The sounds of prehistoric speech

Abstract

Evidence is reviewed for widespread phonological and phonetic tendencies in contemporary languages. The evidence is based largely on the frequency of sound types in word lists and in phoneme inventories across the world's languages. The data reviewed point to likely tendencies in the languages of the Upper Palaeolithic. These tendencies include the reliance on specific nasal and voiceless stop consonants, the relative dispreference for posterior voiced consonants and the use of peripheral vowels. More tenuous hypotheses related to prehistoric languages are also reviewed. These include the propositions that such languages lacked labiodental consonants and relied more heavily on vowels, when contrasted to many contemporary languages. Such hypotheses suggest speech has adapted to subtle pressures that may in some cases vary across populations. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Reconstructing prehistoric languages’.

The vocal tract as a time machine: inferences about past speech and language from the anatomy of the speech organs

“…Even closer to the present, if the link between food, bite and labiodentals [94] holds, then strict uniformitarianism breaks down at the dawn of agriculture, as we cannot expect pre-12 000-years old languages to have the same distribution of labiodentals as present-day languages, but the uniformitarian principle would still largely apply, as the same articulatory constraints and affordances worked then as they do today. (For more nuanced discussions and further developments, see [16], as well as [151][152][153]. )…”

“…But our limits in what concerns the speech and language of long-gone people run deeper than this: there seems to a widespread assumption in linguistics that, on the one hand, there are precious few traces left by speech and language (writing goes back not more than a few thousand years) and, on the other, living (and attested) languages are very poor at retaining information about their earlier stages. Taken together, these seem to impose a 'time horizon' beyond which we cannot really know much [11], a time horizon that is usually placed at most 10 000 years ago, and rooted in the breakdown of the 'standard' historical linguistic comparative method of information recovery and inference ( [12][13][14][15]; see also [16]). This breakdown results in the reluctance to connect established language families into larger (and, presumably, deeper) constructs such as 'Nostratic' [17,18], 'Eurasiatic' [19] or 'Altaic'/ 'Transeurasian' [20,21].…”

The Sound Systems of Languages Adapt, But to What Extent?

“…(These are the Pacific Northwest, the Caucasus region, the Atlas Mountains region, Patagonia, the Northeastern US, the Sonoran Desert, Northern New Guinea, and Northeast Asia.) Also, as noted in Everett (2021), the families with the lowest vowel ratios are families like Salishan that are known to allow many complex syllable types and frequent consonant clusters, while those with the highest vowel ratios are families that are known to rely primarily on simple syllable structures.…”

“…In Figure 1, I adapt a usage-based IPA chart I developed in other work (Everett 2021) to highlight some of the sounds discussed in these sections. In the chart the frequency of pulmonic consonants across 2,186 phoneme inventories is visualized.…”

“…Based on approximately 2,186 phoneme inventories in PHOIBLE. (Moran & McCloy 2019) Adapted fromEverett (2021). The cells highlighted with red boundaries relate to phenomena discussed in this and the preceding sections.…”