common origin theory comes back ...stronger

the critics of historical linguistics are never tired of accusing the whole family tree hypothesis in general and the indo-european concept in particular as a part of the big nazist aryan dominance scheme. what they fail to do is find acceptable arguements against the reasoning and method with which the historical linguists established the linkeage. now there is attempt to link all the langauges to a common root. (i have pasted the article dealing with it from Christian Science monitor below). while at first glance the method adopted seems questionable, this was waiting to happen since the out-of africa single origin theory of paleoanthorpology has come forth...


Linguists seek a time when we spoke as one

By Moises Velasquez-Manoff, Christian Science Monitor
A controversial research project is trying to trace all human language to a common root.
Around 50,000 years ago, something happened to our ancestors in Africa. Anatomically modern humans, who had existed for at least 150,000 years prior, suddenly began behaving differently. Until then, their conduct scarcely differed from that of their hominid cousins, the Neanderthals. Both buried their dead; both used stone tools; and as social apes, both had some form of communication, which some think was gestural.
But then, "almost overnight, everything changes very rapidly," says Merritt Ruhlen, a lecturer in the Anthropological Sciences Department at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif. Humans began making much better stone tools. They started burying their dead with accouterments that suggested religion. And perhaps most telling, Homo sapiens, the "wise" apes, began creating art.
"People started having imagination at this time much more than they had earlier," says Dr. Ruhlen.
Many scientists think that fully modern human language enabled this "great leap forward." Language enabled abstract thought, the deciding factor in archaic humans becoming – well, us. And because scientists surmise that language arose only once, they believe that before leaving Africa to colonize the world, all humankind spoke one language. Linguists have dubbed it "proto-world" or "proto-sapiens."
FIND MORE STORIES IN: Africa Latin Linguists Sanskrit
A multidisciplinary team of scientists at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico is working toward reconstructing that mother of all languages. Headed by Nobel Laureate physicist Murray Gell-Mann, the international Evolution of Human Languages (EHL) project is developing a freely accessible etymological database of the world's languages. Where possible, EHL linguists are attempting to reconstruct – and then compare – ancestor languages, moving ever closer to the first human language. Viewed by many linguists as a fringe movement, the project has attracted much criticism. Many linguists say that historical languages cannot be studied beyond an 8,000-year threshold; they change too much, they say. Some take issue with the project's methods: A few words shared among reconstructed languages doesn't prove a familial relationship, they insist, especially far back in time.
Languages change constantly. Speakers invent or borrow words to suit their needs. But for reasons not completely understood, some languages change more than others. Italian, for example, has remained much closer to ancestral Latin than French. Lithuanian has many words that almost exactly match Sanskrit, which was spoken 3,500 years ago. And some language "families" like Afroasiatic retain words in common even after more than 10,000 years of divergent evolution.
"That time limit is totally wrong," says John Bengtson, vice president of the Association for the Study of Language in Prehistory in Cambridge, Mass. "Languages that have been separated 8,000 years get down to a low percentage of common words. However, that low percentage seems to be very stable."
And there begins EHL's approach. Within languages, linguists think that because certain words – including the pronoun "we" and the number "one" – form the basis of a functional language, they are much less likely to change or be lost. EHL linguists begin by comparing this "basic lexicon." They include "words that are thoroughly essential and must have been in human language before significant cultural advances were made," writes EHL team member George Starostin, a linguist at the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow, in an e-mail.
