Arura 1.0: toponymic phonetical fossils in Homo
sapiens prehistoric expansion?
First edition: <2028
© Mikel Alberto de Elguezabal Méndez, 2028
Fundación LEA, Calle Palmar, D-12, Riberas, 6101
Cumaná, Sucre, Venezuela.
Legal deposit:
ISBN: 978-84-617-0672-3
In a Virtuous Earth Collection
Index
Introduction
Aim of this
book
Methodology of
Arura 1.0
Methodology of
Arura 2.0
First Results
in Maps & Sheets
First
Conclusions
References
As a result of our recurrent observations
of physical Earth maps during 3 decades, we have discovered some patterns in the
toponymy of rivers, mountains, and inhabited lands that could signify a
corroboration of the Homo sapiens spread theories from Africa as the
first languages developed and left phonetic traces in their land/river naming,
and, representing a hypothesis of one rooted first family of languages that
derived, as genes did, during the last 60.000 years (Armitage et al.,
2011), until reaching some 5,000 living languages in actual times (Kirchner, University of Alberta
That protolanguage could start with
vocalic sounds derived from guttural naturally occurring voices in first hominids
to communicate and name places and objects.
Probably the first sounds of early
humans comes from gestures between a mother-child relationship (Falk, 2004) or
derived from sounds of pre-Homo humanoid species like australopithecines (Mukhopadhyay,
2009) and founded today in actual hominines which produce speech-like vocalized
sounds as in Theropithecus gelada (Bergman, 2013).
The primary vowel sounds for a, e, i, o, u,
in Italian, Spanish or English language, for example only, appear, for us, as
a core central common dominium among all languages derived from first primitive
Homo sapiens emitted sounds to communicate
between and within families and clans.
Here, the reader must make an effort in
not to think in any particular living language today, to pose these primary vowel
sounds we propose as the root human sounds and the subsequent changes and
adaptations that occurred during the spreading and isolation/interexchange of the
languages of those first humans in their settlement on Africa, Eurasia, Oceania, and Americas lands, accepting this order of colonization given by the fossil and
anthropologic evidence.
Each one of the 5000 languages of today's
planet Earth could have vowels derivatives sounds from these proto vowels, and
we can assume and use the simple classification of open/closed vowels to
distinguish two groups and make more basic yet the origin of human first sounds
(and then language, later).
But, why in the French language exist up to 16 vowel
sounds? We argue on the history of conformation of this (or any other example)
language, with the 5 vowels of Latin-based origin, mixed with Germanic and
Celtic languages, all of the Indo-European language family, and certainly with
borrows from Basque or Euskera a non-Indo-European language (between the
Garonne and Ebro rivers in those times), or probably, even from Hebrew or other
Semitic language that shared history during the conformation of France as a
modern social entity, all that together, encountered in that land during the
development of this (more) Romanic language since 121 before Christ.
As the two fossil phonemes we encountered
in maps associated with geographic nomenclature of rivers and lands (plus inhabited
places near to) that is proposed in this assay, derive from an open vowel (a)
and from a closed vowel (u), we can extend the phonemes to the
"sister" vowels in each case (a: e) and (u: i, o). But
the common sound that took our attention firstly was the consonant r.
The consonants are speech sounds
articulated during complete or partial closure of the vocal tract,
and here the diversity of consonant sounds among World languages is greater
than for vowels, based on the part of the vocal tract contracted, the duration,
the force, the velocity of the sound emitted by the individual, the position of the tongue and many others parameters that we are not considering.
"r" seems to be a primitive sound thought to
be derived from guttural screams in first primates, hominines and/or hominids,
and we have discovered, empirically, a simple pattern associated maybe to designate
placemarks or names as the first protolanguages of the first family branches,
spread with the first Homo sapiens that colonized Africa and then other
continents. These two types of names refer to two of the elements of nature, water
places on one side, and earth (land, soil) places in the other.
We have observed, in a deductive way, the worldwide apparent association
of the phoneme "ur" with water places, be the source of a
river, the river itself, or an inhabited place near a river or sea; the phoneme
"ar" is more associated with earth, lands, soil places, be a
valley, a plain, a mountain.
In the proposed Challenge we will try to gather the best information that each institution participating could create with the proposed methodology, the maps locating every toponymic with the fossil phonemes we identify as potentially linked to early human spreading, and then we will see if our hypothesis is validated or rejected. We ask for each institution and academic centres of human biology &
geography, anthropology, archeology, and for linguistics, philologists,
phoneticians, and phonologists. We will use these maps produced by you dear colleagues in a synthesis of many diverse Atlases,
being a project of collegiate
research that we are proposing to you. If the hypothesis is accepted you could publish your part of the Arura Project in the Journal you might choose.
Aim of this Project (and subsequent book)
We are not
intending to demonstrate any superiority of any language over any other, no,
never. We love the diversity of languages, accepting the Providence
The final result of this Project , should be to give place to a recognizing movement among all cultures and its
beautiful languages, by demonstrating, with another set of proofs, the unity of
our unique cultural species, Homo sapiens, regardless of our skin or
hair biochemical differences, in parallel to linguistic ones.
To achieve our
objectives we will carry out these actions:
