History and the Testimony of Language

2. Writing History from Linguistic Evidence

e materials in this chapter have previously been published in C. Ehret, “Language and History,” in b. Heine and d. nurse (eds.), African Languages: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 272–297. 22 2 Writing History from Linguistic Evidence LAnGUAGE HisTory And HUMAn HisTory Every language contains a wealth of historical documentation on the people who have spoken it in the past. What do we mean by this claim? Just what are the data that a language provides for the writing of human history? Every language is an archive of many thousands of individual artifacts of the past. ese artifacts are the words of the language. Each language contains the full range of vocabulary necessary to express the whole gamut of knowledge, experience, and cultural practice pursued by the various members of the society that speaks the language . As ideas, behaviors, and practices changed in the earlier history of that society , the vocabulary that described these elements of life necessarily underwent changes—in the meanings applied to existing words, through the adoption or deriving of new words, and via the loss or obsolescence of older words. e history of past change and development across that gamut of culture and economy leaves its imprint on the histories of the thousands of individual words with which the members of the society express all the various elements of their lives. e evidence of language history is a democratic resource. it does not normally allow one to identify individual characters in history, but it provides a powerful set of tools for probing the widest range of past developments within communities and societies as a whole, and it lends itself well to studies of history over the long term. Writing History from Linguistic Evidence 23 For although the linguistic reconstruction of history does not allow precise dating, its data relate directly to the whole array of cultural elements that constitute the longer-term trends and sustained courses of human development. EsTAbLisHinG A LinGUisTiC sTrATiGrAPHy How does one uncover and make sense of the testimony of the myriad individual word histories in a language or in a group of languages? e essential first step is to establish what is oen called a linguistic stratigraphy. e most basic form of such a stratigraphy can be represented by a family tree of the relationships among the languages being studied. e technical linguistic aspects of establishing a family tree, and the complications that oen arise in carrying out the task, are not something that can or should be dealt with at length here.1 but the historical meaning of such “genetic” relationships among languages is something that does need explaining here if we are to understand how human history can be recovered from linguistic documentation. At its most fundamental level, the genetic metaphor implies a linguistic relationship like that found in many single-cell organisms. Two or more languages are related because they descend from a common mother language, called a protolanguage . is protolanguage evolved at an earlier time in history into two or more daughter languages: it diverged into its daughters, much as the mother cell splits into daughter cells. e daughter languages each can subsequently become protolanguages themselves, diverging at later periods into daughter languages of their own; and this process can of course repeat again and again over the long run of language history. it is very important when describing language history to use terms like diverged and evolved, which imply extended processes of development. e straight lines of a family-tree diagram sometimes mislead people into thinking that sharp language splits are involved. but in fact the breakup of a mother language into daughters is always gradual. Language change is an ongoing process in any living, spoken language . it consists of the slow, progressive accumulation of many small changes— in vocabulary, in grammatical usages, and in pronunciation—as time goes on. in the special case of linguistic divergence, a language begins initially to undergo different changes in different parts of its speech territory. ese diverging courses of change lead at first to the emergence of different dialects of the language in different areas, and then, over a period of centuries, to the evolving of these dialects into distinct languages, no longer intelligible to each other’s speakers.2 e mitotic metaphor for linguistic relationship and divergence, drawn from biology , is an apt one in most respects. e most important insight we discover is that the mother language diverges into...