The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue

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As a sophomore in college, I desperately wanted to major in theoretical linguistics, but I knew only three languages, and I was advised that this was insufficient for the major. Things might have been different if this book were available then: unlike most books about language evolution, Ruhlen's Origin of Language actually gets you involved in applying standard linguistic techniques to carefully chosen examples--by the end of the book, you will have constructed a family tree of the world's languages. And you needn't know any other than your mother tongue when you start, but you'll probably want to go out and learn several more languages by time you are done. Recommended.

Book Description

The Origin of Language

A critically acclaimed journey back through time in search of the Mother Tongue and the roots of the human family

"Invites the reader to learn and apply the common process used by linguists." —Science News

"This book represents exactly the kind of thinking that is needed to pull historical linguistics out of its twentieth-century doldrums. . . . [W]ithout a doubt, a very readable book, well adapted to its popularizing aim." —LOS Forum

"Believing that doing is learning, Ruhlen encourages his readers to try their hand (and eye) at classifying languages. This exercise helps us appreciate the challenges inherent in this fascinating and controversial science of comparative linguistics." —Booklist

"Ruhlen is a leader in the new attempt to write the unified theory of language development and diffusion." —Library Journal

"A powerful statement [and] also a wonderfully clear exposition of linguistic thinking about prehistory. . . . [Q]uite solid and very well presented." —Anthropological Science

Customer Reviews:

Intellectually exciting!.......2007-10-10

Who would have thought that we could reconstruct any part of the earliest language? Yet, it seems that we can, as Merritt Ruhlen shows in this book. Others have already described the contents, so I just want to respond to some of his critics.

1. Apparently, his earliest critics complained that he wasn't using a method approved by professional linguists. His response is that linguistics only made progress AFTER someone (Sir William Jones in 1786) used the same method that he was using, and if it is illegitimate for him to use it, then it was illegitimate for that person to use it, too, which would throw out all of linguistics and not just his work.

2. "Languages change too much over time for the earliest language to have left any traces." But we don't know this. Artistic styles in ancient Egypt didn't change at all over a few millennia, so why MUST language change? If language was thought of as sacred, then it may not have changed for thousands of years.

3. "Ruhlen chose the data that would give him the conclusions he wanted." Ruhlen used data to show that in the earliest language, "tik" means one and "pal" means two. Anyone who disagrees can do their own study showing that "pal" means one and "tik" means two. As far as I know, no one has done this.

4. "Going back that far leaves too much to chance." Let's say that the probability of our reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European is 90% accurate. Going back to its proto language would give 81% accuracy, and going back yet further would give 73%. 73% is of course as not as accurate as 90%, but on the other hand, it means that the reconstruction is more likely to be right than not, and that is more than I would have expected. Of course, if the original reconstruction were only 75% accurate, then by the third reconstruction we would be at 42%, which isn't very impressive. Now if mainstream linguists want to say their work is at best 75% accurate, then they've got a good objection, but I suspect they want to say their own work is better than that.

5. "Ruhlen whines." The logic that Ruhlen used in the first point I listed above I found to be quite clear and compelling. Nevertheless, another reviewer, Robert L. Trask, utterly failed to understand it. Trask was a professor of linguistics at the time he wrote his review, whereas the back cover of this book doesn't even give an affiliation for Ruhlen. The fact that a professor of linguistics couldn't understand the simple logic that someone who wasn't a professor used is, I think, an excellent reason to complain. I don't think of it as whining.

By the way, when I first heard of Ruhlen, he was teaching high school, but he is now apparently at Stanford, a move up that is well deserved.

Groundbreaking ideas for the non-specialist.......2007-08-17

I have given this book 5 stars because of the potential significance of the ideas it contains. The book is a bit quirky and I can see why those trained in linguistics might give it the thumbs down. The methods and approach that are described in the book are not rigorous. However, they are designed to present a few important concepts and in that regard, I think the book succeeds.

