Was There a Universal First Language?

When the Cro-Magnon men painted their colorful animals deep in the caves of present-day France and Spain 25,000 years ago, what language did they speak? Would you believe that there are scientists who are seriously trying to answer that question?

How can one possibly find out? Ancient people may leave their bones behind, and their tools, and even their art, but they don’t leave any record of their language. They’d have to be able to write to do that, and writing was invented only about 5,500 years ago.

In a way, though, they do leave records of their languages, because languages aren’t completely independent of one another. There are similarities, for instance, between such languages as Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Provencal, French, Italian and (believe it or not) Romanian. These are all called “Romance languages,” because they are all similar, not only to each other, but to the old Roman language we call Latin.

This is not a mystery. Latin was the common language of Western Europe in the days of the Roman Empire. After the fall of that empire, and the temporary decline of education and other aspects of civilization, the Latin dialects in different parts of what had been the empire drifted apart and eventually developed into new languages.

You can still detect similarities in vocabulary and grammar, however.

Suppose, then, you had only these Romance languages, but that Latin had died out so completely that we had no record of it whatever. Might it not be possible, then, to go through the various Romance languages, study all the similarities and construct a common language from which all might have developed? And if one did, might that constructed language not be something like Latin?

If you want to go even farther back, there are similarities between Latin and Greek. The ancient Romans recognized this and adopted the more sophisticated grammatical principals that had been used for Greek and applied them to their own language. Must there not have been, then, an older language from which Greek and Latin both developed?

The surprising answer to that came when the British began to seize control of India in the 1700s. The prime purpose was to indulge in trade that would enrich Great Britain, but there naturally were scholars among the British who were interested in Indian civilization for its own sake. Among these was Sir William Jones, who studied an old Indian language, Sanskrit, which, like Latin, was no longer in use, but which had given rise to later variations.

Sanskrit survived in ancient epics and religious writings, however, and as Jones studied it, he found similarities in its vocabulary and grammar to both Greek and Latin. Furthermore, and this was the great surprise, there were similarities to the old Teutonic languages, such as Gothic, Old High German and Old Norse. He even found similarities in Persian and in the Celtic languages.

In 1786, he concluded, therefore, that there was an “Indo-European” family of languages that stretched from Ireland to India and that probably stemmed from a single source. We might imagine that about 7,000 BC there was an “Indo-European tribe” that lived, perhaps, in what is now Turkey. It spread outward in all directions, carrying with it its language, which evolved in different places as groups became isolated from each other. By studying all the similarities, might it not be possible to work up a kind of common language, an “Old Indo-European” that might indeed resemble what the original tribe spoke in 7,000 BC?

This is made the more possible because in the 1800s, rules for the manner in which languages changed with time were worked out by, among others, the Grimm brothers, who are better known today for the fairy tales they collected.

There are other language families that are not Indo-European. There is the Semitic group that includes Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Assyrian and so on. There is the Hamitic group, which includes certain early languages in Egypt, Ethiopia and Northern Africa. There is the Ural-Altaic group, which includes Turkish, Hungarian and Finnish (so that if Turkey was the original home of the Indo-Europeans, the vicissitudes of history have arranged to have a non-Indo-European language spoken there today).

Then there are the varieties of languages spoken by American Indians; by black Africans; by the Chinese and other people of the Far East; by the Polynesians; by the Australian Aborigines, and so on.

There are even languages that have no known connections with any other--such as ancient Sumerian and modern Basque.

If all of these were studied, might it be possible to work up an original language from which all descended? It would be an enormous task, but to linguists it would be a fascinating job.