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

by Merritt Ruhlen

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

Genres: Linguistics, Language, Nonfiction, History, Science, Anthropology, Biology

256 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1994

Reviews

[Manny · Rating 5 out of 5]

On 29 December 1566, Tycho Brahe, a young Danish nobleman who was studying at the University of Rostock, quarrelled with his third cousin Manderup Parsberg about the validity of a mathematical formula. Neither side would back down and they ended up fighting a duel over it, which resulted in Brahe losing part of his nose and being disfigured for life. He went on to become the greatest observational astronomer of his age, carrying out detailed measurements of planetary movements which after his death allowed his assistant Johannes Kepler to formulate the ground-breaking Three Laws.

Now that's how academics ought to be if they want to make a mark and be taken seriously. I am ashamed to say that, like everyone else I know in modern academia, I have never once fought a duel to defend a point of principle. The closest I've come was an incident in 1990 when I published a critical journal article that seriously pissed off a Swedish professor. One of my colleagues was attending a conference; a colleague of the person I'd criticized came up to him during the coffee break, pinned him against the wall, and asked him what the fuck I'd meant and how dared I say that. My friend was impressed! But, despite a few attempts, I have never been able to repeat this early triumph. In general, the current generation of academics are taught to avoid confrontation and try to get on with people.

Merritt Ruhlen, I'm delighted to see, is an old-school kind of guy, and even if he hasn't yet had his nose cut off I'm sure there are plenty of linguists who'd like to help him with that problem. This book gives a condensed, accessible account of the program he's been pursuing for a large part of his distinguished career, whose ambitious goal is to establish a family tree for all the world's languages. I am impressed to learn how much progress Ruhlen and his collaborators have made. Most comparative linguists apparently call him a crank, but Ruhlen has many supporters in the genetics, archaeology and anthropology communities, and is well-liked there; he has even published papers together with the legendary Murray Gell-Mann. For my money, Ruhlen is not a crank, and may go down in history as one of the 20th century's most important linguists.

Ruhlen says that his methods are essentially no more than common sense, and appears exasperated by the hostile reception he has received. It is, indeed hard to explain the hostility on purely rational grounds. The book starts with a precis of the pioneering work done 200 years ago to discover the Indo-European family of languages, which was very simple in nature: people noticed that basic words ("I", "you", "hand", "blood", "fly" etc) tended to have similar forms in all these languages, and logically hypothesized that this pointed to a common origin. Since then, the methods have become more sophisticated, and in particular have moved towards detailed reconstruction of the original "Proto-Indo-European"; but Ruhlen argues persuasively that linguists have lost sight of the original intuitions. Although linguists are now unwilling to admit that two languages are related if they have not been able to reconstruct a common ancestor, Ruhlen points out that the thing which started off the whole process was coincidence of common words. This is what motivated the later reconstructions.

A fairly large part of the book is concerned with the debate about Native American languages, where Ruhlen, building on earlier work by the late Joseph Greenberg, argues that all these languages can be divided into three main groups, each with a common origin: Amerindian, Na-Dene and Eskimo-Aleutian. This is apparently anathema to mainstream Americanists, despite the obvious fact, noted from the earliest days of the subject, that the Amerindian group is generally distinguished by a first-person singular pronoun which starts with an 'n' and a second-person singular pronoun which starts with an 'm'. This contrasts with the equally wide-spread pattern among "Euroasiatic" languages of a word like "me" starting with an 'm' and one like "thou" starting with a 't', 'th', 'd' or similar consonant.

The obvious explanation of the contrasting n/m and m/t patterns, which correlate well with other less obvious items, is that they point to two very large language superfamilies, but this is roundly denied by most experts. Ruhlen spends some time discussing why this should be, and stops just short of accusing his colleagues of Nazi-like racial theorizing; he claims that much of the thinking goes back to the late 19th century, where linguists believed that Indo-European languages were more "advanced" than others, and somehow could not be related to them. It is easy to see why people hate him; however, Ruhlen says, with understandable satisfaction, that recent genetic research supports many of his claims, in particular the tripartite Amerindian/Na-Dene/Eskimo-Aleutian division.

