Five protolanguages and a mother tongue

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Five protolanguages and a Mother Tongue

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Afroasiatic, Dené-Sino-Caucasic, Eurasiatic, Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan
compared according to the qualities of the protolanguages and the living
languages of their descendants
An introduction to the linguistic landscape, prepared for the non-linguist
interested in the history and the mystery of our sound & meaning
Pieter Uys

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The Mother Tongue
Humans have always known about and regretted the loss of the Mother Tongue as witnessed by myth and folk tales. But were it not
for some committed individuals, it would forever remain a matter of vague regret.
I dedicate these words to Professor Greenberg and Messrs Ruhlen and Fleming for their roles on the front line of historical linguistics
and language taxonomy. The reality of the protolanguages of the Meso and late Palæolithic now haunts the sterile fields of late
modernity. And Boreal the mystic hovers at the edge of our dreams, an envoy and a witness of the time when our ancestors
encountered the gift and the curse of speech.
I should hope that these words and this rudimentary attempt to provide a framework for researching the protolanguages in context,
would interest and maybe inspire someone, perhaps even a future linguist. There’s so much magic entangled in the sounds and
rhythms of speech, but one must first take the initiative to explore. The rewards, when they come, will be profound and valuable on
many levels.
And remember, when the diachronics fail, the dates disappoint and the cognates collapse … then you will hear the whisperings of
the word drawing near.

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CONTENTS
The Mother Tongue 3
Language Families 5
Genetic Linguistics 6
Gender, Noun Class 8
Consonant Inventory 11
Vowel Harmony 14
Morphological Typology 16
Affixes 18
Adpositions 19
Word Order 20
Conclusion 25
Bibliography 27
MAPS
Language Families 5
Sprachbund 7
Gender, Animacy 9
Grammatical Gender Categories 11
Number of Consonants 12
Vowel Inventory 13
Vowel Harmony 15
Prepositions & postpositions 19
Subject - Verb - Object 21
Subject – Object – Verb 22
WALS Word Order 23
Table: Comparison 24

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LANGUAGE FAMILIES
World Map of Language Families by Alphonse Eylenburg eylenburg.github.io
https://eylenburg.github.io/languages_map.htm

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GENETIC LINGUISTICS
It was Sergey Starostin who first revealed the opulence of the Dené-Sino-Caucasian sound system. But a language lives not only by its sounds, but by the
shapes and patterns they form. The inventory of language can be uplifting, intriguing and weird.
Vowels are slurred, they alternate and they shift, become rounded and get two dots placed over them. Sounds apologize, displace, and shift between
transitive, intransitive and mediopassive states while a host of affixes perform their functions efficiently.
Sounds are suffused with secrets and mystery, even to the experts. The respective reconstructions of Proto-Nilo-Saharan by the linguists Lionel Bender
and Christopher Ehret differ markedly – with Bender proposing 22 consonants against Ehret’s 42.
The Niger-Congo languages with the largest phoneme inventories are Nguni- and Sotho of Southern Africa. Sesotho has 39 consonants and 9 vowels while
Xhosa has 66 and 10. And you never knew that those South African languages that incorporated click consonants far surpass those who did not in number
of non-click consonants.
Along with Europe’s Caucasus area, Southern Africa holds the record for languages with the highest number of phonemes. The Tuu or southern branch of
San has the !Xóõ language which is the absolute champion in this regard.
Consider Nilo-Saharan again, and note how her quirks have flourished and evolved in the mouths of her daughters despite the insufferable areal onslaught
and the tyranny of the Sprachbund.

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SPRACHBUND
A sprachbund is an ensemble of neighbouring languages within a defined geographical area and without a close genetic heritage, which share
certain structural features. The correspondences or similarities arise from language contact. Areal linguistics is about the diffusion of structural
features across the languages and dialects of a defined geographical area. Owing to language contact which often involves bi- or trilingualism, the
languages of such an area draw lose and develop shared features.
Linguistic maps featuring several grammatical and phonological features, created by R. Pereira, a graduated linguist and conlanger.

