Reconnecting the isolates

Determining which languages are related to which is significantly more difficult than you might expect.

English, for example.  Most people know that it's a Germanic language, related not only to German but to Dutch, Flemish, and (more distantly), to the Scandinavian languages.  This shows most strongly in the basic vocabulary; the majority of our common verbs and nouns, as well as pronouns, prepositions, and conjunctions, have Anglo-Saxon -- i.e., Germanic -- origin.

However, consider the first sentence in this post.  The words which, are, to, is, more, than, you, and might are Germanic; but the more complicated words (determining, languages, related, significantly, difficult, and expect)  -- the ones that carry most of the meaning -- are all Latin in origin.  So is English actually a Romance language?

It isn't, of course, but a superficial look at the language might well push you to reach the wrong conclusion.  Most of our words of Greek and Latin origin were either via the Norman French spoken by the conquerors and ruling class in England who came in during the eleventh century, or later borrow-words that slipped into common parlance from their use in legal, scientific, and religious contexts.  English, in fact, has borrowed words from just about every language it's contacted.  A few interesting ones:

• algorithm (Arabic)
• loot (Hindi)
• torso (Italian)
• ketchup (Malay, by way of Chinese)
• easel (Dutch)
• sauna (Finnish)
• amen (Hebrew)
• chess and checkmate (Farsi)
• coffee (Turkish)
• icon (Greek, possibly via Russian)
• chocolate (Nahuatl)
• hurricane (Taino)
• tattoo (Samoan)

Despite all this, it remains a Germanic language in basic structure, something that is borne out by our knowledge of the history of English-speaking people.

We English-speaking linguists are lucky, because the written records for English and its antecedents are generally excellent.  We have a highly-detailed map of how the language evolved, and even in the case of borrow-words, we can often pinpoint not only where they came from, but when they entered the English language.  Things are far murkier with languages that have a poorer -- or completely nonexistent -- written history.  In that case, we're left with the immense task of using similarities in word roots and syntactic structure as the basis for inferring where a language fits in the overall family tree.

And sometimes even that isn't enough.  There are a good number of languages for which we have been unable to establish a clear relationship to any other; these are called language isolates, and include Basque, Sandawe (a language spoken in Tanzania), Zuni, Huave (an indigenous language in Mexico), Burushaski (spoken by about 100,000 people in Pakistan), and -- amazingly -- Japanese and Korean.

In fact, it's the latter two that are why this topic comes up today.  Both Japanese and Korean are of unclear relationship to each other and to the other languages in the region.  The Japanese writing system is largely borrowed from Chinese; the Japanese kanji is an ideographic script that uses many identical characters to those in Chinese (although the pronunciations, and some of the meanings/connotations, are completely different).  Korean writing, on the other hand, is of known provenance; the script (hangul) is a phonetic alphabet that was invented by the fifteenth-century King Sejong to give the speakers of Korean a standard, easily-learned way of writing the language.

So despite having complex and well-studied writing systems, the historical records of Japanese and Korean don't help us a lot with establishing how they fit in with other Asian language families.  But some research published last week in Nature, which I found out from loyal reader of Skeptophilia Gil Miller, has proposed a solution to the mystery.  Using computational analysis to map out not only the related features between the languages but their degree of separation -- analogous to the genetic bootstrap analysis used by evolutionary biologists to determine when the common ancestor between two species existed -- they figured out that not only are Japanese and Korean distantly related to each other, they're also related to Mongolian, to the Tungusic languages of eastern Siberia and Manchuria, and to... Turkish!

"We have languages, archaeology and genetics which all have dates.  So we just looked to see if they correlated," said study co-author Martine Robbeets, of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, in an interview with New Scientist.  "We all identify ourselves with language.  It’s our identity.  We often picture ourselves as one culture, one language, one genetic profile.  Our study shows that like all populations, those in Asia are mixed."