The later chapters move towards the even bolder hypothesis that all the world's languages may be related. I was in particular astonished to see a list of roots that, it is claimed, may occur in all the world's language families. The clearest candidate is apparently TIK meaning "finger/one", which, Ruhlen says, has correlates ranging from "DIGit" and "inDICate" in English to te ("hand"; apparently a reduced form of tek) in Japanese. The number two candidate is "AK'WA", meaning "water", which also seems to be remarkably widespread. Ruhlen connects linguistic and genetic evidence, making a pretty good case.

The book is well-written and amusing; I read it in about a day. Highly recommended if you're at all interested in language! And now, if you'll excuse me, I must go and piss off some of my fellow academics. Ruhlen reminds me that I'm behind schedule.

[Manybooks · Rating 3 out of 5]

I do have to point out that while I have found Merritt Ruhlen's The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue a very enlightening and at times very much enjoyable reading experience, I also have not really found the book all that linguistically convincing.

Now I do and fully admit that I am NOT a professional linguist by any stretch of the imagination. However, I did have to take enough basic linguistics (especially comparative linguistics) for my PhD in German to (at least in my opinion) be able to propose and consider that The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue is not really or at least that it does not really seem to be all that much about serious, academically rigorous historical linguistics and proto-language reconstruction, but that the book, that the author's text and musings rather feel more like an interesting (but ultimately also rather fantastical) attempt by Merritt Ruhlen to link all world languages to a supposed original mother tongue, but without all that much of an actual system of comparison and study in place. For simply taking diverse languages and seemingly mostly cherry picking and comparing supposed inherent similarities does not really work all that well for me, especially since many of these similarities could also of course be coincidental.

And while I certainly do not have the linguistic background to verify whether the online claims I have read that Merritt Ruhlen has also and repeatedly used wrong data, are actually correct, are justified, I do find this whole scenario a bit troubling in and of itself. And yes, these claims have certainly made me approach The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue with caution and trepidation, and have also made me wonder at the arrogant nastiness with which Merritt Ruhlen sometimes seems to approach anyone who might not one hundred percent agree with his methods and concepts, as the bitter name calling and personal barbs have certainly made me enjoy The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue less and less as the text, as the presented narrative was progressing (although from how much I actually did find the book enjoyable, interesting and diverting, I will albeit more than a bit grudgingly still grant a three star ranking to The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue).

[Michael Connolly · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the most fascinating books that I have ever read. The author was a student of the late Joseph Greenberg of Stanford University. Some of their theories are not widely accepted by academics. But if the out-of-Africa consensus among anthropologists is true, it seems plausible that all languages are related, and descend from an original, African language.
Greenberg is critical of linguists who require the reconstruction of a common ancestor language in order to prove that two languages descended from the same language. The most famous such reconstruction is proto-Indoeuropean, the ancestor of Hindi, Bengali, Urdu, Farsi, Russian, Armenian, Greek, Celtic, Germanic and Romance languages. One of the controversial ideas is to group Indo-European, Finnish, Hungarian, Mongolian, Korean, Japanese and Inuit into a superfamily called Eurasiatic. What they languages have in common is a k-suffix for the dual and a t-suffix for the plural. The dual is when you have exactly two items.
It makes a case that the Basque of the Pyrenees and the Chechens of the northern Caucuses have similar languages, because they are remnants of the first settlers of Europe. Both peoples retreated to their respective mountains when a new wave of settlers appeared. This new wave of settlers included the Indo-Europeans, the Finns, the Mongols, the Koreans, the Japanese and the Inuits, all of whom have languages that are distantly related. The Indo-European expansion displaced the earlier Semitic peoples, Georgians (to the southern Caucuses), and the Dravidians (to southern India).

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Don't read this book without a paper and pen, there are exercises that are worth the effort.

[Charlie Bray · Rating 4 out of 5]

Glad I had pen/paper at the ready for the (short) technical exercises... Really fascinating how the author constructed a taxonomy of languages, starting from the individual languages and going into increasingly higher-level, more inclusive families to argue for the "monogenesis" of all languages from a single source. The cool-headed way he rails against traditional arguments of language classification was a side of the book I wasn't expecting; it added a lot more depth to the book by describing the landscape of the controversy as of 1994. Sometimes analyzing the fine details of the grammatical and lexical similarities between languages wore on a bit long, but I understand that these were necessary points in making the author's case.

