On the classification of Taushiro

When in Lima I spent quite a bit of time in taxis, where I inevitably fall into discussions about what I am doing in Peru. When I explain that I am a linguist working on Peruvian Amazonian indigenous languages, the driver normally responds with a either puzzled silence or just assumes that I talking about Quechua. Either way, this gives me an opportunity to talk about the linguistic diversity of Peruvian Amazonia — which truly is impressive — the scale of which many a taxi driver has seemed to find quite amazing.

But when I was in Lima a few weeks ago, things went quite differently: I was in a taxi, and for the umpteenth time I was explaining what I was doing in Peru, and the taxi driver responded, without dropping a beat, “Oh, you mean like Taushiro” (except, of course, in Spanish). “Well, er, yes, exactly,” I fumbled, as I tried to assimilate the fact that the driver had just named one of the most obscure Peruvian Amazonian languages there is. I think the driver was somewhat alarmed at my disconcerted response and helpfully explained that there had recently been a television program that focused on the last speaker of Taushiro, a linguistic isolate spoken in Loreto. Now, for the benefit of all of us that missed the original program, Nila Vigil, over at Instituto Lingüístico de Invierno has made it available here. Check it out.

In relation to her post, Nila made a pair of comments here on Greater Blogazonia about the classification of Taushiro (here), which I now want to take up. Specifically, Nila remarks that the apparently incorrect classification of Taushiro as a Zaparoan language continues to be propagated in many linguistic and anthropological works. In fact, if one takes a closer look at how Taushiro has been treated by classifiers of Amazonian languages, as we shall do now, we find an excellent illustration of the kind of confusion and borderline linguistic malpractice that bedeviled Amazonian comparative linguistics until relatively recently.

As Nila notes, we can probably trace the modern-day prevalence of the incorrect classification of Taushiro as Zaparoan to Beuchat and Rivet’s (1908) influential article delimiting the Zaparoan family (available here via the amazing Persee site). For the most part, this article does an excellent job with the Herculean task of sorting through the truly vast number of colonial era ethnonyms and then delimiting the Zaparoan family. Their achievement is all the more impressive for the fact that they only had access to very scanty linguistic data, most of it of low quality. In fact, the only significant error in their classification, as far as I am aware, is their inclusion of Taushiro in the family.

A close reading of the article suggests that Beuchat and Rivet had no data on Taushiro, but instead based their classification on the word of colonial era writers who claimed that ‘Pinche’ (a colonial era name for Taushiro) is related to Andoa, which is quite unambiguously a Zaparoan language. In particular, Beuchat and Rivet seem to be indebted to Hervas (1800), a Spanish translation of Hervas (1784). Lorenzo Hervas’ Wikipedia biography here suggests that his linguistic methodology mainly consisted in working with Jesuits who had been ejected from the Americas after the 1767 order of Carlos III, and who were personally familiar with the languages of particular groups. An examination of Hervas’ classifications suggests that they were based at least as much on geographical proximity as on properly linguistic grounds.

In particular, Hervas (1784 : p. 61) ( the whole work is available here) enumerates the following languages as ‘dialects’ of Andoa: Arafo, Chudaviño, Gae, Murato, Pavo/Pabo, Pinche, Simigae, and Bobonazo. Of these, Andoa, Gae, Simigae and Bobonazo are clearly names for Zaparoan languages (as is evident by looking at Beuchat and Rivet (1908)), Murato is colonial era name for Candoshi, and Pinche is, of course, Taushiro. Hervas thus treats languages from three distinct language families as dialects of Andoa, thereby seeding, I believe, the belief that Taushiro is a Zaparoan language. The only obvious thing that these languages have in common is that all these languages were spoken on the Río Pastaza, or on the nearby Río Tigre. In other words, the languages appear to have been grouped together on the basis of geographical proximity.

The fact that colonial-era writers made an error about the classification of Taushiro is not surprising, but this error has proven to be quite resilient, as Nila remarked. Solís (2003: 200), for example, remarks:

La lengua taushiro … debe ser considerada como una rama divergente dentro de las lenguas que conforman el grupo Záparo.

[The Taushiro language ... should be considered a divergent branch among the languages that form the Zaparoan group.]

And Wise (1999: 312) remarks

Taushiro is possibly a Zaparo language, but its classification has not been confirmed.

