches). Amazingly low numbers of matches are found in Hungarian and

Quechuan (both with only 1 match).

Subfields included in this semantic field comprise words for

quickness and rapid motion, for scorching, burning and objects of high

temperature as the sun, for leading, growing and exceeding, for the cause,

the origin, the active principle or actor (expressed through r-containing

suffixes in some languages as Basque, Ainu or Latin), for violence, for

masculinity and force, for energetic body organs as the heart or muscles,

for thundering (as shown below for Russian, Preclassic Old Chinese and

Australian, Pama-Nyungan, Yalarnnga), for climbing and rising, and e.g. for

ploughing (as shown below for North Caucasian, Andian language family,

Proto-Indoeuropean, Ancient Greek and Latin).

7.7. Semantical fields for the sibilants ‘s’

7.7.1. Semantic field for ‘being silent, silencing’ starting with the

sibilant ‘s’


The voiceless sibilant ‘s’ is one of the most unnoisy consonants, as

an ‘s’ can be articulated without being accompanied or followed by the

voice or a vowel. Moreover an ‘s’ is imitating the sleeking of an animal or

of a hunter when attacking a prey, two very archaic and archetypic visual

and audial settings for animals and humans in their environment. A

sleeking animal, if a predator, as also a human when hunting, try to avoid

noise, at the most causing an ‘s’-like sound when touching the ground or

grasses. As the avoidance of carnivorous animals, as well as human

hunting of animals were very essential human and prehuman needs during


a tremendously long period of evolution, we might find a coding for these

circumstances in ancestral language. The alert for predating animals has

to be accompanied by silence on the side of the prey in order to notice the

slightest sound source to trigger a correctly directed flight. On the other

hand, also a human hunter has to avoid any kind of noise, such as from

cracking branches, when approaching a potential prey. Thus, for humans

as social beings, there should also be a coding for conveying to partners to

be silent. This coding can be found almost as an universal (as e.g the

eyebrow flash or the expression ‘mmm!’ for pleasure) in the articulation of

‘sss…’, often also accompanied by a raised digital finger in front of the

mouth (personal hypothesis), to signify forbidding of opening the mouth to

articulate the voice.

Of the 33 language families and languages chosen in this survey, all

but two have a representation of the sibilant ‘s’, the outliers being

Australian, Pama-Nyungan, Yalarnnga and Austronesian, Malayo-

Polynesian, Maori (‘s’ is substituted by ‘h’ in Maori as convincingly seen in

loanwords from English).

Yalarnnga and Maori clearly lack an ‘s’ in its phonological repertory as a

phylogenetic apomorphy.

Knowing that Maori replaces ‘s’ by ‘h’, this language would also

belong to the important stock with matches (Maori has ‘hāngū’ and ‘hū’,

both for ‘quiet’).

Of the remaining 31 language families and languages, 26 have matches

for this narrow semantic field. The slight incompleteness is caused by the

lack of matches at the phylogenetic extremes of the languages tree, at its


base in the Macrokhoisan language family, !XÓÕ and 4 of the 5 highly

nested New World language families have no matches. In the case of the

American absences, we would argue once more, that they underwent the

longest sequence of evolutionary and migratory changes from the

ancestral human language stock (this is especially true for the core-New

World languages) and thus might also have lost track to a fair amount of

ancestral linguistic codings.

The narrowness of this semantic field is expressed by the low to very

low number of matches in the majority of languages. Austronesian,

Malayo-Polynesian, Malayan with 7 and Indoeuropean, Germanic, German

with 5 matches are the two languages of our array with the highest

numbers for this semantic field.

The field was defined as containing words for quietness, peacefulness,

silencing, whispering, rhustling, but we found also a link of these words to

the one’s for resting and sleeping.

7.1.1. Semantic field: ‘dispersing’


When articulating the sibilant ‘s’ the air is markedly dispersed

around the tongue and afterwards between the teeth. This can be felt by

the sensitive nerves around the tip of the tongue and on the mucosa

neighbouring the inner delimitations of the lips. The air dispersal caused

by the articulation of voiceless and voiced ‘s’, but similarly also by the

articulation of voiceless and voiced ‘sh’ aptly codes for actions of

dispersal, dissemination and scattering.


This semantic field is amazingly large, as human behavior abunds in

behavior involving dispersing in the one or other way.

An important semantic subfield included into this larger one is the

one of sowing and the seed. Seeds have been important in the evolution of

prehumans and humans long before the invention of agriculture in the

Neolithic, as seeds have formed an important food source for these

populations. Thus, a large number of mutually more or less independant

but also of mutually related languages have words, starting with ‘s’ for the

subfield ‘seed’. This begins with the Macrokhoisan languages

macrophylum, where our representative, !XÓÕ has ‘sa^ʔa‘ for ‘the seed’.

