Coframed by Factors As Human Behavioral Or Psychological Universalisms

Language Evolution

Coframed by Factors as Human Behavioral or Psychological Universalisms

Dedicated to the University of Zurich, Peter Endress and Peter Linder, as well as my beloved family and friends

Copyright of the total file Dr. Owi I. Nandi

Zurich, August 4th 2010

Dr. Owi I. Nandi

1.Preface

My fascinating journey with languages started, as is natural, in my earliest childhood when I began to speak the dialect of my mother and my Swiss grand parents, Bernese Swiss German which is still my most innate language, that is foremost to me when thinking, dreaming at nightor speaking to close Swiss relatives. The picture in Switzerland with its four languages and many small dialects was illustrative as to how on a small geographical background language diversity could arise.

From my Indian father, I started to learn some High German, but quite soon wanted to know a few words of his Bengali mother tongue - for instance the word for bird, which is “pākhi”. My father was enthusiastic to teach me more Bengali and gradually I learned to speak this language as well. He also used to tell me some English words. For instance, when he drove his old-fashioned 1960’s car stopping before a traffic light he said “ready, steady, go!” as the light turned from red through yellow to green and these were my first English words I learned.

When I attended primary school, my father institutionalised his Bengali teachings and taught me to speak, write and read in regular Sunday classes. For me, these tedious hours of learning a distant language soon became an imposition. He went on to teach me Bengali until I was 15 and used to convey me a lot of the philosophical background of Indian thinking. Sometimes he told me: “Although you look at it as an imposition, I am convinced that someday you will tell me, Baba, I am very thankful to you for having taught me Bengali!”

As I grew up in the Swiss Cantons of Zurich and mainly Argovia, I also learned to speak the Eastern dialect of Argovia, which I spoke with my classmates and always separated from the Bernese dialect. I only used the Bernese dialect when at home with my mother and younger brother, Dilip, or with my relatives in Berne, and also when thinking to myself or dreaming at night. From TV, the school and many conversations with my father, my High German also improved a lot, as is commonly the case in the allemanic part of Switzerland.

Aged 12, we started to learn French in Secondary School. We took French classes for eight years until the end of High School. Afterwards, we often adventured bicycle tours in France and I could improve this language even more. I received my best training with the age of 24 when a friend, Anna Belser, and I went to Serre de la Fare in the upper Loirevalley of France, where French environmentalists protested against the planned construction of several dams on the rivers Loire and Allier.

I cherish these memories of our outdoors camping in the pine tree shadow, where we met a lot of younger and elder persons from all around Europe but especially from France. Jean-François Lopès became a friend of mine, we hiked together along the Loire river, had a lot of fun, and later exchanged letters and e-mails in French.

From middle Secondary School onwards I learned English, which gradually became my second best language after German. One of the first larger books I read in English was Sir Edmund Hillary’s “The True Story of the First Ascent of Mount Everest” and Mahatma Gandhi’s Autobiography “The Story of My Experience with Truth”. During my biology study at the University of Zurich and in the course of my PhD I read much of scientific literature and significantly improved my English language skills. Starting from this time onwards, I also wrote scientific articles in this language and I enjoyed communicating with fellow scientists all around the world. !One of these publications was coauthored by the renowned American molecular biologist, Mark W. Chase, and also together with my dissertation advisor, Peter K. Endress, was very well received in the community of Systematic Botanists (Nandi, Chase & Endress, 1998: A combined cladistic analysis of angiosperms using non-molecular and rbcL characters). I also regularly read American and English newspapers. Viewing the impressive richness of the English vocabulary and expressions, it seems to be a lifelong process to improve this language. As I tested my skills in writing lyrics (I first published a poem book called “Seesommer” in German in 1998), in 2005 I translated this book into English with the help of a couple of native speakers, foremost Mr. Timothy Holman, with the title of the English booklet being “For an Hour, We Lived from Flowers”. I was very happy to have the help of people with an English mother tongue.

For six years during my later school time, I also took Latin. The language was a good stepping-stone for learning other Romanic languages, later and introduced me to the etymology of languages. During my high-school time, I got a glimpse of other ancient languages such as Ancient Greek and Ancient Hebrew. As for Ancient Greek, I now and then attended the lessons of a part of our class, who also learned this language in addition to Latin. As for Hebrew, I followed the first semester, to get an idea of the Hebrew alphabet and some simple sentences.

I learnt considerably more of the Greek vocabulary by searching for the etymologies of scientific terms, especially zoological and botanical terms. Also, I have visited Greece thirteen times for vacations until now, thus also learning some New Greek.

Because some of my classmates in High School were very eager to have an insight in many languages, especially old ones, we also had the opportunity to study Sanskrit with Dr. Karl Scherrer, our Latin teacher. Starting with the simple proverb “lobhaḥ pāpasya kāraṇam”, which translates as “greed is the cause of evil”, we gradually improved our skills. The Sanskrit word roots are tremendously useful for the understanding of all Indoeuropean languages and for instance later helped me to learn several Slavic ones, particularly Russian.