First of all, this book and its author have been seriously challenged by mainstream academics. But it is worth pointing out that there are two sides to any debate. In a nutshell, the author bases his ideas (in part) on those of his mentor Greenberg and he presents the idea that it is possible to identify protolanguages that existed and form the basis for the language families of today. In itself, that is nothing terribly new or controversial. It is well understood that languages like Hindi, German, Welsh, Latin, English, Greek, Hittite etc. all fall into a common language family known as Indo-European and that a proto-indo-european (PIE) language may have been spoken somewhere in eastern Europe or the middle east thousands of years ago.

Rather than review the book in depth, I would like to take the space provided here to argue against the critics of this book. The book becomes controversial when the suggestion is made that remnants of an original common world language can be identified from a few common words found in many of the world's existing languages.

The major criticisms of this idea are (as I understand it):

1) Ruhlen does not use methodology that is considered appropriate by most linguists. He uses a global comparison approach which many linguists believe favours the identification of chance similarities. Ruhlen himself argues elsewhere that the length of the words he has identified rules out the possibility of chance comparison. Because I do not know any way of easily evaluating this statistically, I cannot comment on this argument. However, as a scientist, I would never dare to argue that something was not true solely because the only method that was accepted by the academic community provided no evidence for its truth.

2) It is argued that the rate of language change is too great for there to be any possibility of comparison between major language families. Here I have to differ. Of course I am not a linguist. But it seems to me obvious that the rate of change of languages depends on many social and geographic factors. A larger population might be expected to have a more stable language structure than a smaller population for example. It is argued that over just a few hundred years, French and English have changed almost to the point of being different languages. This may be true, but obviously we can still easily discern similarities between Indo-European languages, for example.
So, how old is PIE? It is argued on the linguistic evidence (the reasoning seems a little circular here) that PIE is at least 3500 years old and probably about 5000-6000 years old. The problem here is that the archaeological evidence (we know for example that the Celts moved into Ireland soon after the end of the last Ice Age) and the genetic evidence argue against the mass movement of people (and therefore language) in recent millenia. For this reason alone, we might date PIE to at least 11,000 years ago. Of course the arguements linguists use to date languages are sophisticated and I am cautious in concluding that they are wrong. However, their dating is only as good as their methodology. They would argue that movement of people does not necessarily coincide with movement of language. Hmmm... yes, a ruling elite can impose its language on a majority subservient population (Anglo-Saxons, Normal French etc.) but there is not archaeological evidence for this sort of thing during the neolithic period, say in Ireland).

3) It has been argued that Proto-World (the original language) must be hundreds of thousands of years old and that this date is well beyond the period that similar words would be preserved. Here I must differ most strongly. Both the archaeology and the genetics suggest that language could have been invented approximately 50,000 years ago. This period coincides with the start of the great leap forward in artistic endeavour and the migration of people out of Africa. It also coincides with evidence for a major linguistic event (leap forward) as defined by a genetic sweep that occured in the FoxP2 gene which is linked to language acquisition. If we believe an older date for PIE of say about 10,000 BCE, then 50,000 BCE does not seem so distant.

The book presents some of the concepts of language families in an easy-to-digest fashion. This is also its weakness. If you are not trained in linguistics, this book will seem easy to read and enjoyable. If you are trained in linguistics, then its methodology may annoy you. Either way, it is ground-breaking stuff.

I can also recommend The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention by Guy Deutscher as an intelligent read and a great exposition of the mechanisms of language change.

A little shallow.......2006-07-03

I hoped a more scientific book, it starts with too many assumptions, but I have like and I think is worth reading it, at least reading it, since it's not a book to consult frquently.

Controversial Thesis: All Languages Come from One Source.......2006-02-05

This is Ruhlen's point. Based on modern similarities, all languages are related, some more distantly than others. At the end there is a "tree" showing the purported relationships between our language families. Ruhlen offers his case; he does not prove it. And with the exception of a handful of words, he does not attempt to recognize *Proto-World. He argues that reconstruction is unnecessary.

This book is for the lay reader. It offers a small group of words from a group of languages, and asks the reader to compare them. In each case the careful reader will find the intended relationships. Thus "The Origin of Language" guides the cooperative reader to accept the existence of language families, and then, and here's the controversial part, to accept the existence of links between families.