Using this method, EHL has grouped all the world's languages into 12 linguistic superfamilies. They've tentatively grouped four of these superfamilies, which include languages of Eurasia, North Africa, and some Pacific islands (and maybe languages of the Americas as well) into one super-superfamily dubbed "Borean." An ancestor to a large share of today's languages, Borean was spoken some 16,000 years ago when glaciers covered much of Europe and North America, they say.
EHL linguists use several methods. One – the most controversial, but not the most widely used, says Starostin – involves matching words and meanings across languages. For example, Ruhlen and Bengtson have noticed that a word roughly corresponding to "water," which they render in proto-sapiens as "AQWA," appears in many languages. In Latin it's "aqua"; in Japanese, "aka" means "bilge water"; in Chechen, meanwhile, "aq" means "to suck"; in an African Kung dialect, "kau" means "to rain"; and in Central American Yucatec, "uk" means "to be thirsty."
But critics look at etymologies like these and see only problems. They're too loose with meanings and sounds, they say. And too many alternate explanations exist: Maybe the word was borrowed from one language and spread to the others. Perhaps it's onomatopoetic, a word that sounds like what it is. ("Cock-a-doodle-doo" is an onomatopoetic word that appears in similar form in many languages, but that doesn't prove relation.) Finally, the shorter the word – in some of the languages, just one syllable rather than two or three – the greater the possibility of a chance match.
"You've presented this list of words, but it looks like you can explain these lists in several different ways," says Lyle Campbell, a professor of linguistics at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. "Their data is really easy to challenge, and it's really easy to find words that are similar to one another across languages."
EHL linguists argue that they're only doing exactly what Sir William Jones, who first postulated a common ancestor for classical Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit, did in the 18th century. (Indo-European, the eventual result of Jones's initial observations, is perhaps the most widely accepted language family.) Historical linguistics begins by observing similarities that occur more frequently than dictated by chance, they say – and they're just starting.
The comparison to Jones also underscores another argument central to EHL's endeavor. The further one moves back in time, the more related languages should resemble one another, they believe. "It is more risky because you're comparing two or more hypotheticals to arrive at an even more hypothetical construction," says Mr. Bengtson, "but we think it's still a valid thing to try to do."
Human genetic evidence appears to support EHL's basic assumptions. The human genome indicates that all humanity traces its ancestry to as few as 1,000 individuals who lived between 50,000 and 60,000 years ago. This small founding population may explain how the capacity for language spread so quickly. "Bottlenecks play a very important part in human evolution," says Ruhlen. "This was the first major bottleneck."
Genetics also suggests two separate migrations out of Africa. One followed the south coast of Asia, ending up in Australia at least 45,000 years ago. The other took the land route through the Middle East into Central Asia, where they went both west into Europe and east, eventually reaching the Americas.
Very tentatively, EHL has grouped the world's languages into three super-superfamilies corresponding to these migrations: those that correspond with the coastal route, which include Papuan languages; those that correspond with the land route out of Africa, descendants of Borean, the best reconstructed; and the "click" languages spoken by the San, or "Bushmen," of southern Africa. Scientists think that the San most resemble the first modern humans. Their language, almost unique in its use of click sounds that perhaps other early languages lost, may best conserve traces of proto-sapiens.
Recently, EHL further refined its hypothesis. How could the 16,000-year-old Borean have engendered the lion's share of Eurasian, North African, and American languages? Some 20,000 years ago, at the peak of the last ice age, the world lost much of its linguistic diversity, they argue. Advancing glaciers pushed humanity south, mashing linguistic groups together. As in later periods of human history – like now – only a few languages emerged from that mixing. Borean, they say, was one of them.
Copyright 2007 Christian Science Monitor