And Pozzi-Escot (1998) simply classifies Taushiro as Zaparoan without any further comment. What I find remarkable about these classificatory claims is that they are not accompanied by any evidence to support them, nor do they cite anyone else who provides such evidence. In fact, I suspect that what has happened is that the idea of Taushiro as Zaparoan has simply gained legitimacy by having been repeated for so long, by so many people. How anyone who has actually looked at lexical and grammatical data on Taushiro could consider this language to be Zaparoan is beyond me. Here, do it yourself: thanks to the excellent SIL Peru site, you can download a Taushiro grammatical sketch (here) and a Taushiro vocabulary (here). Please write me if you find any plausible evidence of a Taushiro-Zaparoan connection. All the solidly Zaparoan languages exhibit numerous grammatical similarities and connections, and Taushiro doesn’t even come close. Of course, it may ultimately be the case that Taushiro is a Zaparoan language — it is certainly possible that there is a very distant relationship here — my point is simply that no one who has judged this hypothesis favorably has presented any evidence in its favor. In fact, according to Fabre (here (pdf)), Alicea (1976), who carried out fieldwork on the language, found no evidence to support a Zaparoan connection.

Well, so much for the Zaparoan classification of Taushiro — but the story does not end there! A common fate for Amazonian isolates is that they end up being included in a number of different language families by different classifiers, and Taushiro is no exception. Tovar (1961: 151) groups Pinche with Omurano, another unclassified language, and Loukotka (1968:156) groups Pinche with Candoshi, which is generally believed to be an isolate. Interestingly, if one looks at Loukotka (1968), the author is quite upfront that he has no sources or data on Pinche (Taushiro) at all! How Loukotka manages to classify Taushiro with Candoshi on the basis of no data at all is a mystery — but it’s certainly a nice trick. It’s also pretty clear that Tovar’s (1961) is also an immaculate classification. Note, by the way, that Hervás original classification groups Taushiro and ‘Murato’ (a colonial era name for Candoshi) together, so the ultimate responsibility for this classification may also be laid at Hervás’ feet.

Interestingly, Kaufman (1994) tentatively proposes that Taushiro belongs to a grouping that includes Candoshi and Omurano, in effect combining Tovar’s and Loukotka’s proposals. To his credit, Kaufman identifies one phonological correspondence between the three languages, lending at least a measure of credibility to the proposal. In my opinion, it will probably never be possible to arrive at any solid conclusion regarding the position of Omurano in this grouping, as the only data on this extinct language, of which I am aware, are modest wordlists in Tessman (1999 [1930]) and Villarejo (1959), both of which are of dubious quality. However, the question of the genetic relationship between Candoshi and Taushiro seems fairly straightforward to settle, as Candoshi is a vital language, and obtaining substantial lexical and grammatical data should pose no insurmountable difficulties. In fact, trying to evaluate the Candoshi-Taushiro hypothesis with the available lexical materials (here) might even make a nice term paper or undergraduate thesis project.

To summarize, then, classifiers have grouped Taushiro with the Zaparoan family, with Candoshi, and with Omurano, the latter two of which are otherwise considered isolates in their own right by most present-day Amazonianists. The evidence for a Zaparoan connection is non-existent, and the evidence for either a Candoshi or an Omurano connection is thin, but in the case of Candoshi, may ultimately prove viable.

References

Alicea Ortiz, Neftalí. 1976. Apuntes sobre la cultura taushiro. DEL 56. ILV.

Campbell, Lyle. 1997. American Indian Languages. OUP.

Hervas, Lorenzo. 1800. Catálogo de las lenguas de las naciones conocidas, y numeración división y clase de éstas según la diversitad de sus idiomas y dialectos. Madrid: Librería de Ranz.

Hervas, Lorenzo. 1784. Catalogo Delle Lingue Conosciute E Notizia Della Loro Affinita’, E Diversita’. Cesena: Gregorio Biasini.

Kaufman, Terrence. 1994. The native languages of South America. In C. Mosley and R.E. Asher (Eds.), Atlas of the world’s languages. New York: Routledge: pp. 46-76.

Loukotka, Cestmir. 1968. Classification of South American Indian Languages. Los Angeles : Latin American Center, University of California

Pozzi-Escot. 1998. El Multilingüismo en el Perú. Cusco: Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos “Bartolome de Las Casas.

Solís, Gustavo. 2003. Lenguas en la Amazonía Peruana. Lima:. Visual Service S.R.L.

Tovar, Antonio. 1961. Catálogo de las lenguas de América del Sur. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana.

Tessman, Gunther. 1999 [1930]. Los indígenas del Perú Nororiental. Quito: Abya Yala.

Villarejo, Avencio. 1959. La selva y el hombre. Lima: Ausonia.

