In the last post I mentioned the Sumerian sexagesimal system. Quite remarkably, the Sumerian language used base 60 to count. Although not all their number words survive, many of their names for numbers up to five dozen are simple. That is, they don’t have a smaller scale structure to their words like English, for example, has. We have a slight tendency towards vigesimal in the fact that the teens are named differently than the twenties, thirties and so forth, so we have secondary structure in our own numerical vocabulary. Sumerian also has this, but it doesn’t break up sexagesimal. The numbers 7 and 9 translate literally as “five-two” and “five-four”, but this is sporadic and doesn’t reflect a system, although it may have done so in prehistoric times.
It’s hard to imagine a widespread modern language which used that many basic numeral words. These traces suggest that the Sumerian system used to be smaller, but in some ways this complexity is typical of what might be called “primitive” languages. The trend in most languages is from complexity to simplicity, but this leads to a quandary.
If you assume the Whig conception of history, which is of general progress towards the current social order, you’re presented with a depressing view of the past if progress is synonymous with improvement. We can look back on a decline of overt racism, sexism, homophobia and other identity-based prejudice, better conditions for workers, more tolerance, increasing care for the vulnerable and the like, and will be confronted with the idea that the past was utterly appalling in all sorts of ways. This is not actually how things happened. For instance, whereas Georgian Britain had the slave trade, the death penalty for homosexual acts and a general contempt for the needs of the poor, it was also less puritanical than the Victorian era, and in some ways that made it a better place to live. This is a major oversimplification of course, but it definitely isn’t a case of a terrible past trending towards a good present across the board.
A similar illusion afflicts the conception of language change. A lot of the time it really feels like languages are all becoming simpler and easier with the passage of time. Taking English as an example, we now have fewer strong verbs, we use “have” rather than “be” as the auxiliary for all past participles used in the perfect tense, we don’t use “thou” any more and many of our consonants in clusters have become silent, such as “knight” and “know”. The same process seems to take place in almost any familiar, widely spoken language you can think of. Latin is generally much more complex than any of the modern Romance languages, North Indian languages and Romani are way simpler than Sanskrit and Greek has become much simpler grammatically than it was in the Bronze Age. Sometimes this trend seems to be completely across the board, and it leads to a very odd apparent conclusion: that prehistoric languages were so complicated that it’s hard to imagine children being able to learn them at all.
We can only trace most languages back a little way into the Neolithic. Before that, the nature of languages spoken is highly mysterious. The oldest traceable languages are probably the Afro-Asiatic ones, which may be descended from a parent language spoken eighteen thousand years ago, which is Upper Palæolithic, also known as the Mesolithic. Further back lies the Nostratic hypothesis, which attempts to link a large number of language families together, but this is not accepted by mainstream linguists. It is very tempting though, and it leads to a language which looks very much like some Caucasian languages in form. It should be noted that the Caucasian languages do not form a single family, but they are nonetheless characterised by extremely complex grammar and many consonant clusters and types of consonant, sometimes with very few vowels. The extinct Ubyx, for example, had seven dozen and two consonants but only two vowels, which is a record number of consonants only exceeded by click languages.
Types of languages can be classified in various ways. One is word order, so for instance English is SVO, Subject-Verb-Object, Hebrew, Arabic and the surviving Celtic languages are VSO and Latin, Sanskrit and Turkish are SOV. However, a more relevant way of addressing types of language is in the complexity of their grammar. Languages can be analytic, fusional, agglutinative or polysynthetic. English is very close to being analytic. Its words vary very little and it often expresses cases, tenses and other inflections with prepositions and auxiliary verbs, which are approaching particles as with “should of” instead of “should have” and “gotta” for “must” or “have to”. However, English is not completely analytic (also known as isolating), because for example it still has mutation plurals such as “teeth” and participles formed by adding suffixes. Mandarin Chinese is closer to this state, with even plural pronouns being expressed using a separate “word”, which is in fact a bound morpheme but is very regular, being the same for their words for “we”, “you” and “they”. Chinese tends to be thought of as a purely monosyllabic language but it’s also been stated that the mean number of syllables in Mandarin is “almost exactly two”. This is because of things like words for “insect” which can only be used together, the plural marker for pronouns being considered a separate word and the tendency to think of separate vowels as diphthongs. Nonetheless Mandarin and the other Chinese “dialects”, which are of course really separate languages, are particularly good examples of analytic languages.
