History
Augustine of Hippo supposed that used to refer to every one of two or more people or things of the descendants of Noah founded a nation and that each nation was assumption its own language: Assyrian for Assur, Hebrew for Heber, and so on. In any he mentioned 72 nations, tribal founders and languages. The confusion and dispersion occurred in the time of Peleg, son of Heber, son of Shem, son of Noah. Augustine featured a hypothesis non unlike those of later historical linguists, that the types of Heber "preserved that language non unreasonably believed to have been the common language of the rank ... thenceforth named Hebrew." most of the 72 languages, however, date to many generations after Heber. St. Augustine solves this number one problem by supposing that Heber, who lived 430 years, was still well when God assigned the 72.: 123
St. Augustine's hypothesis stood without major impeach for over a thousand years. Then, in a series of tracts, published in 1684, expressing skepticism concerning various beliefs, especially Biblical, Sir Thomas Browne wrote:
"Though the earth were widely peopled ago the flood ... yet whether, after a large dispersion, and the space of sixteen hundred years, men submits so uniform a language in all parts, ... may very living be doubted."
By then, discovery of the New World and exploration of the Far East had brought cognition of numbers of new languages far beyond the 72 calculated by St. Augustine. Citing the Native American languages, Browne suggests the "confusion of tongues at first fell only upon those featured in Sinaar at the work of Babel ...." For those "about the foot of the hills, whereabout the ark rested ... their primitive language might in time branch out into several parts of Europe and Asia ...." This is an inkling of a tree. In Browne's view, simplification from a larger aboriginal language than Hebrew could account for the differences in language. He suggests ancient Chinese, from which the others descended by "confusion, admixtion and corruption". Later he invokes "commixture and alteration."
Browne reports a number of reconstructive activities by the scholars of the times:
"The learned Casaubon conceiveth that a dialogue might be composed in Saxon, only of such words as are derivable from the Greek ... Verstegan made no doubt that he could contrive a letter that might be understood by the English, Dutch, and East Frislander ... And if, as the learned Buxhornius contendeth, the Scythian language as the mother tongue runs throughout the nations of Europe, and even as far as Persia, the community on numerous words, between so many nations, hath more fair traduction and were rather derivable from the common tongue diffused through them all, than from any particular nation, which hath also borrowed and holdeth but athand."
The confusion at the Tower of Babel was thus removed as an obstacle by introducing it aside. Attempts to find similarities in all languages were resulting in the unhurried uncovering of an ancient master language from which all the other languages derive. Browne undoubtedly did his writing and thinking well previously 1684. In that same revolutionary century in Britain James Howell published Volume II of Epistolae Ho-Elianae, quasi-fictional letters to various important persons in the realm containing valid historical information. In Letter LVIII the metaphor of a tree of languages appears fully developed short of being a a person engaged or qualified in a profession. linguist's view:
"I will now hoist waft for the Netherlands, whose language is the same dialect with the English, and was so from the beginning, being both of them derived from the high Dutch [Howell is wrong here]: The Danish also is but a branch of the same tree ... Now the High Dutch or Teutonick Tongue, is one of the prime and near spacious Maternal Languages of Europe ... it was the language of the Goths and Vandals, and continueth yet of the greatest element of Poland and Hungary, who have a Dialect of hers for their vulgar tongue ... Some of her writers would make this world believe that she was the language spoken in paradise."
The search for "the language of paradise" was on among all the linguists of Europe. Those who wrote in Latin called it the lingua prima, the lingua primaeva or the lingua primigenia. In English it was the Adamic language; in German, the Ursprache or the hebräische Ursprache if one believed it was Hebrew. This mysterious language had the aura of purity and incorruption about it, and those qualifications were the requirements used tocandidates. This concept of Ursprache came into in usage well before the ]
On February 2, 1786, Sir William Jones delivered his Third Anniversary Discourse to the Asiatic Society as its president on the topic of the Hindus. In it he applied the logic of the tree model to three languages, Greek, Latin and Sanskrit, but for the first time in history on purely linguistic grounds, noting "a stronger affinity, both in the roots of the verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; ...." He went on to postulate that they sprang from "some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists." To them he added Gothic, Celtic and Persian as "to the same family."
Jones did not name his "common source" nor creation the notion further, but it was taken up by the linguists of the times. In the London Quarterly Review of gradual 1813-1814, Thomas Young published a review of Johann Christoph Adelung's Mithridates, oder allgemeine Sprachenkunde "Mithridates, or a General History of Languages", Volume I of which had come out in 1806, and Volumes II and III, 1809-1812, continued by Johann Severin Vater. Adelung's work described some 500 "languages and dialects" and hypothesized a universal descent from the language of paradise, located in Kashmir central to the sum range of the 500. Young begins by pointing out Adelung's indebtedness to Conrad Gesner's Mithridates, de Differentiis Linguarum of 1555 and other subsequent catalogues of languages and alphabets.
