Sumerian and other ＂Language Isolates＂ are not some great mystery...

Welcome to the video. This one is inspired by a comment on the Sumerian Origins video, linking it to the Basil Eurasians. Someone critiqued that I mentioned that Sumerian is an isolate as if that helps the case and makes these people really unique, and I actually agree. Focusing on the fact that Sumerian is an isolate should just be removed from the argument of why they're so mysterious. It was a very minor point that I made in that video, basically a throwaway line, because so many popular scholars do include that fact when they're talking about Sumeria, but I agree it kind of weakens the case, or at the very least is just unnecessary to mention. It doesn't change the logic of that video, all the points made are still the same, so if you want to check it out it is up in the cards and in the description. As will be beaten into you by this video, there's just endless amounts of language isolates all over the world. Language isolates are the norm, it's these large language families that spread over an entire continent or multiple continents. These are more modern, more artificial, linked to technological advances in almost every case, and so this video is a deep dive into research on language isolates. Let's just start with the definition. A language isolate is a language with no demonstrable genealogical relationship to any other living language. You have all these different languages. In the Indo-European language family, you have everything from Hindi to Russian to English, but a language isolate is a family with just one member. There are no proven sibling languages descended from a common ancestor. The most notable living language isolate families today are Korean, Basque, and Ainu. Linguists currently recognize around 129 language isolates worldwide, which accounts for roughly 37% of all independent language families, over one third of the world's languages. Which means that isolates are not as freakishly rare as one might think. Even today they make up a significant portion of human languages. Now despite many ancient myths, scientists don't think people just sprouted out of the ground. If all people groups were related to each other, having just slowly spread over the world over tens of thousands of years, then in some way wouldn't all languages be connected in the same way we are all genetically connected? That's not really how it works. Language isolates typically arise because all sister languages have died out, or importantly because their possible relatives are too distant in time to be established by current methods. In many cases, an isolate may once have been part of a larger family in prehistoric times, but today is the sole survivor. Linguists hypothesize that some isolates today were part of wider prehistoric language networks that later disappeared. Like the Ainu language of Japan, it's thought to be a language of the Jomon people and could have been part of a wider language family, but which was later displaced by Japanese expansion. Similarly, Basque in Europe is often described as the last survivor of the ancient languages spoken in Western Europe before Indo-European tongues arrived. The key point is that isolated does not mean the language popped up from nowhere or has no history. Think of it like all the bridges were burned so far in the past that we can't see any connections. We don't have evidence for the living relatives, but just from understanding our genes and studying the most primitive groups on Earth today, they all have language. And so there's every reason to think that 200,000 years ago, Homo sapiens had language. Our other human cousins like Neanderthal and Denisovan, they almost surely had languages as well. And so with us Homo sapiens, it's probably true that if you had a time machine, you could see how all the languages were connected along the gene expansion routes. Languages in South America would just be traced all the way back into Asia, across through the Middle East, and into Africa. At least major branches coming out of parts of Africa, like East, Northwest, or Northeast Africa. Even putting the out of Africa migrations at around 70,000 years ago, that's still so much time for things to develop in isolation that they just diverge. And that's where we get to the issue that started this video, in the so-called cradle of civilization, the Ancient Near East, where we find two of the earliest known language isolates, Sumerian and Elamite. Sumerian was spoken in Southern Mesopotamia, in modern day Iraq, and is the oldest written language on record, evidence from around 3100 BC. Elamite was spoken just to the east, in the region of Elam, modern southwestern Iran, from at least the 3rd millennium BC to the 1st millennium BC. Sumerian and Elamites were right next door to each other, they were as close as neighbors can be, and they coexisted during the rise of their separate civilizations. Tools and domesticated animals, trade goods, all kinds of stuff were going in between these two people, while their languages were unrelated to each other, and each of these languages were unrelated to anyone else in the neighborhood. Sumerian and Elamite are true isolates. This situation shows perfectly that in the early Bronze Age, having multiple isolates in one area was not especially odd or unexpected. And it's another example that you'll see across tons of my videos that just because people could mix, doesn't mean they actually did. From the recent genetic evidence of the Green Sahara people, to the extreme diversity in Africa in general, and the extreme diversity in Australia, groups could have far off trade networks and still coalesce in their little neck of the woods to the point that they