Fusional languages have affixes and other changes in word form which tend to express more than one idea with a single change. Most Indo-European languages are fusional. English, for example, expresses both plurality and possession by adding an S on the end of nouns. It’s easier to illustrate this in other Indo-European languages. German “der” and “die” are fair examples of this. The former is used both for the feminine and plural genitive and the latter for the feminine nominative and accusative and the plural nominative and accusative. As well as being fairly characteristic of Indo-European languages, there’s also a tendency for non-Indo-European languages not to be fusional. The trend from fusional to analytic is evident in English in its current state, with relatively few but some strong verbs. Fusionality probably makes languages harder to learn as second languages whether or not one’s first language is fusional.
Somewhat similar to fusional languages are agglutinative ones. Turkish and Finnish are agglutinative, and so is Esperanto. Agglutinative languages have separate morphemes for each expressed idea whose forms change little when they’re added to words. Finnish is quite agglutinative but tends to weaken some of its suffixes, changing double consonants to single. Agglutinative languages may be able to express entire phrases in single words, as with the Finnish “tottelemattomuudestansa” – “because of your disobedience” (that may be misspelt). Agglutination and fusion are both features found in languages which are generally considered to be in the other class, so for example the Indo-European Armenian uses agglutination with nouns but not elsewhere and general word-building in English and many other fusional languages is also agglutinative, with something as simple as “everyday” being an example. Agglutinative languages can be seen as descended from analytical languages but tending to run their words together in a way which has become enshrined in grammar.
The final class of language is known as polysynthetic, and these are what I’m mainly going to talk about today. Polysynthetic languages have entire sentences as one word. There are other languages which are able to do this, and clearly one-word sentences exist in English for example, such as “go”, “yes”, “hello” and so forth, but in polysynthetic languages these are the norm. The title of this post, “they wouldn’t easily let themselves become Greenlanders” is a single word in Iñupiaq, one of the languages of the Inuit. Incidentally, I’m not going into the politics of why they’re sometimes called “Esquimaux” here because it’s more complex than might at first appear. For reasons which might be connected to sociolinguistic features of polysynthetic languages, most first-language speakers or English, Castilian, German and the like are more likely to quote references to such words rather than be able to form them themselves, because these are not common second languages. The above phrase is from an edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica and its original Iñupiaq is lost to me. One that I can retrieve, by copying unfortunately, is the Mohawk example of “tkanuhstasrihsranuhwe’tsraaksahsrakaratattsrayeri” – “the praising of the evil of the liking of the finding of the house is right”. This fifty letter word is said to be one of any number of Mohawk words of unlimited length, because Mohawk is a polysynthetic language. This, by the way, is why it cannot be true that the Inuit have many words for “snow”. It’s more that they have many words, some of which mention snow, but they could equally well be said to have lots of words for anteaters, animals for which the Arctic is not renowned. In fact I’m not sure they have a straightforward way of referring to anteaters, but I hope you take my point. And the problem here is that knowledge of polysynthetic languages outside their communities is usually sparse.
There’s some controversy as to what constitutes a polysynthetic language. One important aspect is polypersonal agreement in verbs. Swahili and other Bantu languages have this. The Swahili verb inflects for the object as well as the subject, so “nimekuosha” means “I washed you” and “sikukuosha” means “I didn’t wash you”, four or five words in English and a complete sentence with subject and object. However, what Swahili does not do is incorporate nouns into the verb phrase, and it’s probably this which makes a language truly polysynthetic. It’s easy to understand how it could happen. Just as Latin has “amo, amas, amat” and the like, where “-at” refers to “she/he/it/this/that” and probably a lot else, so could a language, instead of in a sense incorporating pronouns, actually use nouns as part of the verbal inflection, and that’s the point when it counts as a polysynthetic language. Incidentally, although I contrast “polysynthetic” with agglutinative and fusional here, and using the last two to refer only to non-polysynthetic languages, polysynthetic languages can in fact be fusional or agglutinative themselves, and will actually be one of these, or tend towards being one or the other.