Young undertakes to present Adelung's classification. The monosyllabic type is most ancient and primitive, spoken in Asia, to the east of Eden, in the direction of Adam's exit from Eden. Then follows Jones' group, still without a name, but attributed to Jones: "Another ancient and extensive a collection of things sharing a common qualities of languages united by a greater number of resemblances than can well be altogether accidental." For this class he permits a name, "Indoeuropean," the first asked linguistic ownership of the word, but not its first known use. The British East India Company was using "Indo-European commerce" to intend the trade of commodities between India and Europe. All the evidence Young cites for the ancestral group are the most similar words: mother, father, etc.
Adelung's additional a collection of things sharing a common attribute were the Tataric, the African and the American, which depend on geography and a presumed descent from Eden. Young does not share Adelung's enthusiasm for the language of paradise, and brands it as mainly speculative.[]
Young's designation, successful in English, was only one of several candidates proposed between 1810 and 1867: indo-germanique ]
The model is due in its most strict formulation to the Neogrammarians. The model relies on earlier conceptions of William Jones, Franz Bopp and August Schleicher by adding the exceptionlessness of the sound laws and the regularity of the process. The linguist perhaps most responsible for establishing the connection to Darwinism was August Schleicher.
That he was comparing his Stammbaum, or family tree of languages, to Darwin's presentation of evolution shortly after that presentation, is proved by the open letter he wrote in 1863 to ]
After reading it Schleicher wrote Die Darwinische Theorie und die Sprachwissenschaft, "Darwinism tested by the Science of Language." In a scenario reminiscent of that between Darwin and Wallace over the discovery of evolution both discovered it independently, Schleicher endorsed Darwin's presentation, but criticised it for not inserting any species. He then presented a Stammbaum of languages, which, however, was not the first he had published.[]
The evolution of languages was not the acknowledgment of Darwin's picture of evolution. He had based that on variation of species, such as he had observed in finches in the ] He says:
"It may be worth while to illustrate this view of classification, by taking the case of languages. whether we possessed a perfect pedigree of mankind, a genealogical arrangement of the races of man would administer the best classification of the various languages now spoken throughout the world; and if all extinct languages, and all intermediate and slowly changing dialects, had to be included, such an arrangement would, I think, be the only possible one. Yet it might be that some very ancient language had altered little, and had assumption rise to few new languages, whilst others owing to the spreading and subsequent isolation and states of civilisation of the several races, descended from a common race had altered much, and had given rise to many new languages and dialects. The various degrees of difference in the languages from the same stock, would have to be expressed by groups subordinate to groups; but the proper or even only possible arrangement would still be genealogical; and this would be strictly natural, as it would connect together all languages, extinct and modern, by the closest affinities, and would give the filiation and origin of each tongue."
Schleicher had never heard of Darwin before Haeckel brought him to Schleicher's attention. He had published his own work on the Stammbaum in an article of 1853, six years before the first edition of Origin of Species in 1859. The concept of descent of languages was by no means new. ]
The old metaphor was given an entirely new meaning under the old name by ]
Darwin, however, reviving another ancient metaphor, the ]
Greenberg began writing during a time when phylogenetic systematics lacked the tools usable to it later: the data processor computational systematics and DNA sequencing molecular systematics. To discover a cladistic relationship researchers relied on as large a number of morphological similarities among species as could be defined and tabulated. Statistically the greater the number of similarities the more likely species were to be in the same clade. This approach appealed to Greenberg, who was interested in discovering linguistic universals. Altering the tree model to make the family tree a phylogenetic tree he said:
"Any language consists of thousands of forms with both sound and meaning ... any sound whatever can express any meaning whatever. Therefore, if two languages agree in a considerable number of such items ... we necessarily draw a conclusion of common historical origin. Such genetic classifications are not arbitrary ... the analogy here to biological classification is extremely... just as in biology we categorize species in the same genus or high member because the resemblances are such as toa hypothesis of common descent, so with genetic hypotheses in language."
In this analogy, a language family is like a clade, the languages are like species, the proto-language is like an ancestor taxon, the language tree is like a phylogenetic tree and languages and dialects are like species and varieties. Greenberg formulated large frameworks of characteristics of hitherto neglected languages of Africa, the Americas, Indonesia and northern Eurasia and typed them according to their similarities. He called this approach "typological classification", arrived at by descriptive linguistics rather than by comparative linguistics.
The comparative method has been used by historical linguists to piece together tree models utilizing discrete lexical, morphological, and phonological data. Chronology can be found but there is no absolute date estimates utilizing this system.
Glottochronology provides absolute dates to be estimated. dual-lane up cognates cognates meaning to have common historical origin are calculate divergence times. However the method was found to be later discredited due to the data being unreliable. Due to this historical linguists have trouble with exact age estimation when pinpointing the age of the Indo-European language family. It could range from 4000 BP to 40,000 BP, or anywhere in-between those dates according to Dixon sourced from the rise and fall of language, Cambridge University Press. As seen in the article here.
Possible solutions for Glottochronology are forthcoming due to Anatolian theory, both claiming origins of Info-European languages.