Ethics and IRBs

During the past week my wife Chris and I have been in transit from Peru, to Austin, and finally to Berkeley, and we are now setting up our new home. Much neglect of this blog has ensued. I did, however, want to pass on two interesting links. The first, brought to my attention by Jane Simpson over at Transient Languages and Cultures, is a link to the draft of the LSA’s ethics statement. The statement itself is available here. The draft statement is cleverly set up as a series of blog posts, with each major section getting its own post, with its own comments section. (The front page of the blog is here.) This seems like a nice way to get discussion going among linguists, and there have already been some interesting comments posted. Also included are links to ethics statements by other professional organizations such as the American Anthropological Association.

On a related note, Claire Bowern over at Angarrgoon (who also mentions the LSA ethics statement blog) provided a link some time ago to Institutional Review Blog, which is maintained by Zachary M. Schrag, an Assistant Professor of History at George Mason University. According to its subheader, the blog is dedicated to providing “[n]ews and commentary about Institutional Review Board oversight of the humanities and social sciences.” Schrag is apparently preparing a book and he posts frequently. His perspective seems like a valuable complement to discussions going on at places like Savage Minds (e.g. here, here, and many others).

I must admit that my personal experience with IRBs at the University of Texas was not that bad. Certainly there were lots of bureaucratic hoops to jump through, but at the end of the day, the members of the IRB seemed sane and did not engage in the over-reaching that I’ve heard about in some of the worse horror stories from my colleagues. I will be very interested to see how the IRB is at Berkeley. (I’m keeping my fingers crossed.)

Abstract deadline approaching: Structure of Amazonian Languages II conference

The deadline for abstract submissions for this exciting-sounding conference is drawing nigh. Abstracts are due August 15, and the CFP makes it sound like open spots are scarce. The full announcement and CFP are available via Linguistlist (here), and I’ve also included the Announcement and CFP below:

The Structure of the Amazonian Languages II

Location: Recife, Brazil
Start Date: 24-Nov-2008 – 28-Nov-2008
Contact: Stella Telles

Meeting Description: This conference is the second of a series of three meetings, as part of a cooperation initiative between the CELIA Paris, UFAM Manaus, Leiden University, and the VU University Amsterdam research centers. The themes to be discussed at the second meeting are ‘nominalization’ and ‘word-prosodic systems’. Although the nature of the meeting is that of a seminar for which part of the contributors are individually invited, there is space in the program for non-invited speakers, which we wish to encourage submitting a paper through this call. In addition, the meeting is open for students and scholars that are interested in assisting without presenting a paper.

Call for Papers

Call Deadline: 15-Aug-2008
Call for Papers

The conference themes are:

Nominalization and Subordination

Since deverbal nouns have the ability to recover the arguments of their finite counterpart, nominalization is one of the procedures that languages make use of to put a verbal predicate in a position of dependence with regard to another predicate. The link between nominalization and subordination is more or less tight cross-linguistically. Very visible in Turkish, Tzeltal, or Arabic, it is pervasive in the Amazonian languages.

Several typological issues must be addressed in considering the relation between subordination and nominalization. First, the way in which the recovery of arguments is achieved, since the case assigner is a noun. When the nominalization concerns a transitive verb, one observes a relatively general tendency for ergative alignment, which has a direct incidence on the way syntactic pivots are established between the main clause and the subordinate clause. Second, the loss of the finiteness properties of the verb and the acquirement of typical nominal categories (gender-classes, quantification, definiteness) can reveal a continuum the landmarks of which have to be stated language particularly. Since the deverbal construct generates a noun phrase, the subordination markers will often be recovered from the inventory of adposition type relational markers. With respect to relativization, the designation ”headless relative” sometimes obscures the necessary distinction between a clause in a modifier position in a noun dominated phrase and a deverbal noun in the same syntactic dependent position. Moreover, in languages that allow a certain degree of choice in discourse between a finite dependent clause and a deverbal modifier, the semantic and pragmatic correlates of each option must be highlighted. The diachronic recovery of finiteness properties by deverbal forms, often accomplished through a reanalysis of the nominal morphology, may cause changes in the alignment patterns. More specifically, the study of the relations between nominalization and subordination, if taking into account the so-called masdar form in the Arabic grammatical tradition, is very well-suited to shed a new light on that hybrid form known from many Tupi and Jê languages, which the tradition of Tupi-Guarani studies calls ”indicative 2”.

