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Topic: Protolanguage

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Language families and languages

	Dessalles ch 8
		Two other features of their communication that are reminiscent of pidgins are the fact that the protolanguage of signs was developed rapidly and spontaneously by the youngsters themselves, and of course the fact that they seem to have been already too old to learn how to make their protolanguage evolve towards a language with syntax.
		Protolanguage does enable hearers to construct meanings which roughly fit the meanings that speakers have had in their thoughts, though this requires that the contexts be sufficiently restricted.
		Protolanguage is not the result of a rough simplification of language; it is a tool for communicating meanings that has its own organization.
	perso.enst.fr /~jld/UCSD/Chapter8_excerpts.html (2515 words)

	African Languages - MSN Encarta
		Other words that can be traced back to the Niger-Congo protolanguage include “yesterday,” which is jana in Swahili (Bantu subgroup) and ana in Yoruba (Kwa subgroup), and “three,” which is tatu in Swahili, eeta in Yoruba, and ati in Fulfulde (West Atlantic subgroup).
		The protolanguage of this family, which began to diverge into separate branches about 6000 years ago, is known as ancestral Semitic.
		It is also the protolanguage of other Semitic languages, such as Arabic and Hebrew.
	encarta.msn.com /encyclopedia_761565449/African_Languages.html (1785 words)

	Language & Species
		So he argues there is a thing called Protolanguage that is not fully innate, because to realize its existence you need some form of lexical input.
		It seems that protolanguage did develop a set of proto-grammatical items, that is, meaningful if somewhat abstract units that may have included some or all of the following: negators, question words, pronouns, relative-time markers, quantifiers, modal auxiliaries, and particles indicating location.
		Protolanguage was found to be the connecting point between all 4 groups looked at, thus foundation of language.
	www.drmillslmu.com /EVOLPSYC/fall00/panel5.htm (2414 words)

	According to our earlier position, pictorial metaphor was distinct from linguistic metaphor in that is could make use ...
		In protolanguage, concrete nouns and verbs are strung together in a loose order, perhaps determined in part by pragmatic considerations (such as things that happened later in time being mentioned later in the expression), in combination with gestures to convey simple messages.
		Not only is protolanguage said to be typical of pre-linguistic hominids, but it can also be found in people who speak a pidgin, or by those who find themselves in situations where they do not speak the local language, but are able to pick up a few of the more basic concrete terms.
		In protolanguage, utterances are understood despite their formal ambiguity because the interpretation is constrained by background knowledge and pragmatic inference patterns common to both the speaker and listener.
	www.yorku.ca /christo/papers/fpp.htm (2351 words)

	SRB Editorial 3(2)
		Bickerton illustrates the distinction between protolanguage and language with a telling comparison of utterances recorded from a child in the process of acquiring language with utterances recorded from a chimpanzee in the most advanced stages of its training in ASL.
		The leap from protolanguage to language requires only the acquisition of syntax, and since syntax operates according to only a single principle, once that principle is acquired for any grammatical construction, syntax has been acquired in its entirety.
		To soften the abrupt transition from protolanguage to language somewhat, Bickerton suggests that, in the later H.
	www.chass.utoronto.ca /epc/srb/srb/protolang.html (3511 words)

	"Two Languages for Architecture", by Nikos A. Salingaros.
		It is a protolanguage that a computer would understand, or a person stranded among others who spoke a different language.
		A protolanguage, on the other hand, is characterized by the absence of such internal complexity and structure.
		It has been proposed that the transition from a protolanguage to a real language corresponds to the evolutionary transition from the language of apes (and people brought up in linguistic deprivation) to human language [5].
	www.math.utsa.edu /ftp/salingar.old/twolanguages.html (4909 words)

	Babel's Dawn
		The switch from protolanguage (drawing attention to figures) to language (drawing attention to figure and ground together) permitted the change from assertive communication to “argumentation.” By argumentation I don’t think Dessalles means that a hominid Bickerson family could argue about whose fault it was that junior was such a devil.
		The obvious difference between protolanguage (presumably spoken by Homo erectus) and normal speech is the presence of syntax.
		Post #5 described protolanguage, a pre-syntactic form of speech with a protosemantics that enabled speakers to direct attention to objects without saying anything about them.
	ebbolles.typepad.com /babels_dawn (2300 words)

	Origin of the Indo-European languages: Part I (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-08-12)
		Latest investigations indicate that the protolanguage was born in the Eastern region of Anatolia over 6000 years ago.
		According to recent investigations, the reconstruction of the protolanguage's consonants shows it is more similar to the Germanic, Armenian and Hittite languages than to those of the Sanskrit branch.
		The landscape depicted by the reconstructed Indo-European protolanguage is a mountainous one.
	www.sanskrit-sanscrito.com.ar /english/linguistics/origin1.html (1966 words)

