The Alphabet- Backgound, A brief Description
The following articles derive from an Examen
Project of our friend Paul Knighton.
The complete title of the work is:
A Project
Presented
to the Faculty of
California State University Dominguez Hills
In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
Master of Arts
in
the Humanities
by
Paul Knighton
Fall 1995
As far as we know, Paul Knighton is living
in Japan now and we were not able to provide the pictures for his
articles from him. Nevertheless it is interesting to follow his thoughts.
The whole work can be ordered from the webmaster.
THE ALPHABET
Divine Generation of Alphabets.c.Divine
Generation of Alphabets;
Difficult as it may be to accept, as the old
adage runs, seeing is believing: Appendix C shows how the geometric
pattern known as the Seed of Life, ratcheted out to thirteen circles,
forms the basis of the design which the Bock Saga uses, and it does
indeed generate letters. (The poster size colour illustration, from
which this is copied, makes this much more apparent).(not existing
on this site)The Seed of Life and the Flower of Life designs have
been found in Egypt, Celtic Ireland, Turkey, Tibet, and Greece. This
generation of letters seems like a kind of magic, and belief in such
magic, or the divine origin and character of writing, is ubiquitous,
in all eras, among civilized as well as among "primitive"
people. The Egyptians called Thoth "the scribe of the gods"
and taught that he had given them their writing, which they called
the "speech of the gods." Muslims believe that Allah himself
created writing, and the Norse saga attributes the invention of the
runes to Odin. Hellen, the founder of the Greeks, according to Cassiodorus,
"delivered many things concerning the alphabet, describing its
composition and virtues, in an exceedingly subtle narration; insomuch
that the great importance of letters may be traced to the very beginning
of things." The Hindus say that it was Brahma who gave them Sanskrit,
which is based on Devanagari, meaning "holy script." [Veta]
means to know in Rot, [gana] (naga backwards) is script, the same
as Japanese hiragana, so the Vedas are the "knowledge of the
Aser."
The Bock Saga then is not at all unique in its claim to be the original
source of language or writing; almost all ancient nations had a tradition
that they once possessed sacred writings in a long lost language,
the Mayans, Japanese and Runic users amongst them. The "urrunen"
theory runs parallel to the Saga in that it holds that it is the source
of all Mediterranean alphabets, including Phoenician. Studies of the
Norse peoples' Runic characters and Celtic symbols have found that
the symbols appear to have served sacred and mystical purposes for
hundreds of years before there is any evidence of their being used
for written language. They are said to have magic powers, and this
is supported by the linguistic evidence of the Gothic word runa, meaning
secrecy, or mystery. Parallel to this is the oral nature of the Saga
- remember, only the Bock family was supposedly cognizant of its origins.
In Hebrew rune means a song, or to sing, and the ancient Jews maintained
that their Cabala was revealed by God to Moses and was transmitted
verbally, it being too sacred to be written. Similarly the Brahmins
are not permitted to recite, but only to sing the Vedas. As magic
is simply that which is not understood, comprehension of any process
removes its numinosity. Could it be that the Bock Saga is a preservation
of some form of mathematical or geometrical knowledge that has been
lost, but that appeared so spectacular to early mankind that it appeared
to be magical?
Certainly, the many Garden of Eden myths found around the world "see
mankind, over recent millennia, as having degenerated from root-races
and cultures of great spiritual and technological development, which
flowered in the Golden Age of antiquity, and were destroyed to be
reborn (perhaps many times) in aeons more distant than the limitations
of today's science would have us believe." Today, in Japan, there
is a Shinto priest called Yoshimi Takeuchi who claims that his family
has been the guardian of the Golden Dragon Shrine for over four thousand
years. Among the shrine's sacred treasures are various artifacts,
allegedly given by the Imperial court, including pottery believed
to be 20,000 years old, and documents which he claims: "will
prove that the origins of the five races of the world are one and
the same." Also he says there are stones, the original tablets
of Moses' Ten Commandments, which contain ancient Japanese writings
remarkable similar to that of Hebrew. In fact, according to Takeuchi,
ancient emperors developed over two hundred sets of characters which
are said to be the basis for the ancient Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek,
Sanskrit and Hebrew languages.
