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All Languages Linked To Common Source
Old Wolf writes "A New Zealand evolutionary psychologist, Quentin Atkinson, has created a scientific sensation by claiming to have discovered the mother of all mother tongues. 'Dr Atkinson took 504 languages and plotted the number of phonemes in each (corrected for recent population growth, when significant) against the distance between the place where the language is spoken and 2,500 putative points of origin, scattered across the world (abstract). The relationship that emerges suggests the actual point of origin is in central or southern Africa, and that all modern languages do, indeed, have a common root."
Reader NotSanguine points out another study which challenges the idea that the brain is more important to the structure of language than cultural evolution.
Humans!
Everybody knows the original language is English, as used by God to write the Bible.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
What about that other research that was done a while ago, that confirmed that not all languages follow the same mental rules ? Or maybe that came later ? My memory on this is a bit sketchy, but it is interesting to see if these 2 findings can influence the result of the other.
OK, this'll sound corny, but here goes:
People are divided up into all sorts of races/subraces/cultures/subcultures. As humanity has developed people have "specialized" into straight hair/curly hair/kinky hair, big/small noses, different colors, etc. But all evidence available so far seems to indicate a common genetic (and now linguistic) origin of man.
Hopefully, we'll be able to get our act together and stop blowing each other up (and also unite against a common enemy - government/power elites).
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
I didn't RTFA since, after all, I am on Slashdot.... but I didn't realize that Fortran & C were both part of the Algol language family.
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
that great spark of power, that has propelled mankind from fetid caves, cruel and dark,
to chariots, to sailing ships, to steam locomotives, to automobiles, to jet engines, to the moon...
and eventually to fetid internet comment boards, cruel and dark
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I read this earlier, and at first glance it's counter-intuitive. Why would older languages have more phonemes and not less? That's a lot more sounds to have to learn and be able to physically reproduce. I presume the extra physical difficulty was a substitute for the extra intelligence required to couple many phonemes together to make new meanings. So perhaps a single utterance was used to mean food, another sound for sleep, etc, so that each phoneme meant just one thing? Then it was small step to take the phoneme for food, add a hand gesture to it and that meant eat. Eventually that gesture was replaced with another phoneme, thus you had two phonemes combined like "food + action" meaning to eat. As humans became more intelligent they ditched the hard to produce sounds and used groups of easier to product phonemes instead? I'm not a linguist and the article doesn't talk about any of this sort of thing, but it makes sense to me.
Better known as 318230.
So, the team comprised of the hero, his hot chick, and his sidekicks learn of a relic they have to retrieve or destroy before the bad people get to it first, and on the way they learn of the original "mother tongue" and have to figure out What This Means and How It Works to save all of us from the relic...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The "cradle of life" was apparently the same place that language originated?!
Astounding!
Africa gave us life and language, and now look at her =(
I'm afraid that I have some very bad news about your ongoing use of unlicenced derivatives of my legally protected intellectual property...
XOXOXO,
The Ancestral Ur Language.
I realize that the ones studying this are testing the hypothesis that distance from Africa would result in decreased phoneme complexity, but the graph that was provided doesn't seem to jive with that idea. That chart of languages (clearly, not all 504 languages are included) seems to imply that languages are all over the map as far as phoneme complexity and distance to Africa.
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
Don't the archeologists pin the origin of our species in Africa too? Don't Christians, Jews and Muslims (probably others) place it there too? Just seems logical and should not be a shock.
Home of The Suki Series
Not gonna lie, my first thought when I read the article was of the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel.
So... you're saying that according to the bible there was a point when everyone on the planet spoke the same language and then something changed and different languages developed. Ignoring details like time, location, towers to heaven, and god's holy wrath; I'd say the bible got the broad strokes of the truth right, even if only by accident.
Whales and Dolphins are people, too!
The study correlates simpler phonetic structures with more isolated populations. However I wonder if languages begin as relatively phonetically simply and then become more phonetically complex as various linguistic populations mingle, like in south Africa? Or is the reverse, that in isolation they start shedding complexity, like in Polyneasia?
:-)
Please dont cite computer languages as an example, because everyone knows that answer
Just a warning: if a crudely rendered naked chick opens a scroll at you DO NOT LOOK AT THE SCROLL!