At first I found this infuriating. I was not a cooperative reader. After all, I have always known that there are several major language families and several isolates, each separate from the others. Ruhlen hand-picked words that would make his point. But as I read on, I accepted first that he was making a case that I disagreed with and that was likely wrong. And by the end, my previous thinking had been shaken.

"New Synthesis"

"The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue" falls into a category of scholarship that seems to go by the name "new synthesis." Mutually supporting bits of linguistic, archaeological, genetic, and social evidence are woven together to tell the story of humans leaving Africa and spreading, first along the shores of the Indian Ocean and on to New Guinea and Australia, later to the interior and western parts of Eurasia (and even later to the Americas). Authors including Renfrew and Cavelli-Sforza have written, in their own fields, books which fit into this new synthesis. A nice introduction would be Steve Olsen's "Mapping Human History."

Worth a Look

You may not agree with Merritt Ruhlen's thesis. But if you curious about the origins of language, you should take a look at this short volume. Reject it if you will, but at least you will know what the "lumpers," the single origin people are claiming.

OK, now comes the hard part. .......2005-09-24

This book, written for lay readers, ventures two arguments. One, which seems plausible enough, is that existing linguistic families correspond to genetic markers in the peoples who originally spoke them, and are related in a similar tree that relates human populations. The other, far more controversial, is that just as *Homo sapiens sapiens* is the offspring of a single stock and a common group of ancestors, so also are all human languages related; and in fact some root words of Proto-Human can be reconstructed by the comparative method.

Amateur philologists like myself will naturally jump at such a tantalizing suggestion; and perhaps one test of how good an amateur you are is to see how many problems you can find with his development of the themes.

His basic method, like Joseph Greenberg's, is bulk comparison of vocabulary. Few attempts to reconstruct underlying forms are made here, with some conspicuous exceptions. His method is to present words in lists, and invite readers to perceive similarities themselves; an interesting rhetorical ploy that makes the reader the accomplice in setting up the main thesis. In these lists, reconstructed forms from protolanguages appear unmarked next to vocabulary items taken from wide ranges of existing lnaguages; there's no reassurance that any of the words in one of his rows are from the same language, or are actually attested forms. The same is true of the long lists of words cited in text: protolanguages appear besides dozens of obscure languages. Nouns, verbs, and grammatical particles or inflections appear alongside one another in the same list.

The rest of the book is taken towards presenting an argument that explains why reconstructions or analyses of the history of his roots will not be forthcoming. Ruhlen argues that no such analysis was necessary to identify Indo-European, which was discovered on the strength of word lists alone. One flaw in this argument is that scientific hypotheses are not thumbs-up or thumbs-down propositions; rather, they gain or lose confidence depending on the depth, power, and detail of their explanatory power. It isn't that these word lists aren't enough to get to "maybe," it's that they aren't enough to go further than that.

In any case, phonological and historical rules *do* appear in the text. Ruhlen notes correctly that often a /k/ sound is voiced to /g/, or that /t/ sounds can be palatized to /c/ or /s/ sounds. These phonological rules let Ruhlen cast a wider net, allowing more and more words from different languages to be mustered as evidence. They *never* appear as historical grounds to reject a purported cognate, on the ground that the inherited form in this particular branch must have changed in an intermediate stage prior to the observed form in one language.

The bottom line is that Ruhlen's hypothesis stalls at the "maybe" stage. Someone is going to have to do the harder work of actual historical linguistics here if this hypothesis is going to be able to move past that stage.

The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue.: An article from: American Scientist

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The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue.: An article from: American Scientist

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The Origin of Language : Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue

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The Origin of Language : Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue
Merritt Ruhlen
Manufacturer: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated
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ASIN: B000V2NSL0

Customer Reviews:

A sound framework for understaning environmental degradation.......2001-06-30

There's a lot of information out there about the destruction of the planet, but an understanding of where it comes from is harder to come by. Vulnerable Planet is a very useful starting point. Using historical materialism to trace the roots of environmental degradation, Foster breaks down some of the key debates, showing that it is not over-population, industrial production or humanity in of itself that is the problem. Rather the way that production and distribution are organized under capitalism that consistently puts the drive for profit above environmental sustainability. This book is short, but packed with information, statistics, and crucially a sound political framework from which to understand both the roots and the solution to the problem.

