Root and branch

Linguists estimate that there are a little over seven thousand languages spoken in the world, sorted into around four hundred language families (including linguistic isolates, languages or language clusters that appear to be related to no other known languages).

As a historical linguist, one of the most common questions I've been asked is if, ultimately, all of those languages trace back to a common origin.  Or, perhaps, did disparate groups develop spoken language independently, so there is no single "pre-Tower-of-Babel" language (if I can swipe a metaphor from the Bible)?  The honest answer is "we don't know."  Determining the relationships between languages -- their common ancestry, as it were -- is tricky business, and relies on more than chance similarity between a few words.  My own area of research was borrow words in Old English and Old Gaelic (mostly from Old Norse), a phenomenon that significantly complicates matters.  English has an unfortunate habit of appropriating words from other languages -- a selective list of English vocabulary could easily lead the incautious to the incorrect conclusion that it originated from Latin, for example.  (In the preceding sentence, the words unfortunate, habit, appropriating, language, selective, vocabulary, incautious, incorrect, conclusion, originated, and example all come directly from Latin.  As do preceding, sentence, and directly.  So none of those are original to English -- they were adopted by scholars and clerics between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries C.E.)

As you might expect, the longer two languages have been separate, the further they diverge, not only because they borrow words from (different) neighboring languages but because of random changes in pronunciation and syntax.  There's a good analogy here to biological evolution; the process is much like the effect that mutations have in evolution.  Closely-related species have very similar DNA; extremely distantly-related ones, like humans and apple trees, have very few common genes, and it's taken a great deal of detailed analysis to show that all life forms do have a single common ancestor.

That feat has not yet been accomplished with language evolution.  Finnish and Swahili may have a common ancestor, but if so, they've been separate for so long that all traces of that relationship have been erased over time.

Even with groups of languages with a more recent common ancestor, it can remarkably difficult to piece together what their relationship is.  For Indo-European languages, surely the most studied group of languages in the world, we're still trying to figure out their family tree, and aligning it with what is known from history and archaeology.  This was the subject of a study out of the University of Copenhagen that was published last week, and looked at trying to reconcile the language groups in southern and western Europe with what we now know from genetic studies of ancient bones and teeth.

[Nota bene: the Germanic and Slavic peoples were not part of this study; the current model suggests that 

Germanic groups are allied to the neolithic northern Corded Ware and Funnelbeaker Cultures, which appear to have originated in the steppes of what are now western Russia and Ukraine; the Slavs came in much later, probably from the region between the Danube River and the Black Sea.]

The study found a genetic correlation between speakers of the Italo-Celtic language cluster (Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Catalan, Occitan, and Romanian; Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Manx, Cornish, Breton, and Welsh) and one between speakers of the Greco-Armenian cluster (Greek, Cypriot, Albanian, and Armenian).  The southern branch of the Corded Ware culture seems to have undergone two influxes from the east -- one from the Bell Beaker Culture, starting in around 2800 B.C.E. (so called because of the characteristically bell-shaped ceramic drinking vessels found at their settlement sites), which ended up migrating all the way to the Iberian Peninsula, and the other from the Yamnaya, which came from the Pontic steppe but never got past what is now Switzerland and eastern Italy (most of them didn't even get that far).

It's tempting to overconclude from this; just like my earlier example of Latin borrow words in English, the genetic correlation between the Italo-Celtic and Greco-Armenian regions doesn't mean that the differences we see in those two branches of the Indo-European language family come from the Bell Beaker people and the Yamnaya, respectively.  The lack of early written records for most of these languages means that we don't have a good "fossil record" of how and when they evolved.

But the current study provides some tantalizing clues about how migration of speakers of (presumably) two different dialects of Proto-Indo-European may have influenced the evolution of the western and eastern branches of today's Indo-European languages.

So it's one step toward finding the common roots of (most) European languages.  Even if we may never settle the question of how they're related for certain, it's cool that they're using the techniques of modern genetics to find out about where our distant ancestors came from -- and what languages they may have spoken.

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The web of contingencies

History is really nothing more than one contingency after another.

This leaves fertile ground for the "what-ifs."  What if the Roman Emperor Titus -- who by all accounts was shaping up to be a pretty good leader -- had reigned for more than two years, instead of dying young in 81 C. E. and being succeeded by his cruel, paranoid brother Domitian?  What if King Edward V of England, one of the "Princes in the Tower," had lived, and the Tudor Dynasty never come to power?  What if Mehmed II lost the Battle of Constantinople in 1453, and the Byzantine Empire had survived?  What if the Spanish failed in their attempts to conquer the Aztecs, Incas, and Mayas?  What if the Confederacy won the American Civil War, the Cavaliers the English Civil War, the Republicans the Spanish Civil War, or the Nazis World War II?

