Is gutturality a trait of primitive languages?

[awer]

I've always had this idea in the back of my head. I've just heard what the epiglottal trill is pronounced like and I thought there's something primitive about it. I imagine early hominids as grunting. Also the languages in the areas of the first cultures, like Hebrew and Arabic, have many guttural sounds. Modern languages tend to front their sounds, as in Latin /k/ > Romance /tʃ/, Ancient Greek /u/ > /i/. Am I prejudiced or something?

[linguoboy]

Define "primitive language". Bonus points for doing so in a way that isn't inherently racist.

[KathTheDragon]

Am I prejudiced or something?

Yes.

There is no such thing as a "primitive" language: all languages have histories, and when they were spoken, they where the "modern" forms of older languages.

Fronting is an extremely common change, cross-linguistically. There were, in fact, two rounds of palatalisation (fronting of consonants) in the history of Greek, for example. The "Satem" languages of Indo-European traditions (Balto-Slavic, Albanian, Armenian, and Indo-Iranian) very early palatalised one series of PIE dorsal stops, for another example.

[Ziz]

In these enlightened days since the demise of scientific racism, linguists do not use the term 'primitive' in reference to any language, because there's really no such thing. Though I can't be certain what you mean by 'primitive,' I can say that languages spoken by hunter-gatherer peoples (for instance) are no less complex or expressive than any European, ""advanced"" language. Indeed, English is primitive in some areas that some ostensibly primitive languages have robustly developed, like evidentiality marking, which English can only express with periphrasis.

As for gutturals: Hebrew and Arabic are not the languages of "the first cultures;" not even close. Languages had probably been spoken for thousands and thousands of years before the invention of writing, and all of these earlier languages have been lost. Nor are "gutturals" absent from European languages. The sound [h] is guttural. German and Dutch both have [χ]. Languages from France all the way up to Sweden have [ʁ].

Languages tend to palatalize certain consonants because it makes them marginally easier to pronounce in certain contexts. Ancient languages like Sanskrit had palatals, and modern languages like Dutch and Danish have palatals (besides /j/) only marginally.

[vokzhen]

Fronting is an extremely common change, cross-linguistically. There were, in fact, two rounds of palatalisation (fronting of consonants) in the history of Greek, for example. The "Satem" languages of Indo-European traditions (Balto-Slavic, Albanian, Armenian, and Indo-Iranian) very early palatalised one series of PIE dorsal stops, for another example.

I'd go further and say, apart maybe from unstressed vowels losing their distinctiveness, palatalization is probably the single most common sound change cross-linguistically. Of course the details vary greatly, Romance involved both coronals and velars, resulted in things cross the board of coronals (dental in Spanish, alveolar in French, postalveolar in Italian), triggered by /j i e/, and in French with a second round that included /a/ for velars only, while modern English is alveolars triggered only by /j/.

Fronting of back vowels is also pretty common, the most common being i-mutation (Germanic, Chechen-Ingush, Vantuatu) but also things like coronal fronting (Chinese, Tibetan, and allophonic in some English and Eskimo-Aleut dialects), syllable-level frontness (allophonic in Irish, Russian, Mixe), and simply spontaneous fronting with a crowded vowel space (u>y in French, Greek; ou>ɵu,ɛu in English dialects).

I've always had this idea in the back of my head. I've just heard what the epiglottal trill is pronounced like and I thought there's something primitive about it. I imagine early hominids as grunting. Also the languages in the areas of the first cultures, like Hebrew and Arabic, have many guttural sounds.

"Guttural" sounds are extremely common cross-linguistically, English and most Romance just happen to lack them. Except, of course, huge swaths of Romance have them now thanks to a guttural r. And English does have "guttural" sounds - /r/ is usually pharyngealized, and in some American speech is fully back (something close to [ɰˤ]), and my /l/ is strongly uvularized and occasionally loses front contact ([ʁ̞] or [ɰ^ʁ̞ or something). And German and Dutch have them even without guttural r. So do many dialects of Spanish. Depending on your definition of "guttural," so do Celtic languages and Greek and Slavic and Turkish.

