Hessen probably. This is still the biggest problem for me in Hessen, since I used to live in NRW for the better half of my life, and there this way to speak "ch" is somewhat comparable to the US American phenomen called "Ebonics".
It could have been worse, they could have been from Bayern. I knew a guy for a while from Bayern, and I could hardly understand him, I had doubts about my German because of it, as I am American. Then his dad randomly came by to visit and I could perfectly understand his dad. I breathed a deep sigh of relief...
Well aside from the paraphrasical "Speaking of me, there is a book." Which is a result of being a topic-based language rather than subject-based language. ("Beans, I have them." It can be done in English as well.) The construction of sentence to noun phrase, and then used in a phrase indicating possession or ownership... yes, the two structures are the same, even if the syntax isn't.
Japanese isn't without unusual phonemes either... The Japanese syllable "fu" for one doesn't occur in English. As well the Japanese "r" phoneme doesn't occur in English either. Neither does the "tsu" (the "ts" sound occurs in English but not as a distinct phoneme and not at the beginning of a syllable.) But granted it's nothing like voiceless nasals...
No, I was being very serious (I live in Texas, major hispanic population). You seemed to know of this matter than I do, hence why I asked you.
Ah, I live in, and was raised in New Mexico, even greater majority Hispanic population. What you're witnessing is children being raised in close exposure to Spanish with minimal exposure to English itself. This results in them being raised in a bit of a "bubble" and thus never having sufficient exposure English to acquire phonemic fluency prior to puberty and thus locking in an accent.
Here's the kicker: research of these individuals has shown that for the most part, if you don't learn to to speak before aged 5 or 6, it's a skill that simply cannot be developed. The most that these people could ever master was a few broken words.
Move the age to "about 12" or "prior to puberty". There have been a few kids found at age 7 or so, who pick up language just fine.
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?
It also fits in with broader theories that language was one of the things that allowed early humans to greatly expand their range. Are you arguing that people left Africa without language and it developed independently in multiple locations?
No, I am not arguing this, and I'm fairly confident that the assertion made by the paper is true, that Proto-World existed and it was spoken in Africa. However, we totally lack enough evidence to suggest that this is known... right now it's just something that we imagine is a really good hunch.
By the way, your Hawaiian example is a classic of the founder effect seen throughout the Pacific.
This paper is the first application of the "founder effect" on phonology... but it requires that a founding population have missing phonemes when they found a new population. The likelihood of this occurring is only in rare phonemes, and even then super unlikely because even rare phonemes are reasonably common given the size of vocabularies.
There are better explanations for why phonemic diversity decreases and "founder effect" is a fairly bad theory. Hawaiian has 8 consonants while Maori has 10, but Hawaiian has heavy allophonic matching between "t" and "k", and "w" with "v", both of which suggest that there was a consonant shift in the Hawaiian/Maori proto-language that caused a phonemic collision in Hawaiian.
We don't need the claim that "Hawaiian when it left didn't bring over any of the words that had 'k' or 'wh' in them"...
Interesting. That would explain why a first generation born American from immigrant parents will speak with foreign accent too. I'm curious to know how many generations it takes for that to erode away. Two, three maybe?
I know you're being facetious and all, because babies are capable of acquiring other languages without accents through exposure to those other languages. However, babies do not babble the entire gamut of human pronounceable phonemes... they babble in a very constrained set of phonemes of those used by their parents.
It is better to have explored this argument and rejected it as without merit than to have not considered it at all. It doesn't have to be remotely right to be valuable.
EXACTLY... I don't know if this "evidence" will be useful in the future or not, so I don't know whether or not to give the author kudos... in fact, I'm more on the skeptical side of withholding any kudos until he can prove his methodology, because it seems fringe.
Some, but not all, German speakers have changed the [r] sound into an uvular one, as has most of France.