Afro-Asiatic, Chadic, Haussa, ‘shibk’ and ‘suka’ for ‘to sow’, Afro-Asiatic,

Semitic language family as a whole has ‘*ʒVry/ʔ/ʕ-’ for ‘the seed, sowing,

sown field, to sow, to cultivate’, Proto-Indoeuropean has ‘*seg-‘ for ‘to

sow’, ‘*sei-‘ for ‘to sow, to dispatch’, ‘*semen-‘ for ‘the seed’ and ‘*setis’

for ‘sowing’, 5 of the 6 individual Indoeuropean languages have matches

originating from these Proto-Indoeuropean roots, Dravidian, Southern

Dravidian, Tamil has ‘calavanpanṟi’ for ‘to sow’, Austronesian, Malayo-

Polynesian, Malayan has ‘sebaran’ for ‘the seed’ and ‘semai’ for ‘to sow, to

plant seedlings’, Austro-Asiatic, Mon-Khmer, Khmer language family ‘sa:p’

for ‘to scatter, to sow, to spread’, Uto-Aztecan, Papago has ‘ 'es’ for ‘to

plant seeds’.

Additionally to the manyfold actions linked to dispersing, also some

highly dispersed objects, as sugar, salt, sand, stars or drizzling rain,

frequently begin with ‘s’ and can be included in this semantic field.


The field is very wealthy, 9 languages having more then 10 matches.

The highest number of matches is found in Indoeuropean, Germanic,

English (32 matches) and Afro-Asiatic, Egyptian language branch, Ancient

Egyptian (19 matches).

7.1.1. Semantic field: ‘sipping’


When sipping in a liquid, the sound of an ‘s’ or ‘sh’ is produced.

Although during this behavior the airstream is inhaled, it closely resembles

the articulation of these sibilants (this is done during breathing out). Thus,

a first pulmonary consonant ‘s’ or ‘sh’ also codes for the bahvior of sucking

and sipping.

The semantic field is of a medium size. Apart form the verbs ‘to sip’,

‘to suck’, ‘to drink’, ‘to swallow’, also nomens associated with sipping as

‘the juice’, ‘the soup’, ‘the gravy’, ‘the porridge’, and ‘the vinegar’ are

included in this field.

Of the 31 language families and languages of this project with a

representation of sibilants, 27 have matches for this semantic field, the

exceptions being the Semitic language family as a whole, North

Caucasian, Andian language family, Eskimo-Aleut, Eskimo, Inupit language

family and Quechuan, Quechua. As for the Semitic language family this

absence could also be due to some unceoverd etyma in the etymological

dictionary, as the Semitc language, Arabic itself has 2 matches, ‘شرب’

(shariba) for ‘to drink, to sip’ and ‘شفط’ (shafaṭa) for ‘to suck, to absorb, to

sip’.


The psychological reaction of ‘fear’ is very ancestral to animals. The

higher the neurological competence of an animal, due to its higher

evolved cognition, the more the reaction of ‘fear’ is diversified with

answers of the body, and in highest evolved mammals of the face. Thus,

many mammals as e.g. dogs or primates spread apart their lips and show

their frontal teeth as a reaction to a danger (causing fear). This deeply

archetypic behavior is a neathlessly related prerequisite for the human

connotation of fear which apart from more ancestral hormonal and body

reactions is also an outcry similar to ‘uä!ä!’. This outcry is again a

psychological and behavioral universal in humans (personal hypothesis). It

is linked directly to the facial and often also vocal expression of fear in

primates and apes, where in fear the muscles around the mouth also

cause first the mouth to open as a small central orifice (close to the

articulation of an ‘u’ in humans) and then by widening the open mouth and

exposing the frontal teeth (close to the articulation of ‘ä’ in humans). Even

the sound loudness and quality is gradually similar in many higher evovled

mammals to the condition in humans, which is a good example how

language continously and without discrete changes evolved during the

phylogeny of animals and ultimately humans.

The expression ‘u!ää!’ accompanying fear and hence also coding for

it thus results in a strong behavioral and psycholgical basis for words

linked to fear beginning with ‘u’ or its phonolgical hemiconsonantal

derivations ‘v’ and ‘w’.

This is a very narrow semantic field, most languages having 3 or less

matches. 28 of the 34 language families and languages surveyed have


representations of words starting with the first pulmonary letter ‘u’, ‘v’ or

‘w’, the Basque and the Andian language families, as well as Ainu and

Quechua being the 4 languages that have no matches. English is by far

the language with most matches (8). In Khoisan, Southern Khoisan,!XÓÕ

has ‘||u-a’ is articulated for ‘to fear’. As in some other languages given

below, this is very close to the universal exclamation ‘u!ää!’, but again this

natural excalmation is preceded by a click consonant (an alveolar click

here). This click is clearly not part of the insticntiv exclamation and thus

seems to be a cultural feature apomorphically added to many words in the

Khoisan languages. This is an other example substantiating the hypothesis

that clicks are attention markers in these African hunter-gatherer

languages, but have not be ancestral to human languages, as Nilo-

Saharan languages, a presumably almost equally old branch of human

languages inferring from molecular genetic analyses (see above in the

description part of the language families under ‘Nilo-Saharan languages’)

lack click sounds.

