Human Language Evolution: As Coframed by Behavioural and Psychological Universalism - Hardcover

Nandi PhD, Owi

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1462057845 ISBN 13: 9781462057849

Publisher: iUniverse, 2012

Synopsis

Human speech is one of the most fascinating realms of study on earth, and the diversity of languages is overwhelming. In Human Language Evolution, author Dr. Owi Nandi explores the results of his long-term study delving into the origin of spoken language and his search for common patterns among all language families.

In an effort to compare and connect recent developments in linguistics and in the study of human evolution via genomic sequencing, Nandi's study shows how various languages use similar sounds for words with similar meanings. It also demonstrates that these similarities may have evolved from human facial expressions caused by emotions like fear, alertness, joy, pleasure, or pain. Covering thirty-four world languages, Nandi discusses the psychological background of an array of words-such as counting, evil, hurting, scratching, coughing, thinking, father-and compares those among other languages.

Seasoned with notes on psychological backgrounds, Human Language Evolution provides rich insight into the whys of universally conserved linguistic patterns in light of the 170,000-year history of modern mankind, transcending the reaches of traditional etymology.

About this title

From the Author

My fascinating journey with languages started, as is natural, in my earliest childhood, when I began to speak the dialect of my mother and my Swiss grandparents, Bernese Swiss German. This is still my most innate language--that is, foremost to me when thinking, dreaming at night, or speaking to close Swiss relatives. Switzerland, with its four languages and many small dialects, was illustrative as to how language diversity could arise in a small geographical area.
From my Indian father, I started to learn some High German, but quite soon wanted to know a few words of his Bengali mother tongue--for instance, the word for "bird," which is pākhi. My father was enthusiastic about teaching me more Bengali, and gradually I learned to speak this language as well. He also used to tell me some English words. For instance, when he drove his old-fashioned 1960s car, stopping before a traffic light, he would say "Ready, steady, go!" as the light turned from red through yellow to green, and these were the first English words I learned.
When I attended primary school, my father institutionalised his Bengali teachings and taught me to speak, write, and read in regular Sunday classes. For me, these tedious hours of learning a distant language soon became an imposition. He continued to teach me Bengali until I was fifteen and used to convey to me a lot of the philosophical background of Indian thinking. Sometimes he told me, "Although you look at it as an imposition, I am convinced that someday you will tell me, 'Baba, I am very thankful to you for having taught me Bengali!'"
As I grew up in the Swiss cantons of Zürich and mainly Argovia, I also learned to speak the Eastern dialect of Argovia, which I spoke with my classmates and always separated from the Bernese dialect. I only used the Bernese dialect when at home with my mother and younger brother, Dilip, or with my relatives in Berne, and also when thinking to myself or dreaming at night. From TV, school, and many conversations with my father, my High German also improved a lot, as is commonly the case in the Allemanic part of Switzerland.
At aged twelve, we started to learn French in secondary school. We took French classes for eight years until the end of high school. Afterward, we often adventured on bicycle tours in France, during which I could improve this language even more. I received my best training with the age of twenty-four when a friend, Anna Belser, and I went to Serre de la Fare in the upper Loire valley of France, where French environmentalists protested against the planned construction of several dams on the rivers Loire and Allier. I cherish these memories of our outdoor camping in the pine tree shadow, where we met a lot of younger and older people from all around Europe, but especially from France. Jean-François Lopès became a friend of mine; we hiked together along the Loire River, had a lot of fun, and later exchanged letters and e-mails in French.
From middle secondary school onward, I learned English, which gradually became my second-best language after German. One of the first larger books I read in English was Sir Edmund Hillary's The True Story of the First Ascent of Mount Everest and Mahatma Gandhi's autobiography, The Story of My Experience with Truth. During my biology study at the University of Zürich and in the course of my PhD, I read much scientific literature and significantly improved my English language skills. Starting from this time onward, I also wrote scientific articles in this language, and I enjoyed communicating with fellow scientists all around the world. One of these publications was coauthored by the American molecular biologist Mark W. Chase, and by my dissertation advisor, Peter K. Endress (Nandi, Chase, and Endress, 1998: A combined cladistic analysis of angiosperms using non-molecular and rbcL characters). 
I also regularly read American and English newspapers. Considering the impressive richness of the English vocabulary and expressions, it seems to be a lifelong process to improve this language. As I tested my skills in writing lyrics (I first published a poem book called Seesommer in German in 1998), in 2005 I translated this book into English with the help of a couple of native speakers, foremost Mr. Timothy Holman, with the title of the English booklet being For an Hour, We Lived from Flowers. I was very happy to have the help of people with an English mother tongue.

For six years during my later education, I also took Latin. The language was a good stepping-stone for learning other Romanic languages, and it introduced me to the etymology of languages. During my high-school years, I got a glimpse of other ancient languages, such as Ancient Greek and Ancient Hebrew. As for Ancient Greek, I now and then attended the lessons of a part of our class, who also learned this language in addition to Latin. As for Hebrew, I followed the first semester to get an idea of the Hebrew alphabet and some simple sentences.
I learned considerably more of the Greek vocabulary by searching for the etymologies of scientific terms, especially zoological and botanical terms. Also, I have visited Greece thirteen times for vacations until now, thus also learning some New Greek.
Because some of my classmates in high school were very eager to have an insight into many languages, especially old ones, we also had the opportunity to study Sanskrit with Dr. Karl Scherrer, our Latin teacher. Starting with the simple proverb lobhaḥ pāpasya kāraṇam, which translates as "greed is the cause of evil," we gradually improved our skills. The Sanskrit word roots are tremendously useful for the understanding of all Indo-European languages; for instance, they later helped me to learn several Slavic ones, particularly Russian.
This tantalised me to study the Cyrillian alphabet and the Russian language. From my hometown's library, I borrowed some bilingual Russian-German books. Russian poetry from the Middle Ages until modernity left a permanent impression upon me and inspired my own lyrical work. Later on, I even had the courage to read a larger part of Crime and Punishment by Fjodor Dostojewski in Russian, a novel that I had already read twice in English and that had become dear to me. During my PhD thesis, I was also particularly fond of reading the two editions of Systema Angispermorum by the renowned systematic botanist Armen Takhtajan in its original language, which is Russian.
This was more or less the level of my language skills at the end of high school, aged twenty, when I started to get more and more interested in comparative linguistics and felt the wish to investigate language universals, if they at all existed.
In this same year, 1986, I started my study in biology at the University of Zürich. During the first two years, I was presented with an enormous mass of scientific learning material, which meant a break in my language learnings. An Arabian colleague, however, taught me some Arabic words from time to time, offering my first encounter with this important world language I am now continuing to learn.

From the Inside Flap

Simple linguistic sounds may have evolved from human facial expressions. Facial expressions as reactions to emotions are found in apes (Pongidae) and humans (Hominidae), especially in the region of the mouth. They seem to be a first step towards very few linguistic sounds. Thus, these mimic expressions, including those of the lips, the mouth, and the tongue, could have been standardized into simple sounds. If this evolution from facial expressions to linguistic sounds covers the whole process of language origin, a similar process could also have arisen several times independently in mankind. For example, the expression for fear as a tense opening of the rounded lips that then widen and expose the frontal teeth, trasitioning to the well-known "Furchtgrinsen" (an established reaction to fear in mammalian ethology that in humans is accompanied by the uaa sound) may give rise to a primitive word like wuahas a flexible particle signifying fear. In fact, as I show in the current work, languages of a diverse array of large language phyla possess words that seem to be derived from this uaa sound.

Edition details

• Publisher: iUniverse
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1462057845
• ISBN 13: 9781462057849
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 236