Whether we recognize Darwinism and evolution or not, scientists continue to search for Adam and Eve. Of course, not those who were expelled from the earthly paradise, but the real first men and women on our planet. They were distinguished from great apes not only by a different physical structure, but above all by their ability to speak.
Even in international academic circles, some consider Vitaly Shevoroshkin to be crazy. Others confine themselves to calling him a dreamer. Everyone agrees that he is a utopian. What is the fault of this Russian linguist who became a naturalized American? That he devoted his scientific life to a completely hopeless cause.
How hopeless is explained by Shevoroshkin himself better than others: "The obstacles here seem insurmountable, the ground is unsteady, and the path of search is at least indefinite." He is looking for the lost language, which he calls the "mother of languages", that is, the prehistoric language that gave rise to all the languages of the world: the language spoken by the first homo sapiens, which appeared on Earth, according to paleobiologists, about 100 thousand years ago.
The difficulty lies in the fact that almost no one takes Shevoroshkin seriously. His requests for funds, directed to American universities, are regularly rejected, and Yale University offered him a place on one condition: never discuss his "incredible" theory in class. To Shevoroshkin's credit and for the sake of truth, it should be recognized that the theory of monogenesis of languages is regarded as plausible by many linguists. At the same time, however, it is considered unprovable and therefore inapplicable.
Indeed, all linguists, including Shevoroshkin, know that languages change over time through changes in words and grammatical forms, as well as through the acquisition and loss of words. Given the relatively high rate of such changes, many linguists believe that the history of a language can be investigated to a depth of no more than 5,000 years.
The situation becomes even more confusing when we add that scientists often cannot rely on “fossil” evidence, that is, written texts, when studying dead languages. The earliest examples of writing found in Mesopotamia date back only 6,000 years ago. And in regions such as Italy, the transition from the prehistoric period to the historical one took place even later - some 2,700 years ago.
“If we, linguists, like archaeologists, possessed fossil materials, of course, everything would be much easier,” says Shevoroshkin. "However, there are no less rigorous methods and no less scientifically based concepts that allow us to reconstruct the common origins of all languages."
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Let's look at a specific example: in German, in Dutch and in Swedish, “hand” is pronounced “hand”, in English “hand”, in Danish “haand”. To explain this striking similarity, only three hypotheses can be put forward: we are talking about a simple coincidence: a word was borrowed by one language from another; all the languages listed are of the same origin.
Accidental coincidence in relation to so many languages is mathematically impossible, especially since there are many other coinciding or similar words in the same languages. It is necessary to exclude the assumption of borrowing, since "hand" is an elementary basic word for any language. Thus, a third hypothesis remains: about a common root, in other words, that this word goes back to the word of that single language in which people spoke in the past.
In our particular case, we are talking about the Pro-Germanic language, which, although it has disappeared for a long time, can still be reconstructed ("hand" in this language is "hando").
The next step is to identify the language from which both Proto Germanic and Latin (the language that gave rise to the family of Romance languages) originate. This step was first taken by the Englishman William Jones, a judge from colonial India. Studying Sanskrit, the language that gave birth to Hindi and many other Indian languages, he found in it elements of similarity not only with Latin and Proto-Germanic, but also with ancient Greek and Celtic languages.
At a conference in 1786, Sir William announced his theory of the existence of a common Indo-European language. Later, scientists proved that the Indo-European language was used in the Middle East and in the basins of the Caspian and Black Seas for several millennia, starting from about 5000 BC. Then Sanskrit and Greek developed from it.
Over time, nine more proto-languages were identified, corresponding in time to Indo-European, including Afrasian (from which Arabic and Hebrew originate), Uralic (which gave rise to Finnish and Hungarian) and Altai (ancestor of Mongolian, Japanese, Korean).
Already in the 19th century. some linguists, having found common linguistic origins and roots, set about reconstructing these dead languages. However, the lack of strictly scientific methods and the tendency towards approximation over time greatly discredited the very idea of such a reconstruction.
“I argue that the use of methods simply borrowed from the arsenal of comparative linguistics as such, like those used at the beginning of this century, is irresponsible and can only lead to distortion of the results,” explains Shevoroshkin. - It is strange, however, that no one in the West seems to have paid attention to the methodology of linguistic reconstruction that has been applied since the early 1960s. by Soviet researchers. This methodology is scientifically irreproachable."