Pharyngeals/epiglottals do tend to be strongly areal, they occur only rarely outside the Ethiopian-Levant-Caucasus or Northwest Pacific Coast areas, but do occur sporadically elsewhere (Galacia, the Netherlands-Denmark area, Taiwan, Guatemala). But uvulars on the other hand are extremely widespread - Western Europe, much of Africa apart from West Africa and the Congo, the Middle East, the Caucasus-Central Asia-Himalayas region, eastern Siberia, and much of the western half of the Americas all have uvulars. If you're counting /x ɣ/ as guttural, they're so common "gutturals" don't really even have a distribution except maybe that they're they're uncommon in Australia and Polynesia. So yes, you're prejudiced, with quite a bit of misinformed as well.

[Richard W]

I've always had this idea in the back of my head. I've just heard what the epiglottal trill is pronounced like and I thought there's something primitive about it. I imagine early hominids as grunting. Also the languages in the areas of the first cultures, like Hebrew and Arabic, have many guttural sounds. Modern languages tend to front their sounds, as in Latin /k/ > Romance /tʃ/, Ancient Greek /u/ > /i/. Am I prejudiced or something?

The Semitic languages and Ancient Egyptian are related, so almost the first civilizations in Western Eurasia had similar sounds. However, either Akkadian lost them, or they didn't write them, because the language of the earliest literate civilisation of Mesopotamia, lacked these 'throat' sounds. Hittite looks weirder than it need do because it's /h/ and /s/ are written with symbols normally used for sounds absent from Latin.

Your thoughts are probably coloured by pictures of cavemen saying 'Ugh!'.

[Terra]

Am I prejudiced or something?

Yes.

There is no such thing as a "primitive" language

The only thing that'd make sense to call primitive, would be a pidgin. Pidgins have certain grammatical features (and lack other certain grammatical features.), so I wouldn't be surprised if they had phonological peculiarities either. Even then though, the features of a pidgin seem to depend heavily on its parent languages.

Also, it's telling that a pidgin ceases to be "primitive" when it becomes the first language a group. They then begin freely adopting/evolving complex features. The same thing probably happened to the first language. By the tenth generation after the genesis of language, the people probably had no idea that their ancestors from 10 generations ago were mute.

[Xephyr]

I think that the term of contention here actually might not be "primitive" but "guttural"-- it's awfully vague, and people tend to use it to describe nearly any language that sounds incomprehensible to them, whether it actually contains more throaty consonants or not. Awer seems to know what an epiglottal trill is, so perhaps he's not making that particular error, but I wouldn't be surprised if Hebrew and Arabic speakers (if their languages had a word with the exact same range of meanings as "guttural"... perhaps they do) would call English guttural despite its lack of pharyngeal[ized] consonants.

The proposition, though, isn't quite as immediately absurd as the PC police might think-- especially if you just replace "primitive" and "civilized" with "spoken by small, isolated populations" and "spoken by large, international populations"*. John McWhorter in this book argues that languages that have become standard linguae francae for major civilizations and so have attracted large numbers of second-language speakers who need to learn them have suffered grammatical simplification as a result (even for features that are shared by the learners' L1). It's not ridiculous to think that the same might apply to phonological inventories. After all, when you look at the list of languages with huge consonant inventories-- Ubykh, Tlingit, !Xuun, etc.-- you don't exactly see a lot of cosmopolitan empires.


(* - And to be honest, it would do people a lot of good to recognize that they may have ejected ~~the P word~~ as culturally insensitive but have still retained the exact same thinking and 2-way dichotomy of culture types in their mental conception of the world. All that's changed is that in place of the imperative uplift the The Savage from his state of nature and to bring him Christianity is the imperative to revere The Indigenous for living in harmony with nature and to allow Nat Geo to show their women topless.)

[Travis B.]

The proposition, though, isn't quite as immediately absurd as the PC police might think-- especially if you just replace "primitive" and "civilized" with "spoken by small, isolated populations" and "spoken by large, international populations"*. John McWhorter in this book argues that languages that have become standard linguae francae for major civilizations and so have attracted large numbers of second-language speakers who need to learn them have suffered grammatical simplification as a result [even for features that are shared by the learners' L1]. It's not ridiculous to think that the same might apply to phonological inventories. After all, when you look at the list of languages with huge consonant inventories-- Ubykh, Tlingit, !Xuun, etc.-- you don't exactly see a lot of cosmopolitan empires.