[Roar · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some of it is interesting, but the author sounds bitter about other scholars not agreeing with him.

[Jerry · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very intriguing book about how languages can be compared to discover language families, and how the technique can then be extrapolated to discover families of families. For example, if you’re interested in a book like this you are probably familiar with the term proto-Indo-European in historical linguistics, the theorized language that preceded all of the Indo-European languages (such as English, Latin, Bengali, and so on).

Ruhlen argues (successfully, I think) that we can use similar techniques to compare proto-languages and look for families among the various families already discovered.

In the epilogue, he also shows how knowledge of the older families can help with the reconstruction of the basic families, such as the reconstruction of proto-Indo-European, by providing examples of where the languages were when they broke off. For example, analogizing with genetic classifications, we know that the proto-mammal almost certainly laid eggs, even though most mammals today do not, because (a) there are mammals that lay eggs, and (b) the nearest relatives of mammals also lay eggs. This is a vast oversimplification, but the logic is sound, and the same logic applies to language reconstruction.

This book is a lot of fun, because Ruhlen provides classification games for the reader using words from unnamed languages. After the reader classifies them as amateurs, he provides the actual names of the languages the words came from. He does the same for constructing families of the major families. He is, I suspect, probably mostly right. In some cases, such as the proposed Dené-Caucasian family of families (spanning Europe, Asia, and North America), while his broad family is still not generally recognized twenty years later, a subset, Dené-Yeniseian (spanning Asia and North America), recently has been recognized.

The search for families of families is controversial. Some historical linguists believe that such a search is fruitless and should be abandoned; others, that it is very difficult and that researchers are prone to seeing similarities that are not there.

Merritt intersperses his book with a lot of sharp words against both those groups, mashing them together into one, which is, I think, unfair. The problem is that historical linguistics of this sort is not, strictly speaking, a strict science. It is mostly classification, or applying rules discovered by classification backward.

Strictly speaking, science is marked by the scientific method—make a theory, make a prediction to disprove that theory, and test that prediction. For example, when physicists today experiment with Einstein’s general relativity, they are looking to disprove that theory; when and if they finally disprove it, it won’t matter that so many thousands of other experiments were consistent with the theory. It only takes one inconsistency to disprove the theory and supercharge the search for a replacement theory. Despite how often its results match up with what we see, Newtonian gravity is wrong. It has been disproven.

But historical linguistics doesn’t work that way, and mostly can’t. With the comparative method, historical linguists are mostly looking for similarities: these words with these meanings are similar enough to those words with those meanings to justify suspecting that they are a match.

There can be very few predictions, and tests cannot be conclusive. For example, when looking for the Amerindian language family in the Americas, Joseph Greenberg found words meaning girl, son, daughter, child, and even small with sounds like tana, taniw, t’ini, t’ini-si, tune, tana, tanna, and t’an’a. These words are certainly similar, but how does one go about testing the theory that they are similar because they are related to the proto-Amerindian word? Even if a new language shows up in the area without that similarity, that disproves nothing. Such orphan languages already exist in the literature surrounded by languages of a different family.

But what if a similar word does appear, but meaning “imp” or “nuisance”. That doesn’t strictly fit the theory and yet our brains, which often seem designed to see classifications which aren’t there, jumps at the very logical conclusion that, by golly, it could.

Even the use of the internal reconstruction method has similar issues. While languages change in a regular manner over time, and some of this can be quite predictive, life can also get in the way, halting a language change when it has only partially spread throughout the words of the language, for example. And these rules themselves are built up by watching what languages have done over time and classifying those changes into rules.

While predictions can often be made based on either of these methods, those predictions are not used to invalidate the theory on which the prediction was based. Nor, reasonably, can they be.

Humans are very good at finding patterns, even ones that don’t exist. So it makes sense to be skeptical of complex patterns of double-similarity (where both the sound and the meaning are allowed to vary) until the examples become overwhelming.

But even what constitutes “overwhelming” is itself a classification issue. It isn’t surprising that there are controversies like this in historical linguistics. If there weren’t, the discipline couldn’t be trusted.