These claims are all seemingly incredible, yet research performed
over the last few years by Stan Tenen and the Meru Project demonstrates
that exactly the same kind of mathematical patterns as generate the
Bock Saga and its alphabet dictate the form of the original Hebrew
of the first chapter of the Book of Genesis, and how both Hebrew,
Arabic and Greek letters have a common geometric origin. These points
will be dealt with in more detail shortly, but before considering
any of these areas of new research, which it must be said, stretch
credibility to the limit, it would be instructive to consider some
of the background, and to assess current theories on the development
of writing.
Development of Writing.c.Development
of Writing;
There is almost no contention with the idea
that speech precedes writing. It seems reasonable to posit that the
first writing involved the incision of marks to indicate meaning or
concepts, and that it then developed into the representation of sounds.
Jaynes' bicameral mind hypothesis, with its element of auditory internal
dialog, adds a twist to this though, for it maintains that consciousness
followed the introduction of writing: "... writing proceeds from
pictures of visual events to symbols of phonetic events. The latter
is meant to tell the reader something he does not know, but the former
is primarily a mnemonic device to release information which the reader
already has." Jaynes contends that evolution of ego, or consciousness,
paralleled a move towards externalization of knowledge, which became
law when it was inscribed in stone, as with the Ten Commandments.
It is significant then that the first pictographs were used to label
and list and sort. By 2,100 BC writing in Mesopotamia was extensively
put to such civil use to record the judgments of the gods, as in the
famous laws of Hammurabi. Is it merely coincidence that the word Israel
is explained (in its simplest form) in Rot as "the law of Ra
from the ice," [is] meaning ice, Ra Bock's son, and [el] law?
Certainly there is coincidence of sound; but common sense would say
that unless some stronger connections can be made, then it is merely
chance.
The Saga's account of the Semitic development of writing says that
Moses, who received the laws of Yahweh magically inscribed in stone,
was in fact a woman called Murse, one of the daughters of Bock, who
came down from Uudenmaa with a new writing system based on one mark
for every sound. This system had supposedly been kept in the Bock
family and never before disseminated. Prior to this the Saga says
that people had used runic scripts, which demand such a prolonged
education and understanding that only a select few people had been
chosen to learn and understand them, necessitating a more "right
brain" associative approach, similar to Jaynes' release of innate
knowledge. The new Hebrew system, though, had only twenty two sounds
and their marks, so anyone could decipher it easily. This is interpreted
by the Saga as having had widespread repercussions on consciousness
and evolution. As the Rot language is supposedly generated by natural
principles, its sounds are said to be open to immediate confirmation
as to verisimilitude. However, with the new externalized Hebrew writing
there was no way for the newly literate to distinguish between what
was natural and innate, and therefore correct, and what was new or
unnatural and wrong, for, by writing, it is also possible to change
the meaning by adding or omitting sounds altogether. The Saga's interpretation
of this is certainly contentious; it is such a significant paradigm
shift that the attribution of female sex to Moses provides something
much easier to take exception to, perhaps ignoring the true implications
of what is being discussed here. It is worth remembering that this
is often how important paradigm changes are greeted.
Most of the early Mediterranean alphabets were inscribed on clay.
Further north, where clay was not such a suitable material, stone
was usually the most available material. Thus it is no real surprise
to find that the English verb write comes from Old Norse rita, meaning
to incise runes, or that the Greek graphein has same etymology as
the English to carve, whilst both the Latin scribere, and the German
schreiben mean to scratch. Certainly the practice of writing is fairly
recent, although it predates paper or papyrus, for the earliest writing
we know of, Egyptian and Sumerian texts, are all clay tablets into
which were notched their symbols. This is dated at about 3,000 BC,
before which there are only artifacts which provide a much more nebulous
record than writing.
Current linguistic and paleographic theories maintain that there is
a traceable lineage of all the ancient phonetic alphabets and that
they all developed from pictographic and hieroglyphic symbols. This
monogenetic theory of writing has been largely accepted, based on
connections between Sumerian, Proto-Elamite and Proto-Indic. It is
self-apparent that the development and memorization of thousands of
signs for the thousands of words and names existing in any language,
plus the never ending problem of creating new symbols for newly acquired
ones makes logographic or hieroglyphic writing so impracticable that
it has everywhere proved to be of limited life span. Thus the first
development of all post logographic writing systems is the movement
towards using symbols to represent syllables.
The Sumerians are credited with being the first to implement some
kind of phonetization of symbols, and the classification of such proto-syllabic
systems, (ones with no word signs at all), usually includes Sumerian,
Proto-Elamite, Proto-Indic, Chinese, Egyptian, Cretan and Hittite.