Her use of the phrase "we just looked" makes it sound simple, but that's undue modesty and a significant understatement.  In practice, determining these kind of relationships is anything but easy, and the Robeets et al. study -- if it bears up under further analysis -- is positioned to solve a linguistic conundrum of very long standing.  The work by Robbeets and her colleagues traces these curious language isolates and their relatives to a common origin in the Liao River Valley of northeastern China, on the order of nine thousand years ago, which is pretty stunning.

It also shows that despite the dearth of records and distance in time, we can still gain new insights into the origins of languages long thought to be a mystery -- and potentially reconnect spoken languages that once were considered oddball isolates, related to no other speech system.

*********************************************

If Monday's post, about the apparent unpredictability of the eruption of the Earth's volcanoes, freaked you out, you should read Robin George Andrews's wonderful new book Super Volcanoes: What They Reveal About the Earth and the Worlds Beyond.

Andrews, a science journalist and trained volcanologist, went all over the world interviewing researchers on the cutting edge of the science of volcanoes -- including those that occur not only here on Earth, but on the Moon, Mars, Venus, and elsewhere.  The book is fascinating enough just from the human aspect of the personalities involved in doing primary research, but looks at a topic it's hard to imagine anyone not being curious about; the restless nature of geology that has generated such catastrophic events as the Yellowstone Supereruptions.

Andrews does a great job not only demystifying what's going on inside volcanoes and faults, but informing us how little we know (especially in the sections on the Moon and Mars, which have extinct volcanoes scientists have yet to completely explain).  Along the way we get the message, "Will all you people just calm down a little?", particularly aimed at the purveyors of hype who have for years made wild claims about the likelihood of an eruption at Yellowstone occurring soon (turns out it's very low) and the chances of a supereruption somewhere causing massive climate change and wiping out humanity (not coincidentally, also very low).

Volcanoes, Andrews says, are awesome, powerful, and fascinating, but if you have a modicum of good sense, nothing to fret about.  And his book is a brilliant look at the natural process that created a great deal of the geology of the Earth and our neighbor planets -- plate tectonics.  If you are interested in geology or just like a wonderful and engrossing book, you should put Super Volcanoes on your to-read list.

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

The origin of Antarctican

Here's a bit of writing that should be familiar to most of you.

Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum; Si þin nama gehalgod to becume þin rice gewurþe ðin willa on eorðan swa swa on heofonum.  Urne gedæghwamlican hlaf syle us todæg, and forgyf us ure gyltas swa swa we forgyfað urum gyltendum; and ne gelæd þu us on costnunge ac alys us of yfele soþlice.

Recognize it?

It's the Lord's Prayer in English as it was spoken only a thousand years ago.  My guess is a lot of you had no idea what it was (although I have a number of regular readers who, like me, are aficionados of obscure languages; y'all don't count).  There are a few words that haven't changed in that time -- in this passage, only "us" and "and" -- but most have changed dramatically.  There are even a couple of letters that don't exist in Modern English, strikingly ð (pronounced like the first consonant in there) and þ (the first consonant in thin), both of which are written as "th" in Modern English.

Languages change, and they change at different rates.  Old Norse and Modern Icelandic are really more like different dialects of the same language than they are like different languages, even though just as much time has passed between Old Norse and Modern Icelandic as between Old English and Modern English.  There are sometimes sudden jumps -- the Norman Conquest in the 11th century and the Great Vowel Shift in the 15th are the two best-known examples from English, although the Viking Invasions of the 9th and 10th centuries had a significant effect, too, not only on vocabulary and pronunciation, but on place names.  (The subject of my master's thesis was how the Vikings affected Old English and Old Gaelic, which should win an award for research with no practical applications whatsoever.)

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons M. Adiputra, Globe of language, CC BY-SA 3.0]

These huge leaps are uncommon, however, and most language change progresses slowly and gradually.  The parallels to biological evolution are obvious, and the argument over whether language change is smooth or goes by fits-and-starts is just as silly as the corresponding argument over evolutionary gradualism vs. punctuated equilibrium.  It's not that one is the correct model and the other is not; both are correct, just in different circumstances.

