The fields of crops and water
Nicholas Wade New York Times, Haaretz.
The countries of origin of the Indo-European languages stretch from Dublin to Delhi. But the Hadza, a unique language, lives in the mouths of only a thousand people, living near Lake Iasi in Tanzania. Why do the languages of the world have such an unequal distribution pattern?
Two researchers speculate that the explanation for this is largely related to events that began 10,000 years ago, when field crops were domesticated in different areas.
The invention of agriculture has been cited many times as one of the explanations for the spread of Indo-European languages. Now, Dr. Jared Diamond of the University of California, Los Angeles and Dr. Peter Bellwood of the Australian National University in Canberra, have applied this idea to 15 large language families. Their article was published in the April 25 issue of "Science" magazine.
The researchers' assumption is that when humans lived as hunters and gatherers, their populations were small, because wild animals and strawberries could only support a limited number of humans. But after the agricultural system was developed, the populations expanded, pushing out the surrounding hunter-gatherers and spreading their own languages. According to this theory, the language that was spoken by the inhabitants of the area where the field habitat was spread along with the peasants who spoke it. And even if there was intermarriage between the farmers and the hunter-gatherers whose lands they took, then genes can mix and languages - not.
Therefore in many cases the hunter-gatherers adopted the language of the peasants. That's why languages "preserve these processes of demographic expansion more clearly than genes," Bellwood said.
One of the most obvious demographic expansions - perhaps because it happened at the latest stage - is preserved in the 1,436 languages in the Niger-Congo language family, or the Bantu languages, the largest language family in the world. 5,000 years ago, the Bantu speakers of West Africa who cultivated the sweet potato began to spread out of their homeland. One group spread south, the other east - to the Great Lakes, and then south. Both migrations resulted in the spread of Bantu languages across a third of the African continent and the suppression of the click languages of many groups of hunter-gatherers.
The agricultural regions of China were the birthplaces of three major language families, Diamond and Bellwood write. One of them is the Austro-Asiatic family, which includes many languages spoken today by the people of Cambodia, southern China, India, Malaya and Thailand. Another group is the Thai languages, which includes the Lao and Thai languages. The third is the Sino-Tibetan family.
In the New World, the farmers who domesticated corn and beans in Mexico spread north, to the area that most days became the southwestern United States, where they brought the Oto-Aztec language family. The Austronesian family, which includes 1,236 languages, is the second largest family, after the Niger-Congo language family. The founding language was spoken by rice growers in southern China who settled Taiwan before 3000 BC and spread throughout Polynesia, until they reached New Zealand in 1200 AD.
The article in "Science" supports a bold hypothesis regarding the origin of Japanese. The authors claim that it originates from the language of the rice growers who came from Korea around 400 BC. Modern Japanese is very different from Korean, but the history of Korea includes three ancient kingdoms, each with its own language. Modern Korean originated from the ancient Ceylon language. According to the article, Japanese may have evolved from another ancient Korean language, Koguryo.
As China was a vast habitat for families of new languages in the East, so the Fertile Crescent, stretching from Lebanon to Iraq, was the source of at least three important families of languages in the West. One of the families was Dravidian, a language family now centered in southern India. The second was the Indo-European family, which includes the English, French and German in the western branch and the Iranian and Hindi in the eastern branches. The third may have been the Afro-Asiatic family, which includes ancient Egyptian languages and Semitic languages such as Arabic and Hebrew.
"These early waves of the spread of languages were actually based on demographic processes, in other words, on colonization," Bellwood said. According to Diamond, agriculture did not drive all waves of language expansion - one example of this is the expansion of the Inuit throughout the Arctic Circle - but "for most common language families, the driving force behind the expansion was agricultural". Diamond said the new theory also states that waves of propagation are likely to occur more easily along an east-west axis than a north-south axis, because the field crops on which agriculture depends typically grow only at certain latitudes.
Diamond is a physiologist interested in the origin of man and Bellwood is an archaeologist specializing in Southeast Asia. Their collaboration spans the fields of many experts, who will certainly not agree with every single detail. Dr. Christopher Ahart of UCLA, an expert in the history of African languages, says the authors overstated the importance of agriculture as an explanation for the pattern of language distribution. "The spread of language families happened for different reasons at different times and places. One of the reasons was sometimes the development of agriculture," said Ahart. He disagreed with Bellwood's opinion that the Indo-European languages spread thanks to agriculture. According to Ahart, linguistic evidence shows that early Indo-European speakers knew wheel technology and owned horses from about 3,500-4,500 BC, but agriculture reached Europe at least 2,500 years earlier. Ahart also disputed the claim that Afro-Asiatic languages were spread by farmers from the Fertile Crescent. Afro-Asiatic appeared in northeast Africa 13,000 years ago. The Semitic branch spread to Southwest Asia 5,000 years ago, according to Ahart, with two much later return migrations that gave rise to the Amharic language in Ethiopia and the Arabic languages in North Africa.
But Dr. Colin Renfrew, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge, said that while he disagreed with Diamond on some aspects of the spread of the Indo-European family, "I anticipate that his synthesis will be useful." Dr. Merritt Rohlen of Stanford, an expert on language families, said the two authors had put together a "very useful review."