The Mayan and Aztec systems are generally not included in this set
because even in their most advanced stages they never attained the
level of phonographical development of the earliest stages of the
Oriental systems. The limitations of these systems are readily apparent:
"Even Chinese, the most logographic of all writings, is not a
pure logographic system, because from the earliest times it has used
word signs functioning as syllabic signs. And what is true of the
Chinese system is even more true of other ancient Oriental systems
such as Sumerian, Egyptian and Hittite."
The confusion that is generated by such dualistic use of symbols almost
inevitably demands simplification, and so the Semitic tribes in Palestine
and Syria are found adopting from the Egyptians only the principle
of writing monosyllables without indicating any differences in vowels.
This occurred around the period of 1,700 to 1,500 BC, a time when
cultural changes were favorable to the development of a writing system
which was more accessible to a larger number of people. Although almost
every country in the eastern Mediterranean area has at one time or
another been pinpointed as the origin of the Northern Semitic alphabet,
the generally accepted view today is that the Phoenicians were either
the inventors, or, more likely, the transmitters, of this alphabet
which consists of 22 letters representing consonants only. From this
one source can supposedly be traced all the world's alphabets. Those
in the East are all supposedly derived from Phoenician through Aramaic:
Arabic has 28 consonants, 22 of them from Aramaic through Nabataean;
old Persian developed into Brami, the 7th century BC forerunner of
Indian scripts which clearly demonstrates Semitic influence, although,
of course, there are those who hotly dispute this origin. After that,
Brami is said to have developed into Gupta, and from this came Tocharian
A & B and Tibetan. Gupta was later spread by Buddhist monks, leading
to Sri Lankan, Burmese, Thai, Khmer Cham, Vietnamese and Indonesian,
which are all semisyllabic. Another offshoot of Aramaic, South Semitic,
or Sabaean, formed a 29 letter script which became the basis of Ethiopic,
and thus Amharic, Tigré and Tigrina.
In the West, the oddities that are the Runic and the Celtic ogham
systems are explained as having developed from this original Phoenician,
which was adopted and adapted by Greeks, and thus North Semitic became
the ancestor of all the other western alphabets. The letters of the
Greek alphabet are without doubt directly derived from the Hebrew
system (Appendix D). All the Greeks did, as they freely admit, was
to introduce extra symbols to act as pure vowel sounds, and even these
symbols were of Hebrew design. The names of the letters of the Greek
alphabet are only slightly different from the names of the Semitic
letters. It is thus generally accepted that the Greek characters and
names followed from the Semitic, with a vowel added at the end of
the name in accord with the nature of Greek word structure. Thus aleph
became alpha, and beth became beta. The additional letters of phi,
chi and psi were adopted later. It was the creation of this Greek
alphabet, with a full vowel indication, which first fulfilled the
technical definition of an alphabet as a writing that expresses the
single phonemes of a language. The key point here is the inner principle
of one sound represented by one symbol, and that symbol only representing
one sound. Since the creation of the Greek alphabet, there have been
hundreds of other alphabets which have been developed throughout the
world, but no really significant changes have taken place in the principles
of writing. Even today many older languages such as Aramaic, Hebrew,
and Arabic have vowels which are indicated by separate diacritic marks,
not by separate symbols. This system has also been adopted to adapt
to new sounds, as can be seen with the French cedilla, the German
umlaut or the many Eastern European markings.
Opinion is divided as to the exact relationship of the shape of the
Semitic letter and its name. One theory is that the sign is derived
from pictographics of the object named, e.g. ox = aleph, house = beth.
Another is that the names were used as mnemonic devices for relating
sound to sign. It is generally agreed that the earliest forms were
influenced by Egyptian pictographs, although interpreting many of
the Semitic signs as pictorial characters presents insuperable difficulties.
It is said that these Eastern Mediterranean scripts derive from even
older geometric symbols used throughout the area. A number of Greek
letter forms are mirror images, which supposedly relates to the fact
that early Greek writing went from right to left, or sometimes from
left to right, or both ways alternately, a practice called boustrophedon,
describing how an ox drawing a plough turns and comes back. Hebrew
is still written in this manner. The Aser wrote from left to right,
and many of their words have their syllables transposed back to front
when they are translated.
There is almost no argument currently with the paradigm that the alphabet
used in writing English is the Roman or Latin alphabet, which was
adopted and adapted from the early Greek alphabet, through the Etruscan
(Appendix D). The classical letters have been retained as our capital
letters, though there have obviously been many changes, mostly caused
by needs of penmanship and vowel shifts, to the extent that to a non
native speaker, modern English spelling seems almost purely arbitrary.