The big jumps, of course, are easier to detect.  The effects of the Norman Invasions of England were profound, as words were adopted from French and then bent to conform to English phonological rules.  It's why we have so many pairs of words for food, one for its living farmyard state and the other for when it's on the table.  Cow/beef; sheep/mutton; pig/pork; chicken/poultry; calf/veal.  In each case, the first is from Old English (because the lower socioeconomic class Anglo-Saxons were the ones on the farm raising the animals) and the other from French (because their Norman overlords only saw the animal after being cooked).

But the similarity between language evolution and biological evolution runs a lot deeper than its pace.  Like evolutionary change in populations, language "speciation" not only needs small changes (corresponding to genetic mutations), selection (some forms succeeding and others disappearing), and some form of isolation.  Isolated populations take off on their own paths, often very different from the parent population, and because of the small number of individuals often do so more quickly than a large group would -- a sort of linguistic genetic drift.  (A good example is the Cornish language, which branched off from Welsh as a dialect in Roman times; by the 13th century, when the earliest extant examples of Cornish were written down, the two had evolved into two no longer mutually intelligible languages.)

This topic comes up because of some recent amazingly cool research by Jonathan Harrington, Michele Gubian, Mary Stevens, and Florian Schiel of the University of Munich, in which linguists have -- perhaps for the first time -- seen the beginnings of a dialect forming as it happens.  In "Phonetic Change in an Antarctic Winter," published last month in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, we find out about a study of the people who were isolated at the field station of the British Antarctic Survey during the long, frigid Antarctic winter, and about whom the researchers found something astonishing.

They started with a variety of accents, coming as they did from different English-speaking regions, but over the six months they were isolated, their accents began to converge into a distinct way of speaking unlike any of the "parent" accents.  Vowel sounds, especially, merged.  As an example, some of the speakers started out pronouncing the vowel sound in the word food as a front vowel (this is more common in British English), whereas others used a back vowel (more common in American English).  After only six months, the two sounds had converged, and everyone pronounced the sound as a middle vowel about halfway between the two extremes.

The authors write:

An acoustic analysis was made of the speech characteristics of individuals recorded before and during a prolonged stay in Antarctica.  A computational model was used to predict the expected changes due to close contact and isolation, which were then compared with the actual recorded productions.  The individuals were found to develop the first stages of a common accent in Antarctica whose phonetic characteristics were in some respects predicted by the computational model.  These findings suggest that the phonetic attributes of a spoken accent in its initial stages emerge through interactions between individuals causing speech production to be incrementally updated.

Of course, since the field station isn't permanently occupied by the same people, it's pretty likely that when the eleven test subjects went back to their homes (eight from various regions of England, one from the United States, and the other two -- who were not native speakers -- to Iceland and Germany) their accent reverted to the pronunciations typical for their milieu.

But it does give us a lens into how dialects form in other less contrived situations, and you can easily see how -- given enough time -- you might end up with modes of speaking so different that they would no longer be mutually intelligible.

Even, perhaps, to the point that "Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum" becomes "Our Father, who art in heaven."

***********************

This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is brand new; Brian Clegg's wonderful Dark Matter and Dark Energy: The Hidden 95% of the Universe.  In this book, Clegg outlines "the biggest puzzle science has ever faced" -- the evidence for the substances that provide the majority of the gravitational force holding the nearby universe together, while simultaneously making the universe as a whole fly apart -- and which has (thus far) completely resisted all attempts to ascertain its nature.

Clegg also gives us some of the cutting-edge explanations physicists are now proposing, and the experiments that are being done to test them.  The science is sure to change quickly -- every week we seem to hear about new data providing information on the dark 95% of what's around us -- but if you want the most recently-crafted lens on the subject, this is it.

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