Now, one of the surprising things about polysynthetic languages is that whereas there are globalised and industrialised nations with official languages of all sorts of typology, there are absolutely no countries at all with main official polysynthetic languages. Examples of the others are easy to find. Malay, Indonesia and China have isolating languages. European nations mainly have fusional languages. Finland, Turkey, Georgia and Hungary have agglutinative languages. Many of these nations have no indigenous polysynthetic languages in any case, but some have. There are in fact no polysynthetic languages at all which are widely spoken in terms of area or numbers, although there have been in the past. The exception to all this is Nahuatl, the language of the Aztec Empire, which currently has 1.5 million speakers. Apart from that, only Navajo and Cree are spoken by more than a hundred thousand people, and in fact “spoken” may be the operative word here because most polysynthetic languages have few literate speakers. It’s also notable that those three examples are all spoken in North (and Central) America, and at one point in the nineteenth Christian century it was thought that polysynthesis was a distinctive characteristic of American languages.
This last point might conceivably be why there are so few widely-spoken examples. If it really was a feature of America, the genocide visited by White people on Native Americans could explain this distribution. There are also many Australian aboriginal languages of this type, but again a similar process took place on that continent. Many Papuan languages are polysynthetic, but in this case it could be simply due to the wide variety of languages spoken in Papua. In Eurasia, most such languages are spoken in Eastern Siberia and this includes Ainu, which is a special case and also a potentially informative case study. The only European such languages are the Northwest Caucasian ones. They also seem to be absent from Afrika, at least insofar as Bantu languages are not considered under this heading due to not incorporating nouns. What is going on here? The situation often seems to be that marginalised, low population indigenous peoples such as the Ainu, Iroquois, Inuit, those of the Amazon and Siberia and Australian Aborigines, all tend to speak polysynthetic languages, in small groups isolated from the rest of the world and tend to be conquered by larger powers, particularly Westerners but not always: the Japanese, Chinese and Arabs have also done this. By contrast, all the powerful nations speak other types of language. Why?
Linguistic complexity is associated with small, isolated and stable communities with dense social networks, i.e. where everyone knows everyone else. The density of a social network can be measured by dividing the number of links between people in a community by the number of possible links. Where the result is high, the network is dense. Such groups are socially cohesive, stable and have few external contacts. Languages associated with these are relatively rarely learnt by outsiders, but before I go further on that, what exactly constitutes an outsider?
There are three orders of social network involvement. The first order consists of people linked to each other. This is the core. The second order comprises people who are linked to the first order but not the central members. The third order is of people with no direct connection to the first order zone. This seems to contradict the idea of six degrees of separation, but in fact there could be an exponential growth in possible zones four to six.
As stated above, I’ve had to raid reference works to come up with examples of words from polysynthetic languages because I’m not familiar with even one of them. I’m conscious of the occasional word from Nahuatl used in English, and Iñupiaq words like igloo, anorak, umyak and kayak, but no serious words from the languages themselves not used internationally. This is not just me. It’s because they just don’t speak much to outsiders. In the case of the Inuit, this may be due to being in a very hostile environment in small groups,and the same applies in Siberia and the Amazon. Elsewhere, it isn’t as obvious what’s going on.
One suggestion is that second language learners lead to the language becoming simpler for first language learners too, because there are certain things they just can’t manage. If that’s so, it means that the use of second languages is more normal than it seems to be for most first language English speakers today. It’s possible that the intermarriage outside communities would lead to something a little like creolisation, only not to the extent of borrowed vocabulary or mixture of languages.