Despite his unnecessary harshness to critics, Ruhlen makes a very good case for looking for families of families—especially for why such knowledge is useful when reconstructing the proto-language of a family.

[Matt Kowaleski · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was super-interesting. Some of Ruhlens theories about language groups seemed rather implausible, but they were still fascinating to consider

[S.M.Y Kayseri · Rating 4 out of 5]

[9:13 am, 20/05/2022] Sidi M. Yusoff: The book propounds the monogenetic theory of origin of language. What this means is that the author believes that all languages originated from a single mother-language. This thesis is problematic exactly because there’s no records at all regarding this proto-language; it is a mere speculation. But we do have ample scientific evidence that the triumph of the homo sapiens correlated directly with the expansion and maturation of the neocortex; the part of brain that is responsible for critical and abstract thinking. Abstract thinking extends beyond the thing it connotes; this is the very definition of a concept. A concept internalizes is what we called as a thought, a concept externalizes is what we called as a word; a language.

Thus, the maturity of us as a species yielded an almost concurrent appearance of language. While we certainly could not find any written records of a proto-language, we certainly found concrete signs of concepts externalized; burials, ritual sites. These landmarks certainly could not exist without any language, which certainly prior to complex concepts mentioned above.

A major difference between concrete signs of concepts and the abstract ones is that the former is static, while the latter is dynamic. Burial sites buried beneath the sands of time, while languages evolve as soon as community break away from their respective geographical and historical receptacle. In a primitive and highly volatile community, it is wiser to expand on day to day expedient creations rather than expending time and energy for something unprofitable as writing. Tightly knit groups only requires passed down stories, not writing. Communities are egalitarian and property rights are not well developed, there would be some more time before the first writing recorded in Sumerian about property inventory.

The homo sapiens must possess strong conceptual thinking by the time they migrated out-of-Africa. The moment these first waves of human migration departed, they faced extreme divergent geographical and historical encounters that provides more and specific cues that shapes firstly, the worldview of a group and then later, the language. Mitochondrial studies succeeded in identifying the biological “Eve”, from which every modern human originated from. This Eve lived somewhere in today Ethiopia some 50-80,000 years ago. This biological Eve does not prove the existence of the biblical Eve, because it only means the current modern human originated from this single woman, while the rest of her contemporary’s offspring extinguished over time.

Therefore, I cohere to the thought that language tied with ethnicity. An ethnic while indeed possessing more of a social construct rather than biological, is nevertheless an actual concept as each ethnicity possessed specific worldviews shaped by their geographical and historical context. It is only during recent times this sharp distinguishing factors soften as an impact from globalization. Several factors persists, however. Non-native French speakers above the age of adolescents, cannot master entirely the specific inflections in French vocabulary. So does non-native speakers of Chinese, Japanese and other more complex languages. First generation chimeras who dedicated themselves to copy the culture they want remains as an abnormality among the native people; they either could produce a child who eventually assimilate to the native culture, or if unable to secure a partner, would simply dissipates as a persistent outsider. Such are the real truth of globalization.

Coming back to the monogenesis theory. Ruhlen extrapolates the existence of families and super-families based on similarity of cognates. Cognates are words that are related to each other phonetically. For an example, it is not hard to see how the French peuple and Spanish poplar are related in a family, and this family is also related to Latin, as people in Latin is populus. Thus French and Spanish are members of a language family called as Romance, which is a product of Roman expansion. Latin, on the other hand resonates with the Sanskrit praja, which while certainly not as similar as previous example, retains similar basic form of phonetics which change due to erosion and shifts over time. So Ruhlen able to extrapolate the existence of language families and then super-families (like Indo-European), and onwards to a single primal language. This primal language certainly does not been supported by any written or archeological evidence, simply because of above mentioned reasons.