... Astronauts taught us to speak.
Reader NotSanguine points out another study which challenges the idea that the brain is more important to the structure of language than cultural evolution.
Perhaps we should not forget the evolution of the structure of our tongue, mouth, and vocal chords in the evolution of language.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
A serial founder effect model of phonemic diversity was used to infer the most likely origin of modern languages, following an approach outlined in studies of human genetic and phenotypic diversity (S6). Under this model, during population expansion, small founder groups are expected to carry less phonemic diversity than their larger parent populations.
This approach only models the decrease in phonemic diversity due to migration. It does not say anything about how phonemic diversity grows. In essence, it models only half of the system. To me it seems difficult to answer questions of the origin of language without also modeling the growth of phonemic diversity Phonemic variation can be introduced to the region by migration as well (as in the case of the apparent migration of phonemes from Borneo to Madagascar).
One word of caution: I am not an expert in the field... just a slashdot reader.
Any of us who have taken a theory of computation class know about generative grammar, the Chomsky hierarchy and the like. While for our field, we're more familiar with the part of this theory that deals with regular expressions, the Church-Turing thesis, the halting problem and the like, at least we are familiar with the rules of a generative grammar, and hopefully have had at least some exposure as to its application to linguistics. The fact is that all languages follow the same rules of generative grammar. Some languages favor certain rules over others, but there are no languages that people regularly use that fall outside of the accepted rules for generative grammar. As we began seeing cave paintings, Venus figurines, and more advanced tools starting 50,000 years ago with the onset of behavioral modernity among humans, we can assume that language existed then, and we know it has existed from the time we have written records. If there is not a biological basis for language, if there is no underlying sense of rules for all human languages, why have no languages evolved outside of the framework of rules of the basic generative grammar? You have thousands of languages all over the world, in fact depending on the strictness of the definition of language, everyone speaks a different language - if you know a word your friend does not know the meaning of, and vice versa, under a strict definition, you are speaking different languages when those words are used. Why does everyone follow the same underlying grammar rules, why has no other type of language evolved over the past thousands (probably tens of thousands) of years? Everything points to a biological basis for this, and our study of Broca's and Wernicke's area in the brain, and the brain in general, and every study in every field points to the universal rules of grammar for all languages and the biological basis for this.
While there are of course minor arguments over this or that, the universal grammar of all languages and the biological underpinnings of this are accepted throughout many fields - linguistics, study of the brain and so forth. Scientists and linguists make minor challenges to various rules over the years, and some of these challenges are accepted, and the theory is slightly changed. On the other hand, every few years some scientist or linguist, or even non-scientist or non-linguist, comes out and says he has disproved the mass of knowledge accumulated over the decades and says he has discovered language is completely cultural in our tabula rasa brains. Eventually, this is always disproven. As time goes on, the cultural people chip away at the edifice of proof, but it still stands. Obviously there is some cultural influence and exchange and lineage of languages, but the underlying basis of all of this is our brain's biology.
do chimps have the vocal chords to speak a human language? If so then why hasn't anybody taken a newborn chimp and taught the chimp to talk English or Spanish for example? Maybe even an easier language would work.
Chimps lack vocal chords, as well their mouths are not suited towards producing the variety of noises like we can. I recall an early attempt at raising a chimp in a house like any other human child and it never acquired speech.
Later the same experiment was tried with Washoe, who was raised with ASL exposure like a deaf child would be. The results were not impressive. She learned some signs and was able to communicate immediate needs and concerns, but never progressed beyond the abilities of a 3 year old linguistically. The research was announced as a success, and that Washoe learned ASL incredibly well, but the researchers refused to release any of the actual data, or anything to substantiate their claims. Having had to raise the chimp as it were a child, they are quite obviously not the most unbiased or objective source on the quality of their research.
Later, a Nim Chimpsky was raised with intent to reproduce the results purported by the Washoe experiment, and failed to replicate the results. He learned again, very limited communication only of immediate needs and concerns with no actual regularized syntax. In fact, the Deaf reviewer on the team consistently reported that he knew less signs than the hearing reviewers. Concerned he might be wrong, he looked into the reasons why, and discovered that people were giving Nim great leeway in signs; reporting some non-verbal behaviors as verbal communication.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
I guess he was wrong when he posited Sumerian as the first language...
