WHEN LANGUAGES DIE

FROM:  NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION

Documenting endangered languages

The N|uu language, spoken by a few elderly people in South Africa, has features that help build a greater understanding of human language
There are fewer than half a dozen people left in the world who are native speakers of N|uu, a Khoisan language traditionally spoken in the Northern Cape of South Africa. The remaining speakers now live in and around the town of Upington. Sadly, they are elderly and when they die, the language likely will die with them.

"When one of these languages dies, it's a part of our human cultural heritage that is dying," says Chris Collins, a professor of linguistics at New York University. "These languages have unique features that tell us much about human language in general. When they die, it's a real tragedy."

Collins studies Khoisan languages, which are a group of non-Bantu languages of eastern and southern Africa that have "click" consonants. These languages fall into three subgroups: northern, central and southern, with two outliers in eastern Africa. How these subgroups are related historically is an open question, he says.

In recent years, Collins has been focusing on N|uu, which for a long time experts feared had been lost. But in 1997, the late linguist Anthony Traill interviewed a woman in her 90s, Elsie Vaalbooi, and verified that she was speaking N|uu. Ultimately, other surviving speakers were identified as a result of their attempts to reclaim ancestral lands taken from them under apartheid.

"Nobody was aware that the language still existed," Collins says. "It was a surprise. Everybody thought it was dead, but it wasn't."

But "it's going to die very quickly because there are so few speakers left, and they are all older than 60. They are trying to teach it to succeeding generations, but it's not easy, and there's not a lot of money to do it."

Collins does not speak N|uu, but he is studying and documenting its complexities, believing that insights about this unusual language add to the expanding knowledge of human language.

"I find N|uu and other Khoisan languages fascinating," he says. "Each has unique structures, not found in any other languages on Earth. By studying these, you gain insights into the human capacity for language."

Collins recently received a prestigious fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, which annually supports a diverse group of scholars, artists, and scientists chosen on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise.

Collins also has received a series of grants in recent years from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for his linguistic research, totaling about $400,000. The NSF-funded work also includes research on other Khoisan languages, including ǂHoã, Sasi and Juǀ'hoan, funding for a cross-linguistic syntactic database, as well as for the African Linguistics School.

The NSF-supported work on ǂHoã resulted in a grammatical description of the language, co-authored with the late linguist Jeffrey S. Gruber.

"One of the most remarkable features of ǂHoã is its complicated system of plurality," Collins says. "In English, to form a plural of a noun like "cat", one adds an "s" to form "cats". ǂHoã has a much more complicated system involving double plurals, with both a plural prefix and a plural suffix, that depends on the type of possessor a noun has, for example, 'their houses' has a different plural than 'their mothers.'

"Also, in ǂHoã, a verb can be put into the plural, in which case it means that the event described by the verb takes place several times," he adds. "For example, in ǂHoã, 'I shot' could be pluralized as 'I shots,' meaning I shot several times. Linguists refer to this way of pluralizing verbs as pluractionality. Studies of languages with pluractionality morphemes have deep implications for the study of the meaning of verbs in natural language."

Collins, together with the late linguist Henry J. Honken, also have shown that other Khoisan languages have traces of the complicated system of plurality found in ǂHoã.

In the case of N|uu, he and a linguist colleague in Namibia, Levi Namaseb, produced a grammatical sketch of the language, a book that provides an overview of its unusual structures. Collins and Namaseb worked together with American linguists Amanda Miller and Bonny Sands, who documented the sound system of N|uu.

As one example of a unique syntactic feature, N|uu uses a particular word to introduce expressions into the verb phrase, which he calls the "linker." This word sounds like "ng'' that one finds in the English word "sing".

For example, if someone were to say "I am afraid of your dog," it would be "I am afraid ng your dog" in N|uu. "It looks like it plays the role of 'of' but it doesn't always have the same role in the N|uu language that 'of' has in English," he says.

Also, the linker introduces adverbs. "He will dance ng tomorrow."