Word-Prosodic Systems

An assessment of any typological feature in South American indigenous linguistics is premature. Although for certain families (e.g. Tupi-Guarani) available descriptions are sufficiently good and numerous to allow for interesting family-wide observations, for many others there is almost nothing. This is especially true regarding the characteristics of the word-prosodic systems (stress or tone based) that exist in the Amazonian languages. Even among the ‘well-documented’ languages, very few have had their word-prosodies analyzed in a meaningful way. The descriptions are mostly sketchy, sometimes no more than a generic statement and contain few, if any, examples. A systematic consideration of word-level stress and/ or tonal patterns including detailed accounts of morphological or lexical conditioning is rarely encountered. Terms such as ‘pitch accent’ are used often with a vague definition and are employed to refer to systems that are very dissimilar. For this conference we wish to invite papers that present detailed analyses of word-prosodic systems in the Amazonian languages, preferentially based on laboratory evidence.

The abstract should be no longer than 2 pages including examples and bibliography, single spaced, Times New Roman, pitch 12. The abstract should be send in both Word/W and PdF formats to the local organizers.

Fieldwork on Vacacocha

In an earlier post I outlined my plans to do some exploratory work this summer on Andoa, a minimally documented Zaparoan language spoken on the Rio Pastaza, near the Peru-Ecuador border region. As I was preparing for my trip to the Rio Pastaza, however, some of my travel arrangements fell through, and it became apparent that I would not be able to make it to the Andoa community in the time I had available. Fieldwork on Andoa would have to wait until next year.

I thus found myself in the lovely city of Iquitos with a free week on my hands. Perfect, I though, this would be an opportunity for me to see if I could find any speakers of Vacacocha. Now, if you haven’t ever heard of Vacacocha (also known as Aushiri), you are not alone. It is among the most poorly documented of Peruvian Amazonian languages, and the language is known only from a few short word lists, none of them collected by trained linguists (a bibliography of Vacacocha references is available here (pdf)). Based on this limited information, the language is considered by most classifiers to be a linguistic isolate, but for the most part, so little is known about the language that it tends to elude linguists’ attention. The one clue about where to locate speakers of Vacacocha, repeated in many sources, is that in the early 20th century, there were several families of Vacacochas in a place on the Rio Napo known as Puerto Elvira.

Two days later, then, I found myself on the Rio Napo with a theoretical destination and a general direction to head in — upriver. After two more days’ travel up the Napo I pulled into Puerto Elvira, a community of about 200 people, situated on a bluff overlooking a majestic bend in the Rio Napo. Shortly after touching down I was shuttled over to the community’s three school teachers, who politely asked me what I was doing in their community. After I explained that I was looking for speakers of Vacacocha, the teachers put their heads together and came up with some recommendations for whom I might speak to.

I spent the remainder of the afternoon shuttling back and forth between various little islands upriver of Puerto Elvira, following up on suggestions about where older individuals with some knowledge of Vacacocha might be found. Eventually I met Delia Luisa Andi Macahuachi, a slight woman of some 70 years, who explained that she spoke Vacacocha as a child, and had used it intermittently as a young adult, but had not spoken the language in several decades. She expressed willingness to work with me, however, to document anything she could remember.

Delia Luisa Andi Macahuachi with one of her granddaughters

It very quickly became apparent that the language is tonal — in fact, shortly after beginning the first elicitation session, Delia reprimanded me for repeating the words with a flat intonational contour, and I subsequently paid more attention to carefully reproducing the tone contour of the words. Also obvious is the fact that the language has a contrast between oral and nasal vowels. Neither the tonal nature of the language nor the oral/nasal contrast is mentioned in the available material on the language, so it became clear that even if I were only able to collect lexical data, it would be possible to significantly improve linguists’ knowledge of this isolate.

From what I was able to determine, Delia is the only remaining individual in the Puerto Elvira area with any significant knowledge of Vacacocha. During the two days I was with her, Delia worked hard to remember aspects of the language she had not used regularly in close to sixty years. Although she initially found the work frustrating, she came to find the exercise of recovering long-dormant parts of her knowledge quite gratifying. I promised to return to her at the earliest opportuniry a copy of all the words and phrases I was collecting from her, and she was especially excited about the idea of leaving the linguistic documentation as a legacy for her grandchildren.

Delia and her family members mentioned another relative who they considered to be the best and sole other remaining speaker of the language. Unfortunately, this other speaker was taken several years ago by her children to live on the Rio Momon, near Iquitos, and I did not have the opportunity to work with her. I hope to locate her next year.

After two days, I had to return back downriver, as I had other pending fieldwork obligations. I was quite excited, however, to have found at least one semi-speaker with who I could work to recover aspects of Vacacocha phonology and lexicon, and I am looking forward to returning next year to make some further progress.