become genetically and linguistically distinct. The Fertile Crescent as a whole had a ton of different languages, there was Hattic in Anatolia, and Minoan on Crete, which appeared to be isolates in that broader region. Linguistic diversity was high, with many languages existing before later expansions, like those of Semitic or Indo-European, which would come to dominate this area. Both Sumerian and Elamite developed writing systems, which give us invaluable records of these otherwise isolated tongues. The cuneiform writing, this logosyllabic script, was devised to record Sumerian, but it was not limited to Sumerian. Cuneiform as a writing system would be used by other neighboring languages, most famously with the Semitic Akkadians. And so with what is believed to be the first writing system, we see a script that is created by one language isolate, being used by other languages to write in a completely different language. Sumerian cuneiform was so influential that it became the international script of Mesopotamia for over 2,000 years. But Elamite used their own unique script. You have Proto-Elamite, and later Linear Elamite, and it is the linear that remains only partially deciphered, but it shows they were developing their own form of writing from around 2300 to 1800 BC. But eventually Elamite too would be written in cuneiform, like in the Achaemenid Persian Empire from the 6th to 4th century BC, royal inscriptions were often trilingual, and Elamite appears alongside Old Persian and Babylonian, all written with cuneiform characters. There's also the Table of the Lion from Susa, but which has the bilingual inscription of King Kutik and Shushanak in two scripts, one part Elamite, using their own indigenous script, and one part Akkadian, using the Sumerian cuneiform. So again, language isolates, especially the further back you go, are actually so common that with the first writing systems, we see it recording multiple different language isolates. Multiple isolates could flourish side by side. You could think of it as the opposite of how English is the dominant language across the world today. You'll see in a lot of sci-fi that thousands of years in the future, everyone's either speaking English or some form of Chinese, because there just is this snowball effect that when your influence becomes so expansive, if learning that language is the most useful for everyday life, more and more people will take that language up and eventually forget their own native language. I mean, even myself, my family is half-Irish. For all the hatred of the English, as far as I know, you can go three generations back in my family, at least, and none of them know any Gaelic. It's that we're just lucky that the invention of writing systems happened in this area, and so these languages were preserved for thousands of years. There have to be countless different languages that have just been lost to history, never written down. And so you shouldn't think it weird that there's so many language isolates in this one little fertile crescent area. It's just that since writing emerged in this area, we were able to record their existence before they were subsumed by larger empires. And speaking of empires, in Italy, long before the rise of Rome, there's the classic example of Etruscan, the language of the Etruscan civilization from around the first millennium BC, in what is now Tuscany. It's a language isolate unrelated to the Indo-European languages of Italy, like Latin. The Romans themselves noted that Etruscan was unlike the speech of their Italic kin, and the Etruscans were literate, but writing in an alphabet derived from Greek, which was itself derived from Phoenician. The Latin alphabet we use today is an indirect descendant of the Etruscan adaption of the Western Greek alphabet. Over 10,000 Etruscan inscriptions have been found on tombs, tablets, and artifacts, but the decipherment of this language is still incomplete. We can read the letters, thanks to their relationship to Greek, but much of the vocabulary remains obscure, since no related language is known to help interpret it. Etruscan's isolate status is what makes it so challenging. Researchers cannot firmly link any words to any language family for clues, but because they're using this modified Greek alphabet, scholars can phonetically translate Etruscan texts with reasonable accuracy, so we can say the words, we just don't know what those words mean, which to be fair is true for many people, even speaking in their own native language. While elsewhere in the Mediterranean, we see the Minoan language of ancient Crete, around the second millennium BC, which is still undeciphered, but generally considered an isolate. The Minoans developed their own writing system, Linear A, and although inscriptions have been found, scholars have not definitively deciphered them, and attempts to link Minoan to various families, even to Semitic languages, have not been persuasive. Linear A was the precursor to Linear B, a script the Mycenaean Greeks would later adapt to write Greek. So here again, we see a writing system jump from one people to another. The early Greeks co-opted the isolate Minoan script for an unrelated language, just as Akkadians adopted Sumerian writing. Another pre-Indo-European isolate was Hattic in Anatolia, modern-day Turkey. Hattic was spoken in Hattusia and the surrounding areas before the Indo-European Hittite language became dominant. The Hittites left records of Hattic religious texts, which were transcribed in cuneiform, and that's how we know a little about Hattic. It appears to have no known relatives, and some of its vocabulary and myths were absorbed by the Hittites. And then there is the Iberian language of eastern Spain, unrelated to Latin or