Psychologist
David Premack, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of
Pennsylvania is famous for having taught language to chimpanzees. Premack has
shown that the chimpanzees can understand the language but cannot produce it.
The epigraph at the head of the webpage for the ‘Third Conference on Evolution
of Languages’ carried this provocative statement by Premack:
“HUMAN LANGUAGE IS AN
EMBARRASSMENT FOR THE EVOLUTIONARY THEORY”
The above
statement neatly sums up the mood of the linguists. But look at the map of human migration
generated by the molecular biologist and compare it with the presence of
various language families in the world.
A map of early human migration (from the Wikimedia Commons). Figure shows number of years from present.
HumanLanguage Families Map (from the Wikimedia Commons)
Linguists believe that the original language of humans has become
extinct. It is difficult to establish relationships across major families and that
any grand evolutionary trees of languages cannot be formed. Languages totally un-related
to each are spoken in geographically adjacent zones. From a biologist’s point
of view, I have reasons to believe that all human beings should have carried a
common mother tongue from their centre of origin in Africa. During the
transmission of words from one generation to another, the words would have replicated/
reproduced. Mutations in words would have occurred in much the same way as in
genes. Replacement of a wrong letter in place of the original one would have
given rise to phonetic variation (a la biological variations) in vocabulary
giving rise to synonyms. As branches and sub-branches of the original
populations settled in different geological territories along the path of human
migration, geographic isolation would have cut off the chances of
communications leading to speciation of new language forms. However, some
aspects of evolution of language are difficult to be explained by invoking either
the classical theories of biological speciation or by theories of Chomskian
linguistics. The 144-member strong Indo-European language family has a vast
geographic reach. Cutting cross all sorts of geographical barriers, there is
much less difference in various languages of the Indo-European family, say between Bengali and Spanish. On the other hand there are
no such great equivalent barriers between territories occupied by speakers of Iranian,
an Indo-European language and Arabic, an
Afro-Asian language, or between Dravidian Tamil and Indo-European Oriya. We have to find a satisfactory explanation
for the abrupt discontinuities of the Afro-Asiatic and Dravid language families
with the Indo-European language family. There is no historical evidence for the
alleged Aryan conquest of a Dravidian India that replaced speakers of Dravidian
languages in the North India with the Indo-Europeans. In the last few years,
researches in molecular genetics have completely and convincingly demolished
the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT) proposed by the German linguist Max Muller in
the 19th century. A complete understanding of the factors affecting
the linguistic history of the world continues to elude as well as excite the
investigators and the public alike.
Christiansen, M. H. and S. Kirby, editors of the book ‘Language
Evolution’ (2003) have termed the subject as “the hardest problem in
science”.
In the year 2002, I was supervising the work of a student for
her M.Phil. thesis on bioinformatics. We were performing genome analysis of a
plant Arabidopsis by employing Basic Local Alignment Search Tool, or BLAST
(it is an algorithm for comparing primary biological sequences like
amino acids in proteins and bases in DNA and RNA. While editing the thesis I
felt that it is time that we applied Basic
Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) for matching the
sequence of letters in synonyms. I found that although linguists have been doing
matching of words indifferent languages, they were obsessed with their known
theories of origin of new words. I had no such binding. I was doing for fun. I
did not know theories of linguistics and I still don’t know anything. I started doing the BLAST for words manually, as a hobby and as a serious hobby by February
2004. By the end of 2010, I had the matched the sequences of about 14,000 words
(and it is growing). I was playing with words all these years. During this
play, the words started to unravel the rules of the game. Which letter will
mutate to which one, in a manner similar to the game of bases in the genetic code. The multiple gene
code for amino acids was like synonyms. The letters in words wobbled like bases
in genetic code. I found that just like the bases in DNA, the letters in words never
disobey those rules. But after seven years the words demanded my full time
attention. I quit my job to play with them full time. I invite you to join me in this game! We
shall play with the words and also discuss their behavior and evolution.
Welcome aboard to the “DNA of Words!”
