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The huge gap between human articulate language and all the communication systems of other living beings has prevented a satisfactory answer to this question up until today. Here, the problem is subdivided into a series of necessarily successive steps.
List of contents
Tables
Prologue
Chapter 01 Introduction
Chapter 02 The climatic species pump
Chapter 03 Hums
Chapter 04 The Proto-Sapiens negative / prohibitive particle
*ma and the invention of the CV syllable
Chapter 05 Stages in the evolution of phonetic articulation
Chapter 06 From Proto-Sapiens back to Proto-Human: an evolutionary history
Chapter 08 Universal
papa/mama words
Chapter 09 Merritt Ruhlen's discovery
Chapter 10 Innovations galore
Chapter 11 Transmission and preservation of
papa/mama words
Chapter 12 The age of
papa and
mama Chapter 13 From
mama to
me Chapter 14 Borrowing personal pronouns?
Chapter 15 Personal pronouns and person markers in Indo-Hittite
Chapter 16 Eurasiatic pronouns' long march
Chapter 17 1st person
*n and 2nd person
*m in Amerind
Chapter 18 Of pronouns and geography
Chapter 19 Global variability of personal pronouns vs. their age-old persistence
Chapter 20 Move along, nothing to see here
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Index of languages
Index of authors
Index of notions
Books and articles consulted
About the author
Pierre Bancel was attracted to languages and focused on learning a dozen including German, Russian, Hindi and Kabyle as well as Classical Latin and Greek. He has earned a MA in Language Sciences from the Université Auguste et Louis Lumière, Lyon, with an emphasis on comparative linguistics, instrumental phonetics and fieldwork on Bantu languages. He has worked as a copyeditor for the French dictionary, a journalist for various periodical publications, and as a translator by the United Nations in New York, Geneva and Vienna. Bancel translated into French two books by Stanford linguists Joseph Greenberg and Merritt Ruhlen, and has published several dozens of linguistic research articles in scientific journals, many of them in the then Harvard-based Mother Tongue, of which he has become a coeditor since 2021. This is his first book, summarizing years of research and into language and how articulated words may have come about to an originally speechless ape species, turning them into humans in the process.