Hyperbole: I use it liberally!
All the professor did do is to locate the the tower of babel the origin of the different languages.
It's as useful as a historical/archeological guide as any set of mythologies. The advantage is that this particular one is incredibly well-preserved.
If you are not an expert but would like more understanding on this topic, then I'd recommend Steven Pinker's, The Language Instinct.
http://www.amazon.com/Language-Instinct-How-Mind-Creates/dp/0060976519
One of his books discusses a series of experiments where babies were shown to be able to understand all phonemes but by the age of six-months only the phonemes of the parent's language are available. They did experiments with both adults and babies.
Also, Pinker talks about a group of people with no history that linguists have posited to once exist based upon common roots in modern languages that trace back to a period in history and then stop. Kind of a missing language link of people if you will. Not sure how that fits in here.
...History became legend. Legend became myth.... LoTR
Makes you wonder, doesn't it?
Life is not for the lazy.
I'm withholding judgment until I read Chomsky's thoughts on this (always a solid analysis whenever there's a claimed breakthrough in linguistics). I'm not sure how much weight to place on conclusions drawn from computational analysis of phonemes.
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-rms
The Intellectual Property Hostage Corporation has claimed that it has a patent on the source of all languages and every one in the world should pay it license fees. A law suite has been filed in the East Texas, listing all human beings and corporations as respondents.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The assumption is that language started somewhere, evolved into the prototype language, and then spread from there. If that's true, they are only concerned with what happened after the prototypical language. Essentially saying "If A happens then B happens, and B happened, then A probably happened."
What they are not saying is this is the only way it could have happened. This is support for a hypothesis, one which cannot be proven or disproven given our current level of information.
This is no different from someone finding support for ideas of string theory. They know what they are looking for, and are trying to bolster support for it. Eventually, one such hypothesis will have piles of evidence behind it and become adopted theory. Until then, it's one opinion after the next.
They specifically are not coming at this from a clean slate to determine what evolved from what, and have it point back to a single trunk language. As the article says, making a family tree for languages is difficult. That's why they are attacking this by forming ideas and trying to validate those ideas. Not prove, just validate.
The French must have better PR.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoLIU2NI66w#t=1m07s
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
At least on the religious side the debate could be settled by God.
Or he who boiled for our sins.
But think about it, there is no action anyone could take, not now and not ever, that could validate the claims made by atheists.
And they say the most hurtful things about the Pastafarians too. They can't prove that either.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Most atheists I know don't argue that there is no god. They simply lack a belief in it. You've been listening to too many Christian windbags who try to make atheists into some kind of anti-christian crusaders.
I was watching this on the History Channel just yesterday.
In a nutshell, there is a theory that the super volcano Toba erupted about 75000 years ago and reduced the human population down to approximately 500 mating pairs in Africa. In addition to reducing the average temparature by 15 degrees and causing a volcanic winter and, it also caused a genetic bottleneck. This bottleneck explains the apparant lack of diversity of the human genome.
If correct, this theory is also a good explanation for the language tracing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory
I'm afraid this is just silly.
There is a very simple action that would invalidate the claims of atheists: that would be for a god, any god, to reveal himself in some obvious, unequivocal, unmistakable way. Like, pop up on the nightly news and heal an amputee or something.
The theists, on the other hand, are the ones making the unfalsifiable claims. They're the ones claiming that there exists a sky fairy who chooses to keep himself hidden from man and whose presence can only be intimated by reading an ancient book or books with the aid of some sort of secret decoder ring.
Please, put aside your rancour for a second and tell me, truthfully, which side is making a claim which cannot be falsified...
Oh, wait, you're an AC. I should have known better than respond because you're only here to make yourself feel like you're too good to be living in mommy's basement among piles of pizza boxes and soiled Kleenex.
Give a man a match: warm him for an instant. Douse him in petrol and set him aflame: warm him for the rest of his life.
I can't remember the name of that stupid ape they had in California where the trainer was the only person allowed to interact with it and "interpret" it's signs.
There was an interview with it on AOL long ago where it's trainer said something like "She's happy to communicate with all you people" when the ape was just signing "nipple" over and over and trying to grab someone's boob.
