The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue"Ruhlen is a leader in the new attempt to unify the theory of language development and diffusion."––Library Journal "A powerful statement...also a wonderfully clear exposition of linguistic thinking about prehistory."––Anthropological Science One of the world's foremost language researchers takes readers step-by-step through the hotly contested evidence that all modern languages derive from one "mother tongue" once spoken by primitive humans in Africa. With The Origin of Language, Merritt Ruhlen makes this fascinating science accessible to readers with no linguistic background. MERRITT RUHLEN, PhD (Palo Alto, California) is the author of A Guide to the World's Languages |
Contents
What Do We Mean by The Origin | 1 |
Language in the New World | 4 |
Why Classification Succeeds | 11 |
Copyright | |
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The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue Merritt Ruhlen No preview available - 2023 |
Common terms and phrases
Africa Afro-Asiatic Algonquian Amerind languages Anatolian ancient families archaeological Asia attested Austric Austronesian Bantu expansion Bantu languages basis Basque borrowed branch Cavalli-Sforza century Chadic Chapter classification classifying languages cognates common origin consonant daughter Dene-Caucasian different languages Dolgopolsky Dravidian drink English Eskimo-Aleut Eurasiatic Eurasiatic family Europe European languages example expansion explanation fact finger forms genes genetic Germanic Greenberg guages guistic historical linguistics homeland human language identified Indo Indo-European family Indo-European languages Indo-Europeanists Khoisan Khoisan languages language families Latin linguistic evidence meaning migration modern humans Na-Dene Native American languages Niger-Kordofanian Nilo-Saharan North Nostratic obvious families older brother phonetic populations prefix pronoun Proto Proto-Amerind Proto-Germanic Proto-Indo-European proto-language reconstruction relationship resemblance Romance family root Sanskrit Sapir scholars Semitic single earlier Sino-Tibetan Solution to Table sound changes sound correspondences spoken spread suffix t'ina Uralic vowel word for mouse world's languages Yeniseian Yukaghir Yurok