I would like to close my thoughts on this book by touching on a sore topic: the Austronesian Expansion. According to Ruhlen, the Austronesian language originated from the Tai-Kadai people in Southern China. The Tai-Kadai people then migrated to the Phillipines southward. For convenience sake, I would call his idea the Southeast Expansion. But archeological and genetic studies supports completely opposite idea. Expansion from Africa arrived earlier to the Southeast Asia via route from India to Burma and then to the previously Sundaland. Expansion from Africa northward and then onto the Chinese mainland arrived much later simply because of the harsher terrains. So it is not possible for the Tai-Kadai to expand into southeast, simply because they came from southeast then northeastward into Southern China. By the time people actually arrived in China, it is approximately 2000-5000 years later and they already conglomerated to the proto-Sino-Tibetan people, which linguistics is distinguished from the Tai-Kadai people. Thus the inhabitation of Southern China and perhaps Japan, sparked from a northward expansion from Southeast Asia, not the way around. It was only due to Sino-Tibetan infringement that the Tai-Kadai people migrated into the Indochina and the Formosan people were pushed to Phillipines and Southeast Asia as the new Austronesian people.
[9:46 am, 20/05/2022] Sidi M. Yusoff: The book propounds the monogenetic theory of origin of language. What this means is that the author believes that all languages originated from a single mother-language. This thesis is problematic exactly because there’s no records at all regarding this proto-language; it is a mere speculation. But we do have ample scientific evidence that the triumph of the homo sapiens correlated directly with the expansion and maturation of the neocortex; the part of brain that is responsible for critical and abstract thinking. Abstract thinking extends beyond the thing it connotes; this is the very definition of a concept. A concept internalizes is what we called as a thought, a concept externalizes is what we called as a word; a language.

Thus, the maturity of us as a species yielded an almost concurrent appearance of language. While we certainly could not find any written records of a proto-language, we certainly found concrete signs of concepts externalized; burials, ritual sites. These landmarks certainly could not exist without any language, which certainly prior to complex concepts mentioned above.

A major difference between concrete signs of concepts and the abstract ones is that the former is static, while the latter is dynamic. Burial sites buried beneath the sands of time, while languages evolve as soon as community break away from their respective geographical and historical receptacle. In a primitive and highly volatile community, it is wiser to expand on day to day expedient creations rather than expending time and energy for something unprofitable as writing. Tightly knit groups only requires passed down stories, not writing. Communities are egalitarian and property rights are not well developed, there would be some more time before the first writing recorded in Sumerian about property inventory.

The homo sapiens must possess strong conceptual thinking by the time they migrated out-of-Africa. The moment these first waves of human migration departed, they faced extreme divergent geographical and historical encounters that provides more and specific cues that shapes firstly, the worldview of a group and then later, the language. Mitochondrial studies succeeded in identifying the biological “Eve”, from which every modern human originated from. This Eve lived somewhere in today Ethiopia some 50-80,000 years ago. This biological Eve does not prove the existence of the biblical Eve, because it only means the current modern human originated from this single woman, while the rest of her contemporary’s offspring extinguished over time.

Therefore, I cohere to the thought that language tied with ethnicity. An ethnic while indeed possessing more of a social construct rather than biological, is nevertheless an actual concept as each ethnicity possessed specific worldviews shaped by their geographical and historical context. It is only during recent times this sharp distinguishing factors soften as an impact from globalization. Several factors persists, however. Non-native French speakers above the age of adolescents, cannot master entirely the specific inflections in French vocabulary. So does non-native speakers of Chinese, Japanese and other more complex languages. First generation chimeras who dedicated themselves to copy the culture they want remains as an abnormality among the native people; they either could produce a child who eventually assimilate to the native culture, or if unable to secure a partner, would simply dissipates as a persistent outsider. Such are the real truth of globalization.

Coming back to the monogenesis theory. Ruhlen extrapolates the existence of families and super-families based on similarity of cognates. Cognates are words that are related to each other phonetically. For an example, it is not hard to see how the French peuple and Spanish poplar are related in a family, and this family is also related to Latin, as people in Latin is populus. Thus French and Spanish are members of a language family called as Romance, which is a product of Roman expansion. Latin, on the other hand resonates with the Sanskrit praja, which while certainly not as similar as previous example, retains similar basic form of phonetics which change due to erosion and shifts over time. So Ruhlen able to extrapolate the existence of language families and then super-families (like Indo-European), and onwards to a single primal language. This primal language certainly does not been supported by any written or archeological evidence, simply because of above mentioned reasons.