	Japan Whaling Assoc. -Publication(ISANA No.27)-
		Because the protolanguage of whales was hwala-, or hwalis (the h at the head of the word was silent frictional sound [k]), hwal came into existence in the Old English (1150 or before) and turned into whale in the Middle English (1150-1500).
		From the same protolanguage hwal and walfisc (fisc means fish) were evolved in the Old Highland German (750-1050), which nowadays has become Walfisch in German.
		Qet- (meaning hole in the ground for dwelling, living space or living room) in the IE protolanguage* was adopted, after some mutations in the meaning, as ketos in Greek, which became a general term indicating a giant animal in the sea, and later was specified as a whale.
	www.whaling.jp /english/isana/no27_01.html (1434 words)

	William H. Calvin and Derek Bickerton, Lingua ex Machina, chapter 4 (MIT Press)
		If the brain is working in protolanguage mode, each word is sent separately to the part of the brain that controls the motor organs of speech, and each word is uttered separately.
		Protolanguage too has "missing" things, such as a missing subject in "kissed Mary" and a missing object in "John kissed." But the antecedents of these empty categories — the people or things they refer to — can’t be found anywhere in the utterance.
		Now we come to what’s maybe the most crucial difference between language and protolanguage: the existence in the former of phrases and clauses that are entirely absent from the latter.
	williamcalvin.com /LEM/LEMch4.htm (3753 words)

	[No title]
		However, recent proposals by Mithen (2005) and Arbib (2005) for a holistic protolanguage, assumed to be in use at least 500kya, seem to imply exactly this: the presumed content of holistic messages requires a lexicon with storage and retrieval capacities vastly superior to those available to sapiens.
		Such a protolanguage cannot reasonably be attributed to hominids at a less advanced stage of linguistic evolution.
		Since no such hooks can exist in a holistic protolanguage, lexical access would appear to be a task of immense cognitive difficulty, one that would surely have been beyond the capabilities of the early hominids envisaged to use such holophrases.
	www.tech.plym.ac.uk /socce/evolang6/tallerman.doc (895 words)

	Evolution of Language - Abstracts
		This paper tests that scenario, by considering the ways in which such a protolanguage would restrict the expressive scope of its speakers, and the effects that this could have on the nature of hominid life and on the timing of further evolution.
		But in a holistic protolanguage there is no place for naming, and the use of pronouns in the glosses of tebima and mutapi above is significant.
		The holistic protolanguage described above is a self-supporting, stable edifice, whose constraints would stifle its own further evolution, perhaps for thousands of generations: specific naming is unsustainable; without naming, declaratives have almost no purpose; without declaratives, information exchange is largely impeded; this minimises technological and cultural innovation, rendering naming unimportant.
	www.infres.enst.fr /~evolang/actes/_actes80.html (2051 words)

	Indoeuropean
		The set of softer "voiced" consonants "b," "d," "g" (followed by momentary vibration of the vocal cords), posited in the protolanguage, had apparently given way to the corresponding hard set "p," "t," "k." According to Grimm's law, this had come about by "devoicing" those consonants ("p," for example, is unaccompanied by vocal vibration).
		Because the Anatolian protolanguage had already fissioned into daughter languages by that point, investigators estimate that it departed from the parent Indo-European no later than the fourth millennium B.C. and possibly much earlier.
		An uncontested peculiarity of the sound system of the protolanguage, for example, is the near absence, or suppression, of one of the three consonants "p," "b" or "v," which are labials (consonants sounded with the lips).
	www.biblemysteries.com /library/indoeuropean.htm (2777 words)

	Language Origins Society talk by William H. Calvin (July 1996)
		Protolanguage is what is produced by children under two, some of the mentally retarded and agrammatic aphasics, the most accomplished apes, speakers of pidgins — and by American professors trying to communicate with Hungarian shopkeepers.
		Protolanguage has little structure, relying mostly on simple contextual associations between a few words to convey the message.
		Corticocortical coherence is thus one candidate for what converted protolanguage into Language Itself; while I have used my own triangular array example for how to achieve that coherence, other yet-to-be-discovered coherence-enhancing schemes should similarly improve novel associations and nesting.
	www.williamcalvin.com /LOS96.html (2831 words)

	Lingua Ex Machina
		I tried to explain to them that some gene-specified aspect was unsurprising to a biologist — that you and I hoped to flesh it out with appropriate anthropology and neuroscience in a way that Chomsky wasn't particularly interested in doing, and to provide some evolutionary proposals that wouldn't rely on macromutations and the like.
		Protolanguage has no way of saying who did what to whom, not without an enormous effort.
		So, Derek, I wonder if your protolanguage isn't just going to be a level of relationships — mostly associations between a few objects and a verb — atop which syntax can operate as a new, more structured level.
	partners.nytimes.com /books/first/c/calvin-ex.html (3663 words)

	World Statistics and Facts: World Language. (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-08-12)
		The common ancestor of a family is known as its protolanguage.
		For example, the reconstructible protolanguage of the well-known Indo-European family is called Proto-Indo-European.
		This is not known from written records, since it was spoken before the invention of writing, but sometimes a protolanguage can be identified with a historically known language.
	www.sheppardsoftware.com /worldgeographymainpage/worldstatistics10.htm (375 words)