Social networks often have “hub” people, who link people who don’t know each other together. Sarada and I became aware of a mutual acquaintance soon after we met who is definitely one of these, and I think I’ve experienced the influence they have over language in their own way. A few years ago, I used to edit a newsletter and used the word “planet” to refer to Earth in order to give a sense of unity and vary my use of language, and they found this usage peculiar, probably due to their world view, which separated the mundane from the celestial and reflected their negative view of science. It became very difficult to insist on retaining the use of the word, which contrasted with how it was used outside our community but in, for instance, associated pressure groups such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and also in the Green Party, and I think this was probably a minor example of how hub people, sometimes inadvertantly, exert pressure to keep language use in a particular form, which can be both innovative and conservative, and I suspect similar forces are at play here
The lack of literacy, and its possible imposition from without, may also be a factor. If a whole community doesn’t use writing or read at all, it may not divide utterances into words in the same way as a literate one would. English has been strongly influenced by widespread literacy, which has changed the pronunciation of certain words to be more in line with spelling, such as “again” and “often”. If foreigners came into a linguistic group and decide on where the words are divided, they may make different decisions than the native speakers might. In the case of Nahuatl, the very nature of its writing was not close to how other cultures are literate. In fact, pre-Columbian Nahuatl has often been considered not to have a writing system at all in spite of the fact that it had paper and books with pages. It used ideograms and was also partly based on wordplay (such as “bee leaf” for “belief” would be in English), similar to how proto-writing worked in Bronze Age Mesopotamia. Aztec codices are reminiscent in some ways of graphic novels. In parts of Siberia, letters were written in pictures representing the situation, such as a crossed-out vertical spear to express not being able to see someone because they were beyond the horizon. In a culture using this kind of graphical communication, it seems possible that they didn’t particularly think of themselves as using words.
The same situation is likely to be familiar to a hearing parent using spoken language with a young child who is not deaf. Their early language use is unlike mature speech in various ways, including using phrases which they don’t analyse into words, and only later does this emerge. For instance, one of our children used to refer to an untidy scene as a “what a mess”, and to a ball as a “make a ball”, and a child of one of our friends used to say “hat on” and even “hat on on” for “hat”. Many English speakers will be aware of young children saying “wassat” as if it’s one word. If the influence of the idea of short, separate words was entirely absent, it’s easy to imagine a whole culture continuing to do this. Another example is our daughter saying “Llater” for “see you later” with a voiceless “Welsh” LL at the start. This can extend into adulthood even in English. One quoted example is “azeniayuenionya?” – “has any of you any on you?” as a request for loose tobacco. In a way, maybe it’s we who misunderstand the nature of spoken language and we imagine we’re saying the latter rather than the former. Another one is my text-speech like “cuinabit” – “see you in a bit”.
Celtic and Sanskrit are both known for their tendency to merge spoken words into each other, such that the unit of speech for a speaker of those languages may not actually be the word so much as the phrase. It’s also been suggested that French is on its way to becoming a polysynthetic language. It contains clitics, which are word-like morphemes which depend on full-fledged utterances and therefore cannot occur on their own. There has long been a major discrepancy between the spelling and pronunciation of French, and it shares with modern Celtic languages a connection between consecutive words in speech. Phrases such as «je te l’ai dit» and «je ne sais pas» come across differently in speech than writing, and considered as words are “zheteledi” and “zhensepa” in my made up on the spur of the moment orthography. Coming across French anew as if it were an unknown language, one might regard “di” as the stem of the verb, “-e-” as the sign of the perfect tense, “-te-” as the third person objective prefix and “zhe-” as the first person subjective. “Zhensepa” also has the “n-pa” circumfix which indicates the negative, and there are others such as “n-zhame” for “never” and so forth. This makes French a much more exotic-seeming language than the boring old so-called “Standard Average European” paradigm into which it tends to get forced.
French has liaison between “words”, which link the words together, as with «mes amis», where the only indication of the plural is outside what we would think of as the noun. It also has obligatory elision. In fact, many of the structures of French, once one ignores the written language, are quite similar to Bantu languages such as Swahili. There is some overlap in the areas where French and Bantu languages are spoken, and it’s interesting to speculate how first language Bantu speakers, such as those in the Congo, perceive their French speaking when they learn it. It’s possible that it tends to be refracted unnecessarily through a lens of European-ness. Conversely, is there a way at looking at, say, Swahili, which makes it seem more like written French? However, neither French nor Swahili have noun incorporation so far as I can tell, though it’s very difficult to view French without the filter of its written form.