I would like to close my thoughts on this book by touching on a sore topic: the Austronesian Expansion. According to Ruhlen, the Austronesian language originated from the Tai-Kadai people in Southern China. The Tai-Kadai people then migrated to the Phillipines southward. For convenience sake, I would call his idea the Southeast Expansion. But archeological and genetic studies supports completely opposite idea. Expansion from Africa arrived earlier to the Southeast Asia via route from India to Burma and then to the previously Sundaland. Expansion from Africa northward and then onto the Chinese mainland arrived much later simply because of the harsher terrains. So it is not possible for the Tai-Kadai to expand into southeast, simply because they came from southeast then northeastward into Southern China. By the time people actually arrived in China, it is approximately 2000-5000 years later and they already conglomerated to the proto-Sino-Tibetan people, which linguistics is distinguished from the Tai-Kadai people. Thus the inhabitation of Southern China and perhaps Japan, sparked from a northward expansion from Southeast Asia, not the way around. It was only due to Sino-Tibetan infringement that the Tai-Kadai people migrated into the Indochina and the Formosan people were pushed to Phillipines and Southeast Asia as the new Austronesian people.

Addendum: the spread of modern human

There's several theories on origin of modern human. One is unipolar origin, which suggests that modern human originated from a single pole, and that pole usually assumed by Africa. Secondly, is the multipolar origin, which believed man sprung from multiple independent regions, indicated by the existence of proto-sapiens like the Peking or Java Man. Genetically, the second theory is disproved from mitochondrial studies that shows all modern human is related to a single mitochondria of a woman in Africa sometime 100,000 years ago. But this mitochondrial studies does not exclude the existence of other matrilineal lineage that went extinc over time. Personally, I adhere to the hybrid theory that stated while indeed current modern human are essentially originated from a single woman, there is multiple independent existing proto-sapiens across the world. These are the famous Neanderthal, Peking and Java Man. But these colonies of people eventually either hunted to extinction or intermarried into the new out-of-Africa migrators.

The first out-of-Africa migrations divides mankind into an African and non-African subgroup. The second division occurs from the Fertile Crescents, which separated the Eurasian and the Southeast/Oceanic people. The group that remains in the Fertile Crescent intermixed with their African cousins to yield the Afro-Asiatic people. This occurs perhaps around 70,000-80,000 years ago. The Southeast/Oceanic people continued southwards, leaving Dravidian offshoots in the Indian subcontinent, into the Malay Archipelago, and then proceeded either towards Australia or northwards to the Philipines or Southern China. They then reached the Bering Straits, crossed it and begot the Amerind people. The Bering Straits later submerged by water, the expansion into America was approximated to be around 12,000 years ago. This is the primary expansion of modern human across the world, driven by momentum of climate change of Africa.

Secondary expansion of mankind sparked by the emergence of agriculture and to a lesser extent, climate change. Agriculture sparked the spread of people from Anatolia northwards into Europe, begotting the people of Indo-European. At the same time, the Euroasiatic people has reached the Chinese mainland from Siberia, crystallizing into the Sino-Tibetan people. The spread of Sino-Tibetan people, on the other hand, sparked the migration of the Tai-Kadai people into Indo-China, giving birth to the Austroasiatic people. It also propelled the Formosan people migration, these Austronesian people then intermixed with the local populace of Southeast Asia. In Japan, the earlier people of Yayoi (which might originate from a fringe of people heading towards the Bering people), was displaced by the arrival of the Jomon people, who spoke a more distant form of the Altaic (which in turn a branch of the Turkic, a branch of the Indo-European), and then later gives rise to the Japanese. At the same time, the Bantu expanded southwards into Africa.

The third expansion of mankind is sparked by the arrival of Christopher Columbus to the New World, creating an influx of Europeans and Africans into the Northern and Southern America.

[Adham Abozaeid · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very fascinating book that traces the origin of languages, and tries to find common ancestor languages to modern languages, and connections between different language families.
Before reading the book, I had an assumption that similarities between languages are mainly a result of borrowing, where one community borrows words from another language through invasion, trading, or other interaction. This can be widely seen in how Arabic affected Spanish, and how French affected Algerian for example.

But what if homosapiens have already spoken some kind of a language even before spreading out all over the globe? Even if it was just primitive sounds like mama, papa.. etc.
If that happened, then traces of that primitive language might have found it's way to modern languages in one form or another.

