In Search Of The Babel Tower

The many and varied languages of the world: do they all historically derive from a single parent "proto-language"? There is much speculation on that question, especially with the use of computer technology to compare language data in order to find common elements and trends between languages. Happily, some languages have a well-known and well-documented parent language, e.g. Latin, Sanskrit, ancient Greek, Achamenid Persian. Yet, there is no conclusive proof that all human languages arose from a single blissful and proverbial Garden of Eden-type scenario, completely devoid of all communication confusion. Nevertheless, the more we discover similarities between existing languages, the more tempting the speculation of the existence of a prehistoric "proto-language" becomes, as an object of further academic pursuit.

The first most obvious sign of historic kinship between languages is similarity of vocabularies. Yet often, lexical items referring to sophisticated economic, religious and socio-political institutions, as well as to science and technology, may easily be borrowed from one language to another, with no evidence of historic kinship between the donor and recipient languages in question. Far less likely to be mere borrowings, and thus more likely to be relevant and useful to prove linguistic kinships, are words referring to mankind's most primitive state of existence. Those words are: 1)counting numbers, 2)names of body parts, 3)names of family relations, and 4)names of natural phenomena. In considering lexical items for comparison, phonological differences, as well as similarities, may point to a common origin of two or more languages, so long as the phonological differences are correspondingly regular, systematic and predictable.

Also important to compare is language grammar, far less transient than individual words in languages. Do the languages in question have similar sentence structure and word order? How do the languages conjugate their verbs? Do the languages in question decline their nouns and adjectives by means of a series of case endings, or is the spatial relationship between nouns defined only by prepositions and postpositions?

Most importantly, it must be remembered that no one single consideration alone proves and conclusive historic relationship between languages, but all evidences must be weighed together as a whole. The bottom-line point here is that definite and reasonable criteria do exist to guide us, in proving and defining historic relations between languages.

-Lawrence K. Marsh