"Although the linker appears with a post-verbal adverb, it does not appear with a pre-verbal adverb, as in 'he will tomorrow dance,"' Collins says. "The linker is also found in 'how' questions, for example, 'how will he chop ng the wood?"

Collins' goal is to try to understand the bewildering array of contexts in which the linker appears, and to document how its use varies among the Khoisan languages.

"These results tell us about how a particular group of human languages organizes the verb phrase, and thus help establish the kinds of cross-linguistic variation a general theory of human language must account for," he says.

As it turns out, a subset of the Khoisan languages - the northern and southern Khoisan languages--all have a linker with similar properties that are not present either in the surrounding Bantu languages or in the central Khoisan languages.

"It is unclear how the northern and southern Khoisan languages all came to have the linker," he says. "One hypothesis is that they borrowed it from each other after a period of extensive pre-historic contact. Another hypothesis is that the languages share a common ancestor, and that is why they all have the linker. I think personally that the northern and southern Khoisan languages are historically related, but the evidence is not so compelling. How did they come to share a linker? It has a very specific kind of syntax."

To gather their material, he and Namaseb conducted extensive interviews over three summers with the remaining N|uu speakers, who also speak Afrikaans, asking specific questions about language constructions, and recording the responses. They also recorded a number of stories told by the N|uu consultants.

In addition to his language research, Collins also was one of the primary organizers of the African Linguistics School (ALS), which is held every two years, most recently in Accra, Ghana (2009), Porto Novo, Benin (2011, with NSF support under a grant titled "African Linguistics School") and Ibadan, Nigeria (2013).

The ALS is a two-week institute that takes place during the summer, and brings the latest work in core areas of linguistics to 70 students from African universities. The areas of focus are syntax, semantics, phonology, sociolinguistics and fieldwork.

"We have been very successful in helping graduate students to find research topics, to complete their dissertations and to gain admissions into competitive European and North American graduate schools," he says. "These students are very eager and very smart, and we have a lot of high caliber teachers. Organizing and teaching at the ALS has been one of the most rewarding of all my teaching experiences."

-- Marlene Cimons, National Science Foundation
-- Maria C. Zacharias
Investigators
Christopher Collins
John Singler
Amanda Miller
Related Institutions/Organizations
Cornell University
New York University

SCIENTISTS FIND EARLY MONKEY-APE SPLIT

Olive Baboon.  Credit:  Wikimedia.

FROM: NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
Scientists Discover Oldest Evidence of Split Between Old World Monkeys and Apes
Two fossil discoveries from the East African Rift reveal new information about the evolution of primates, according to a paper published this week in the journal Nature.

Findings by scientists at Ohio University's (OU) Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine and colleagues document the oldest fossils of two major groups of primates: the group that today includes apes and humans (hominoids) and the group that includes Old World monkeys such as baboons and macaques (cercopithecoids).

The research, funded in part by the National Science Foundation (NSF), underscores the integration of paleontological and geological approaches that are essential for deciphering complex relationships in vertebrate evolutionary history, the scientists said.

Geological analyses of the study site indicate that the finds are 25 million years old, significantly older than fossils previously documented for either of the two groups.

Both fossil discoveries uncovered primate species newly recognized by scientists. The fossils were collected from a single site in the Rukwa Rift Basin of Tanzania.

Rukwapithecus fleaglei is an early hominoid represented by a fossil mandible in which several teeth were preserved. Nsungwepithecus gunnelli is an early cercopithecoid represented by a tooth and jaw fragment.

The primates lived during the Oligocene epoch, which lasted from 34 to 23 million years ago. The research documents that the two lineages were already evolving separately during this geologic period.

"The late Oligocene is among the least sampled intervals in primate evolutionary history, and the Rukwa field area provides a first glimpse of the animals that were alive at that time from Africa south of the equator," said Nancy Stevens, Ohio University paleontologist and first author of the paper.

Co-authors are Patrick O'Connor, Cornelia Krause and Eric Gorscak of Ohio University; Erik Seiffert of SUNY Stony Brook University; Eric Roberts of James Cook University in Australia; Mark Schmitz of Boise State University; Sifa Ngasala of Michigan State University; Tobin Hieronymus of Northeast Ohio Medical University and Joseph Temu of the Tanzania Antiquities Unit.