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GENDER & NOUN CLASSES
Proto-Dene-Sino-Caucasian had noun classes, marked with prefix *u- for male and *i- for female, while prefix *w-/*b-/*m- encompasses
parts of the body, bodily fluids and some animals. Prefixes *r/*d cover more animals and natural phenomena with *s and *a.
This system is robust among the languages of the Northeast Caucasus, and far to the east where the Hindu Kush and Karakoram meet, and even in Siberia
on the banks of Yenisei. Elsewhere relics of the class markers cling to Basque and Tibetan nouns.
The number of noun classes in Niger-Congo languages can reach 23. They accommodate male, female, animacy, inanimacy, places, plants, more animals,
diminutives and abstractions.
On the other hand, Eurasiatic and Nilo-Saharan had no such thing, not even her or him. Only much later did some Nilotic tongues like Turkana and Bari pick
them up from the banter of some witty or pedantic speakers of Afroasiatic. And the Indo-Europeans, no doubt wishing to be with-it or cool, acquired three
genders in an act of excess!
So that leaves one family who’s kept him and her from the start – Afroasiatic in whose prototongue is proof.

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GENDER, ANIMATE & INANIMATE
https://linguisticmaps.tumblr.com/

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CONSONANT INVENTORY
The formidable consonant inventory of Dené-Sino-Caucasian puts that of Eurasiatic in the shade. For one thing, all of its stops and all of its affricates have
the choice of voiced or not or ejective. All in all the arsenal comprises 50 phonemic consonants and eight phonemic vowels.
This majestic phonology encompasses complex sibilant-affricate and resonant combinations, of which the cognates in Eurasiatic pale in their simplicity.
Another of its treasures is the wealth of lateral affricates like / dl, tl and tl’/. All of them survive in the East Caucasian languages Avar, Andi and Tsez, and in
Na-Dene, in words like Navajo ‘dloo’ “ground squirrel”, ‘-tle/-tlee’ “socks” and ‘tl’ee’ “night”.
Three series of sibilants and sibilant-affricates appear before the phonemes /s, c, c, ʒ/, before the palatals /ś, ć, ćʼ/ and after /š, č, čʼ, ǯ/, of which the traces
linger in Basque. Plus a series of uvulars /ʁ ɢ x, χ/ which is rare elsewhere.
By contrast, Eurasiatic offers only the plain old /l/ in *luńgV “snow” and *lVp’V “leaf, bark”, versus Proto-DSC *Htl’wǐnV “winter” and *tl’ăpǐ “leaf ” c and
PDSC *tl’ānpV “tongue, lip”.
Nilo-Saharan languages are tonal with complex vowel systems; some use tones to mark inflections like case, aspect, person. Although the north-western
group displays analytical elements and agglutination, they retain the core characteristics of the inflectional type, especially root-internal vowel change.

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VOWEL HARMONY
Some people make a special quest of living in harmony. Of course their speech is part of it. Instead of slang and swearing, they strife to articulate the
elegance in every word.
Some languages are like that, too. In Europe, Asia and Africa these employ vowel harmony. It means that a word may contain only the approved vowels of
a certain class. The criterion may be front or back position, nasal or palatal articulation, lip rounding or the position of the tongue root.
Vowel harmony is a process of assimilation in which the sounds of a word are shaped aesthetically. The result is called metaphony and it serves Eurasiatic,
Niger-Congo and the Nilo-Saharan languages very well.
In Eurasiatic it usually means that a word has either front or back vowels and that the vowels of the suffixes or declensions get in line with the “Anlaut” of
the root. Some languages like lip rounding harmony too, which occurs together with front-back harmony. African and Mongolian languages tend to use
tongue root position (ATR) harmony.
The Niger-Congo languages that have two sets of vowels: /i e ə o u/ and /i ε a ɔ υ/, use only one set in a word. Even in languages without vowel harmony,
restrictions are often placed on a word’s second vowel. Nilo-Saharan might have borrowed tongue root position harmony from the Niger-Congo family but
it might also be an ancient inherent trait of Proto-Nilo-Saharan.
Vowel harmony is strongest in the Uralo-Siberian (Finnish, Hungarian) and Transeurasian (Turkic, Mongolic) branches of Eurasiatic, and in the Niger-Congo
family. It does not seem to be important to the Afroasiatic family although there are Arabic dialects with vowel harmony, and historically the phenomenon
of Babylonian vowel harmony is well known. That was after the Akkadian language gained a fourth vowel, /e/ (on top of /a/, /u/ and /i/) by virtue of Sumerian
which in many ways was the polar opposite of Akkadian.

