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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
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.
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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
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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.
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.
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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.
Just a warning: if a crudely rendered naked chick opens a scroll at you DO NOT LOOK AT THE SCROLL!
Finding the mother tongue in this linguistic equivalent to cold fusion. Plenty of whackjobs and fraudsters claim to find it, but soon enough the cold heart light of reality shines in and reveals it's a load of nonsense.
If there was a mother tongue, it's likely buried so deep in the past as to be impossible to find. We're talking over 100,000 years ago. That so much time for substantial changes, even one generation innovations, that the exercise is pointless. Even more "moderate" theories like Nostratic, which mainly just wants so desperately to unite the Eurasian families, quickly reveals itself to be as much wishful thinking as actual science.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
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
Neandertals descended from H. erectus, which did come out Africa. Your analogy is crap.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
You seem uncertain as to whether kudos are truly in order, but I'd say they are. Your are right to put "proving" in quotation marks, but providing meaningful evidence in support of a hypothesis that is so far only "thought likely to be true" is valuable science.
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