Book contents
- Millennia of Language Change
- Millennia of Language Change
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Prologue: the Long View
- 1 Prehistoric Sociolinguistics and the Uniformitarian Hypothesis: What Were Stone-Age Languages Like?
- 2 From Ancient Greek to Comanche: on Many Millennia of Complexification
- 3 First-Millennium England: a Tale of Two Copulas
- 4 The First Three Thousand Years: Contact in Prehistoric and Early Historic English
- 5 Verner’s Law, Germanic Dialects and the English Dialect ‘Default Singulars’
- 6 Deep into the Pacific: the Austronesian Migrations and the Linguistic Consequences of Isolation
- 7 The Hellenistic Koiné 320 bc to 550 ad and Its Medieval and Early Modern Congeners
- 8 Indo-European Feminines: Contact, Diffusion and Gender Loss around the North Sea
- Sources
- References
- Index
Prologue: the Long View
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 March 2020
- Millennia of Language Change
- Millennia of Language Change
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Prologue: the Long View
- 1 Prehistoric Sociolinguistics and the Uniformitarian Hypothesis: What Were Stone-Age Languages Like?
- 2 From Ancient Greek to Comanche: on Many Millennia of Complexification
- 3 First-Millennium England: a Tale of Two Copulas
- 4 The First Three Thousand Years: Contact in Prehistoric and Early Historic English
- 5 Verner’s Law, Germanic Dialects and the English Dialect ‘Default Singulars’
- 6 Deep into the Pacific: the Austronesian Migrations and the Linguistic Consequences of Isolation
- 7 The Hellenistic Koiné 320 bc to 550 ad and Its Medieval and Early Modern Congeners
- 8 Indo-European Feminines: Contact, Diffusion and Gender Loss around the North Sea
- Sources
- References
- Index
Summary
We do not know for certain how old human language, as we understand it, is. Lieberman (2008: 359) argues for a date in the Upper Paleolithic around 50,000 bc as the ‘start-point for fully human linguistic capacity’ [my italics]. Dixon (1997: 2) mentions 100,000 years as a possibility for the age of human language. Evans (2010:14) suggests that language dates back to ‘long before’ 150,000 years ago. Foley (1997: 73) says that ‘language, as we know it, was born about 200,000 years ago’. And Dediu and Levinson (2013) argue, on the basis of their supposition that Neanderthals and Denisovans also had language (a possibility specifically excluded by Lieberman, and others), that it might even be 500,000 years. Whatever the answer may be, however, we are at least justified in describing human language as having been with us for ‘a very long time indeed’.
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- Information
- Millennia of Language ChangeSociolinguistic Studies in Deep Historical Linguistics, pp. 1 - 6Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020