Celtic. Iberian is written with its own semi-syllabic Iberian script, and is still only partially understood. Iberian inscriptions from the 4th to 1st centuries BC use a script influenced by Phoenician or Greek, but adapted for this Iberian language. Then we see the Hurro-Arartian languages of the Near East, the Hurrian and Arartian. The Hurrian spoken in the 2nd millennia BC, and Arartian in the 1st millennia BC. And these two are related to each other, forming a small family, but that family has no known wider relatives, effectively making them an isolated branch of their own linguistic tree. And these were also written in adaptions of cuneiform. In an ancient Nubia, modern Sudan, the Meroitic language of the Meroe civilization around 300 BC to 400 AD was recorded in the Meroitic script. Some argue it might belong to a distant family like Nilo-Saharan or Afro-Asiatic, but today it still remains essentially unclassified. Like Etruscan, the Meroitic alphabet was inspired by another script, an alpha syllabary likely derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs. Just about everywhere you look, one group invents a writing system, and all the neighboring language groups eventually use that system. Like we saw in my Pygmy video, or with the Aboriginal Australians, trade and cultural influences can spread for hundreds of miles, so complex interactions with your neighbors existed long before writing, but when writing is taken up, people just integrate into that system. Now what's really cool is if you fast forward to today, many language isolates still exist across the world. Some are thriving, many are endangered. I want to quickly break down all of them, it's a bit extensive, if you do want to just skip ahead, I put timestamps in the description. Let's look at Europe first. The only living isolate in Europe is Basque, or Uscara, spoken in northern Spain and southwestern France. It's a true isolate and the last pre-Indo-European survivor in Europe. Despite centuries of contact with Latin, Spanish, and French, it retained its distinct vocabulary and structure, while Etruscan and Iberian have long gone extinct. And again, today Basque uses that Latin alphabet. Now really interesting is that the Caucasus have no confirmed isolates, but that may mean that they just weren't erased, because the indigenous languages fall into a few families, Kartvelian, Northwest Caucasian, and Northeast Caucasian. All of these families are unique to the Caucasus, but they are families with multiple members, not isolates. While Asia has several known isolates, the most famous one in this entire video probably is Korean. Spoken by 80 million people in North and South Korea, it has no proven genetic relationship to other languages. Despite past hypotheses trying to link it to Japanese or Altaic, the consensus today is just that Korean is a pure isolate. If you want to get really pedantic, there are closely related dialects. Some people want to call them languages like Jeju, but those are within the Koreanic group itself. It really can't just be described as Korean. The coolest part to me is that it also has its own unique writing system, but this was an alphabet invented in the 15th century AD, specifically for Korean. It's not that they didn't have writing up until then. Before that, they were using borrowed Chinese characters and systems like Idu, really beating this point home that across the world, language isolates are using the script from their larger more powerful neighbors that established writing. But in this case, when you get a bit tired of that neighbor and you want to preserve your own cultural identity, these people who presumably were speaking Korean for thousands and thousands of years decided that they would no longer rely on the Chinese writing system, again developing Hangul in the 1400s AD. While the Ainu language of northern Japan and Hokkaido, and formerly Sakhalin, also has no demonstrated relatives, the tongue of Japan's indigenous Ainu people, it is today endangered with only a handful of elderly speakers. Traditionally, it had no written form, but in times it's been written using Japanese kana or Latin letters in an attempt at linguistic transcriptions. Some sources describe Ainu as a small language family isolate, since there were multiple Ainu dialects, like Hokkaido Ainu and Sakhalin Ainu, but those were dialects of essentially one language. Then there's Nivkh, spoken in the lower Amur river basin and in the Sakhalin island, the far east of Russia. Some have tried to link it to Paleo-Siberian, but those are geographic groupings rather than proven language families. Nivkh remains an isolate, with a very small number of speakers, and has only been written in modern times, with Cyrillic script used since the Soviet period. Moving more towards central and southern Asia, Burushaski is spoken in northern Pakistan, in the Hunza and Nagar valleys, by only about 90,000 people, and is a linguistic isolate. It has a complex grammar, with four gender noun classes, and this complex system of verb agreement, though no native script or literature until recently. Since the 1940s, some Burushaski has been written in modified Perso-Arabic, or Urdu script, and more recently, in Latin alphabet. One scholar, Elijah Kassel, proposed in 2010 that this language might be distantly related to Indo-European, but that theory remains very controversial and not widely accepted. Most do think it's an isolate. Nahali is a small language isolate in central India, spoken only by a few thousand people in Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh. This language is highly mixed, with much of its vocabulary borrowing from neighboring languages like Indic and Dravidian, but the core of its words and