The Implications of Finding the Earliest Spoken Human Language
In the article entitled Isolating the Earliest Human Speech (cf. in this web-site below) we have presented the hypothesis that the earliest human language consists of at least the 214 proto-syllables in eleven categories outlined in my article. These findings have been circulated to over three hundred linguists and anthropologists for their comments. A few have replied but the discovery has remained largely unreported. For this reason I am writing this apologia in order to explain more fully what I consider to be the main values of my hypothesis.
That which I propose is the earliest human speech which was developed in Africa before homo sapiens moved north-eastwards ‘out of Africa’ (about 150,000 years ago) and southwards into Africa.
Charles Graves
November 2020
Photograph: ‘rock painting’ in Australia photographed by Graeme Churchard, Bristol (UK)
In the article entitled Isolating the Earliest Human Speech (cf. in this web-site below) we have presented the hypothesis that the earliest human language consists of at least the 214 proto-syllables in eleven categories outlined in my article. These findings have been circulated to over three hundred linguists and anthropologists for their comments. A few have replied but the discovery has remained largely unreported. For this reason I am writing this apologia in order to explain more fully what I consider to be the main values of my hypothesis.
- Why these findings are important;
- For linguists
- For religions
- For geo-politics
- For biological sciences
- They must ‘enter into the game’ to try to find the earliest speech. As Noam Chomsky in his writings has clearly emphasized, any research that does not ‘go to the root’ of language development of homo sapiens is avoiding something essential in the studies
- The comparison of different large families of languages with other large families of languages has not taken into account all the large macrofamilies of languages and this minimizes the results vis à vis the usefulness for 4a(1).
- Unfortunately, the Russian-originated ‘Nostratic’ and ‘Sino-Caucasian’ macrofamilies hypothesis has been downplayed in importance by ‘Western’ linguists, but those theories can help linguists discover a language spoken c. 10,000 years ago which pre-dates the two categories (Nostratic (N*) – Indo-European, Finno-Ugric, Kartvelian, Altaic) and Sino-Caucasian (SC*) - Basque, Chechen, Burushaski, Proto-Chinese, Tibetan, Kampuchean etc.).
- Using the criteria provided by (3) we can find languages which satisfy both N* and SC* criteria and thus can be considered very old languages and these very old languages can be compared to one another such as Australian aboriginal language, Ainu, and Amazon- area languages
- The author has found that religious terminology has been carried to the ‘New World’ (the Americas) from Siberia, and that the Amerindian religions as well as keeping some elements in religious practice from Siberia have also kept some elements of language describing these practices. My three books in the series Bochum Publications in Evolutionary Cultural Semiotics published in the 1990s at Bochum, Germany, investigates this phenomenon
- The above shows that religions are long-lasting, accompanying human migrations and should be taken seriously by anthropologists in their studies
- Religious terminology, because long-lasting, can be used to identify ‘groups’ of humans across the globe who are ethnically similar because their religions are similar. Ethnic and religious studiers can go ‘hand in hand’.
- Finding and discussing the earliest development of language in homo sapiens may reveal the earliest ‘religions’ of humanity. Early syllables used may reveal to us man’s particular attitude towards ‘the after life’, ’beyond life’ etc.
- The world contains more than 200 different countries today and these struggle with one another for ‘a place in the sun’. In general, each does not ‘identify’ with other ones except as in ‘blocs’ or groupings banded together for common interests
- At the present time the institution of the United Nations brings some sort of unity between the nation-states but this is not enough to create common efforts to solve the problems of human rights to food, education, good climate or prosperity
- New, unifying elements have been found going beyond politics, in the DNA structures describing human groupings by genetics. Such genetic studies may reveal the historical causes underlying conflicts between ethnic or ‘national’ groups. Certain groups accustomed to warring with each other may discover that they are united ‘genetically’ in their DNA with their adversaries.
- Language and terminology are related to ethnicity and thus discovery of the earliest spoken language and its developments over time may show, and afterwards improve, ethnic ‘belongingness’ of groups and may diminish tensions in certain areas of the world. Of course, the most obvious example of this possibility is among the ‘Indo-European’ speakers
- Discovering the earliest spoken language of homo sapiens reveals how the earliest human brains functioned together with the mouth and its parts. The phonemes or syllables emitted, if we can describe them, leads us inevitably to learn about human cerebral biology. Why did one particular ‘subject-object’ relation of early men and women within their environment lead to one particular phoneme / syllable in their speech?
- If we can classify these phonemes and determine that the phoneme could only arise in the mouth if a particular subject-object relation took place between the human and his/her environment (including their inner environment as well), and if these classifications seem to be valid for all human languages, then we have discovered the proto-language of mankind.
- If this proto-language lies behind all existing human languages developed over the course of history, then we have a certain special unifying aspect to human history. If every human inherits the same ‘tendency’ to express the proto-language through his/her DNA then at least as far as language is concerned, there is unity between every human being today and in the future
That which I propose is the earliest human speech which was developed in Africa before homo sapiens moved north-eastwards ‘out of Africa’ (about 150,000 years ago) and southwards into Africa.
Charles Graves
November 2020
Photograph: ‘rock painting’ in Australia photographed by Graeme Churchard, Bristol (UK)