I learned my German as textbook Hochdeutsch, with trilled [r], and without "ch" merging with "sch", and the first time I met a speaker who changed those two things, saying recht as if it were something like ghescht, I could barely understand him! But that doesn't mean that it's not a legitimate variety of German. That's how language variation gets started.
Why Germans get so much guff for the supposedly-throat-clearingly-unpleasant sound of their "ch" whereas French people's "r" goes unnoticed is a great injustice. The French must have better PR.
What part of Germany were you in that had the ich-laut and "sch" merged? Oh wait, this is common in American speakers as well... nevermind.
I do use a uvular r myself for "recht", which I think is becoming significantly more common in wide-use, while I don't think the same is true of the ich-laut and "sch" merge.
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.
But the "evidence" is a statistical joke and it is based on patent assumptions about language evolution... There is a lot of stuff that would have be proved before this paper even has the strength of "evidence"... 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.
Most phonemes undergo shifts. Say, a language only has unvoiced plosives, but makes a distinction between aspirated and unaspirated. Then, a shift happens and the unaspirated plosives shift into being voiced unaspirated plosives, and then become voice aspirated plosives. This is the vast majority of phoneme change.
Next up, in the above phoneme shifts sometimes two phonemes end up colliding as a result of a shift. Say, interdental fricatives shift to being dental plosives, as a result "that" becomes "dat", but it's ok because the language doesn't have the voiced plosives yet. But then the unvoiced unaspirated plosives above turn into voiced unaspirated plosives, and now we have two consonants that have collided. But only the interdental plosives shifted in this block, so the velar fricative remains distinct from the voiced velar plosive. The language has "lost" a phoneme.
But there's another thing going on here. Phonemes are not rendered purely all the time, it is not uncommon at all for a phoneme to be expressed as an allophone. Which is an alternate pronunciation that is still yet identified as the phoneme in question. In the continued example, the alveolar unvoiced aspirated plosive is pronounced as an interdental fricative before a front vowel. The next generation comes along and contextualizes this into a distinct phoneme and begin treating it like its own phoneme, and as a result the language has now "gained" a phoneme.
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.
Which are different still from German, which is linguistically more intermediary between the two, but has sounds found in neither (such as uvular consonants)?
Huh? German doesn't have any uvular consonants as phonemes...
By contrast, I find the pronunciation of Japanese quite easy, but for the life of me, I can't find one obvious similarity between the vocabulary, structure, conceptualization, etc of the language.
"I have a book." "Watashi wa hon ga arimsu." (Literally, Speaking of me, there is a book.)
"I have seen Paris." (A possible literal translation: I am in possession of the act of having seen Paris.) "Watashi wa Parisu o mitte no ga arimasu." (Literal translation: Speaking of me, there is (the act of having seen Paris.))
And similarity in vocabulary? They're borrowing our words left and right. "kompyutaa" "mausu" "kiboodo" etc.
(I totally agree with your point though, just pointing out that you're likely not thinking broadly enough about relations between the languages... but then these relations follow through for ALL languages, in a brilliant display of Universal Grammar... so... it's kind of meaningless...)
Phonemes themselves are lost over time. This is less related to this so-called "founder effect" than on the existence of small, isolated groups of speakers. As these isolated speakers interact more and more, they are bound to lose specific phonemes, morphemes, even full words and syntatic structures (and possibly create novel forms of the same) as a result of common usage patterns. Elsewhere, these patterns may reflect different "choices" by different isolated groups which originally spoke the same language. Your Scandanavian example is a perfect representation of this commonly-seen phenomenon.
The idea is that isolated groups tend to lose much more than they gain. Eventually these groups may come in contact with outsiders, intermingle, and then split off into other isolated groups again, where the process can repeat.
Actually, language isolationists tend to preserve more than the original languages. Icelandic is much more similar to proto-North-Germanic than the Scandinavian languages. American English is closer to Victorian English than British English is...
The closer nit the language community is, the more likely it is to retain language features.
