LECTURE 9

Today we start talking more directly about the cultural landscape. What we've covered thus far in the class dealt with the spatial interactions of an unevenly distributed world population. What I hope you saw in those relationships between the landscape and human habitation were the common characteristics, behavioral constraints, collective processes, and unifying traits that form a background to the human occupation of the Earth. Now our attention turns to the distinguishing features of the groups of people that occupy the landscape. We'll be looking more closely at the cultural landscape. We'll be looking at cultural differences. Human populations are distinguished one from another in many ways, but there are relatively few MAJOR points of difference Among those MAJOR POINTS of difference are differences in LANGUAGE, RELIGION, and ETHNIC differences.

Today we take up The GEOGRAPHY of LANGUAGE .

Modern day cultural identities are the result of centuries of divergence and diffusion.

The two that are of most importance are LANGUAGE and RELIGION.

LANGUAGE
Is the key by which culture is transmitted and cultural identity is gained.. Differences in language mean differences in culture and are a potential source of misunderstanding and conflict between peoples. The geographic study of language focuses on current distributions of language and on the evolution of languages and language patterns over time and space. Studies focus especially on source areas and the paths of diffusion. Contact among cultures is increasingly common in our world economy, and this causes languages to be inconstant change. Still, concerted efforts are made by some groups to preserve their linguistic identities.

WHAT IS LANGUAGE?
A system of sounds. Each sound or combination of sounds symbolizes a thought, an item, an activity. A language is usually matched by a written system which enables a culture to diffuse, and language is a critical component of any cultural identity. Translations between languages can be difficult because meanings are often not contained in individual words but in phrases as well.

Language is forever changing and evolving. Some argue that the language of a society structures the perceptions of its speakers. By the words the language contains and the concepts it can formulate, language is said to determine the attitudes, the understandings, and the society to which it belongs. If that's true then language is a key aspect to cultural cohesion, and one key aspect to the heterogenous nature of the cultures of the Earth.

The 6 billion people on Earth speak many thousands of different languages. There are as many as 1500 different languages, language variants, and dialects spoken in Sub-Saharan Africa and 600 in India. Europe alone has more than 100 languages and dialects, and language differences were partial reasons for drawing the political boundaries when the victorious allies redrew the boundaries of Europe after WW I.

So language is a hallmark of cultural diversity. It's frequently defended as a symbol of cultural identity which helps groups distinguish themselves from other groups. It's a matter of pride.

How many languages are there? There are far more than most of us realize. Presently more than 6000 tongues being spoken around the world. The languages are classified in terms of large language families that have no shared history such as the Indo-European Family and the Sino-Tibetan Family, or languages that do share a history, such as French and Italian. Linguists continue to search, however for distant relationships which may perhaps indicate all languages evolved from a single tongue.

Languages vary in importance. Importance can mean the number of people who speak a particular language. More than half of the people on Earth speak just eight languages. So the linguistic diversity of the Earth is shrinking.. It's estimated that in pre-history humans spoke 10,000 and 15,000 languages.. Of those 6000 remaining between 20% and 50% are not being passed on to children and are effectively dead. It's estimated that in 100 years there will be only 600 of the current 6000 languages still in use.

So what are the languages being spoken today (see above Table). To make sense of all these languages linguists classify them much like biologists classify living things.

LANGUAGE FAMILIES - are thought to have shared a common but distant origin.

LANGUAGE SUB-FAMILIES — the languages' relationship is more recent so they are more similar

LANGUAGE GROUPS — more closely related and includes individual languages There are 20 major language families. (See map) We will mention some of the other families but talk mostly about the Indo-European Family.

INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGE FAMILY
9-Sub-Families

► Germanic

► Romance

► Slavic

► Baltic

► Celtic

► Albanian

► Greek
Armenian

► Indo-Iranian

Geolinguists theorize that a lost language, or set of languages, they call the PROTO-INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGE existed somewhere in the vicinity of the Black Sea or East Central Europe and the present languages in the Indo-European family evolved from it. As the people who spoke this language dispersed, vocabularies grew and linguistic differences took place. Latin arose during this early period and was disseminated over much of Europe during the rise of the Roman Empire. Later Latin died out and was supplanted by Italian, French, and the other Romance languages.

The Indo-European Family also includes the languages of Russia and the former Soviet Union, northern India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran. This reflects the probable route of ancient migration from the west to South Asia. More modern migration carried Indo-European languages (especially English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French) to the Americas, Australia, and Africa.

The evidence of a proto IndoEuropean language is derived from the physical attributes of words themselves in various IndoEuropean languages. Some words we use today are strikingly similar in several languages...(beech, oak, bear, deer, pheasant, bee). Since all IndoEuropean languages share these similar words, linguists believe the words must represent common things in the lives of the proto-indo speakers. They don’t share such words as camel, rice, bamboo which have different roots in various languages and cannot be traced to one language so they must have been added later. Individual IndoEuropean languages share common roots for winter and snow but not for ocean. So the Proto-IndoEuropean language must have originated in a cold climate away from oceans.

So where did the Proto-IndoEuropean language originate?

Let's look at the development of the Indo-European Languages. How do linguists do it? In the history of Homo sapiens, the first language spoken was likely 200,000 years ago. How do we try to reconstruct the relationships among languages today?