grammar appear unrelated to any other language in India. But of course, there's no traditional script, nowadays it might be written in Devanagari. Kusunda is a nearly extinct language of western Nepal, probably spoken for tens of thousands of years. It's been recorded of the forest hunter-gatherer people here, but only a few semi-speakers were alive as of the 2010s. We're very lucky that this was recorded at all. Kusunda shows no clear relation to Tibeto-Burman or other Himalayan languages. And then Champin on Nicobar Islands and Veda of Sri Lanka might be isolates, but the data is still out. Now let's turn to Africa. In East Africa, we have Hadza and Sundawe of Tanzania. They both use click consonants like the Khoisan languages, but they are not actually related to the Khoisan family, or even to each other. Hadza and Sundawe are isolates, with Hadza spoken by the Hadzabe hunter-gatherers, and it has less than 1,000 speakers. Sundawe has a much larger community, but still only 40,000 people. And this is actually a great example of what I mentioned early on in the video, that the first idea they might think of is that if we are all genetically somewhat related, wouldn't all languages somehow be related to each other? That is very likely, but remember it's just that the languages became isolated over time. If not for the Homo sapiens across all of Africa, at least in relatively close regions, but remember it's just that all the bridge languages have been lost. And so here researchers wanted to say that obviously due to the same click structure, they must be related languages, but when you look at them closer, they really are isolates. But this could imply that the languages of the Khoisan and these isolates both stem from some even far more ancient version of click languages, out of some common ancestor, some click language that was spread all throughout this region. And over time, maybe tens of thousands of years, they become so distinct that even though they have this one characteristic that is unique to this area, they still can be classified as isolates. In Central Africa, Lall and Chad is only spoken by a few hundred people along the Chari river. Jalla, Ohora, and Nigeria is essentially extinct now. It just barely made it into being captured and recorded, with linguists thinking there was heavy influence from Chadic languages. Today, only a handful of elderly people even remember it. Shabo, also called Nakir, in southwestern Ethiopia, is a small language of maybe at most a few hundred speakers. And no one has a clue where this came from, the best guess is that it's distantly Amadic, from the people of the Omo river basin. Angota, or Barale, also in Ethiopia, is nearly extinct, and though once proposed to be of Cushitic, it has since been deemed an isolate. And only a handful of elderly speakers remained in the early 2000s. So for all I know, at the time of recording this, it could be extinct. Ancient Egyptian is not considered an isolate, it's of the Afro-Asiatic family. And Kwadi in Angola is considered extinct, again it plays with that trickiness of the click languages, early scholars wanted to group it under Khoisan, but looking into it further, experts think that it is an isolate. Altogether, Africa has at least 10 language isolates. But if we look over to North America, there are at least 20 language isolates. Haida, spoken in the Queen Charlotte Islands, throughout Canada and parts of Alaska, was once thought to be related to the Athabaskan or Ndeni family, but more research has shown that this is an isolate, and it relies on a writing system based on Latin letters today. That's going to be true for almost all of these Native American languages. Kootenai, spoken in the Idaho-Montana region and into British Columbia of Canada, has a very complex morphology to show not to be related to Algonquin or other families. Zuni, spoken by the Zuni Pueblo people of New Mexico, despite being surrounded by other Puebloan people who speak languages of the Keresan or Tanoan families, Zuni stands alone and has retained a very rich oral tradition. Yuchi or Soyaha is spoken in Oklahoma by a very small community, shown not to be related to Siouan or Muskogee families, and it is on the verge of extinction. There's Washoe, spoken in the Lake Tahoe region, and there's not really any details here, and there are many other languages that were just recorded before they went extinct. Timichua, Tonakawa, and Ankarankawa in Texas, Chidimacha in Louisiana, Acelan and Chamarico in California, Susla and Cayuse in Oregon, Yona in California, are all extinct today, but the sheer number of them point to the fact that there are probably many others that just weren't recorded at all. I should note that there are some large-scale hypotheses like Joseph Greenberg's Amerind grouping, which attempted to lump most Native American languages into a superfamily, but this has not been accepted by most linguists. Then moving into Mesoamerica, several isolates are found in Mexico and Central America broadly, despite the presence of big families like Uto-Aztecan and Mayan. There's Puripecha, spoken in Michoacan, Mexico, and this was the language of the Tarascan state that resisted the Aztec expansions, and is still spoken by about 125,000 people today. Huave or Ikuts were spoken by a few fishing villages in Oaxaca, Mexico, and they resisted being erased by the surrounding Mayan or Mixe-Zoquine languages, and today still has around 20,000 speakers. There's Seri in Sonora, Mexico, on the Gulf of California, which only has a few hundred speakers, and is known for having a very rich vocabulary for desert and marine life, kind of like how you may have heard the Inuits have at least 50 words for snow. Tequistaltec is actually a small