Muniche documentation

I arrived back in Lima a few days ago, which means that I have been meeting with colleagues and friends in the short time that remains before I return to the US. One of more interesting meetings was with Karina Sullón, a young Peruvian linguist whom I came to know through her participation in the Iquito Language Documentation Project. Karina returned recently from an exploratory trip to the community of Munichis, near the town of Yurimaguas, where the last speakers of Muniche live.

The purpose of Karina’s visit, for which I helped obtain funding, was to determine if a project aimed at the documentation of Muniche would be feasible. The only significant documentation of the language to date is Gibson (1996) (available here), which provides a description of the phonology and morphology of the language, and a small lexicon. The last fluent speaker of the language died in the late 1990s, but Karina found several ‘rusty’ speakers who retain significant knowledge of the language. In the course of a week’s work with these speakers, Karina determined that lexical, morphological, and basic syntactic work was feasible with these speakers. Given the modest documentation available on this language, a limited documentation project seems worth the effort, and Karina will be returning soon for a month of documentation work. I am very much looking forward to seeing the results of Karina’s work.

Gibson, Michael L. 1996. El Munichi: Un idioma que se extingue.‭ Serie Lingüística Peruana, 42. Pucallpa: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano.

Words from Sepahua

I am now writing from the small town of Sepahua, located at the confluence of the Urubamba and Sepahua Rivers. My wife Chris and I arrived here this morning from a trip to the Machiguenga communities of the Camisea and Urubamba basins, and we hope to be heading tomorrow back downriver, en route, eventually, to our new lives in Berkeley.

I am quite surprised to be writing a post from Sepahua. I predicted that with the economic decline in the region brought on by the collapse of the logging industry, the fledgling internet service here would be an early casualty. It seems I was half right.

The signs of economic decline are clear in Sepahua. Over half the stores have closed down, and in the ones that remain open, the goods that are offered are the cheapest possible. A small number of people are working with the oil and gas companies that are active in the region, but most people are very worried about how they are going to survive. Many people we know have already left Sepahua for other places, and I suspect that this trend will accelerate.

As I predicted, the previous internet service, managed by the municipality, has closed down. But to my great surprise, two new internet businesses have been launched in Sepahua, and they seem to be doing well. It is presently 8 pm, and eight of the ten computers are in use at the internet cabinas from which I am writing. It seems that communication and access to information are a high priority for people in Sepahua, despite their shrinking budgets. This seems to be an instance of a more general pattern I have seen here in Peru, namely, that people are willing to spend a relatively large fraction of their income on communication (especially cell phones), even when their financial situation is precarious.

Tomorrow is the next leg: by river down to Atalaya, where we will be waiting for a small plane to Pucallpa.

Notes from Atalaya

I am writing from the humid environs of Atalaya, a town of some 5,000 people located at the point where the Urubamba and Tambo Rivers meet to form the Ucayali. As the major town of the region, it is the only place with internet within two days travel by local means. The machine is a battered seven year old IBM that looks like it has been repaired many times, and the internet connection is struggling to deal with the WordPress server. But the presence of internet is impressive nevertheless. I still remember from my first visits to this part of Peruvian Amazonia in the early 90s that telephones were scarce to non-existent, never mind internet.

I am on my way from Loreto, and fieldwork on Iquito (in northern Peruvian Amazonia), to a brief visit to the Lower Urubamba region for about two weeks of humanitarian aid and linguistic work in the Matsigenka and Nanti communities on the Camisea River (in southern Peruvian Amazonia). My time working with the Iquito speakers we know was very productive, and yielded some suprising results. I plan to blog about those experiences when I am back in places with reliable internet connections, probably in early August.

We arrived in Atalaya this morning from the major jungle city of Pucallpa by plane — a six seater into which they crammed eight passengers. Tomorrow my wife Chris and I will be heading upriver on the next stage of the trip, to the town of Sepahua, where we will obtain a boat and crew to take us up the Camisea. Unless the internet connection is still working in Sepahua, which I doubt, I will be out of touch until the end of the present month.

Iquito Fieldwork

I am back in Iquitos from the field for just a day. Tomorrow my partner Chris and I will be heading to the Iquito community of San Antonio de Pintuyacu for two weeks of intensive fieldwork, and to visit our friends in the community.

During these two weeks I have planned work on the Iquito ‘pitch accent’ system (really a mixed metrical/lexical tonal system), NP recursivity, discontinuous constituency in irrealis constructions, and some checking of the Iquito-Spanish dictionary that is nearing completion. 

In any event, I expect to be off  the air until around July 8th, as there is, alas, no internet connection in the community.

 

In search of Andoa

Tomorrow morning I travel from Lima to Iquitos, en route to the Río Pastaza. My reason for this brief trip is to follow up on information I have received that there are two elderly speakers of Andoa in the community of Andoas Viejo, which is located on the Río Pastaza, not far from the border with Ecuador.