KURGAN PEOPLE OF THE STEPPE OF ASIA (Russia/Kazakhstan border)
CONQUEST THEORY OF LANGUAGE DISPERSION
So by using this type of analysis the homeland is believed to be somewhere north of the Black Sea in the steppe land of present-day Ukraine and Russia. The time is about 5000 years ago, and judging from the words in the reconstructed vocabulary those people used horses, had developed the wheel, and practiced far ranging trade, especially by horseback.

The logical conclusion is the language was spread by a fairly aggressive people on horseback, overpowering earlier inhabitants and beginning the diffusion and differentiation of Latin, Germanic and Slavonic languages. In fact, Lithuanian is considered one of the oldest known languages.

This CONQUEST THEORY is tied to a group of nomadic herdsmen called the KURGANS. Great invaders, feared horsemen, who drove great herds of cattle into Europe in successive waves, trampling and subduing small peaceful Neolithic villages of the ancient world. They brought the new language, and new gods; village gods were more likely weather gods which guaranteed a good harvest and good weather. The gods of the Kurgans were fast moving, more unpredictable. This was about 6000 years ago when the agriculturists encountered the herdsmen. These Kurgan horsemen were probably agriculturalists at first but the domestication of the horse changed that. They became more mobile, able to travel long distances and they did, as a result they spread their culture quickly. They bred horses that could carry a man and they took off across the steppe into Europe and took their language with them. This theory has long been supported by many to show the move of language and culture. Breton in France, Scottish Gaelic and Welsh in Britain, and Irish Gaelic in Ireland appeared to be due to the arrival of newer languages from the east.

Not all scholars are convinced of the conquest theory. Those other believed it was spread more slowly and less militaristically by simple diffusion of agriculture technology. This means the source area of the ancient language would have to be in a place of agricultural innovation, rather than in a herding place.

AGRICULTURAL THEORY
2000 years before the Kurgans in eastern Anatolia – part of present-day Turkey.

Belief that it originated in Anatolia and spread westward to Greece, then to Italy to the Mediterranean coast of France and Spain and Portugal. Also that it diffused northward to Romania and central and to the Baltic Sea. Idea is the language triumphed because its speakers became more numerous and prosperous by growing their own food. Regardless how it spread, communication was poor among individual groups and many developed in isolation and they evolved distinctly different languages.

Fertile Crescent? no, because the proto language has few words for plains but many words for mountains, valleys, mountain streams, rapids, lakes and other high relief landforms. WOULD THIS BE A PLACE OF VAST FLAT STEPPE? Some Russians scholars published a book in 1984 showing there were also words in the ancient language for trees that grew in mountain regions, lions, leopards, monkeys, etc none of which lived on the plains north of the Black Sea.

So with this analysis arose the Agricultural Theory with the place of origin as the well watered terrain of Anatolia in modern Turkey. The leading hearth of agricultural innovation was nearby in Mesopotamia.

1991 — genetic analysis of individuals in several thousand locations from Turkey into Western Europe showed a certain genes were steadily less common as samples were taken farther and farther away, leading investigators to conclude that farming people moved out and migrated as population pressure forced them to. They mixed with non-farming people diluting their genetic identity as the distance from their source area increased. One hypothesis is that people moved 11 miles every generation (25years).

This would mean that the European frontier would be completely penetrated by farmers in about 1500 years which is close to what the archeological record suggests.

Some non farming cultures held out. Etruscan did not become extinct until Roman times and Basque survives to this day as a direct link to Europe's pre-farming days.

DRAWBACKS
Anatolia is not an ideal place for farming and there's no strong archeological evidence for an agricultural society. Some  language geographers also still prefer the other source area despite the genetic evidence. They still prefer the homeland area south of the Caucasus Mountains and then dispersion around the Caspian Sea, into the steppe land and into Europe. Maybe truth in both hypotheses. If Anatolia was the source, it could have spread both westward across southern Europe and in the broad arc around the Caspian.

Sound Shifts --- Milk Latin = lacte; Italian = latta; Spanish = leche; French = lait.
Number Eight: Latin = octo; Italian = otto; Spanish = ocho; French = huit .

Even if we didn't know there was a Latin root for these words we could figure out they are similar and related. So linguists go backward and deduce an ancient vocabulary and it may be feasible to go back further and recreate that language and that's what modern day linguists try to do. 200 years ago William Jones, without computers found a striking resemblance in ancient Sanskrit (of India) to the ancient Greek and Latin he's studied in college.

Another man — Jacob Grimm of Grimm's Fairy Tales fame — pointed out related languages have similar, but not identical consonants. He believed those hard consonants would become softened over time. Look at "v" and "t" in the German word vater. Softened and evolved into 'vader' in Dutch and 'father' in English. So consonants tend to get softer as the language evolves and if you went back in time, you would discover they would tend to get harder.

So with the ideas of Grimm and Jones and others the idea of a PROTO-INDO-EUROPEAN language emerged. It is considered the predecessor of Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit among others. (Look at family tree of languages). To some researchers worked on piecing together the ancient language and the words, others tried to figure out where this language originated. They have put together a better understanding of the historical geography of Eurasia. They have produced remarkably similar results for many words. The ancient languages had strikingly similar words for certain landforms, trees, and other features on the natural landscape. Words about the landscape and climate could give clues about the environment where that language originated. For example, if the language had no word for snow, it would suggest a tropical or warm climate. If there's no word for 'palm tree' the language is likely to have emerged in a cold climate.