Workers also quit and accused the thing of being obsessed with sex and always grabbing at them. I talked to some deaf who had a chance to see it at the zoo, thing would just do random signs that didn't make any sense. Definitely not up to language ability of a 3 year old human. Heck I've had conversations with 3 year old deaf kids.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
Sounds like Koko the Gorilla.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
you're attacking a strawman.
I think it best I explain using the words of Sagan.
"A fire-breathing dragon lives in my garage"
Suppose (I'm following a group therapy approach by the psychologist Richard Franklin) I seriously make such an assertion to you. Surely you'd want to check it out, see for yourself. There have been innumerable stories of dragons over the centuries, but no real evidence. What an opportunity!
"Show me," you say. I lead you to my garage. You look inside and see a ladder, empty paint cans, an old tricycle -- but no dragon.
"Where's the dragon?" you ask.
"Oh, she's right here," I reply, waving vaguely. "I neglected to mention that she's an invisible dragon."
You propose spreading flour on the floor of the garage to capture the dragon's footprints.
"Good idea," I say, "but this dragon floats in the air."
Then you'll use an infrared sensor to detect the invisible fire.
"Good idea, but the invisible fire is also heatless."
You'll spray-paint the dragon and make her visible.
"Good idea, but she's an incorporeal dragon and the paint won't stick." And so on. I counter every physical test you propose with a special explanation of why it won't work.
Now, what's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there's no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true. Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder. What I'm asking you to do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so. The only thing you've really learned from my insistence that there's a dragon in my garage is that something funny is going on inside my head. You'd wonder, if no physical tests apply, what convinced me. The possibility that it was a dream or a hallucination would certainly enter your mind. But then, why am I taking it so seriously? Maybe I need help. At the least, maybe I've seriously underestimated human fallibility. Imagine that, despite none of the tests being successful, you wish to be scrupulously open-minded. So you don't outright reject the notion that there's a fire-breathing dragon in my garage. You merely put it on hold. Present evidence is strongly against it, but if a new body of data emerge you're prepared to examine it and see if it convinces you. Surely it's unfair of me to be offended at not being believed; or to criticize you for being stodgy and unimaginative -- merely because you rendered the Scottish verdict of "not proved."
Imagine that things had gone otherwise. The dragon is invisible, all right, but footprints are being made in the flour as you watch. Your infrared detector reads off-scale. The spray paint reveals a jagged crest bobbing in the air before you. No matter how skeptical you might have been about the existence of dragons -- to say nothing about invisible ones -- you must now acknowledge that there's something here, and that in a preliminary way it's consistent with an invisible, fire-breathing dragon.
Now another scenario: Suppose it's not just me. Suppose that several people of your acquaintance, including people who you're pretty sure don't know each other, all tell you that they have dragons in their garages -- but in every case the evidence is maddeningly elusive. All of us admit we're disturbed at being gripped by so odd a conviction so ill-supported by the physical evidence. None of us is a lunatic. We speculate about what it would mean if invisible dragons were really hiding out in garages all over the world, with us humans just catching on. I'd rather it not be true, I tell you. But maybe all those ancient European and Chinese myths about dragons weren't myths at
Most Atheists I know do argue that there's no god. They believe that the properties ascribed to such an entity are in contradiction with the perceived reality. Or that the properties ascribed to such an entity are logically inconsistent. Either of which is enough for an active belief that there can be no god.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
... right now, it's not really much better than most of the fringe notions of language, like Germanic substrate hypothesis, and the putative relationship between Korean and Japanese.
I agree with most of why you're saying here. However, the relationship between Japanese and Korean is only "fringe" for political reasons. Any serious look at the two languages makes it clear that they are indeed related -- the question is, how.
Interestingly, not only are Japanese and Korean grammars extremely similar (not decisive a match, by any means), but we also begin to find shared vocabulary -- though admittedly not as much as we'd like, it's also important to realize that these two linguistic and ethnic groups were last intimately connected around 400 AD, before either group used any writing system with phonetic fidelity (both used Chinese, not just the characters but also essentially the language, when writing). It's not very well known, but the Japanese government (such as it was then) sent something like 40,000 soldiers to the support of the Baekje kingdom, one of Korea's "Three Kingdoms", and when the Baekje regime fell, the Baekje upper classes and nobles just moved to Japan and were accepted into the Japanese court. This suggests some very strong ties.