	Chronicles of Love & Resentment CCLXXXIII
		Now, since protolanguage clearly has a lexicon, the early humans who had developed the ability to acquire human language but did not yet have a human language to acquire could in principle have simply taken off from whatever protolanguage they already knew and expanded it.
		Bickerton first proposed the idea of protolanguage in Roots of Language (1981) on the basis of his study of "pidgins," simplified versions of languages spoken by non-native speakers that lack complex morphology or syntactic rules, and that evolve into "creoles" when they become the native languages of children brought up in these cultures.
		The notion of protolanguage, the application of which is extended to such cases as apes who are taught versions of human language, appears to offer a bridge between pre-human modes of communication and language proper.
	www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu /views/vw284.htm (2813 words)

	Nean_abstract
		Protolanguage (Derek Bickerton) in linguistics corresponds to an evolutionary stage preceding the grammaticalized language
		It could be possible to reconstruct the principles of protolanguage by turning to most general principles of evolution
		of the mechanism of protolanguage generation is suggested as kinetically controlled linearization of a typically non-linear observable
	users.ids.net /~yuri/Nean_abstract.html (1282 words)

	LSA: About Linguistics
		In fact, we do find such 'protolanguage' in two-year-old children, in the beginning efforts of adults learning a foreign language, and in so-called 'pidgins', the systems cobbled together by adult speakers of disparate languages when they need to communicate with each other for trade or other sorts of cooperation.
		This has led some researchers to propose that the system of 'protolanguage' is still present in modern human brains, hidden under the modern system except when the latter is impaired or not yet developed.
		A final change or series of changes would add to 'protolanguage' a richer structure, encompassing such grammatical devices as plural markers, tense markers, relative clauses, and complement clauses ("Joe thinks that the earth is flat").
	www.lsadc.org /info/ling-faqs-lang-begin.cfm (1794 words)

	Conlinguistics
		A fifth group, the rándhin nomads of the enénsahar desert east of the mountains were a later addition to account for a descendent language that remained morphologically closer to the protolanguage.
		The only one of these that even approached completion told the story of how the peoples came to be divided in some mythical past, thus serving as a foil for the concept of a protolanguage from which each of the derivatives were to descend.
		The plan was to distribute to each group of people a set of interesting linguistic parameters that would drive the development of that group’s language from the protolanguage along diverging pathways.
	www.graywizard.net /Conlinguistics/conlinguistics.htm (816 words)

	Stanford Linguistics Colloquium (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-08-12)
		However, one aspect of social intelligence is implicated in the subsequent development of syntax: reciprocal altruism, which probably predated protolanguage by millions of years.
		Some time (perhaps 1.5 million years) after protolanguage developed, cheater detection was adapted to give protolanguage a basic phrasal- clausal structure.
		These conditions were satisfied by brain enlargement and growth of the arcuate fasciculus--developments supported by long growth-curve activities such as precision throwing, rather than by protolanguage, which would have remained unaffected until a coherence threshold was achieved.
	www.stanford.edu /dept/linguistics/colloq/1997/1997oct17.html (441 words)

	Introduction
		This protolanguage has long been dead, but I was fortunate enough to have acquired copies of two ancient texts that shed significant light on its structure and form.
		While ámman îar is the language of the nárdhost court and intelligentsia as well as the most widely used literary and commercial language of amman, a dialect of the language called nathya is commonly used in everyday conversation among the residents of the larger towns.
		One of the more significant sister languages of ámman îar is called foréndar and is spoken by the rándhin nomads who inhabit the remote enénsahar desert east of the eröid elórenath This language appears to have remained closer to the protolanguage in morphological typology while undergoing a different series of sound shifts.
	www.graywizard.net /Conlinguistics/introduction.htm (984 words)

	Wikinfo \| Language families and languages
		Language families can be subdivided into smaller units, conventionally referred to as "branches" (because the history of a language family is often represented as a "tree" diagram).
		The common ancestor of a family (or branch) is known as its "protolanguage".
		For example, the reconstructible protolanguage of the well-known Indo-European family is called Proto-Indo-European (not known from written records, since it was spoken before the invention of writing).
	www.wikinfo.org /wiki.php?title=Language_families_and_languages (432 words)

	Stanford Linguistics Colloquium
		However, one aspect of social intelligence is implicated in the subsequent development of syntax: reciprocal altruism, which probably predated protolanguage by millions of years.
		Some time (perhaps 1.5 million years) after protolanguage developed, cheater detection was adapted to give protolanguage a basic phrasal- clausal structure.
		These conditions were satisfied by brain enlargement and growth of the arcuate fasciculus--developments supported by long growth-curve activities such as precision throwing, rather than by protolanguage, which would have remained unaffected until a coherence threshold was achieved.
	www-linguistics.stanford.edu /Linguistics/colloq/1997/1997oct17.html (441 words)

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