A Basic Course in Anthropological Linguistics (Studies in Linguistic ...

34 A BASIC COURSE IN ANTHROPOLOGICAL LINGUISTICS
The predictive power of the reconstruction technique was established
beyond any shadow of a doubt after a remarkable discovery in the first part of
the twentieth century. In his work on Hittite-an ancient Indo-European language
of Asia Minor spoken in the second millennium BC-Ferdinand de Saussure
had proposed to resolve various anomalies in the reconstructed PIE vowel
system by postulating the existence of a laryngeal sound /h/ (similar to the
English h in house) that, he claimed, must have caused the changes in the
length and quality of adjacent vowels to occur in PIE’S linguistic descendants.
Saussure’s suggestion was based purely on reconstructive reasoning. It was
considered clever, but dismissed as improbable because it could not be
substantiated. However, in 1927 when cuneiform tablets of Hittite were dug
up by archeologists in Turkey, they revealed, upon close scrutiny, the presence
of an /h/ sound in that language that occurred in places within words where
Saussure had predicted it should be!
Linguists have reconstructed various language families. By going further
and further down the trunk to the “roots” of the protolinguistic tree, the idea
has been to reconstruct one of the original tongues of humanity-which has
been designated recently as “Nostratic” (from Latin noster ours^'). The linguist
Shevoroshkin (1990: 22) explains the importance of work on Nostratic as
follows:
Spoken 14,000 years ago, it [Nostratic] links the Indo-European
protolanguage with language families encompassing the Near East
and northern Asia. But now a group of scholars believe they have
taken the final step. By painstaking comparison of Nostratic with
the ancestral languages of Africa, Southeast Asia, Australia and
the Americas, they believe they have partially reconstructed human
language as it was first uttered 100,000 years ago.
Several thousand words of Nostratic have been reconstructed so far (Ross
1991; Bomhard 1992). The words are mainly concrete ones referring to body
parts and natural objects. They suggest that our ancestors were mainly hunters
and gatherers, that they dwelled in villages in times of bounty, that they used
twigs covered with mud to build their abodes, but that they had virtually no
knowledge of agriculture. Remarkably, archeologists have been discovering
many of the things-bones, remnants of dwellings, etc.-that linguists have
indicated should exist! Aided by computer technology, linguists can now scan
thousands of words. Almost instantaneously, they can establish lexical relations
among many languages and generate precise algorithms for mapping phonetic