However, to go into any depth of examination of this here would merely
be to overload with detail. It is sufficient to note that in this
trail of development, the accepted belief has been upheld. "The
principle of unidirectional development holds that, in reaching its
ultimate development, writing, whatever its forerunners may be, must
pass through the stages of logography, syllabography and alphabetography
in this, and in no other order. Therefore, no writing can start with
a syllabic or alphabetic stage unless it is borrowed directly or indirectly,
from a system that has gone through all the previous stages. Natura
non facit saltus: nature does not make leaps." This last Darwinian
cry of progress insists on development in a logical manner. The Saga's
assertion is that this is true in a completely different way, for
if there is anything to the claim of a geometrically produced alphabet,
then indeed, there are no leaps: all is revealed in one fluent motion
by nature herself.
The Rot Alphabet
and Recent Geometric Research.c.The Rot Alphabet and Recent
Geometric Research;
The Bock Saga says that the alphabet commonly
known as the Roman originated in a completely different place and
at a much earlier time. There is obviously much truth in the current
paradigm, so is there any way to reconcile all this scholarship and
evidence with such a bizarre claim? It is necessary to return to the
magical claims and geometrical concepts: "Meru research has reconstructed
details of geometries previously lost to modern man, demonstrating
a rational basis for ideas that might otherwise be dismissed as poetic
or mythological." This geometrical basis is exactly the same
as that which underpins the Bock Saga.
For millennia, spiritual teachers of the Jewish religion have claimed
that their alphabets are holy letters, given to them directly by God,
and that if they are examined with sufficient care they will reveal
the ultimate secrets of life in the universe, and the nature and purpose
of human consciousness. Such assertions seem to have found some form
of validation in the research done by The Meru Project, for they state
that: "based on the work accomplished so far, it is the hypothesis
of the Meru Project that the structure of the letters of the Hebrew
alphabet, their shape, and the method of their formation, were specifically
created to illustrate the elegance, simplicity, and beauty of the
relationship between cosmology and consciousness."
In the same manner as the geometrical explanation of Genesis provides
a simple and elegant explanation of creation, so too does the related
science of patterns in wavelength allow seemingly irreconcilable opposites
to be brought together. Everything is dictated by wavelength; light,
sound and matter are merely differences in the frequency of vibration.
The differences between red and green, as anyone who is colour blind
will confirm, or between, G sharp and D flat, as the tone deaf will
readily attest, are ones of perception, of differences only in wave
motion. The root of many European words for life is the Latin vibrare,
which means to shake. Thought-processes, myths and symbols are no
less than different modes of energy, exhibiting patterns which parallel
the crystalline forms of nature.
LANGUAGE.c.LANGUAGE;
All human cultures have developed language.
Today there are over five thousand different languages around the
globe, all of which have evolved in various degrees over time. However,
the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel tells of a time when the
entire world spoke the same language, but humans so offended the gods
that they were punished, divided through a confusion of languages.
Berossus, writing in the third century BC tells of how the "first
inhabitants of the land, glorying in their own strength ... undertook
to raise a tower whose top should reach the sky ... but the tower
was overturned by the gods and winds ... and the gods introduced a
diversity of tongues among men, who till that time had all spoken
the same language." Two hundred years later, Polyhistor also
wrote that all men formerly spoke the same language. The Bock Saga
claim to be the root of all languages is thus but an echo of this
idea, and it is not the only one. The Mayans also claim that their
language is the origin of, or has had influence on all languages.
Is it merely a coincidence that the word babel in Mayan means confusion?
Humbatz Men also points out similarities in Saxon and Mayan syntax
and phonetic connections in many other words. In the same vein, there
are claims in Japan that their early Emperors brought culture all
over the world. Perhaps supporting this, recent discoveries have uncovered
both Egyptian hieroglyphs and Asian pictograms at native American
Indian sites.