At the end of High School I fell in love more seriously for the first time, and although this love was not reciprocated to the degree I would have wished for, I was fascinated that N. was fond of reading Russian. This tantalised me to study the Cyrillian alphabet and the Russian language. From our home towns library I borrowed some bilingual Russian-German books. Russian poetry, from the Middle Ages until Modernity, left a permanent impression upon me and inspired my own lyrical work. Later on, I even had the courage to read a larger part of “Crime and punishment” by Fjodor Dostojewski in Russian, a novel that I had already read twice in English and that had become dear to me. During my Ph.D. thesis, I was also particularly fond of reading the two editions of “Systema Angispermorum” by the renowned systematic botanist Armen Takhtajan in its original language, which is Russian.

This was more or less the level of my language skills at the end of High School, aged twenty, when I started to get more and more interested in comparative linguistics and felt the wish to investigate language universals, if they at all existed.

In this same year, 1986, I started my study in biology at the University of Zurich. During the first two years, there was an enormous mass of scientific learning material, which meant a break in my language learnings. An Arabian colleague, however, from time to time taught me some Arabic words, which was my first encounter with this important world language I am now continuing to learn.

In summer of 1989, I spent several weeks in France. One of these stays was at Taizé in Burgundy, where Christians - mostly young ones - from all over the world met, prayed and discussed biblical texts. In this camp, I was assigned to a group together with Erszévet, a beautiful, brown-haired woman in her early twenties from Hungary, who used to walk barefoot. I secretely fell in love with this girl and although Erszébet seemed not to realize this, she made me a friendly present when we parted. She bestowed uponme a bluebell flower and a printed souvenir with an image and a Hungarian sentence from St. Exupéry’s ‘The Little Prince’: ‘One sees well only with the heart. The essential is invisible to the eyes.’ I was deeply moved by this little gift and it motivated my Hungarian studies. Afterwards I sometimes attended Hungarian classes at the Institute for General Language Science, University of Zurich. Later, I gradually deepened my knowledge of this Finno-Ugric language, especially when researching for the present publication.

In my mid-twenties, I also gradually learned Italian and Spanish, both not so difficult to master when already knowing Latin, French and English. Two other Romanic languages I can understand fluently when reading them are Rhaeto-Romanic and Portuguese. My Italian improved considerably when travelling in the Italian speaking part of Switzerland and in Italy, as when, for instance, when I made a bicycle tour from Florence to Rome with a Swiss colleague.

As for Spanish, I had already read nature encyclopaedias in this language during my High School time, but the triggering experience to get fairly fluent in Spanish was an excursion to Andalusia for three weeks, together with my girlfriend Shuqing from China, in the first spring of my Ph.D. work. During this short period around Easter 1992, we had intense contacts to the local people and it seemed to me to be the easiest language to learn. Two years later Shuqing and myself parted and I made the entangling and important acquaintance of my later wife, Annette. We met at a party of a common friend in Switzerland and one of the first things we realized that we had in common was that we found Spanish to be one of the most beautiful languages. At that time, we did not realise that Annette rather meant the language as spoken in South America or to be more precise, in Bolivia, while I was fonder of the Spanish as spoken in Spain. But, nonetheless, this was a very good ground stone for our growing relationship. Annette had travelled for a full year through South America, earlier. We frequently practised our ‘Castellano’ when undertaking countless getaways and also at home. In 2001, aged 35 and 34, we visited Tenerife for the first time, this pulchritudinous Canary island, where her parents by then had bought an own apartment in Puerto de la Cruz, close to the overwhelming Botanic Garden in the verdant North of the island. From this year onwards, we have visited Puerto de la Cruz almost each year and, of course, this entails an excellent opportunity to practice Spanish.

For Annette, as for me, it is difficult to keep the proficiency level in Italian and Spanish high at one time, because - from the perspective of a Swiss German speaker - these languages are so similar.

During the second half of my biology studies, I attended various language courses at the University of Zurich, including Turkish, Ancient Lithuanian, Swahili and a grammatical survey of the Kiranti languages (Kiranti languages are a Himalayan family member of Sino-Tibetan languages). Although I received a brief introduction to these languages, I only remained at the beginner level here.

This differed from my experience with Polish, in which I took a two year course and, as I already mastered some Russian, it was fairly easy for me to learn another Slavic language.

As I already hinted at before, in late autumn of 1990, I made the acquaintance of my girlfriend He Shuqing, from Kunming, China. We were a couple for a little longer than two years and it was a period of rich experiences. Shuqing taught me much about the Chinese way of living, starting from cooking, through literature, philosophy, to traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and above all, she skilfully introduced me to the Chinese language. China and Chinese have become important elements in my future life. I not only attended Chinese courses at the Oriental seminar of the University, but later in 1996, I also got a job as the head of Quality control of a company dealing with TCM herbs, a company owned by a very generous and friendly Swiss TCM doctor, Severin Bühlmann.