Finding the mother tongue in this linguistic equivalent to cold fusion.
Pretty much. This study doesn't even really seem to purpose a Proto-World, but rather just simply suggest that one existed, and it was likely from Africa... this is generally well accepted beliefs in linguistics already. We imagine that there was likely an original language, but we can't find or learn any evidence about it. Our inductive techniques for linking languages together reliably begins failing relatively recently in history...
So um... kudos? To this guy for "proving" what nearly every linguist thinks likely was the case already...
Babies "babble" in the full range of sounds a human can make.
Actually, babies "babble" in the full range of phonemes that they have heard their parents use. Even baby babbling is language dependent. Babies don't begin babbling until they are well exposed to the sounds of their parents, and in fact, while developing in the womb fetuses already are honing in on the phonemes used by their mothers, and are born with an innate interest towards the phonemes that their mother used as opposed to any other phonemes.
The simplest possible spoken language would be a single phoneme per meaning, correct?
Only if one limited it strictly to vowels, and syllabic consonants. Vowel distinction is incredibly hard, and typically in the range of 3 to maybe 10 pure vowels at most. The naive thoughts about what would be "simple" in a language is getting in the way here.
Thus the number of meanings, or words, you can produce are restricted to the number of phonemes sounds that can be physically produced.
Theoretically yes... but the vast array of phonemes in languages cannot exist all on their own, and require "carrier" signals upon which to be formed. The carrier signals are vowels, and the bumps and hisses around them are the consonants and typically carry the most amount of phonemic distinction.
Thus you would be creating as many unique sounds as possible to be able to express the maximum number of meanings, which is why the earliest languages had a huge number of phonemes.
This doesn't really hold... there are limits to the human ability to produce sounds, and even more so there are limitations on distinctive sounds that can be recognized. For instance, the likelihood that a language will distinguish from a dental "t" and a alveolar "t" is almost nonexistent, as they sound so incredibly similar.
It's about complexity. The complexity can either lie in the physical production of sounds, or in the combination of multiple sounds together. The former is a physical and more primitive process, while the latter is a more mental process (which also requires greater auditory discernment as well). So my point is simply that it makes sense that primitive humans would have sided with physical complexity over mental complexity when first applying meaning to sounds.
Actually, the former process requires the great auditory discernment than the later. The more sounds made the better we have to be able to distinguish the various parts apart from each other. The human mind however is incredibly good at generalizing everything, and as a result merges similar sounds incredibly quickly, and eventually a person develops a solid lock on the distinctive sounds that they can recognize.
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.
The number of phonemes in a language has nothing to do with intelligence. In theory, the more modern languages have fewer phonemes because of the "founder effect". If you think about this in terms of vocabulary, it is obvious -- no-one knows all the words in any language, so if a small group set off to start their own colony, the language of that colony won't have the words that none of the founders knew. New words may be invented to substitute for the missing words but they will be different. It is the same with sounds (and genetic diversity, where this was first observed). Since new sound formation is a very slow process, the signal remains for a long time.
Your argument for the founder effect works for words, but not necessarily for phonemes. In order for a phoneme to be dropped by founder effect, the phoneme would have to occur in none of the words that the founders brought over. The idea of a phoneme rare enough in a vocabulary large enough for use by a small colony seems unlikely...
Plus, the Scandanavian languages lost the interdental fricative, while the colony of Iceland kept the interdental fricative... poor standing for your "founder effect" notion...
I read this earlier, and at first glance it's counter-intuitive. Why would older languages have more phonemes and not less?
This is a good question and in fact it's right on the money as a way to argue against this study. Languages change, this is true, but they don't change in a monotonic way. Some languages gain phonemes, some languages lose phonemes. That's how linguistic change works. In the same way, some languages have a complex synthetic syntax, and some have a relatively simple creole-like isolating syntax. When languages become too simplified, children learning the language create novel complications to fill out niches.