Slender but potent.......2000-07-29

This is a little book, but very informative, although some may be put off by its Marxist point of view. Environmental destruction, as Foster shows, is as old as humankind. Nevertheless destruction of the natural world has increased at an astonishing rate during modern times making ours a very vulnerable planet. Foster links this increase to a specific social system, capitalism, instead of industrialism in general as many other critics do. This is a thought-provoking connection to make, since our media is usually silent on this topic. According to Foster (and Marx), it seems our system, capitalism, has an inborn need to turn everything it can into a saleable commodity in order to make money. Moreover it has to keep expanding commodities into ever new fields in order to return profits on money already invested. Like Topsy, then, the laws of its development tell it to either grow or die. Thus, when venture capitalists look at nature, they don't see what is living there; they see limitless raw material to be processed and sold, and if they don't do it, some competitor will. It is this relentless engine of development and destruction that has made the planet vulnerable. Thus Foster blames the problem on the way our economy operates, and not on technology in general. Critics should examine his arguments.

A couple of other subjects Foster discusses are worthy of review, given how they are usually talked about. On the topic of population and poverty, Malthus, an 18th century clergyman, famously blames poverty on the poor. The poor keep having kids when they shouldn't, he argues, which is why there are more hungry mouths to feed than food to feed them. So, the lesson is don't feed them, they'll just have more kids. Being a parson and a kind of Newt Gingrich of his time, he would leave the wretched to the mercies of God. On the other hand, Foster (and Marx) take an historical perspective on overpopulation. Capital must have the poor, because wage levels depend on having an excessive number of poor people around. Employers need them as so-called replacement workers, should their own employees strike for higher wages. Without that threat, wages would rise and employers would lose money. The poor are not God's creation, they are man's. (Considering how our chief cental banker Alan Greenspan acts by encouraging unemployment, Foster's approach makes sense.) Ecology is another important part of our planet's mounting crisis. In making his case that our economic system is the main cause of the problem, Foster discusses Barry Commoner's four informal laws of capitalist ecology. They are worth mentioning. 1) Only the cash nexus (money) is lasting; 2) Waste can go anywhere as long as it's out of the capitalist loop; 3) The free market knows best: 4) nature is the possession of the private property owner. Together these provisions make up capital's marching orders in its assault on nature. Provision #3 seems particularly destructive since it replaces the complex web of millions of years of natural evolution with profit-driven human decision. Moreover, these provisions pretty much describe how big corporations act in the real world.

Anyway, friends will find ammunition; foes will find points to ponder; and the appropriately curious will be rewarded. Foster's is a suppressed voice that really needs to be heard.

Adirondack Cabin Country (York State Books)

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Adirondack Cabin Country (York State Books)
Paul Schaefer
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Enter The Earth
My Favorite Book!
Finally a great ecological/spiritual story for girls
An engaging parable of taking responsibility for one's place
Great Read for Babies to Baby Boomers!

Gaia Girls: Enter The Earth
Lee Welles
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ASIN: 1933609001

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Elizabeth Angier was happy to be at the end of the school year. She thought her summer on the family farm would be full of work and play with her best friend, Rachel, and her other best friend, her dog, Maizey. However, Elizabeth didnÂ't anticipate the Harmony Farms Corporation moving to her town. Her world starts to crumble as her best friend moves away and her parents whisper of farmers selling their land and the effects this factory farm operation could have on them. When she thinks things canÂ't get much worse, she meets the most unusual creature, Gaia, the living entity of the Earth. Strange things begin to happen to her, around her, and through her! Elizabeth discovers that with these new powers comes responsibility. A dire mistake makes Elizabeth wonder if meeting Gaia has been a blessing or a curse. Will Elizabeth have the strength to fight a large corporation? Or will her upstate New York home be spoiled by profit driven pork production that fouls the air, land, and water?