I am now able to identify most of the commonly used Chinese herbs frequently to the level of varieties and subspecies with the help of the powerful and sophisticated Chinese Scientific literature. I was also writing expertises about the pharmacology and toxicology of TCM herbs and maintaining contacts to friends in the People’s Republic of China and in Taiwan. I am still studying Chinese, one of the most beautiful and yet most difficult languages to learn for a foreigner. While I am fairly proficient in reading scientific articles and books in Chinese, my writing and speaking still need to be improved. In spite of all these difficulties, I am still intensely interested in learning this language and in the last two years, 2006 and 2007, I made tremendous progress. In 2007, I also got into contact with Dr. Wei Jianing, originally from Ningxia province and now living in Beijing, a wonderful and true friend, who helps Annette and me wherever he can. In this first year of our acquaintance, we have already authored a shared publication in the field of Chemical ecology in PloS one.

We have almost arrived at the preliminary terminus of my so fascinating journey with language learning. In these last years since 2005, I have become more proficient in Swedish and Dutch, while improving some of the already-studied languages. It has also been a fascinating experience to learn the very aesthetic Arabic scripture and first words of this important world language. Learning Arabic was also facilitated by some Arabic loanwords in Bengali, which I already was familiar of. Lately, I also went a little bit deeper into Basque, Iwrit, and Japanese. For the next future, I am very curious to understand more of this latter Semitic world language and to study in more detail its beautiful alphabet.

These last three years since 2005 were also those in which I compiled the bulk of the language material presented in the current book and I am really looking forward to share it with who ever is interested in comparative linguistics and in languages in general.

Zurich, July 2010,

the author Owi I. Nandi

2.Acknowledgement

My great thankfulness is due to my dear friend and former wife, Annette, who always encouraged me in this work. I am also tremendously thankful to my father Nandadulal Nandi for teaching me Bengali in my childhood, for introducing me into the ancient Indian wisdom and its interpretations of language and philosophy.

I would like to mention the many linguists, as well, human molecular geneticists and behavioural biologists in many different countries who helped me with answers to specific questions: Peter Underhill of Stanford University, who never hesitated to help me and to make me aware of important publications in the field of human genetics, Timothy Usher, a wonderful friend living in Seattle, doing an incredible work in the field of Andamanese, Papuan and Australian languages, Georgyi Starostin from Moscow, working also frequently in the US, Harold Fleming, John Bengtsson, Alexander Militarev, Chris Ehret, Paul Whitehouse, Merritt Ruhlen, Ene Metspalu, Richard Villems, Rene Herrera, Thomas Bearth, M. Oppitz and Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, to which all I am indebted with a lot of thoughts of happiness for their important help.

I am also highly indebted to Jewgenyi Kirichenko, a wonderful colleague from Moscow, for reading the manuscript of the current publication and encouraging this work.

My utmost thanks are also due to Peter Linder, head of the Institute of Systematic Botany, University of Zurich, Switzerland, who offered me a working place in this beautiful institution, although this topic here, contrary to others that I pursued at the same place, was not linked to Systematic Botany. My thanks are also due to all colleagues at this institution, though I can not mention all of them: Peter Endress, my PhD supervisor, Jakob Schneller, Rolf Rutishauser, Edwin Urmi, Elena Conti, Florian Schiestl, Hans-Rudolf Preisig, the late Karl Kramer, Jurriaan de Vos, Anita Lendel, Evelin Pfeifer, Gabriele di Salvo, Ed Connor, Serge Haemmerli, Josephine Maksch, Claudia Winteler, Elena Beneti, Barbara Seitz, Niklaus Müller, Alex Bernhard and Sara Manafzadeh (who helped me with Arabic).

I have also to mention the help by Fernando Zúñiga, Tobias Weber and Karin Ebert, Seminar of General Linguistics, University of Zurich and the entire staff of this beautiful institute for taking time to discuss certain specific linguistic topics and giving me access to the impressive library of the institute, Ulrike Niklas, University of Cologne, Germany, and Peter Larssen, University of Uppsala, Sweden, for helping me to eliminate Sanskrit loanwords from the Tamil wordlist and Renate Würsch of the Oriental Seminar, University of Zurich, Switzerland, for helping me with the Arabic wordlist.

Thanks are also due to my brother, Dilip Nandi, with whom I frequently discussed about linguistics of Basque, North-Caucasian, Finnish, Hebrew, Kartvelian, Quechua, Indo-European and Dravidian and to Shuqing He, Wei Jianing, Qi Suogen, Shuyuan Wang-Chen and Xiao Lu, who helped me to learn Chinese and understand more about the Chinese Culture.

I wish likewise to thank my boss, Severin Buehlmann for his great interest in this project and his feeling and thoughtful encouragement of it and Armin Heer, a good friend from Switzerland for his support. Finally, I would also like to thank some important friends and teachers, as Emil Stäuble, my high school biology teacher, Karl Scherrer, my high school old languages teacher, Vladimir Pankin, Finally, I would also like to thank some important friends and teachers, as Emil Stäuble, my high school biology teacher, Karl Scherrer, my high school old languages teacher, Vladimir Pankin, Jewgenji Kirichenko and finally Gregor Siegenthaler, Tobias Straumann, Urs Christen, Armin Heer, Wolfgang Schuehly and Franco Hochstrasser, all good friends of the author.

3.Introduction

Human speech is one of the most fascinating realms that can be studied on Earth. The diversity of languages can almost not be understood by a single researcher.