Documenting the early evolutionary history of these groups has been elusive, as there are few fossil-bearing deposits of the appropriate age, Stevens said.

"Finding monkey and ape fossils of this age in Africa has been extremely difficult, but to find both branches in a well-dated fossil layer this old is extraordinary," said Paul Filmer, program director in NSF's Division of Earth Sciences.

"These 'oldest-yet' fossils reinforce that the Old World monkey and ape branches were already separate 25 million years ago."

Using an approach that dated multiple minerals in the rocks, geologists could determine a precise age for the specimens.

"The rift setting provides an advantage in that it preserves datable materials together with these important primate fossils," said Roberts.

Prior to these finds, the oldest fossil representatives of the hominoid and cercopithecoid lineages were recorded from the early Miocene, at sites dating millions of years younger.

"The Nsungwe Formation of Tanzania is a unique site, both geographically and chronologically, with excellent potential to yield important fossils from a vitally important time period and biogeographic area of Africa," said Carolyn Ehardt, NSF program director for biological anthropology.

"To have described two highly distinctive and completely new primates, one designated the oldest known fossil 'ape' and the other the oldest 'stem' member of the Old World monkey clade, is remarkable."

The new discoveries are particularly important for helping reconcile a long-standing disagreement between divergence time estimates derived from analyses of DNA sequences from living primates versus those suggested by the primate fossil record, Stevens said.

Studies of clock-like mutations in primate DNA have indicated that the split between apes and Old World monkeys occurred between 30 million and 25 million years ago.

"Fossils from the Rukwa Rift Basin in southwestern Tanzania provide the first real test of the hypothesis that these groups diverged so early, by revealing a novel glimpse into this late Oligocene terrestrial ecosystem," Stevens said.

The new fossils are the first primate discoveries from this precise location in the Rukwa deposits, and represent two of only a handful of known primate species from the entire late Oligocene, globally.

The scientists scanned the specimens in OU's MicroCT scanner, allowing them to create detailed three-dimensional reconstructions of the ancient specimens. The reconstructions were used for comparisons with other fossils.

"This is another great example of how modern imaging and computational approaches allow us to address more refined questions about vertebrate evolutionary history," said O'Connor.

In addition to unveiling these newly discovered primates, the Rukwa field sites have produced several other fossil vertebrate and invertebrate species new to science.

The late Oligocene interval is interesting because it provides a final snapshot of the unique species inhabiting Africa prior to the large-scale faunal exchange with Eurasia that occurred later in the Cenozoic Era, Stevens said.

A key aspect of the Rukwa Rift Basin project, she said, is the interdisciplinary nature of the research team, with paleontologists and geologists working together to reconstruct vertebrate evolutionary history in the context of the developing East African Rift System.

"Since its inception, the project has employed a multi-faceted approach to addressing a series of large-scale biological and geological questions centered on the East African Rift System in Tanzania," O'Connor said.

The research was also funded by the Leakey Foundation and the National Geographic Society.

-NSF-

CLEVERNESS AND TOOL EVOLUTION



Photo caption: Ancient stone tools showing the pace of remarkable technological enhancements over time (1.75 to 0.85 million years ago). Credit, Los Alamos National Laboratory.

FROM: LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY
Documenting Stone Age Cleverness By Tool Development
Ancient handaxe craftsmanship gives insight into mental advances

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., March 12, 2013—LOS ALAMOS, N.M., March 12, 2013—Stone Age man’s gradual improvement in tool development, particularly in crafting stone handaxes, is providing insight into the likely mental advances these early humans made a million years ago. Better tools make for better hunting, and better tools come from more sophisticated thought processes. Close analysis of bits of chipped and flaked stone from across Ethiopia is helping scientists crack the code of how these early humans thought over time.