Andoa is a member of the Zaparoan family of languages, which includes Iquito, a language with which I have worked a great deal over the last six years. In recent years I have become interested in the historical linguistics of the family, but there is something of a dearth of information on the other languages of the family. There is quite a good dictionary of Arabela, which includes an adequate description of the language’s morphology (Rich 1999), and a grammatical sketch of Záparo (Peeke 1991), but otherwise the data available on the other languages is very spare. In this context, even basic lexical and morphological data on Andoa would be a tremendous boon.

Andoa, however, is widely believed to be extinct — Ethnologue, for example, reports that that last speaker of Andoa died in 1993. However, in late 2006 I met an anthropologist in Iquitos who had recently made some recordings with two elderly Andoa speakers. I listened to them briefly, and my superficial impression was that the speakers displayed significant fluency. So, the report of the demise of Andoa may have been premature — and that is what I would like to ascertain on this trip.

(Incidentially, Nick Evans has a nice chapter entitled ” The last speaker is dead — long live the last speaker”, in Linguistic Fieldwork, edited by Paul Newman and Martha Ratliff, which discusses the phenomenon through which who counts as the “last speaker” of a language is frequently a moving target, as much tied to issues of local identity community politics as linguistic ability.)

On this particular trip I don’t anticipate doing a great deal of actual linguistic documentation. If I in fact locate any individuals who identify themselves as speakers, I hope to talk with them about a small-scale documentation project and see if they — and the community more generally — are interested. If I can, I would like to do enough work with the speakers to roughly gauge their level of fluency. Can they remember only core vocabulary, or can they easily construct relative clauses?

Interestingly, there are signs that the ethnically Andoa communities on the Ecuadorean side of the border have recently become interested in language documentation and revitalization. See, for example, a newspaper article here, and a UN report here. These reports indicate that there are several speakers on the Ecuadorean side, which leads me to hope that Ecuadorean linguists will be taking up the challenge to document the language on that side of the border.

References

Rich, Rolland G., compiler. 1999. Diccionario Arabela—Castellano.‭ Lima: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano.

Peeke, M. Catherine. 1991. Bosquejo gramatical del záparo.‭ Quito: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano.

Evaluating the linguistic evidence for an Out of America hypothesis

A lively debate has been going on over at anthropology.net regarding a proposal by German Dziebel, expounded in his recent book, that modern humans originated in the Americas and spread from there to the rest of the world — an Out of America (OOAm) hypothesis to mirror the more widely-accepted Out of Africa (OOAf) hypothesis. The debate has been stimulated by two posts by Dziebel (here and here), which argue that many diverse sources of data suggest that modern humans originated in the Americas, or at the very least, the available data certainly do not rule this possibility out. Much of the debate in the comment threads focuses on genetic arguments, as one might expect, but I was interested in the linguist evidence. I asked Dziebel to elaborate on the linguistic evidence, and he kindly responded as follows:

Regarding the relevance of linguistic diversity in the Americas to the problem of the peopling of the Americas, I base myself off of Johanna Nichols’s “Linguistic diversity and the first settlement of the New World.” Language 66:3. (1990) as well as her Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time (1992).

Being stranded in Lima as I am, I have no access to Nichols’ 1992 book, but I was able get the Language article through JSTOR. In this post my goal is basically to evaluate to what degree the evidence and arguments presented in Nichols (1990), cited by Dziebel in support of the OOAm hypothesis, in fact support this hypothesis. For those who want the Reader’s Digest summary, my conclusions are the following: to a large degree, the basic evidence given in Nichols (1990) is neutral with respect to the OOAm hypothesis or competing hypotheses that place human origins in other continents. However, those parts of the paper that raise arguments relevant to distinguishing various origin hypotheses come down in favor of America as a site of colonization from the Old World, and not as a site from which humans migrated. (Just to be clear: I am not arguing for or against the OOAm hypothesis as a whole, but rather, taking on the much more restricted question of whether the linguistic evidence that Dziebel cites in fact supports the OOAm hypothesis.)

For Dziebel, the interesting point of Nichols (1990) lies in the relatively high linguistic diversity of the Americas and the implications of this diversity for the antiquity of human presence in the Americas. In his comment to me, Dziebel writes:

As measured by the number of independent linguistic stocks, linguistic divergence in the Americas must have taken at least 35,000 years. Of course, this figure cannot be taken literally but there’s a marked contrast between language diversity in the Americas (and in places like Papua New Guinea, with human archaeological record of some 40,000 years) and language diversity in Africa.