Moreover, we *do* know that the big Korean dialectical groups (Silla, Goguryeo, Baekje) were already distinct enough to pose communication problems in the Three Kingdoms period, with modern Korean tracing its lineage back to the Silla kingdom -- which beat out the Baekje. Much later, Korean underwent a major sinicization around the Middle Korean period, 1400-1800 or so, where native Korean words fell out of use and were replaced by imported vocabulary from Chinese.
Yet despite so much historical room for divergence, we can still find plenty of cognates if we just look. I'm not steeped enough in the older forms of either language to be able to trace things back as far as I'd like, but I can certainly begin to rule out more recent imports, like gudu in Korean for "shoes", which apparently was borrowed from Japanese kutsu. If we can find not just isolated cognates in both languages, but whole clusters, that would support the argument for a common linguistic ancestry. And there do appear to be such clusters.
By way of background, I'm a Japanese-English translator with a penchant for looking into etymologies and word formation. Japanese has a number of interesting semantic clusters that don't get talked about much, word groupings like maru / muru / moru, or naru / noru. Korean has words of similar meanings that cluster around similar consontants and vowels.
K: nada, "to be born", "to appear or arise", matching with nahta as the transitive, "to lay (an egg)", "to give birth"
K: nohita, "to be laid or put", as the passive of nohta, "to place on something", "to cast"
There seem to be other clusters as well, such as around J mura / maru / muru / moru, "village / round / gather, group / cluster together", all relating to ideas of togetherness, and K maeul / malda / moeuda, "village / roll up / come together".
Then there are groups of cognates that begin to show clear sound shifts:
K: byeol
K: bal
K: beol
K: mwul (attested in some dialects as mil)
For beginnings, there's a pretty clear J "h" -- K "b" shift going on, with some exceptions like for J ashi. However, Old Japanese apparently began many words with "p" that later morphed int
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Phonemic change does not happen on an individual human lifespan... precisely because the older generations lock in linguistic features of language while they are alive. Language experiences less Mendelian evolution than you think it does.
It's also worth noting the effects on a language of population movements beyond just the founder effect -- what happens when two distinct linguistic populations collide?
Languages spoken by folks who move around a lot and interact with speakers of many other languages seem to undergo a kind of erosion, where extreme difficulties in the languages (be it grammar or pronunciation, and always relative to the speech communities involved) are simplified. Meanwhile, languages spoken by folks who don't get around much and don't have a lot of contact with speakers of other languages tend to keep (or perhaps even elaborate on) complexities that would not survive in a higher-traffic environment. This is all broadly speaking, of course. :)
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
And on the stone was etched a single word, more ancient than the clans themselves.
Hiigara. Our home.
I've read that Old Japanese probably had seven or eight vowels as opposed to the five in modern Japanese, as referenced over on the Wikipedia article. The distribution of apparent vowels and how they seem to have been used is viewed by some as evidence of vowel harmony, which later disappeared as the language lost vowel sounds.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
There is no argument by Atkinson that all language change is monotonic or predictable. But the observation that, on average, phoneme diversity increases with speaker population size and decreases with distance from Africa both seem true.
Based on what? His statistics that shows extremely high variance? I bet he would be laughed out of any statistics department trying to extrapolate the linear model that he demonstrates. And let's not forget, that Navajo traveled a significantly longer distance from Africa than Hawaiian did, why does Navajo though have about 33 some consonants while Hawaiian only has 8?
I'm certainly not trying to argue for the paper, but my guess is that the strongest argument for a trend toward phonological simplification is some form linguistic leveling tied to migration and contact between speakers of different varieties. Creolistics provides the most extreme examples of this; pidgins and creoles tend toward relatively simple phonological systems because they result from a sort of compromise between speakers of very different languages, and they fall back toward making fewer phonological distinctions because many of the community members can't hear them anyway.
Leveling also happens between speakers of different dialects of the same language when they migrate and intermix (see, e.g., the relative dearth of variation between New World dialects of Old World languages, or even just USA east vs. west coast), though I'd have to check to what extent that involves simplification as opposed to just convergence. (New World Spanish is certainly no less complex phonologically than most Andalusian Spanish).