* - And to be honest, it would do people a lot of good to recognize that they may have ejected ~~the P word~~ as culturally insensitive but have still retained the exact same thinking and dichotomy of culture types in their mental conception of the world.

This position seems to imply that Latin became Romance and Ancient Greek became Koine Greek and later Medieval Greek because they were used widely. However there are other languages that have undergone similar processes without being spoken by wide international populations. Take, for instance, the history of just about all of Germanic but especially of English - they all* underwent attrition phonologically and morphologically, even when they were not widely spoken (e.g. Old English turned into Early Modern English before it became a major international language). Other non-Germanic, non-Latin/Romance, non-Greek examples include the change of Primitive Irish through Old Irish into Middle Irish, where very great attrition morphologically and phonologically took place despite not being a major international language by any means at all. And conversely, Modern English as spoken by native speakers shows no evidence of influence from non-native speakers despite its great numbers of non-native speakers, unlike what one would assume given this hypothesis. Likewise, Russian is spoken by a very wide number of speakers, yet shows no evidence of undergoing significant attrition vis-a-vis other Slavic languages aside from its vowel reduction.

* even Icelandic and Elfdalian underwent some attrition vis-a-vis Old Norse, and Old Norse itself actually underwent considerable attrition vis-a-vis Proto-Northwest Germanic

[zompist]

The proposition, though, isn't quite as immediately absurd as the PC police might think-- especially if you just replace "primitive" and "civilized" with "spoken by small, isolated populations" and "spoken by large, international populations"*. John McWhorter in this book argues that languages that have become standard linguae francae for major civilizations and so have attracted large numbers of second-language speakers who need to learn them have suffered grammatical simplification as a result (even for features that are shared by the learners' L1). It's not ridiculous to think that the same might apply to phonological inventories. After all, when you look at the list of languages with huge consonant inventories-- Ubykh, Tlingit, !Xuun, etc.-- you don't exactly see a lot of cosmopolitan empires.

I think the highlighted bit is the dubious part. It's well known that complicated features erode. That this happens more in widely spread languages is harder to credit. Imperial languages seem pretty widely varied, from inflecting (Latin, Greek, Russian) to agglutinating (Quechua, Turkish) to near-isolating (Chinese, English). Plus, the ability of subjects to affect the homeland seems small. Britain ruled a quarter of the world, but how many of them came to London to affect standard English?

But the really archaic bit here seems to be the idea that languages only erode. Surely we know a lot more about grammaticalization now, and other processes that increase complexity. Plus we should judge language complexity by more than the length of the Morphology section in the textbook. Does it take any less time to master French than Latin?

Plus, even if features were distributed randomly around the world, we'd find oddities in "exotic" languages— because 5000 languages are going to vary more than the 10 to 20 imperial languages. Right now we're using a language which is on the high upper end for vowel inventories.

[M Mira]

Do you consider voiced/voiceless contrast to be "guttural"? Because for natives of Beijing, Nanjing, Guangzhou or Lhasa, they might feel such contrast to be "guttural", "rustic" or "primitive", as these major cities just happened to get rid of their voiced obstruemt series in favor of aspiration contrast while the ones spoken less economically powerful regions kept them. But in Europe just about everyone has voiceing contrast, and the adjectives above certainly don't fit Europe.

[Xephyr]

Trying to make this a little more data-driven, I made this table of The Civilysed Tongues and their phonological peculiarities of note:



It doesn't look like there's much commonality except the presence of /h/.

[KathTheDragon]

Trying to make this a little more data-driven, I made this table of The Civilysed Tongues and their phonological peculiarities of note:



It doesn't look like there's much commonality except the presence of /h/.

Which is extremely common anyway, so even that's probably just a coincidence.

[Zaarin]

Also, isn't Ancient Egyptian <ṯ> generally reconstructed as /ʧ/ or /ʦ/?

[Travis B.]

Also, isn't Ancient Egyptian <ṯ> generally reconstructed as /ʧ/ or /ʦ/?

That is what I have read, even though I have also read it being reconstructed as [c]. The affricate realizations, though, are indicated by, e.g., the transcription of Semitic <ṣ>, which is thought to have been /tsʼ/, as <ḏ>, which has the same POA as <ṯ> but is though to be an ejective.

The use of <ṯ> to mark /θ/ is a Semitics convention, not an Egyptological one.