Semantic field ‘wideness’


This semantic field is perhaps surprisingly linked to the last one in

that the curvature of the mouth part analogues the turning of the head to

widen the angel of perception. This behavior naturally imminant to

animals as well as humans could explain why this phonem group is used to

assess the wideness of the surrounding environment or abstrahized also

long duration in time. Thus, turning and bending almost directly code for

wideness.


The concept of duality or pairing, contrary to the one for counting,

seems mainly not to stress the discreteness and interruption of the two

parts, which would be better expressed by two syllables starting by plosive

consonants, such as a dental viz. alveolar plosives (for singular dental viz.

alveolar plosives see semantic field for ‘counting’). Rather duality

expresses also a partial intergradedness and this is better encoded by two

vowels following each other, hence a diphthong, occuring in any position

of the word. This is the only semantic field, where we did not find the first

pulmonary consonant being the most information carrying phonem.

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9. Table of contents1. Preface

2. Acknowledgement


3. Introduction

4. Material and Methods

5. Language phyla of the World

6.1. The African languages

6.1.1. Macrokhoisan language family

6.1.2. Afro-Asiatic languages

6.1.3. African Pygmy languages

6.1.4. Nilo-Saharan phylum

6.1.5. Niger-Congo languages

6.2. Non-African language macrophylum

6.3. Boreo-Indo-Pacific macrophylum

6.3.1. Borean

6.4. Eurasiatic-Amerindian superphylum

6.4.1. Amerinidan languages

6.5. Indoeuropean languages

6.6. Austro-Dené superphylum

6.6.1. Austric languages

6.6.2. Ainu language

6.7. Dené-Caucasian languages

6.7.1. North Caucasian languages

6.7.2. (autochthonous Basque language name: Euskara)

6.7.3. Sino-Tibetan languages

6.8. Paleo-Sundic


6.9. Sahaulic languages

7. Results for different semantic fields

7.1. Semantic fields for the consonant pair ‘b’ and ‘p’

7.10.3. Semantic field: ‘Father’

7.10.3.2.Psychological background

7.10.3.3.Words for the semantic field of ‘father’ starting with ‘b’ or

more rarely ‘p’ across the studied languages

7.1.2. Semantic field: ‘Words for evil things or with negative connotation’


7.1.2.2. Words for the semantic field of ‘evilness or negativeness’ starting

with ‘b’ or more rarely ‘p’ across the studied languages

7.2. Semantic fields for the consonant pair ‘d’ and ‘t’

7.2.1. Semantic field: ‘Words for pointing to, showing and direction’


7.2.1.2. Words for the semantic field of ‘pointing to, showing and

direction’ starting with ‘d’ or ‘t’ across the studied

languages

7.2.2. Semantic field: ‘Words for counting’


7.2.2.2. Words for the semantic field of ‘counting’ starting with

‘d’ or more rarely ‘t’ across the studied languages

7.2.3. Semantic field: ‘Words for spitting’

7.2.3.1. Psychological/behavioral background


7.2.3.2. Words for the semantic field of ‘spitting’ starting with ‘d’

or more rarely ‘t’ across the studied languages

7.3. Semantic fields for the velar stop ‘k’ and the uvular stop ‘q’


7.4.1. Semantic field: ‘Hurting’


7.4.1.2. Words for the semantic field

of ‘hurting’ starting with ‘k’ or

‘q’ across the studied

languages

7.4.2. Semantic field: ‘scratching’



of ‘scratching’ starting with

‘k’ or ‘q’ across the studied

languages


and ‘q’: ‘Words for cutting, slicing and

tearing’



of ‘Words for cutting, slicing

and tearing’ starting with ‘k’


or ‘q’ across the studied

languages

7.4.4. Semantic field: ‘Words for itching or tickling’

7.4.4.1. Psychological/behavioral

background


of ‘itching or tickling’ starting

with ‘k’ or ‘q’ across the

studied languages


and ‘q’: ‘pointed structures’



of ‘pointed structures’

starting with ‘k’ or ‘q’ across

the studied languages

7.4.6. Semantic fields for the consonant pair ‘k’ or

‘q’: ‘hard structures’



of ‘hard structures’ starting


studied languages

7.4.7. Semantic field: ‘coarseness’© 2nd of November, 2010, Dr. Owi I. Nandi, legal domicile: Switzerland


7.4.8. Semantic field: ‘hitting’



of ‘hitting’ starting with ‘k’ or

‘q’ across the studied

languages

7.4.9. Semantic field: ‘closing or coming close’



of ‘closing or coming close’