As an example Hungarian has only about 11 irregular verbs, but this is because their verb system is complex and unwieldy, meanwhile English with its incredibly simple verbal patterns has numerous (and in fact no single authoritative count) of irregular verbs.
Chinese has a limited syllable construction pattern, and as a result has picked up tones to make distinctions between words, while Japanese with a similarly limited syllable construction pattern uses longer words, and Hawai'ian with even more strict syllable construction rules and phonemes has gone for yet longer words. (I was surprised to realize that "Meli Kalikimaka" is literally "Merry Christmas" pounded into the strict Hawai'ian phonemic rules.)
So, while I think his ideas might have interest, and could be intriguing, there is also the fundamental problem that he's making a deep assumption of monotonic language "growth" that is not supported by reality. I imagine it's similar to measuring which animal has more evolutionary change by it having more teeth. But everyone wants to be the person to prove that all the world languages are related, right?
Guy sounds like the height of arrogance... "zOMG, you're not doing it my way, the way I think, therefore it is wrong."
Really, his demonstration is just a paper-like source document with a paper-like side document of related or identical material... there's nothing new or interesting about it... and the navigation in 3D of the paper-like documents looks clumsy and ill-conceived...
I like the idea of having parallel text that can be expanded on the fly, but I was thinking about that before I even saw this steaming pile of turds called Xanadu...
Did some more research.... apparently this was declassified in the 70s and published in several books from that time. I don't know how much I would read into it.
Reading the message myself, it sounds like a "we got a report from someone else, and didn't look into it." I'm sure you could find dozens of "reports of UFO activity" in police and FBI call logs throughout the entire time it became popular.
Plus, he got it from an Air Force informant? Whoop dee doo, We already had a public Air Force informant telling the public that we recovered a UFO, who was later overruled by the rest of the military.
The whole memo reads like a damned telephone game. "I heard from Jessica that Barbra told her that Jill likes Henry"... awesome.. thanks for the info...
No, *any* people not just government workers. In the case of threats, no one is 'special'.
The later part of the paragraph corrects this oversight. Government clerks actually do have special provisions for protection against threatening and belligerent behavior while at their job. This protection is greater and above that of the protections for other people.
(Yelling at a Social Security clerk is illegal, while for the average person it is not.)
if you flash a gun at me like you intend to do me harm, you just committed a crime... doesn't matter who I am.
Right, it only matters who I am. If I work for the government, I can do that with impunity.
And cops can speed, and drive through red lights... we've authorized and licensed police to break various laws so long as it is done under color of law. In fact, undercover cops usually get licenses to break nearly any law short of murder regardless of circumstances or appearances.
They cannot legally do it "with impunity" or without good reason, but courts do grant them a wide latitude in this charge, because holding them to a strict accountability would impede their functionality. There is a good argument that restricting them so much would make them ineffective... and whether said argument is true or not, just like a superstition of rubbing a teammate's head before playing a game, there is sufficient psychological pressure to keep the habit in place... because what are you going to do? Risk ineffective cops, or losing the game? An appeal to consequences can be a totally valid reason when consequences are sufficiently serious... even if the argument supported by the appeal to consequences is wrong, the fallacy and risk of consequences keeps people from risking them.
It's actually much cheaper than Propecia too. I got a doc to write me a prescription for finastride and I used a pill cutter to take a quarter pill a day. It was 10x cheaper per mg than Propecia.
The obvious statement here is, "generics are cheaper than brand name pills"... Propecia is Finastride...
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Hessen probably.
This is still the biggest problem for me in Hessen, since I used to live in NRW for the better half of my life, and there this way to speak "ch" is somewhat comparable to the US American phenomen called "Ebonics".
It could have been worse, they could have been from Bayern. I knew a guy for a while from Bayern, and I could hardly understand him, I had doubts about my German because of it, as I am American. Then his dad randomly came by to visit and I could perfectly understand his dad. I breathed a deep sigh of relief...