[KathTheDragon]

Also, isn't Ancient Egyptian <ṯ> generally reconstructed as /ʧ/ or /ʦ/?

That is what I have read, even though I have also read it being reconstructed as [c]. The affricate realizations, though, are indicated by, e.g., the transcription of Semitic <ṣ>, which is thought to have been /tsʼ/, as <ḏ>, which has the same POA as <ṯ> but is though to be an ejective.

The use of <ṯ> to mark /θ/ is a Semitics convention, not an Egyptological one.

I've been reading an Egyptian grammar which reconstructs <ṯ> as /tʰʲ/ and <ḏ> as /tʲ/. The lack of affrication is indicated by the changes of ṯ > t and ḏ > d.

[Travis B.]

Also, isn't Ancient Egyptian <ṯ> generally reconstructed as /ʧ/ or /ʦ/?

That is what I have read, even though I have also read it being reconstructed as [c]. The affricate realizations, though, are indicated by, e.g., the transcription of Semitic <ṣ>, which is thought to have been /tsʼ/, as <ḏ>, which has the same POA as <ṯ> but is though to be an ejective.

The use of <ṯ> to mark /θ/ is a Semitics convention, not an Egyptological one.

I've been reading an Egyptian grammar which reconstructs <ṯ> as /tʰʲ/ and <ḏ> as /tʲ/. The lack of affrication is indicated by the changes of ṯ > t and ḏ > d.

From everything I have read it is pretty clear that <d ḏ g q> (but not <b>) were ejectives.

[Porphyrogenitos]

Trying to make this a little more data-driven, I made this table of The Civilysed Tongues and their phonological peculiarities of note:

It doesn't look like there's much commonality except the presence of /h/.

Out of curiosity, why is pre-Natchez included on this list? Is it hypothesized that the ancestor of Natchez was spoken by the Mississippian civilization, or something like that?

[Zaarin]

Trying to make this a little more data-driven, I made this table of The Civilysed Tongues and their phonological peculiarities of note:

It doesn't look like there's much commonality except the presence of /h/.

Out of curiosity, why is pre-Natchez included on this list? Is it hypothesized that the ancestor of Natchez was spoken by the Mississippian civilization, or something like that?

Natchez was definitely one of the centers of Mississippian culture; they were one of the paramountcies encountered by de Soto. Of course, so was Chickasaw and probably many of the languages of the Southeast...

[CatDoom]

Aramaic was the lingua franca of Mesopotamia and neighboring regions for a couple thousand years, and many of its modern descendants, like Chaldean Neo-Aramic, retain pharyngeals, pharyngealized dentals, interdental fricatives, and a uvular stop.

Arabic, which of course remains a major world language (or several languages, depending on how you want to define "language"), has undergone a degree of phonetic simplification in many regions, but widely-scattered dialects retain unusual features like interdental fricatives and uvulars. The pharyngeals of Classical Arabic seem particularly resilient, and at least one pharyngeal seems to have been retained in every major variety.

The uvular or pharyngeal r, a highly unusual phoneme, propagated across much of western Europe quite recently (in terms of historical linguistics), and became the standard in several powerful and "civilized" countries. In a few cases the shift even spread to the languages spoken in the overseas possessions of these countries, resulting in, for instance, the South African langauge Sotho having a uvular trill.

Anyway, my point is that gutteral consonants can and do stick around in major languages spoken across diverse regions and in cosmopolitan empires.

[WeepingElf]

As others have already said here, "guttural" and "primitive" are words that are utterly inadequate to the characterization of languages. "Guttural" essentially means "full of sounds I don't know how to pronounce them" and "primitive" is a word whose usage alone indicates prejudice. So, no, there are no "primitive" languages, and no "guttural" ones, and the entire question is meaningless.

But to tackle this from another angle: Guttural is a now deprecated term for sounds pronounced in the back of the mouth, such as velar consonants and back vowels. Primitive languages would have been spoken by some early ancestors of us, who would not yet have the full linguistic capabilities of our species, such as Homo erectus. Now, were those primitive languages characterized by guttural sounds, as in clichés of cavemen going "ugh-ugh"? Probably NOT! Indeed, measurements of the vocal tracts in fossil skulls have resulted in that those hominids would have had difficulties with "guttural" sounds, to the point of entirely lacking them.

[Pole, the]