THIS IS THE GENERAL NOSTRATIC LANGUAGE
V. Shevoroshkin has in mind the works of V. Illich-Svitych and A. Dolgopolsky, who in 1963 announced their discovery of a number of words that belonged to the prehistoric language, which was spoken in the Middle East during the period 20-12 thousand. years, and from which six out of ten proto-languages identified to this day originated: Indo-European, Afrasian, Kartvelian, Uralic, Dravidian, Altai.
Independently of each other, Illich-Svitych and Dolgopolsky began to analyze and compare the 25 most stable words of each language, words that were never borrowed, such as the first and second person pronouns "I - me", "you - you", as well as words denoting the main parts of the body: "eye", "hand", "tooth", etc. Then the 50 most stable words were examined, etc. up to 500.
The knowledge about this proto-language, which was dubbed Nostratic (from the Latin "noster" - "our"), has expanded significantly over the years. Today we already know over a thousand words. We also know that in the construction of the Nostratic phrase the verb is at the end, and the verbs could be active, passive and reflexive, and when conjugated, the verb forms of the first and second person singular were formed by adding pronouns meaning "me" and "myself" to the infinitive.
From the first thousand Nostratic words studied, it can be concluded that the society that spoke this language was rather primitive and lived by hunting and gathering fruits. They had neither bows nor arrows yet; they did not grow plants, and they had only one domestic animal - a dog (in Indo-European - "kuon", in Nostratic - "kuyna"), “Our studies,” adds V. Shevoroshkin, “lead to the conclusion that in the Nostratic era, man had already tamed the wolf. The fact is that the word "kuina" means both a dog and a wolf. This sociocultural fact has recently been confirmed by archaeologists who discovered dog bones that are about 15,000 years old."
The Nostratic language was the language of the "vital": for example, it contained designations only for some colors, and in most cases these were words that called animals of the same color (approximately as we now say "mouse color"). Words were completely absent in it associated with feelings, states of the soul, such as "love" or "pain". There were only words for basic, essential concepts - hunger, thirst, etc.
In the same year that Illich-Svitych and Dolgopolsky announced the discovery of the Nostratic language, the Africanist J. Greenberg published his research in the United States proving that all African languages go back to four large families.
However, unlike Soviet scientists, Greenberg did not study or analyze the pronunciation correspondences; he simply limited himself to compiling lists of the 300 most consistently present words in different languages and comparing them in search of a common origin. Despite the omissions and errors of such a research method, the conclusions from its work have been accepted by almost everyone over the years.
Encouraged by this, the American linguist decided to apply his method to the study of the languages of the American continent and in 1987 announced the discovery of the Amerindian proto-language, which differs from the two previously known proto-languages - Nadene and Eskimo-Aleutian, from which all current American languages got their origin.
For his part, V. Shevoroshkin, in contrast to Grinberg, and the search for the lost proto-language seeks to rely on the undoubted works of about three dozen of his former colleagues. "Scientists in Russia continue to make progress: they recently proved that Basque belongs to the North Caucasian family, like Etruscan, probably," he says.
Well, when can you count on identifying the "mother" of all languages?
“Studying the proto-language itself is still just a hobby for me: in order to make such a leap into the depths of time, you must first create a solid base for a run,” the scientist replies. - Humanity that speaks the language appeared in Africa and split into two branches about 100 thousand years ago. Some remained in Africa, while others moved to the Middle East. Thus, the first bifurcation in the linguistic genealogical tree was accomplished; on the one hand, the African language, on the other, non-African.
This latter then divided into three branches: the eastern branch, from which the Amerindian and Australian have grown; the western, from which the Nostratic and Denecaucasian languages were born, and, finally, the southern, or Congo-Saharan, representing the languages of the part of the population that decided to return to Africa."
V. Shevoroshkin is convinced that step by step it will be possible to restore these three proto-branches - eastern, western and southern - and make an ascent to their common trunk - the non-African language. When this is done, there will remain the last - huge - leap into the darkness of the past: to the proto-language of Homo sapiens - the "mother" of all languages. It will probably be a very small, even negligible group of words …