The book makes it clear that to answer the question of how exactly did humans spread out, and where was their origin, different fields of science need to collaborate. Historical linguistics, genetics, archaeology, anthropology.. etc, each can provide a piece that would hopefully someday complete the puzzle.

The book is interactive and engaging. You get to work through different languages yourself, trying to classify them to find language families. You will find yourself flipping the pages back and forth searching for maps to connect the dots between languages, their families, and their families' families!

Yet, this theory isn't well established, and still has it's supporters and opposers, and obviously the author is fed up with blind rejection, so he prepared to listen to a lot of ranting on that.

[Helen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating. Easy to read style, clear and concise.

[Frankie Fredericks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Makes a compelling case for a single origin language, using linguistic taxonomy, genetics, and archaeology. Explains the eurocentrism that kept this theory from earlier consideration.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eye-opening

[Matthias · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ruhlen provides the reader with proof that all extant languages are distantly related. He gives several tables, containing different words in various languages, and lets us come to “our own” conclusion that these languages and languages families, which are traditionally known to have nothing in common, are in fact related. Although it is too easy to lead someone to an “obvious conclusion” only by giving evidence consistent with his own views, his theories are actually quite plausible. Furthermore, Ruhlen offers the reader very interesting insights in the development of language and early human migration by means of archaeological and biological (DNA research) evidence. Yet the author quite childishly has a grudge against the traditional Indo-Europeanists and Americanists who don’t want to draw the same “obvious conclusions” as he does and sounds like a very big fan of classification. This book really is worth reading, I wish it was bigger!

[Jacques le fataliste et son maître · Rating 4 out of 5]

Decisamente chiaro, direi. Si tratta di un testo pensato come divulgativo: l’autore si rivolge ai non specialisti perché valutino con i propri occhi (con la propria ragione) se la sua teoria sull’unica origine di tutte le lingue sia sensata o meno.
Per far questo prepara dei veri e propri esercizi di comparazione fra lingue diverse, perché il lettore colga le somiglianze e operi gli opportuni raggruppamenti.
L’appello ai “non iniziati” è motivato dagli atteggiamenti di chiusura di una parte del mondo accademico, vittima, secondo Ruhlen, dell’iperspecializzazione, della volontà di tenere separati e ben difesi i vari campi (orticelli…) di studio, della paura di mettersi in discussione (e di doversi rimettere a studiare), di veri e propri pregiudizi ideologici.
(Interessante, quindi, anche per comprendere le dinamiche del dibattito accademico.)

[Snicketts · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting, in that it looks at the history of language classification in as much depth as the current theories. It touches on racism, colonialism and miscalculations before inviting you to have a go yourself at identifying language families from lists of similar meaning words. I found this exercise fascinating. It also tries to bridge the divide between archaeological evidence and linguistic evidence and underlines what strides can now be made by incorporating new DNA evidence into the mix. A good overview of recent work in the area.

[Jean-François · Rating 5 out of 5]

Historical linguistic is a hot topic, with about a century of quarrels between different trends. M. Ruhlen exposes one of these theories, that all human languages derive from the some "mother language", and he has some help from biology to prove it.

The reading is interesting, with numerous examples of similarities and reconstructions of proto-languages. If you are interested in how our languages are constructed, this book is definitely worth of your library.

[Liam Malone · Rating 5 out of 5]

Professor argues that all languages originated from a single language in Africa. The people took the language throughout Africa, into the Middle East where it moved into Europe in different waves and into Asia. From Asia 3 migrations into the New World occurred. He believes Indo-europeanists don't compare their work with languages outside their purview because they are stubborn.

[Em Chitty · Rating 5 out of 5]

Makes the argument through linguistic comparisons from all over the world that all language is originally one language--which conveniently dovetails with what is known now from DNA analysis, I believe. Fun to read because you do the comparisons yourself.

[A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I do agree with the main point of the author, being that all languages are related, some just much more distantly than others - and that the walls and limitations put by indo-european linguists need to stop being the only norm. Recommended reading.

[Kathleen · Rating 3 out of 5]

An academic book geared somewhat for the layman. Very interesting approach and I think this author's theory has since proven to be pretty much spot on!