7.4.10. Semantic field: ‘coughing or larynx’



of ‘coughing or larynx’



7.4.11. Semantic field: ‘crying out’



of ‘crying out’ starting with ‘k’


languages© 2nd of November, 2010, Dr. Owi I. Nandi, legal domicile: Switzerland

7.4.12. Semantic field: ‘crackling’



of ‘crackling’ starting with ‘k’


languages

7.4.13. Semantic field: ‘sour or bitter taste or the

palate’



of ‘sour or bitter taste or the

palate’ starting with ‘k’ or ‘q’

across the studied languages

7.4.14. Semantic field: ‘hollow structures’



of ‘hollow structures’ starting


studied languages

7.4. Semantic field: ‘words linked to questioning’


7.4.1.2. Words for the semantic field of ‘questioning’ starting

with ‘kw’ or ‘qu’ or hypothetically simplified thereof (i.e.

starting with ‘k’, ‘q’ or ‘u’, ‘v’ or ‘w’) across the studied

languages


7.5. Semantic fields for the lateral approximant ‘l’.


7.6.1. Semantic field: ‘being loose’



of ‘being loose’ starting with

‘l’ across the studied

languages

7.6.2. Semantic field: ‘sloppiness, lazyness or

idleness’



of ‘sloppiness, lazyness or

idleness’ starting with ‘l’


7.6.3. Semantic field: ‘lameness’



of ‘lameness’ starting with ‘l’


7.6.4. Semantic field: ‘tongue’




of ‘tongue’ starting with ‘l’


7.6.5. Semantic field: ‘flowing’



of ‘flowing’ starting with ‘l’


7.6.6. Semantic field: ‘glossiness, brilliance’



of ‘glossiness, brilliance’

starting with ‘l’ across the

studied languages

7.6.7. Semantic field: ‘praising’



of ‘praising’ starting with ‘l’


7.6. Semantic fields for the alveolar nasal ‘n’.

7.6.1. Semantic field: ‘possession’



7.6.1.2. Words for the semantic field of ‘possession’ starting with

‘l’ across the studied languages

7.7. Semantic fields for the bilabial nasal ‘m’.

7.7.1. Semantic field: ‘mother’


7.7.1.2. Words for the semantic field of ‘mother’ starting with ‘m’


7.7.2. Semantic field: ‘pleasant feeling’


7.7.2.2. Words for the semantic field of ‘pleasant feeling’ starting

with ‘m’ across the studied languages

7.7.3. Semantic field: ‘importance’


7.7.3.2. Words for the semantic field of ‘importance’ starting with

‘m’ across the studied languages

7.7.4. Semantic field: ‘thinking or meaning’


7.7.4.2. Words for the semantic field of ‘thinking or meaning’

starting with ‘m’ across the studied languages

7.8. Semantic fields for the rhotic often alveolar thrill ‘r’.

7.8.1. Semantic field: ‘actions or subjects full of energy’



7.8.1.2. Words for the semantic field of ‘actions or subjects full of

energy’ starting with ‘r’ across the studied languages

7.9. Sematnical fields for the sibilants ‘s’

7.9.1. Semantic field for ‘being silent, silencing’ starting with the

sibilant ‘s’


7.9.1.2. Words for the semantic field of ‘to be silent’ starting with

‘s’ across the studied languages

7.9.2. Semantic field: ‘dispersing’


7.9.2.2. Words for the semantic field of ‘dispersing’ starting with

‘s’ across the studied languages

7.9.3. Semantic field: ‘sipping’


7.9.3.2. Words for the semantic field of ‘sipping’ starting with ‘s’


7.10. Semantic fields starting with ‘u’, ‘v’ or ‘w’

7.10.1. Semantic field: ‘fear’


7.10.1.2. Words for the semantic field of ‘fear’ starting with ‘u’, ‘v’

or ‘w’ across the studied languages

7.10.2. Semantic field of ‘bending’ and ‘curving’



7.10.2.2. Words for the semantic field of ‘curving, bending’

starting with ‘u’, ‘v’ or ‘w’ across the studied languages

7.10.3. Semantic field ‘wideness’


7.10.3.2. Words for the semantic field of ‘wideness’ starting with ‘u’, ‘v’ or

‘w’ across the studied languages

7.11. Semantic field: ‘two’

7.12.1. Psychological background

7.12.2. Words for the semantic field of ‘two’ starting with ‘u’,

‘v’ or ‘w’ across the studied languages

8. Literature

9. Table of contents


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