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VOWEL HARMONY
https://linguisticmaps.tumblr.com/post/120811630523/31-vowel-harmony-very-characteristic-of-turkic

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MORPHOLOGICAL TYPOLOGY OF THE PROTOLANGUAGES
Morphological Typology has limited value in synchronic differentiation of language families, as some terms are vague (analytical, isolating, agglutinating,
synthetic, polysynthetic) but above all because different morphological types arise from the known protolanguages. For example, the highly polysynthetic
Proto-Dené-Sino-Caucasian is the ancestor of the isolating Chinese languages, and of the highly synthetic North Caucasian languages.
One could try to keep it simple by saying that the words of analytical languages lack endings, that agglutinating languages build chains of endings from
blocks with a single meaning each, and that the endings of inflectional languages refer to more than one thing. Polysynthetic languages combine multiple
parts of speech into one word by using fusional and agglutinative elements.
Another way is to recognize agglutination and fusion as forms of inflection; agglutination is one-dimensional while fusion is multidimensional.
Languages with a lot of inflections are called synthetic languages; these inflections may be either agglutinative or fusional. Languages that have so much
inflection that there is no easy way to distinguish an inflected word from a sentence are called polysynthetic languages.
Finnish is an example of an agglutinating synthetic language while Sanskrit is an example of a fusional synthetic language. In this paradigm, English would
be an analytical language with fusional elements.
I Proto-Dené-Sino-Caucasian was a highly polysynthetic language employing both agglutination and fusion. Among its descendants
are analytical languages like Chinese, polysynthetic inflectional languages like the NW and NE Caucasian languages, and the
agglutinative inflectional tongues Basque, Burushaski and Navajo.
II Proto-Eurasiatic was an inflectional agglutinating language that used ablaut and preferred suffixes to prefixes. Among its
descendants are fusional inflectional languages like Proto-Indo-European, Latin and Sanskrit, agglutinating inflectional languages like
Finnish and Turkish, and analytical languages with elements of fusional inflection, like English.

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III Proto-Afroasiatic was a fusional inflectional language that used ablaut, prefixes, infixes and suffixes. Among its descendants are the
modern Arabic dialects that are analytic with inflectional elements of both a fusional and agglutinating nature.
IV Proto-Nilo-Saharan was a fusional inflectional language that used both prefixes and suffixes. Among its descendants are analytical
languages like Central Sudanic and inflectional agglutinating languages like Nilotic and Nubian.
V Proto-Niger-Congo was an inflectional agglutinating language. Among its descendants are inflectional agglutinating languages like
the Ntu Group and isolating languages like those of the Kwa and Benue branches.

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AFFIXES
An affix is a bound morpheme that occurs before or within or after the base of a word. An affix may thus be a prefix, infix or suffix that modifies the
meaning of a word.
https://linguisticmaps.tumblr.com/

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ADPOSITIONS
Prepositions and postpositions are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations or designate various semantic roles.
https://linguisticmaps.tumblr.com/image/184464412838

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WORD ORDER
Gell-Man and Ruhlen prove that the Mother Tongue had SOV word order. Except for instances of diffusion, the direction of syntactic change is mostly from
SOV to SVO. After that phase, SVO becomes VSO/VOS before reversion to SVO through diffusion, although diffusion is not the most important factor in the
development of word order. The two rarest word orders – OVS and OSV – derive directly from SOV.
Five of the six branches of the Dené-Sino-Caucasian macrofamily have exclusive SOV word order. (Subject-Object-Verb). The other branch, Sino-Tibetan,
has mainly SOV except Chinese, Bai and Karen with SVO (Subject-Verb-Object).
In Eurasiatic, 149 languages have SOV, 59 have SVO and 6, (the Island Celtic languages), have VSO. This remains a mystery and the search for substrates
continue.
Nilo-Saharan has SOV, SVO and VSO. Songhai and Saharan have SOV while Kuliak and the Nilotic languages have predominantly VSO.
Niger-Congo has 35 SOV and 264 SVO, and the Ntu-group has 1 SOV and 118 SVO.
‘The distribution of word order types in the world’s languages, interpreted in terms of the putative phylogenetic tree of human languages, strongly supports the
hypothesis that the original word order in the ancestral language was SOV. Furthermore, in the vast majority of known cases (excluding diffusion), the direction
of change has been almost uniformly SOV > SVO and, beyond that, primarily SVO > VSO/VOS. There is also evidence that the two extremely rare word orders,
OVS and OSV, derive directly from SOV.’*
*Gell-Man, Murray & Ruhlen, Merritt. (2011). The origin and evolution of word order. Santa Fe Institute, Stanford University.