bangla and sierra leone

the following is a news from daily times Sunday, December 29, 2002
i was not aware of this news before
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_29-12-2002_pg9_6



Sierra Leone makes Bengali official language
Sierra Leone has named Bengali an official language in recognition of the contributions to the war-torn country by Bangladeshi peacekeepers, a defence ministry spokesman said Saturday.A message recognising Bangladesh’s national language was received in Dhaka from Sierra Leone, the spokesman said.Sierra Leone’s President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah first made the announcement earlier this month as he inaugurated a 54-kilometer (33-mile) road constructed by Bangladeshi peacekeepers in the west African country, the spokesman said. Sierra Leone’s 16,830-strong peacekeeping force is the world’s largest and includes military personnel from 31 countries. Bangladesh has over 5,300 troops serving under the UN flag, more than any other country.English is the chief official language of Sierra Leone, but vernacular languages are more widespread with an English-based Creole serving as the lingua franca.Sierra Leone is home to small but significant communities from South Asia and the Middle East. A 10-year civil war was formally declared over in January. —AFP

CRYSTAL IN CALCUTTA

If scholarship were essentially associated with serious boring theories and incomprehensible terminologies puckered brows, then David Crystal could not qualify as a scholar. For he is refreshingly different from everything dull and lacklustre that is usually linked with knowledge. In his one and half hour talk at the banquette hall at Park, on “the future of Englishes” he actually entertained his audience with his unmatched sense of humour along with his erudition. He explained the concept of “Englishes” as opposed to “English” with a story of what happened at a similar conference where the title was mistakenly written as “the future of English”. When he approached the hotel manager saying that the ending is missing, the manager hit his panic button running all over and even announcing in the mic “we have lost David Crystal’s ending!!!”… the tale ends happily, however, when they did find his ending “in a waste paper box”. In a similar fashion he explained the importance of understanding a culture for proper understanding of a language. “ How many of you would understand the allusion when I say: — BCL reaches the part where no other institution reaches?” very few did. The allusion was that of a catchy beer advertisement “Heineken beer refreshes the part where no other beer reaches” he narrates the popularity of the advertisement and the subsequent puns used of the same such as “Heineken beer reaches the pirate (as in the context of Longfellow who gets two wooden legs instead of a fractured one, two crutches instead of a broken one and a vulture instead of a dying parrot after drinking the beer), … reaches the pilot (who flies his plane to safety after doing the same),…. the parrot, …. the poet etc”With an adequate amount of statistics he showed that taking account of the various degree of fluency of English speakers around the world, for every one native speaker on English, there is three non native speakers and the number of English speakers residing in India is larger than the English native speakers in UK and USA combined. Which is quite an extraordinary situation. However, in the past, around 1600 or so the situation was quite different. The use of English was restricted and even in UK in places like Welsh and Ireland English was not used. And people learned French and Latin to secure better jobs. But then the scenario changed. The laymen came up with“because it is the most beautiful language in the world!” “the most logical one!” “ it has no grammar!” and other similarly silly reasoning. In Crystal’s words “if I were the god of language looking down upon the world trying to choose a world language English would not be it”But English spread for four reasonsi) political powerii) power of knowledge (85% of scientific publishing is made in Englishiii) economic power (money talks and it speaks English in today’s world)iv) cultural power (in the broadest sense of the term, radio, tv, big film industries)Countries like Nigeria tried to get out of their colonial past and so away English but could not choose one of the 450 languages available to them without resorting to communal violence. So they thought “better the devil you know” after all “everybody will hate it equally”. On the positive side with the adoption came the adaptation. There is now one Nigerian English. English being the vacuum cleaner of a language sucked in words and accents from languages that adopted it. Come to think of it, vocabulary-wise it is less a Germanic language more a Romance one. The French complaining about the intrusion of English words in their language should not do so since they came to English from French in the first place. Therefore the englishes are going from strength to strength with more and more literature being written in many of them. The “correct” usage has become contextualised. Crystal points our that even the concept of “correct” spelling was not so important and issue till 18th century when newspaper and other publications came in highlights. In present day, 2% of speakers of English speak the standard and they “learn” it. Crystal leant ‘Liverpool’ English when he was 10 because his parents moved to Liverpool and the older boys, who did not like his Welsh accent, threatend him with dire consequences if he did not, and then “learned” standard English to get a job. But, he says, he still has these three distinct englishes in his head. While the force of intelligibility maintained the standard languageThe force of identity induces the formation of non-standard onesNow the entire world is at least bi or tri dialectal and people in countries like India are multilingual. And human beings can handle multilingual situations with ease. “ we love languages”, Crystal proposes a modification on Chomsky’s LAD (language acquisition device). He says we are born with MAD (multilingual acquisition device) “babies are born with language scanners”. Proper monolinguals are poor minorities in the present day world. And in the multilingual world English is not going to maintain its singular identity, neither is it desirable. Days of native speaker prominence is a thing of the pastIn his first visit to India, something he is planning for the “last 63 years”, Crystal mesmerised the audience with his delightful combination of wit and wisdom