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Enter The Earth.......2007-09-27

Elizabeth Angier is a fourth-grader who lives on a farm. She helps her parents weed the large vegetable garden, dye skeins of wool from their sheep, arrange wildflowers into bouquets to be sold at the farmers' market, and water the saplings that landscapers buy. Will, the high school boy from the dairy farm over the hill, comes over to help her dad on occasion. Elizabeth loves everything about growing up on the farm that has been in her father's family for many generations. But all this threatens to change: a company that runs "CAFO" (Concentrated Feeding Animal Organizations) pig farms arrives to woo struggling farmers into selling their farms and taking jobs with the large corporation. As Elizabeth's parents desperately research the effects of existing CAFO's on a community's air, water, commerce, and quality of life, Elizabeth herself discovers her own connection to the earth and the powers that gives her. Gaia, the spirit of the Earth, appears to her as an otter, and begins to teach her.

That's just a brief synopsis of Gaia Girls: Enter the Earth, recent winner of the 2006 National Outdoor Book Award, children's division. Although this is a fantastical novel that author Lee Welles has written for children ("ages 9 and up"), many parts of the story ring true for communities like ours. Gaia Girls: Enter the Earth takes place on a farm in upstate New York, near the Finger Lakes. Much of it reads like home, the beauty as well as the struggles.

Although I consider myself sympathetic to environmental activists, I am leary of being lumped in with folks who wear hemp and eat vegetarian because it's trendy. In sitting down to read Gaia Girls, I was a little afraid that the story would be heavy-handed on earth goddesses but skim over the true difficulties of living environmentally-aware. I am pleased to report I couldn't have been more wrong. "Three Oaks Farm" is an organic farm, but Welles makes it clear that this makes the Angier family and their products unusual for their community. They need to be very creative to be successful: they advertise their organic produce to upscale restaurants, who pre-order from the farm. Another way they make money is by selling many different products: wool, vegetables, flowers, young trees, honey. Though Elizabeth and her parents feel they live a happy life in a corner of paradise, Welles doesn't flinch from showing how fragile that existence is, and how much work it takes to maintain it.

Welles' writing is strong. At the beginning, I was reminded of Charlotte's Web. As I continued to read Gaia Girls, I realized I was in the middle of a wonderful new literary phenomenon. I see this book, and the series to follow, touching many as it touched me. Enter the Earth reminded me of environmental issues and earth science facts that I already know about, but made me feel more attached to them. Without being preachy, Gaia Girls helps the reader see the science behind farming methods that are good for the earth, and how it is healthy for the people who live there and those of us who eat the food grown there. With Elizabeth, we can connect to the farm, as she and the farm connect to the earth. I raced through the book, loved the story, and can't wait for more.

Author of "Hobo Finds A Home" and editor of "A Predatory Heart"

My Favorite Book!.......2007-01-26

I have to agree with everyones comment about how wonderfully this book was written for all ages. My Grandma and I are a living example of how a young and older reader loved and enjoyed this book.

I Love this book and I hope their are many other people out there that agree.
I hope one day this book turns into a movie, that would be really cool.

Keep up the great work Welles!

Finally a great ecological/spiritual story for girls.......2007-01-10

As a retired teacher I was overjoyed to read this first Gaia Girls book. It has real characters leading real lives. The spiritual connection to our world is handled delightfully and carefully. The spiritual aspects are not connected to organized religion, but to a love for the planet and all that it holds. I sent copies to my female grandchildren, but they tell me their mother grabbed it first. I highly recommend this. I can't wait for the next two volumes!

An engaging parable of taking responsibility for one's place.......2007-01-06

Written by summer camp nature director and wellness expert Lee Welles presents Gaia Girls: Enter the Earth, the first novel of the Gaia Girls Book Series. A young girl, Elizabeth Angier, is shocked when the powerful Harmony Farms Corporation moves in and absorbs family farms like those of her parents and neighbors. As the repercussions of the gigantic factory farm loom closer, Elizabeth unexpectedly encounters the mysterious Gaia, the living entity of the Earth itself. Elizabeth receives a gift of Gaia's power, and strange things begin to happen around and through her. But with these amazing new powers come heavy responsibility, and the challenge of taking on a whole corporation and its profit-fueled pork production that befouls air, land and water. Though written for young adults, Gaia Girls is an engaging parable of taking responsibility for one's place on the Earth for all ages.