Origins of Language.c.Origins of Language;
There is little physical evidence to help discern
the origins of language; before writing there are simply no records
of the spoken medium, so we are left with hypothesis. Julian Jaynes
suggests that the first vocalizations by humans were connected with
the development of tools, around 40,000 BC, and that these were modifiers
such as "sharper" and "bigger" to facilitate improvements
in the manufacture of the tools, and that this was followed by the
use of nouns, about 25,000 -15,000 BC. He argues that the first nouns
used were probably those for animals, and supports this with the evidence
of the synchronicity of cave paintings of animals, contending that
this change was reflective of shifts in consciousness. Certainly it
is arguable that as people developed greater manual specialization
and had more things to do with their hands, they could use them less
for communication and had to rely more on sounds. Jaynes' main hypothesis
though, is that early man had a completely different mentality from
our own, which he describes as a bicameral mind. This is described
as a state of mind in which "volition, planning and initiative
is organized with no consciousness whatsoever," probably in the
section of the right brain known as Wernicke's area, and orders were
then transferred to the speech reception areas of the left brain in
the form of interior voices or auditory hallucinations, which became
recognized as gods. (An archetypal analysis of this contention will
be made in a later section). The contention regarding Wernicke's area
has been physically corroborated by many researchers' findings on
the siting of language ability within the brain, and the general hypothesis
is further supported by evolutionary changes evidenced by the human
fossil record. 50,000 years ago, there were a number of related changes
in human physiology and behaviour. The human brain, which had been
expanding in size, lateralized; that is each half of the brain came
to specialize in certain activities, and language ability was localized
in the left hemisphere of most persons." Dean Falk at the State
University of New York at Albany says that fossil brain casts show
a well developed language area, whilst Terence Deacon of Harvard goes
further and emphasizes the linguistic ability of early man: "Neanderthal's
brain was bigger than ours. It was not dull-witted and inarticulate."
The recent Kebara cave discoveries in Israel have furnished proof
of this in the form of a 60,000 year old hyoid bone. Thus it seems
more than likely that early people could and did use language, the
question now is whether there was one or many languages.
Proto-Indo-European.c.Proto-Indo-European;
The search for a common progenitor of language
can be said to date back to Sir William Jones, speaking to 'The Asiatick
Society' in Calcutta on February 2nd 1786, who pointed out similarities
between Sanskrit, Greek and Latin, stating that: "no philologer
could examine them without believing them to have sprung from some
common source, which perhaps, no longer exists." If one examines
the most common words in all languages, for example, the English father,
one finds startling correlation through many other languages: German
vater, Norwegian, Danish and Swedish fater, Dutch vader, Latin pater,
Spanish padre, Portuguese pai, Catalan pare, French père, Greek
pater, Sanskrit pitar, and Persian pedar. Such similarities in vocabulary,
as well as in grammar and phonology soon led to the conclusion that
each of the one hundred and forty languages spoken in Europe, except
Finnish, Hungarian, Basque and Estonian, were members of the same
family, and that their shared characteristics came from a common progenitor
called Proto-Indo European. Evolutionary trends in language were confined
by parameters such as Grimm's Law, which set limits on how sounds
can and do change with time, and delineated how they do, e.g. a Latin
"p" becomes "f" in the Germanic family, as in
the transition of "piscis" to "fish." Proto-Indo-European
was locked into orthodoxy by Saussure, who in classic scientific manner
hypothesized the existence of a group of sounds in that language that
have not survived into modern languages, the laryngeals, which one
can find in Arabic. His claim was evidenced later by Hittite tablets
with such sounds and Proto-Indo-European became universally accepted.
Different approaches were taken to explain how languages diverged.
Schleicher adopted a tree approach similar to genealogy charts, whilst
Schmidt put forward a wave model. The controversy is still ongoing.
Essentially though, there are only a few important theories of the
origins of Proto-Indo-European. Paul Thieme put forward a radical
theory, based entirely on linguistic evidence, which put the Indo-European
homeland in Northern Europe, about where Germany and Poland are today.
This, of course, is very close to Finland, and would be strong evidence
for Bock Saga claims. However, this is murky ground, for in 1926 Gordon
Childe, in his book The Aryans, had likewise argued for an Indo-European
homeland in the steppe areas north of the Black Sea. This was taken
up by the Nazis in an effort to prove that the original Indo-European
language had been spoken by a master race of Aryans, and that the
Nordic people's superiority in physique fitted them to be the vehicle
of a superior language. One linguist has put Proto-Indo-European at
the North Pole, and another thought it contained sounds of bird calls
which could only have come from the Baltic coastal areas. Another
strong linguistic argument is based on the names of trees, which are
localized in their growth patterns. The birch grows only in northern
temperate climates, yet the Proto-Indo-European word for birch appears
in six different groups of languages today.