Los Alamos National Laboratory Fellow Giday WoldeGabriel and a team of Ethiopian, Japanese, American and German researchers recently examined the world’s oldest handaxes and other stone tools from southern Ethiopia. Their observation of improved workmanship over time indicates a distinct advance in mental capabilities of the residents in the entire region, with potential impacts in tool-development skills, and in overall spatial and navigational capabilities, all of which improved their hunting adaptation.

"Even though fossil remains of the tool makers are not commonly preserved, the handaxes clearly archive the evolution of innovation in craftsmanship, acquired intelligence and social behavior in a pre-human community over a million-year interval," said WoldeGabriel.

The scientists determined the age of the tools based on the interlayered volcanic ashes with the handaxe-bearing sedimentary deposits in Konso, Ethiopia. Handaxes and other double-sided or bifacial tools are known as the first purposely-shaped tools made by humanity and are closely associated with Homo erectus, an ancestor of modern humans. A paper in a special series of inaugural articles in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, "The characteristics and chronology of the earliest Acheulean at Konso, Ethiopia," described their work.

Some experts suggest that manufacturing three-dimensional symmetric tools is possible only with advanced mental-imaging capacities. Such tools might have emerged in association with advanced spatial and navigational cognition, perhaps related to an enhanced mode of hunting adaptation. Purposeful thinning of large bifacial tools is technologically difficult, the researchers note. In modern humans, acquisition and transmission of such skills occur within a complex social context that enables sustained motivation during long-term practice and learning over a possible five-year period.

Making the right tools for the job

Researchers observed that the handaxes’ structure evolved from thick, roughly-manufactured stone tools in the earliest period of Acheulean tool making, approximately 1.75 million years ago to thinner and more symmetric tools around 0.85 Ma or megaannum, a unit of time equal to one million years. The Acheulean is a stone-age technology named after a site in France where handaxes from this tradition were first discovered.

The chronological framework for this handaxe assemblage, based on the ages of volcanic ashes and sediments, suggests that this type of tool making was being established on a regional scale at that time, paralleling the emergence of Homo erectus-like hominid morphology. The appearance of the Ethiopian Acheulean handaxes at approximately 1.75 Ma is chronologically indistinguishable from similar tools recently found west of Lake Turkana in northern Kenya, more than 125 miles to the south.

"To me, the most intriguing story of the discovery is that a pre-human community lived in a locality known as Konso at the southern end of the Ethiopian Rift System for at least a million years and how the land sustained the livelihood of the occupants for that long period of time. In contrast, look at what our species has done to Earth in less than 100,000 years – the time it took for modern humans to disperse out of Africa and impose our voracious appetite for resources, threatening our planet and our existence," WoldeGabriel said.

The research team

WoldeGabriel is a specialist in field and volcanic geology and geochronology, and together with his research collaborators examined the scattered geologic sections in which early hominid fossils and tools are found. Through geological fieldwork, volcanic ash chemistry and geochronology, he helps to rebuild the time and space framework of the paleo landscape.

In addition to the Konso research project, WoldeGabriel is also co-leader and lead geologist of the Middle Awash project, a collaborative research project in Ethiopia of the Institute of Geophysics, Planetary Physics and Signatures and University of California, Berkeley, which has recovered the fossil remains of at least eight species, including some of the earliest hominids, spanning the past six million years.

The team that studied the handaxes and their geological context includes researchers Yonas Beyene (Association for Research and Conservation of Culture, Ethiopia) and Berhane Asfaw (Rift Valley Research Service, Ethiopia), Shigehiro Katoh (Hyogo Museum of Nature and Human Activities, Japan), Kozo Uto (National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and technology, Japan), Megumi Kondo (Ochanomizu University, Japan), Masayuki Hyodo (Kobe University) and Gen Suwa (University of Tokyo), William K. Hart (Miami University of Ohio), Paul R. Renne (Berkeley Geochronology Center and University of California, Berkeley) and WoldeGabriel (Los Alamos National Laboratory) and Masafumi Sudo (University of Potsdam, Germany). The Institute of Geophysics, Planetary Physics and Signatures provided partial funding for the Los Alamos research.