So if this is the case, smaller number of phonemes would indicate intense contact between languages that are dramatically different.
This is still hella speculative at best, and I don't doubt you'll agree.
Are you adequate?
Two things that bother me about this.
1) If in fact African languages have a wide range of phonemes, wouldn't that put them at the centre of a web of languages based on phonemes simply due to a high number of interconnections? This doesn't seem to necessarily imply origin to me, just a high hit rate.
2) Perhaps smaller languages, older ones, have more phonemes just due to fewer speakers. Pidgins tend to be simpler languages to facilitate intercommunication. Perhaps modern languages, which spread to wide areas, were pared down to allow easier adoption.
Unless you want to hypothesize that language was not invented until after our ancestors left Africa, it's obvious that all languages stem from a source in Africa.
But his use of phonemes is ludicrous. Related languages often have very different phoneme sets. Take French and Hindi, for example. (And those are *closely* related, when considering all of the world's languages.)
This is as bad as Greenberg's mass comparison method; maybe worse.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Additionally, with phonemes the act of losing one seems to require a much lower effort than creating one.
Just think about how hard it is to learn a new phoneme as an adult from a different culture. If you didn't acquire it from another culture to speak *their* language, why would you ever go to that effort, and how likely would it be you convince other people to do it as well?
As opposed to losing a phoneme - we can all think of examples of shortening words or sounds, or just being lazy with pronunciation.
It's less that a founder group is likely to consist most of people who slur something, and more that in isolation it is much easier to lose sounds than it is to gain them.
snowgirl's response is quite right, but I feel like I can add an example and a bit of explanation that shows how this whole "getting a new phoneme is hard" is just not true.
The thing is that a phoneme is not a "sound"; a phoneme is a grouping of sounds, which makes them all equivalent for the purpose of a language. Sound is continuous; phonemes are a partition of sounds into discrete units. So there are sounds that are different as sounds but which a language will treat as the same phoneme; the term for such pairs of sounds is allophones. The most famous example is quite likely the fact that native speakers of Chinese, Japanese and Korean have a hard time with the "r" and "l" sounds; in their languages, those sounds are variants of just one phoneme. Correspondingly, Spanish distinguishes two "r" phonemes where English has only one, and thus the sounds that Spanish treats as distinct phonemes are merely allophones in English.
This is at the heart of how a language can develop a new phoneme. What happens is that what was formerly two allophones of the same phoneme, after some changes, become two distinct phonemes.
Now on to the example: in Spanish, the pronunciation of many vowels varies slightly depending on what type of syllable they occur. An "o" in a open syllable (one that ends in a vowel) is pronounced differently from an "o" in a closed syllable (one that ends in a consonant). In many dialects of Spanish, there is an independent phenomenon where an "s" at the end of a syllable variable pronounced either as "s", as an aspiration (English "h" sound), or not pronounced at all. And then there are these really odd dialects in southern Spain where the loss of "s" at the end of a syllable is so severe that the vowel allophones have become phonemes; the difference between la niña ("the girl") and las niñas ("the girls"), which in standard Spanish is carried by the "s" (or the aspiration), is now carried by a phonemic distinction between open and closed "a" sounds.
And in general, creation of new phonemes follows this pattern, which I will summarize:
Are you adequate?
Suppose it was NOT the case that all human languages reach back to a common ancestor language. Then one or both of two things must be true:
1. Disparate groups of humans developed language independently of each other
2. Language was developed in one place, then language was lost, and somehow developed again in two or more places.
I mean, come on, how likely are either of those theories? It makes about as much sense as humans evolving more than once independently of each other.
There is no argument by Atkinson that all language change is monotonic or predictable. But the observation that, on average, phoneme diversity increases with speaker population size and decreases with distance from Africa both seem true. These observations support the hypothesis that language spread out from a single origin in Africa , going through multiple bottlenecks that left this specific pattern of change.
I think this "bottlenecks" part is helping me understand the paper's argument a lot better (though I do have to look it up, I know; I just don't want to pay to read it). Perhaps a required element is that that several of these bottlenecks must have involved substantial contact between very different languages. In this case, a bottleneck is necessary but not sufficient; the thing that generates the trend toward simplification, is that the language spoken by a founding population can either be the result of normal language change (which doesn't trend very obviously toward either simplification or complexity), or of a creole-like event (which does tend toward simplification).