Great Read for Babies to Baby Boomers!.......2006-12-31

We bought a copy of "Gaia Girls: Enter the Earth" for our grand-daughter, but when the book arrived I read the first couple of pages and found I was hooked!

It's a difficult task to write something that appeals to both youngsters and oldsters, but Ms. Welles has done a fantastic job weaving an extremely entertaining story plot with the monumentally important message that we are all threads in Earth's incredible web of life and that our actions have planetary consequences.

We're ordering four more copies (for now) to share with friends and family (including our grand-daughter!) and we're impatiently waiting for Book 2 to become available.

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The New York Environment Book
Mark A. Izeman , and Eric Goldstein
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Book Description

This modern field of multi-agent systems has developed from two main lines of earlier research: its practitioners generally regard it as a form of distributed artificial intelligence, whereas some researchers have persistently advocated ideas from the field of artificial life. AI agents (and their designers) usually take the environment for agent interaction as granted. From the ALife perspective and for ALife agents, the environment for interaction is an active participant in agent dynamics, a first class member of the overall systems.

This book originates from the First International Workshop on Environments for Multi-Agent Systems, E4MAS 2004, held in New York, NY, USA in July 2004 as a satellite workshop of AAMAS 2004. The 13 carefully selected reviewed and revised papers presented together with an introductory survey article of close to 50 pages are organized in topical sections on conceptual models, language for design and specification, simulation and environments, mediated coordination, and applications.

Interdependence Of Organisms And Environments (Life Science Library (New York, N.Y.).)

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Interdependence Of Organisms And Environments (Life Science Library (New York, N.Y.).)
Isaac Nadeau
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ASIN: 1404228195

Making Mountains: New York City and the Catskills (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books)

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Making Mountains: New York City and the Catskills (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books)
David Stradling
Manufacturer: University of Washington Press
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For over two hundred years, the Catskill Mountains have been repeatedly and dramatically transformed by New York City. In Making Mountains, David Stradling shows the transformation of the Catskills landscape as a collaborative process, one in which local and urban hands, capital, and ideas have come together to reshape the mountains and the communities therein, with environmental, economic, and cultural consequences.

Early on, the Catskills were an important source of natural resources. Later, when New York City needed to expand its water supply, engineers helped direct the city toward the Catskills, claiming that the mountains offered the purest and most cost-effective waters. By the 1960s, New York had created a great reservoir and aqueduct system in the mountains that now supplies the city with 90 percent of its water.

The Catskills also served as a critical space in which the nation's ideas about nature evolved. Stradling describes the great influence of writers and artists - especially the painters of the Hudson River School, whose ideal landscapes created expectations about how rural America should appear. By the mid-1800s, urban residents had turned the Catskills into an important vacation ground, and by the late 1800s, the Catskills had become one of the premiere resort regions in the nation.

In the mid-twentieth century, the older Catskill resort region was in steep decline, but the Jewish "Borscht Belt" in the southern Catskills was thriving. The automobile revitalized mountain tourism and residence, and increased the threat of suburbanization of the historic landscape. Throughout each of these significant incarnations, urban and rural residents worked in a rough collaboration, though not without conflict, to reshape the mountains and American ideas about rural landscapes and nature.

David Stradling is associate professor of history at the University of Cincinnati. His focus is the intersection of urban and environmental history. He is author of Smokestacks and Progressives: Environmentalists, Engineers, and Air Quality in America, 1881-1951 and editor of Conservation in the Progressive Era: Classic Texts.

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New York Times Book of Science Literacy Volume II the Environment From Your Backyard to the Ocean Floor

Manufacturer: Time Inc.
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ASIN: B000HFNUMI

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New York Times Book of Science Literacy,Vol.II, The: The Environment from Your Backyard to the Ocean Floor
Science Times Editors
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ASIN: 0812922158
Release Date: 1994-07-12

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Sedimentary facies: Products of sedimentary environments in a cross section of the classic Appalachian Mountains and adjoining Appalachian basin in New ... excursion guide book = Guide d'excursion)
Gerald M Friedman
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ASIN: B0007AWJM0

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