Dziebel raises two points here that are based on Nichols (1990). First, the linguistic diversity found in the Americas suggests that the human presence in the Americas goes back at least 35,000 years. And second, the human diversity of the Americas is significantly greater that found in Africa.

The arguments that Nichols (1990) marshals for the early date for the initiation of human migration to the Americas are very interesting, and rely on converging sources of data. However, the single most important piece of evidence is the sheer number of linguistic stocks found in the Americas. If we follow a uniformitarian assumption about rates of linguistic differentiation, and then calculate the rate of development of distinct stocks in other parts of the world, we are led to the conclusion that there is simply no way that the linguistic diversity we find in the Americas could have developed in the time window given by Clovis-based chronologies that posit that colonization of the Americas began around 12,000 years ago, or more recent accepted chronologies that push that date back to about 20,000 years ago. Pulling together as much linguistic and and archeological evidence as she can about migration rates across Beringia and the Bering Straits, Nichols suggests a date of roughly 35,000 years for the initial migrations into the Americas.

If we abstract away from the colonization-based scenario that Nichols employs, as Dziebel clearly does, we could argue that Nichols calculations support human presence in the Americas from 35,000 years ago — whether due to migration or otherwise. However, this interesting result cannot distinguish between the OOAm hypothesis and hypotheses that place human origins in other continents. It counts as an interesting piece of evidence regarding human presence in the Americas, but does not speak to the validity of OOAm, because it tells us nothing about how these humans got to be in the Americas.

It is worth noting that although Nichols (1990) does indeed argue for an earlier human presence in the Americas than do hypotheses based on physical remains, the entire point of the article is to develop a estimate for the date of human colonization of the Americas, based on linguistic evidence. Dziebel takes the early date for human presence in the Americas presented in the paper as support for the OOAm hypothesis, but discards the fact that this date is given in the context of a model for colonization of the Americas from the Old World.

Let us now take up Dziebel’s second point, which concerns the relative linguistic diversity of the Americas and Africa. Nichols (1990) observes that if one looks at the density of linguistic stocks globally, certain areas, such as New Guinea and South America, show a higher density that other areas, such as Europe. And, as Dziebel correctly notes, the density of the Americas as whole is higher than that of Africa. But, does this fact count as evidence either for or against OOAm? No, not at all.

Dziebel interest in the relative linguistic diversity of the Americas and of Africa lies in the supposed ability of linguistic diversity to predict the age of populations:

To summarize, linguistic diversity is a good and straightforward predictor of a population’s age if geography is factored in and if it’s checked against the mtDNA and Y-chromosome picture.

While it is certainly true that, all other things being equal, linguistic diversity in a region increases over time, it does not follow that linguistic diversity is a straightforward indicator of the age of that area’s population. The confounding factor is large-scale language shift. As Nichols argues, there is good reason to believe that in Europe, for example, Indo-European languages replaced pre-Indo-European languages on a massive scale, radically reducing the linguistic diversity of the region.

Of course, Dziebel also mentions the “mtDNA and Y-chromosome picture” — but it’s not clear to me how this is relevant to the utility of using linguistic diversity to estimate the age of a population, unless his following comment gives us a clue:

Linguistic diversity steadily increases with time, unless this process is checked by geography and reversed by population replacements.

So here it appears that Dziebel makes use of the concept of ‘population replacement’ to account for interruptions in the steady growth of linguist diverstiy. But of course, language shift need not co-occur with population replacement, entirely disrupting the tidy correspondence between linguistic diversity and the age of populations. In Europe, for example, Nichols argues that Indo-European *languages* replaced pre-Indo-European ones, not that *populations* were replaced. The result was a loss of linguistic diversity. And as the following comment shows, Dziebel seems perfectly aware of this fact:

Translated into the levels of linguistic diversity, Europe experienced periods of language replacement (now it’s dominated by Indo-European languages) but all these replacements originated from the same genetic pool.

But then he concludes:

However the factors of geography and population replacement are subordinate to the factor of spontaneous differentiation because differentiation occurs all the time and everywhere, while geographical constraints and population replacements are accidental events.

What Dziebel seems to be arguing here is that even though we know that language shift occurs — and on vast scales, as in Europe and Africa — at the end of the day, linguistic diversity is still a reliable measure of a population’s age. But this is clearly false — or maybe I am misunderstanding his point. The fact that large-scale language shift occurs, without necessarily significant changes in the *biological* population, means that linguistic diversity is good as a measure of the amount of time that has transpired *subsequent to* such large scale linguistic shifts. These shifts largely erase the linguistic history of an area, screening off the population’s age prior to that point from measures based on linguistic diversity.