I still don't know how to fit the speaker population size factor into this, though.
Are you adequate?
Maybe the word believe is not specific enough in this case. I do not believe a god exists...especially not a benevolent man with a beard sitting in the clouds style god. But to me, that is not a statement that a god does not exist. If someone approached me and ask me if I believed that gray aliens were visiting the earth, I would say no. I've never seen any terribly convincing evidence that they are and I would make arguments as to why this is improbable. That doesn't mean I'm stating for a fact that they are not. It was to this statement of absolute certitude that the poster was using to attack atheists, and to which I was speaking.
If one googles "Journey of Man" we see that mitonchondrial studies also show that the origin of man was from that area and branched out to all points so it makes sense that language followed along.
+1 Insightful
There has been and continues to be lively debate and strong belief/opinion surrounding issues of the relationship between language and the brain/ thought process/ consciousness. While a statistical analysis is one way to provide fodder for the debate, as well as ancillary debates concerning origin(s) these things are of little practical concern currently. The people who get wrapped up in them tend to need a life or another research topic. If linguists want something to reasonably get passionate about we fuss about the current loss of languages every year and the resulting loss of cultural identity which language provides. We are becoming a race without core cultural values that came from the previous linguo-cultural centers that we called "home."
Another issue I prefer to worry about is that with the numbers of people who are growing up without a "home culture" there are also large numbers of people who don't seem to be developing deep language/ thought/ processing skills because they speak many languages but none well, none with the ability to do high level analysis and come to creative solutions to even simple everyday problems. Michael Agar pointed to this in his book "Language Shock" when he described a student who spoke a number of languages, including English, but none of them well enough to express himself academically. I work with students who are required to speak English and use English in an "English as a Medium of Instruction" environment, but these students cannot organize their ideas logically in any language, much less a second language.
So, while armchair folks might want to care about origins, they have little value when the present is full of major and important worries regarding language.
Subversion of spatial scale luxury decoration ideas.
Why would older languages have more phonemes and not less?
I think that the increase in variations of a source relates to Darwinian evolution. For instance, corn is from the Americas and moved to Europe after Columbus. And if you look at the varieties of corn in the USA there are a certain number. But if you look at South America, there are many more types of corn. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080627163156.htm
The greater amount of variation indicates the origin.
This is also true for genetics. There is the greatest variation of genes in Africa, and fewer, say, in subset migrations, e.g. Greenland. ["Africans have world's greatest genetic variation "] http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30502963/ns/technology_and_science-science/
I'd like to know how on this grand scheme languages such as Basque are reconciled? - along with a couple of other languages, the Basque language is classified as a language isolate. Although most of these have become isolates in fairly recent history (and therefore shouldn't be too hard to link to a language 'tree') Basque is a tricky one because it's been an isolate for as long as it has been recorded, and does not share its roots with other Indo-European languages.
I read the article (for once) but it didn't go anywhere near those kinds of details - which I find kinda odd: I would've thought when it comes to grand unifying theories of language that linguists would've been all over the issue of isolate languages like a rash.
The chart/diagram in the Economist article did have Basque on it - 'near' Greek and Russian.
Sure it's a damned interesting idea to be able to link all languages to a common source -- but the article makes it seem as though this one all boils down to plotting languages according to similarities, and then best-fitting a line across the chart. I hope there's a lot more to it than that -- otherwise it's not really a discovery, but merely an interesting hypothesis in my book.
(for those interested Wikipedia on Basque language history)
This discovery dovetails neatly with the National Geographic Genographic Project. The Genographic Projects reveals through our human DNA that humans originated in Africa and populated the rest of the world in multiple great migrations starting about 60,000 years ago.
These great migrations are described on a virtual globe of the Earth on the Genographic Project website under the "Atlas of the Human Journey" tab.
Christian theology holds that God and His Creation are Truth. Those who assert that the geological, cosmological, and genetic records are false creations by God to test believer's faith label God a liar and make Him into a cheap parlour magician. Creationism is no more christian than it is scientific, but rather simply so uneducated, illogical, and unfaithful as to be unable to recognize its own inherent contradictions.
- Cardhu