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SVO WORD ORDER
https://linguisticmaps.tumblr.com/image/130564407598

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SOV WORD ORDER
https://linguisticmaps.tumblr.com/post/130564019038/sov-word-order-most-common-word-order-and-present

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Afroasiatic
Dené-Sino-
Caucasic
Eurasiatic
Gender/Class M + F
Four noun classes
Animate M + F
Inanimate I & Inanimate II
Latent; Later in Anatolian:
Animate vs Inanimate
Later: PIE M + F + N
Affixation More prefixes than suffixes Equal distribution More suffixes than prefixes
Vowel inventory i u
a
i ɨ u
e ə o
ä /æ/
i u
e o
a
Vowel harmony Babylonian Latent; appears in daughters
Root structure
CV
CVC
C1VC2V
C1VC2VC3V
CVCC
Rounded front
vowels
In daughters
Consonant
inventory
32
[Bomhard 36 (6])
50+ 25
Morphology
Fusions
with agglutination
Polysynthetic
with fusion and agglutination
Agglutinating
with fusional elements
NB: Vowel inventory in Afroasiatic and DSC probably had a set of long vowels too.

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CONCLUSION
The oldest protolanguage of Africa (Proto-Nilo-Saharan), and the oldest one of Europe (Proto-Dené-Sino-Caucasian) were
contemporaneous with Afroasiatic. (Speculated chronology: 16,000 BC to 9,000 BC?)
Some millennia later, the largest language family of Africa (Niger-Congo) and the largest one of Eurasia (Eurasiatic) were also
contemporaries. The difference between the younger ones and the older ones is that both of the younger ones had a less complex
phonological and morphological structure.
The distributional pattern in Africa reveals that Nilo-Saharan was spoken over a contiguous area of North and North-Central Africa
which was penetrated and broken up by Niger-Congo.
Dené-Sino-Caucasian dominated the Eurasian landmass north of the Mediterranean and the Middle East, from the Atlantic to the
Pacific, including the Karakorum and the Hindu Kush.
Eventually Eurasiatic languages like Indo-European, Uralic and Transeurasian displaced the Dené-Sino-Caucasian languages so that
only the Basque area, the North Caucasus, the Hunza and Nagar Valleys of Pakistan, and a few remote spots along the banks of the
Yenisei River in Siberia remained.
Afroasiatic first expanded into North Africa with the Chadic branch which took a northern route through the Sinai peninsula, and
encountered Nilo-Saharan on the way. Then the Cushitic branch in the Arabian Peninsula crossed the Bab-el-Mandeb to settle the
Horn of Africa. Here also Afroasiatic encountered Nilo-Saharan languages. (Omotic might have arrived before Cushitic).

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The next migration from the Near East involved Berber and Egyptian. Egyptians settled in the Nile Valley while Berbers spread over
the Maghreb and Sahara and did not stop until they reached the Canary Islands.
We get one more answer and more questions:
Nilo-Saharan and Niger-Congo have a strong connection to Borean, as Wim van Binsbergen claimed.
The question arises whether Dené-Sino-Caucasian and Nilo-Saharan were direct successors of Borean.
And when and why did the younger group displace the older one on both continents? It seems that Niger-Congo might have
displaced Nilo-Saharan in the Sahel and North Central Africa only after the Chadic disruption in West Africa.
Is also seems that Afroasiatic did not displace Dené-Sino-Caucasian anywhere in Eurasia unless Sumerian was of PDSC lineage.
Closer to historical times the Semitic branch lived in close proximity to the Proto-Indo-European in northern Mesopotamia and
eastern Anatolia, with Proto-Kartvelian nearby.
And that is that.

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protolanguage boreal borean historical linguistics genetic linguistics protolanguages language contact areal linguistics
sprachbund Nilo-Saharan languages Niger-Congo languages Dené-Sino-Caucasian Eurasiatic comparative linguistics
language in prehistory language families linguistic convergence borean roots Nostratic mother tongue grammatical gender
genetic linguistics Chadic Cushitic Semitic Omotic Berber Egyptian Akkadian Sumerian Sino Caucasian Tsjadies
Kusities Semities Omoties Genetiese taalkunde historiese taalkunde boriese stamme vokaalharmonie vowel harmony
ablaut uralo-siberian phonology altaic semantic shift proto-world mother tongue proto-human

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