The fact that such large scale shifts appear to have occurred in Africa and Europe means that measures of linguistic diversity simply cannot tell us very much about the ultimate ages of those populations. Consequently, the fact that the Americas display greater linguistic diversity than Africa tells us nothing about the relative ages of the populations of the two regions. The linguistic diversity evidence that Dziebel cites simply does not bear on the validity of OOAm.

Apart from the linguistic diversity evidence just discussed, Dziebel also cites typological evidence:

The distribution of grammatical features (such as head-marking vs. dependent-marking, numeral classifiers, etc.) again shows a cline from America and Australasia to Africa and Europe, and Nichols’s argued that our perspective on an early human language comes from America and Australasia and not Africa and Europe.

It is certainly true that Nichols (1990) observes certain typological features appear to cluster in certain geographical areas, and that intermediate areas show intermediate values for the parameters in question. Thus, as extremes, South America shows a very high proportion of head-marking languages, while Europe and Africa show a very high proportion of dependent-marking languages. Intermediate areas, such as Australasia, tend to show either mixed-marking or double-marking. However, the fact that one can identify typological parameters that exhibit a cline of values between the Americas, on the one hand, and Europe and Africa, on the other, tells us little about the locus of modern human origins. By themselves, these linguistic facts are consistent with both OOAm and OOAf scenarios. They simply do not speak to validity of one hypothesis over the other.

Dziebel also says, however, that “Nichols’s argued that our perspective on an early human language comes from America and Australasia and not Africa and Europe.” Well, if she does so in Nichols (1990), I can’t find it. The closest argument I can find in Nichols (1990) to the one that Dziebel attributes to her is an observation about the relationship between colonization and the preservation of linguistic features. To summarize, Nichols observes that when new areas are colonized, it is not unusual for linguistic features to survive in the colonized area that are subsequently lost in the areas from which the linguistic stocks originally spread. Note, of course, that the languages in the colonized area continue to change, as do all human languages, so it is misleading to characterize them as somehow reflecting “early human languages”. Rather, the languages in questions simply preserve some features that were present at the time of colonization, and which tend to get lost in the original area due to language shift. Note, btw, that *were* it possible to show that American languages retain certain features subsequently lost in other parts of the world, this would actually serve as evidence, following Nichols’ arguments, for the Americas having been colonized from the Old World, rather than the reverse, as Dziebel proposes.

Thus far, then, I can find no evidence in Nichols (1990) that supports the OOAm hypothesis. I now wish to briefly review evidence given in the paper that argues against the OOAm hypothesis.

First, linguistic diversity in the Americas tends to increase the further south one goes. Modulo issues of language shift, touched on above, this fact suggests that the older American populations are found in the south, and successively more recent populations are found in Meso-America and North America. These facts are easy to reconcile with a scenario in which populations entered the American in the north in stages, with subsequent populations pushing prior ones towards the south. It is not clear how these linguistic diversity facts fit with an OOAm scenario.

Second, Nichols argues that linguistic diversity is, in general, higher in areas that have been colonized than the centers from which colonization occurred (a point to which I alluded above). Nichols argues (p. 487) that this is due to the fact that centers are loci of large scale economies, which result in linguistic spreads that reduce linguistic diversity. The greater linguistic diversity of the Americas is, by this reasoning, supportive of the Americas being a colonized region, and not the OOAm hypothesis.

To summarize, Dziebel cited Nichols (1990) as a source of evidence and arguments that support the OOAm hypothesis. In particular, Dziebel cites linguistic evidence from this work for the antiquity of human settlement in the Americas and for the existence of a typological cline linking the Old World and New. However, neither piece of evidence supports an OOAm scenario over a OOAf scenario (or vice versa). However, other evidence and arguments presented in Nichols (1990) casts doubt on an OOAm scenario. In particular, the evidence regarding linguistic diversity within the Americas is consistent with a process of colonization of the New Word by multiple migrations from the north, but is not easy to reconcile with a an OOAm scenario. Additionally, Nichols makes arguments regarding the effects of colonization on linguistic diversity which are consistent with the Americas being the site of colonization, but not with the Americas being the point from which the Old World was colonized.

Regardless of the ultimate validity of the OOAm hypothesis, then, the linguistic arguments Dziebel presents in its favor are unconvincing to me. I wish to emphasize that I am restricting my attention to the linguistic arguments, and it is possible that the genetic arguments or those based on kinship terminology provide much better evidence for OOAm. At this point, however, I am led to conclude that the linguistic evidence that Dziebel has presented so far in favor of OOAm is weak.