Trends in Linguistics

Hard words
by Philip E. Ross In his article the author brings in the discussion multiple points of view coming from different fields of activity. Firstly, he states that all languages in the world might have been developed from one single language, according to Merritt Ruhlens idea that it is possible to trace all the worlds languages back to a single source. This unaffiliated linguist says that the word tik is what prehistorics used to designate the finger for it came down to English as toe and to Latin as digit. In this respect, Philip Ross argues the fact that linguists are besieged by amateurs, which leads to many different opinions, such as Adolf Hitlers ideology of an Aryan superrace. Another theory is given by Derek Bickerton about Creole languages common languages created by immigrants to island communities. He says that these languages changed strikely between the first and second generation of speakers. Ross finds some difficulties in studying the words used to name colors starting with the example of Russians who see a color as light blue or dark blue whereas Americans might see it as plain old blue, for which a single English word exists. A factor that may influence those theories is the fact that the language of some colonists has more words for color that those who are conquered. Starting with Luigi L. Cavalli-Sforzas idea that genes and language diverged at the same time, Ross mentions Charles Darwin as the first who linked the evolution of languages to biology and who states that evolution might transform simple languages into complex ones.

Ross gives biological point of view of how language is created and concludes that any child can learn any language without making the grammatical mistakes that one would expect and that the chimpanzees can breathe while swallowing in comparison to humans whose position of the larynx makes this feature impossible. Parallel to biology, Ross explores another field of activity: genetics. Allan Wilson and his colleagues studied the genes to trace humanitys common genetic inheritance; these genes are encoded on DNA of mitochondria, intracellular organelles that convert glucose into a more readily used form of energy. The author of the article appeals to history or old theories about the monogenesis of the languages. Sir Williams Jones observed in 1786 that Sanskrit, Greek and Latin had sprung from some common source which, perhaps, no longer exists . His immediate successors, Rasmus Rask, Franz Bopp and Jacob Grimm discovered that systematic sound differences in words have similar meanings from different Indo-European groups. The Germanic family as English and German have an f and v in places where the Latin groups have a p: father, vater and pater from the Sanskrit pitar. Similarly, linguists think the Indo-European word for God was Deiw-os which later shoes up in Latin as Deus. In combination with pter, it designated the patriarchal God of Indo-European religion: Dyeu pter; it survived as Jupiter in Latin, Zeus pater in Greek and Dyaus pitar in Sanskrit. Finally, Philip E. Ross mentions two groups of researchers who made some researches in the field of the genesis of the languages in the world. The first group consists of soviet linguists that made a big effort to trace the

branches of human language back to a 12000-year-old Neolithic trunk. The latter group consisting of American linguists compared families of languages in the 1950s, giving a classification of the myriad languages into three groups . Thus there is a series of major language families most of which are generally accepted by linguists, which means that World still has Indo-European tongues that have survived over time (English, French, Portuguese etc.).

Questions: 1. How did Merritt Ruhlen find out that tik was the first spoken word? 2. How long does it take for a word to change in the way Dyeu pter changed into Jupiter? 3. Why is so important for researchers to find the original language?