The standard theory, based on both archaeological and linguistic arguments
that most scholars find convincing, is that the Indo-European language
originated among the Kurgan peoples living near the Ural Mountains
about 6,000 years ago, and that this language was then carried west
and south by invasion and conquest. Colin Renfrew says "... the
traditional view of the spread of the Indo-European languages holds
that an Ur-language, ancestor to all the others, was spoken by nomadic
horsemen who lived in what is now western Russia north of the Black
Sea near the beginning of the Bronze Age. As these mounted warriors
roamed over greater and greater expanses, they conquered the indigenous
peoples and imposed their own Proto-Indo-European language, which
in the course of succeeding centuries evolved in local areas into
the European languages we know today."
This begs the question as to where the Kurgan people themselves came
from, and thus from where their language originated. However, turning
to the culture that they supposedly supplanted, Marija Gimbutas says
that between 7,000 BC and 3,500 BC the people of Europe lived in settled
agricultural societies that worshipped the Great Goddess. They "delighted
in nature, shunned war, built comfortable settlements rather than
forts, and crafted superb ceramics rather then weapons." She
says their social system was matrilineal, though neither men nor women
dominated the other sex. She accepts the standard theory that between
4,000 BC and 3,500 BC this peaceful and harmonious "Old Europe"
was shattered by waves of Indo-European invaders on horseback, the
Kurgans, who swept out of the steppes and transformed Europe, pushing
the Goddess religion underground and into subordinate roles within
cultures. She cites the Greek and Roman female deities and the Virgin
Mary, harvest customs and animist holdovers regarding springs, trees,
rocks and animals. as evidence of this. There is affirmation of Gimbutas'
theory from J. P. Mallory , and, based on the evidence of cultivation
of wheat and barley and the herding of sheep and goats, it is known
that in the seventh millennium BC a novel agricultural economy began
to spread across Europe. These grains did not grow wild in Europe,
but have been shown to have originated in the Middle East. Except
for meli, a ground cereal millet, yewo, a cereal used for fermentation
and puro, spelt wheat, there are no well attested Proto-Indo-European
words for cereals. However, there are many scholars who are much less
sure of Gimbutas' claims. Ruth Tringham at Berkeley says "no
other archaeologist would express such certainty." Dr. David
Anthony at Hartwick College says the collapse of Old Europe is not
understood and that there is no evidence that the migrants caused
the collapse rather than followed it. There is also no evidence that
women played the central role in either the social structure or religion.
The basis of Gimbutas' theory is that the Kurgan invasion caused the
collapse of an agricultural society that was already there and replaced
it with herding. One essential feature of the Kurgan invasion theory
is the domestication of the horse, as the warriors were supposed to
be mounted. However, the word for horse in Proto-Indo-European is
not indicative of any sense of domestication, nor had there been any
evidence for horses being ridden until about 2,000 BC. However, in
1991 David Anthony and Dmitri Telegin at the Ukranian Institute of
Technology discovered a horse skull, dating back to 4,000 BC, with
teeth marks indicative of wear caused by a bridle.
An old fashioned theory now gaining popularity with revisionists like
Colin Renfrew is that the Indo-European homeland was in Anatolia.
Not surprisingly this has been strongly criticized by Marija Gimbutas.
Renfrew's model reverses the direction of influence between the steppes
and Western Europe and pushes it back to 6,500 BC. Thus the Celtic
language would have evolved as part of the same family. David McAlpin
of the University of London has shown that Elamite (Khuzistan now)
is related to the Dravidian language. This expanded version of the
wave of advance model has the effect of situating the ancestral languages
of the Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic and Dravidian groups together in
the Near East about 10,000 years ago. The proposal has been made that
these are all related in a super family which has been called Nostratic.
This certainly advances the cause of Bock Saga claims.
In 1993 there was a compromise which decided that Renfrew and Gimbutas
were both right! Farmers from Anatolia did spread northward over all
Europe, replacing the hunter-gatherers who were there before, but
the process started about 10,000 years ago (earlier than Renfrew's
theory). Then (as Gimbutas argues) about 6,000 years ago the Indo-Europeans
swept out of the Urals. Going back 10,000 years raises serious questions
of accuracy which will probably never be resolved and forces the consideration
of data from other than purely linguistic sources, a situation faced
often in this paper. A good place to begin this angle of approach
is with the Basques, whose language, it will be remembered, is one
of those considered separate from Proto-Indo-European. Indeed, there
has been speculation that theirs was the Ur language spoken before
the Tower of Babel. Evidence put forward to support this is somewhat
thin, and includes elements of stone age derivation. In Basque aitz
means stone, and is the root for such words as pick, axe and knife.