The Ainu language is spoken in Northern Japan and previously in the Russian territory north of it called Sakhalin. It’s a moribund language which occupies an interesting position in linguistic typology. Ainu is completely unrelated to Japanese, and probably to any other language, but it does resemble other languages spoken in the area, such as Chukchi, in that it was previously polysynthetic. Ainu has gone from being polysynthetic to agglutinative. The yukar, Ainu sagas, are written in the former form which could be seen as the classical form of the language. Modern Ainu has similar syntax to Japanese, but it’s difficult to tell how strongly it was influenced by it because the two languages are both isolates and have been spoken in close proximity for centuries. It has only two native speakers now, although some Ainu have learnt it as a second language. Around three hundred people can understand it to some extent. This extreme endangerment means that it no longer occupies the usual position of a polysynthetic language of having an inner circle which doesn’t communicate much with the outside world or have much contact with other languages, and it means Ainu has been re-learnt by a lot of natively Japanese speakers. It probably goes without saying that like many other minority languages it’s been subject to persecution and attempts at eradication, and it was only recognised by the Japanese government in 2019.
After all that, the question then arises of whether prehistoric languages, when everyone was a hunter-gatherer, would have been polysynthetic. The trend from complexity to simplicity would certainly seem to suggest so, but it also appears to be a cycle. If that’s so, it’s possible to imagine prehistoric languages going through such a cycle, so that at any one time there would’ve been speakers of polysynthetic, agglutinative, fusional and analytic languages, perhaps coming into contact with each other. However, they’re definitely most common among hunter-gatherers in Western recorded history. There does seem to be a kind of Turkish-like typology which crops up repeatedly in human spoken language which suggests to me that left to ourselves we’d all end up speaking Turkish, though not literally – Quechua and Aymara are also similar in this way for example. However, perhaps this question can be answered by looking at the kind of societies people lived in during the last Ice Age. The word “Ice Age” (see what I did there?) might suggest a lifestyle like the Inuit and indigenous peoples of Siberia, but simply because people live that way in those conditions now doesn’t mean they did twenty thousand years ago. The question of behavioural modernity arises here, but ignoring that for the sake of not veering wildly off-topic, at the time we became a separate species, which oddly is much earlier than the time we stopped being able to interbreed with Neanderthals and Denisovans, there seem to have been between one and three hundred thousand of us. Early in the last Ice Age, a volcanic eruption seems to have caused a global famine among us which reduced our population to somewere between one and ten thousand. By the end of the Ice Age it had grown to somewhere between one and ten million. These low numbers suggest that language change would’ve been slower to me, because for example the three hundred thousand people who speak Icelandic would still be able to understand and be understood by their ancestors over a millennium ago, and if Australia is anything to go by, languages were spoken in extremely small groups – the people on the north side of Sydney Bay used to speak a different language from the people on the south side. However, it may be misleading to compare the situations of hunter-gatherers in recent times to those of the Old Stone Age because they have lived as long as us and are now living in areas which are harsher than, for example, the Mediterranean was a millennium or so after the last Ice Age. This is all assuming that people did live in small, isolated groups, when they may well not have done. Presumably there is archæological and palæontological evidence relevant to all this.
Finally, there is a rather depressing connotation to the phrase “they wouldn’t easily let themselves become Greenlanders”. Greenland, more properly known as Kalallit Nunaat, has by far the highest rate of people killing themselves in the world at eighty-three in a hundred thousand per annum. The next highest is Lesotho at seventy-two, followed by Guyana at 40.3 and Eswatini at 29.4. It’s the leading cause of death there among young men and eight percent of the population die by their own hands. Several factors are likely to be involved, such as insomnia caused by twenty-four hour daylight and perhaps also twenty-four hour darkness, and depression and alcoholism are also more common in the Arctic generally. However, a major contributory cause is likely to be culture shock between Inuit and Danish lifestyle. When you consider that the end of a lifestyle involving close-knit relationships and isolation from Western influence is likely to lead to a lot of stress, dysfunctional home environments and something resembling unemployment, it’s hardly surprising that these polysynthetic language speakers wouldn’t easily let themselves become Greenlanders. Maybe they shouldn’t have to.
A Box Of Chocolates 