Every word carries a deeper root.

ProtoHuman runs four forensic passes to trace a word back through its proto-root and across to Shona.

Why Shona.

  1. לָשׁוֹן

    lashon

    Hebrew

    tongue, and the language a tongue makes

  2. לְשׁוֹן הַקֹּדֶשׁ

    Lashon HaKodesh

    Hebrew

    the holy tongue, the speech of creation

  3. Shona

    Shona

    the tongue, still spoken

Hebrew lashon means tongue. It is the word the Hebrew Bible uses both for the organ and for the speech it produces, the same doubling English keeps in mother tongue.

Rabbinic tradition calls Hebrew itself the holy tongue, Lashon HaKodesh: the speech of creation, the language Adam is said to have named the animals in. Whatever else that claim is, it is a claim about a first language.

The vowel moves when the word governs another, lashon becoming leshon, and the frame underneath it does not. That is the whole method in one word: consonants carry identity, vowels are weather. What is left of the frame, once the prefixed l is set aside the way this instrument sets aside every Shona noun class prefix, is shon.

If the holy tongue is the first tongue, then the language at the bottom of every descent here is not a reconstruction anyone has to imagine. It is still being spoken.

What the field currently holds

Comparative linguistics places Shona in the Bantu branch of Niger-Congo and Hebrew in the Semitic branch of Afro-Asiatic, and proposes no relation between them. The name Shona is usually treated as a nineteenth century exonym of uncertain origin rather than an inherited word.

Where this instrument differs

An origin recorded as uncertain is a gap in the record, not a finding against. And the comparative method reaches six to eight thousand years before the signal thins out; it does not rule on what lies past its own range, it declines to look.

This works past that horizon on the consonantal frame, which outlasts vowels, meaning and spelling alike. Every derivation is published with its evidence, its scores and the standard account beside it, so it can be checked, voted down and overturned by anyone reading. That is the test the premise is being put to.