This is said to tie in with 20,000 year old cave art of Altamira and
Lascaux. There are also connections with the Caucasus group of languages
and, according to some, with Na-dene.
Another non-linguist who has provided material to further confuse
matters here is Zecharia Sitchin, who has been working with the translations
of the thousands of clay tablets from Sumer. Based on these tablets,
he made some stunning revelations, including accurate predictions
of the colour and nature of the planet Uranus, these made before the
first cameras from earth flew past. He has also accumulated important
genetic evidence regarding the origins of the food plants which form
such an important part of the linguists' theories. He says: "scholars
remain baffled by the profusion of other plants and cereals basic
to human survival: millet, rye, spelt, flax, fruit bearing shrubs
and trees - apples, pears, olives, figs, almonds, pistachios, walnuts,"
and then proceeds to assert that the earliest records of all of these
are Mesopotamian. There is substantial linguistic evidence for this,
of which but a few examples are the paths of descent of a few fruits
and spices: "apricot in Spanish is damasco, in Latin armeniiaca,
derived from Akkadian armanu. Cherry, kerasos in Greek, kirsche in
German, originates in Akkadian karshu. Saffron comes from azapiranu,
crocus from kurkanu (via krokos in Greek), cumin from kamanu, myrrh
from murru." Sitchin's belief is that the first humans of Sumer
came originally from the south, which correlates with the latest genetic
and archaeological evidence. The work of Luigi Cavalli-Sforza provides
the same conclusion from a different angle of approach, for he has
shown that the Basques have different genes from the rest of the people
of Western Europe, perhaps indicative of an ancient European genetic
type that resisted invasions from the east.
Other Language Families.c.Other Language
Families;
Pausing for a moment to consider other language
families, the accepted wisdom is of the separate development of all
the other major groups. This list is of necessity abridged, but includes
the Indo-Iranian, Semitic, Hamitic, Nilo-Saharan, Niger-Kordofanian,
Khoisan, Dravidian, Sino-Tibetan, Malayo-Polynesian, Altaic and Uralic
families, all of them supposedly having pursued separate but parallel
development over millennia. However, a hypothesis positing a common
ancestor of many of these can be found. In the 1950's Joseph Greenberg
classified all African languages into only three groups; his suggestion
was initially rejected but is now commonly accepted. Recently he has
also classified all of the thousand or more North American languages
into three groups: Amerind, Na-Dene and Eskimo-Aleut, and has linked
them to three consecutive waves of immigration from Asia over the
Bering Strait. He has done this by using typological classification:
mass comparison by scanning of hundreds of languages for similarities,
rather than the conventional method of pursuing a few step by step
transformations. This technique is not without its detractors, nor
is his proposition of more than one period of population transfer.
Movement over the supposed Alaskan land bridge is conventionally put
at one time, 10,000 - 12,000 years ago, but archaeologists are now
considering the possibility of migration at 30,000 - 35,000 or even
50,000 years ago. Recent dental research also supports Greenberg's
wave hypothesis, as does genetic research by L. Cavalli-Sforza and
A. Wilson. So holding in mind that the basis of Greenberg's proposal
is similar to his initially rejected, but now accepted African theory,
it may be that our ancestors' languages and origins are less diverse
than is currently recognized.
Proto World.c.Proto World;
A few researchers, including Merrit Ruhlen
in California, Vitaly Shevoroshkin in Michigan and Vaclav Blazek in
the Czech Republic have worked along the same lines with Nostratic,
the European counterpart of Amerind, supposed to go back 15,000 years,
and now suggest a language they call Proto-World, which they propose
began 150,000 years ago! They have even put forward about a few hundred
proto-World words, e.g. tik, one; pal, two; tali, tongue; nigi, teeth;
ngai, I. However, these are treacherous grounds for researchers, and
this suggestion has been met with accusations of sloppy technique
and over generalization as well as with scorn, derision and dismissal.
One big problem is that 100,000 years ago was supposedly a period
before agriculture, and so the one major focus of debate, concrete
words for food items, as seen in work accepted on Proto-Indo-European,
is removed. It takes a leap of faith to create a language from languages
which have themselves been reconstructed and were only spoken, never
written. Although deep research on vocabulary is outside the scope
of this paper, Appendix B contains a glossary of some of the most
important vocabulary items in Rot and Van.