family of 2-3 languages, but I include it since it's a very tiny isolate group. Xinkan in Guatemala was a part of a small group of related dialects, but it's all that's left, and it has no proven ties to Mayan or anything else in this region, but it too now is essentially extinct. Blanca in Honduras and into El Salvador is also extinct, but it lived just long enough to be recorded. Then, into South America, we have about 55 language isolates. I'll just cover the most notable ones. Mapudangun, spoken in south-central Chile and in adjacent Argentina by the Mapuche people, resisted being absorbed by the larger Arawakan, and shows no connection to other isolate groups in the Amazon. Today, it is still spoken by tens of thousands of people. There's a tiny two-language group family of Aymara and Quechua. Momochica in coastal Peru is extinct, but there are about a few thousand people who still speak. Kumanagoto in Venezuela, Tecuna in the Amazon, Kamza in Colombia, Quehuiscuar in Patagonia, Yagan in Tierra del Fuego, and Walrani in Ecuador. We see more of these tiny language groups in the Amazon, like Quehuvava, Movima, and Utonoma. And in Rondonia, Brazil, there's Kanoi, Kazwa, and Aikana, which are right on top of each other, but are not of the same family. These are three different isolates. Guyana has the now extinct Turama. Irorina in Peru still has a couple thousand people speaking it. Poquina in Bolivia is extinct, but has some borrowed words from Quechua and Aymara. And honestly, this list keeps going, but you get the idea. It feels a bit funny not mentioning them, but I wouldn't really be adding anything more than just reading the list, because there just isn't much known about them. Basically, they lived on long enough for some person in the modern era to write down their existence, but sometimes that's as little detail as we have, and the majority of them are extinct, with most of them only having a few hundred or a couple thousand people still speaking them. Last region to look at is Oceania. The New Guinea region is legendary for linguistic diversity, having around 800 languages. Many in small language families, but there's also several true isolates. There are at least a dozen or more Papuan isolates. Kuo in New Ireland, an island off the coast of New Guinea, is unrelated to any other Oceanic or Austronesian languages, but it's the only non-Austronesian language on New Ireland. But just being in New Guinea, there's Ebun, Mpur, Soka, Kol, Anam, Yele, Tayap, Burmiso, Masap, Odii, Ensang. This list really does go on for a long time. But it's not to all just be linked to geography, isolated groups separated by rugged mountain valleys, or remote coastal pockets and islands. In the long Australian video I just put out, I mentioned that at the large scale there are two groups, the Pamyungan family and non-Pamyungan families. All those in the non-group are effectively isolates of at the most very small families. I compared the Pamyungan family group to something like Indo-European but of Australia, is that there's a very clear spread of this one language group, and you can map where they are dominant, because all of the non-Pamyungan are isolates. In other words, this expanding language group erased a lot of these other isolates that would have been throughout this area. And last but very unique is the Andaman Islands. Despite being so isolated, the most recent research describes what's called the Great Andamanese Group, which is a language family group unrelated to others. But still it's assumed, though of course not confirmed, that Sentinelese could be an isolate spoken by the uncontacted tribe there, or at least very minimally and very violently contacted people there. So if you listen to all of that, I hope it will beat out of you like it did me this kind of just often repeated thing that it's mysterious how this is a language isolate. It points to how ancient and unique this people group are, it's actually the norm. In the scope of human history, even 5,000 years ago is very modern history. I'm of the group that thinks we've had language for hundreds of thousands of years, if not millions if we include other hominins going back to Homo Erectus. Having a language family that spreads across continents is a very modern phenomena. It really outgrows from tech explosions, from domesticated horses of the Indo-European people, to other domesticated livestock and crops, which led to the rise of civilizations in the Fertile Valley, and likely triggered the creation of writing, creating the world's first empires that would assert their will over larger areas than ever seen before, and start to absorb and erase this normal distribution of isolates everywhere. And I mentioned this in the aboriginal video, but that is what is so odd and unique about the Pama Yungan expansions in Australia. There's no reason to think that there was this tech boom, it's a real mystery as to why this language and culture suddenly spread across Australia. But the big takeaway is one group invents writing, and if they did, it likely means they had a more powerful civilization, and so the neighboring people are brought into that sphere of influence, and write their own native language in that foreign writing system, whether it's all of Mesopotamia using Sumerian cuneiform, Koreans writing in Chinese until they made the conscious effort to throw this off and develop Hangul, or Native American languages being preserved in English. That's it for the video, if you've made it this far, please hit that like button, it really is the best way to help me out, and it's free. I could really use your support, and I have a ton more videos like this planned. Subscribe if you don't want to miss those, and I'll see you in the next one.