Certainly some of these are more likely than others, but the fact remains that the threads of history are pretty fragile.  Speculating about what would have happened otherwise is the realm of fiction writers, and "alternative history" is a popular topic.  I remember reading one of the first stories to use that trope, R. A. Lafferty's brilliant (and hilarious) short story "Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne," when I was in college.  In Lafferty's tale an avatar is sent back in time by some scientists to make sure that Charlemagne is assassinated at Roncevalles in the year 778 (one of the nearest of historical near misses) instead of surviving, winning the day, and eventually becoming Holy Roman Emperor.

The problem, of course, is that when the avatar returns, it appears that nothing has changed, because in altering history it had altered the scientists' knowledge of what happened at the same time.  All it did was create a completely different set of contingencies leading to a different set of circumstances.  So they do it again, and again, changing other seemingly pivotal events in history -- each time with the same results.  Huge alterations, which none of the scientists are aware of, because their own memories shifted every time the past was changed.  It simply became what they always had known.

Ultimately, they conclude that nothing in the past made any difference, because changing past events never has any effect on the present!

In reality, though, we can speculate all we want about the what-ifs, but it will always remain in the realm of speculation.  As C. S. Lewis put it in Prince Caspian:

"You mean," said Lucy rather faintly, "that it would have turned out all right – somehow?  But how?  Please, Aslan!  Am I not to know?"

"To know what would have happened, child?" said Aslan.  "No.  Nobody is ever told that."

Maybe it's because I'm a fiction writer myself, but my mind was bouncing along amongst the what-ifs when I read some recent research about the settlement of Europe.  Back during the Neolithic Period, northwestern Europe had been settled by a culture called the Megalith Builders who had come there from the Balkans, and who were responsible for raising Stonehenge, Avebury, the Carnac Stones of Brittany, and the many other menhirs and stone rings scattered from Portugal to Denmark.  (Contrary to popular misconception, Stonehenge was not built by the "druids" or ancient Celts; when the Celts arrived in the British Isles, Stonehenge was already two thousand years old.)

The Carnac Megaliths of Brittany [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Snjeschok, Carnac megalith alignment 1, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The Megalith Builders thrived for a couple of millennia -- then, around five thousand years ago, the entire culture collapsed.  It was sudden, leading many historians and archaeologists to surmise that they'd been wiped out in a war.  There's a significant flaw in that theory, though.  The Megalith Builders were superseded by the Yamnaya, who came from the Pontic steppe and may have been the first speakers of an Indo-European language in Europe -- but there's at least a five hundred year gap (possibly more) between the sudden disappearance of the Megalith Builders and the first definitive archaeological traces of the Yamnaya.

So the collapse of the Megalith Builders didn't occur because the Yamnaya destroyed them; it seems like when the Yamnaya colonized northwestern Europe, they found the land already strangely depopulated.

A study this week in Nature has found strong evidence of what happened.  DNA evidence from gravesites indicates that of the bones dating from that four-hundred year period between 3,300 and 2,900 B.C.E., during which the Megalith Builders disappeared, one in six showed evidence they'd died of bubonic plague.

"It’s fairly consistent across all of Northern Europe, France and it’s in Sweden, even though there are some quite big differences in the archaeology, we still see the same pattern, they just disappear," said Frederik Seersholm of the University of Copenhagen, who led the study.  "All of a sudden, there’s no people getting buried (at these monuments) anymore.  And the people who were responsible for building these megaliths (are gone)...  These plague cases, they are dated to exactly the time frame where we know the Neolithic decline happened so this is very strong circumstantial evidence that the plague might have been involved in this population collapse."

So the plague seems to have had effects on Europe's history besides the devastating Black Death pandemics in the mid-fourteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries.  And this is where the what-ifs come in; what if the epidemic that struck down the Megalith Builders hadn't happened?  When the Yamnaya came in five centuries later, they would have found a thriving civilization that undoubtedly would have pushed back on their incursions.  And if the historical linguists are right, this would have stopped the progress of Indo-European speakers in their tracks.

What languages would we people of northern European descent now be speaking?

So that's today's ramble through history, alternative and otherwise.  And even if Aslan's right that no one is ever told what might have happened, that doesn't stop us from wondering and speculating how things would have gone if the web of contingencies was rearranged by a little bit.