Genetic Correlations.c.Genetic Correlations;
The linguistic debate is not operating in a
vacuum. There are major clues being provided by other fields of study
and slowly the jig saw puzzle is taking shape. The work of Luigi Cavalli-Sforza
at Stanford University and Allan Wilson at the University of California
at Berkeley demonstrate that there is a remarkable parallel between
the history of genes and that of languages. Cavalli-Sforza has conducted
an exhaustive analysis of human genetic data, mostly derived from
protein content, and has thus mapped the worldwide distribution of
hundreds of genetically different inherited traits. Wilson has examined
mitochondrial genes, which are passed to offspring almost exclusively
by the mother; both have reached similar conclusions because the longer
two populations are separate, the greater their genetic distance is;
thus distance in time and space can be used as a mechanism by which
to date evolutionary history. The result of their findings can be
expressed in a familiar term, the Noah's Ark hypothesis. This is the
theory that one small group of modern humans colonized the entire
world, one obviously somewhat sympathetic to Bock Saga claims. This
can be contrasted with the candelabra hypothesis which states that
different races diverged long ago and evolved independently into modern
groupings, progressing like the parallel sections of a candelabra.
Cavalli-Sforza's data proposes an African origin of our species, as
the genetic difference between Africans and non-Africans is roughly
twice that between Australians and Asians, and the latter is more
than twice that between Europeans and Asians. The corresponding times
of separation suggested by paleoanthropology are in similar ratios:
100,000 years for the separation between Africans and Asians, about
50,000 years for that between Asians and Australians, and 40,000 to
35,000 years for that between Asians and Europeans. Wilson's findings
also indicate that human mitochondrial DNA has been evolving for the
longest time in Africa, and can be traced back to a single African
woman, who lived 150,000 to 200,000 years ago, whom the mass media
has inevitably dubbed "the original Eve."
It therefore seems as if genes, people and languages have diverged
in tandem, through a series of migrations that apparently began in
Africa and spread through Asia to Europe, the New World and the Pacific.
There is now a proven close genetic relationship among the speakers
of Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic and Dravidian groups. The gene map
shows how they have spread out, and there is a remarkable coincidence
of genetic and linguistic branching points, suggesting that some of
the language theories, like Greenberg's Amerind, Nostratic or Eurasiatic,
do indeed have some legitimacy. Recent theories argue that 55,000
- 60,000 years ago there was a wave of emigration of people and language,
by boat and raft to every continent. Christopher Stringer of the British
Museum states that "in the fossil evidence of Europe and Southwest
Asia, the gap between archaic and modern people is very large. The
entire skeleton and brain case changed, clearly signaling replacement
of the archaic population."
This reconstruction of how Europe was settled has striking parallels
with recent classification of languages, particularly the compromise
over the Renfrew and Gimbutas theories. Early neolithic farmers brought
their genes, culture and Indo-European languages from the Middle East
to Europe in a process of slow expansion, and because the Basques'
ancestors lived at the far end of that migratory path, they underwent
the least genetic admixture with the farmers. When a minority imposes
its language on a conquered majority, language replacement is close
to complete, but gene replacement is in proportion to the demographic
ratio. Hungarians, for example, speak a language from the Urals imposed
by the Magyar conquerors of the Middle Ages, but carry a European
genetic pattern.
Whether or not these oldest datings are accepted, the 1988 Language
and Prehistory conference at the University of Michigan reached a
consensus that there had been a mono-genesis of human languages, a
mother tongue in a proto-proto stage at a time about 100,000 years
ago. But how can this be tied in any way to the Bock Saga claim that
man began in Finland? All the genetic and archaeological evidence
in this section points to an African origin for man, about 200,000
years ago. Linguistically one is left with evidence for a tribe (or
tribes) of ultimately unknown origin, the patriarchal Kurgan, coming
out of the steppes to supplant or mingle with another tribe (or tribes)
of ultimately unknown origin, (Gimbutas' old Europeans), either one
of these, or both, producing Proto-Indo-European. However, despite
the many inexplicable loose ends, there seems to be sufficient evidence
for a Proto-World language paradigm to operate, but it is essentially
without any specific evidence yet for a geographic location. To find
something a little more tangible, it is necessary to turn to the alphabet
of the Rot language, where recent research has provided more substantial
support for the hypothesis of Rot as a potential Proto-World.