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A new view of the Indus Valley

It's always fun when I stumble across some research that ties together three of my fascinations -- linguistics, genetics, and unsolved mysteries.

The research in question was published this week in Science, and gives us a new lens into the mysterious Indus Valley (or Harappan) Civilization.  This civilization, which started some time around 3,300 B.C.E. and lasted for a good two thousand years, flourished in what is now the western part of India and eastern part of Pakistan, producing massive cities, temples, a distinctive form of pottery, work in tin, bronze, lead, and copper, and a mysterious script that no one has been able to decipher (in fact, some linguists don't even believe it's a written language -- possibly just a set of non-linguistic symbols).

A Harappan seal with an example of the Indus Valley script [Image licensed under the Creative Commons PHGCOM IndusValleySeals.JPG, Indus seal impression, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Considering the extent of the artifacts and archaeological sites the civilization left behind, it's amazing how little we know for sure about them.  Their affiliations to other groups who were around at the same time (especially in the Middle East), what language they spoke, what religion they practiced -- all are inferences based on relatively scanty evidence.

This latest research adds a significant piece to what we know for sure about the mysterious Harappans.  The researchers who conducted it, a team made up of scientists from Washington University, Harvard Medical School, and the University of Vienna, looked at DNA extracted from 523 skeletons in the region dating all the way back to twelve thousand years ago.  The scientists were trying to shed light on two questions.  First, where did the Indus Valley Civilization's agricultural knowhow come from -- was it a local invention/innovation, or was it brought into a previous hunter-gatherer society by an influx of migrants?  And second, what is the origin of the languages spoken in the region then and now?

The answer to the first question seems to be that Harappans' agriculture was an innovation of their own.  The researchers found traces of DNA from contemporaneous farming cultures no nearer than Iran, and no evidence that they got any further than that.  So it seems like the Indus Valley transition from hunters to farmers was something they figured out for themselves.

What the research uncovered vis-à-vis the second question was that there was a DNA signature from European hunter-gatherers, but not as big as expected.  The usual linguistic model is that when there's a major language shift, it's usually caused by a large influx of migrants (consider the shifts from Native languages to English in Australia and the Americas).  Here, there was not nearly the amount of European and Middle Eastern DNA to explain the shift to an Indo-European language; the Eurasians who showed up there, the Yamnaya people, were apparently present in fairly small numbers.  What's fascinating, though, is that Yamnaya DNA is disproportionally present in modern-day Indians of the highest social classes -- since social class has traditionally been hereditary in Indian culture, the surmise is that the Indo-European speaking Yamnaya were in charge, and their language ended up superseding (or at least strongly influencing) the language(s) spoken at the time.

It's kind of analogous to the influence Norman French had on Old English in the years after the Norman Invasion in 1066 C. E.  Most of our terms that have to do with governance come from Latin via French, while a lot of the basic vocabulary (pronouns, prepositions, and so on) are from the original Germanic language.  Even more interesting is that the Norman Invasion left pairs of parallel words associated with food -- the one used for the animal as it's found on the farm is from the Old English peasants who raised them, and the one for the meat as it's seen on the table from Norman French aristocracy who only came in contact with the animal after it was cooked.  (Thus cow/beef, sheep/mutton, pig/pork, chicken/poultry, and so on.)  As the Indo-European influx into India happened five centuries earlier, you have to wonder if those kinds of word pairs existed for while there, too, eventually being swamped by the higher-prestige Indo-European verbiage.

So this research gives us one more piece of the puzzle regarding a group of people about whom we've known relatively little, despite their being ancestral to the vast majority of the population on the Indian Subcontinent.  And, of course, this is nowhere near the last word on the subject.  We'll continue to uncover more, and refine our understanding of the Harappans -- a civilization that has been gone for almost three thousand years.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is pure fun: science historian James Burke's Circles: Fifty Round Trips Through History, Technology, Science, and Culture.  Burke made a name for himself with his brilliant show Connections, where he showed how one thing leads to another in discoveries, and sometimes two seemingly unconnected events can have a causal link (my favorite one is his episode about how the invention of the loom led to the invention of the computer).

In Circles, he takes us through fifty examples of connections that run in a loop -- jumping from one person or event to the next in his signature whimsical fashion, and somehow ending up in the end right back where he started.  His writing (and his films) always have an air of magic to me.  They're like watching a master conjuror create an illusion, and seeing what he's done with only the vaguest sense of how he pulled it off.

So if you're an aficionado of curiosities of the history of science, get Circles.  You won't be disappointed.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]