Well aside from the paraphrasical "Speaking of me, there is a book." Which is a result of being a topic-based language rather than subject-based language. ("Beans, I have them." It can be done in English as well.) The construction of sentence to noun phrase, and then used in a phrase indicating possession or ownership... yes, the two structures are the same, even if the syntax isn't.
Japanese isn't without unusual phonemes either... The Japanese syllable "fu" for one doesn't occur in English. As well the Japanese "r" phoneme doesn't occur in English either. Neither does the "tsu" (the "ts" sound occurs in English but not as a distinct phoneme and not at the beginning of a syllable.) But granted it's nothing like voiceless nasals...
No, I was being very serious (I live in Texas, major hispanic population). You seemed to know of this matter than I do, hence why I asked you.
Ah, I live in, and was raised in New Mexico, even greater majority Hispanic population. What you're witnessing is children being raised in close exposure to Spanish with minimal exposure to English itself. This results in them being raised in a bit of a "bubble" and thus never having sufficient exposure English to acquire phonemic fluency prior to puberty and thus locking in an accent.
Here's the kicker: research of these individuals has shown that for the most part, if you don't learn to to speak before aged 5 or 6, it's a skill that simply cannot be developed. The most that these people could ever master was a few broken words.
Move the age to "about 12" or "prior to puberty". There have been a few kids found at age 7 or so, who pick up language just fine.
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?
It also fits in with broader theories that language was one of the things that allowed early humans to greatly expand their range. Are you arguing that people left Africa without language and it developed independently in multiple locations?
No, I am not arguing this, and I'm fairly confident that the assertion made by the paper is true, that Proto-World existed and it was spoken in Africa. However, we totally lack enough evidence to suggest that this is known... right now it's just something that we imagine is a really good hunch.
By the way, your Hawaiian example is a classic of the founder effect seen throughout the Pacific.
This paper is the first application of the "founder effect" on phonology... but it requires that a founding population have missing phonemes when they found a new population. The likelihood of this occurring is only in rare phonemes, and even then super unlikely because even rare phonemes are reasonably common given the size of vocabularies.
There are better explanations for why phonemic diversity decreases and "founder effect" is a fairly bad theory. Hawaiian has 8 consonants while Maori has 10, but Hawaiian has heavy allophonic matching between "t" and "k", and "w" with "v", both of which suggest that there was a consonant shift in the Hawaiian/Maori proto-language that caused a phonemic collision in Hawaiian.
We don't need the claim that "Hawaiian when it left didn't bring over any of the words that had 'k' or 'wh' in them"...
Interesting. That would explain why a first generation born American from immigrant parents will speak with foreign accent too. I'm curious to know how many generations it takes for that to erode away. Two, three maybe?
I know you're being facetious and all, because babies are capable of acquiring other languages without accents through exposure to those other languages. However, babies do not babble the entire gamut of human pronounceable phonemes... they babble in a very constrained set of phonemes of those used by their parents.
It is better to have explored this argument and rejected it as without merit than to have not considered it at all. It doesn't have to be remotely right to be valuable.
EXACTLY... I don't know if this "evidence" will be useful in the future or not, so I don't know whether or not to give the author kudos... in fact, I'm more on the skeptical side of withholding any kudos until he can prove his methodology, because it seems fringe.
Some, but not all, German speakers have changed the [r] sound into an uvular one, as has most of France.
I learned my German as textbook Hochdeutsch, with trilled [r], and without "ch" merging with "sch", and the first time I met a speaker who changed those two things, saying recht as if it were something like ghescht, I could barely understand him! But that doesn't mean that it's not a legitimate variety of German. That's how language variation gets started.
Why Germans get so much guff for the supposedly-throat-clearingly-unpleasant sound of their "ch" whereas French people's "r" goes unnoticed is a great injustice. The French must have better PR.
What part of Germany were you in that had the ich-laut and "sch" merged? Oh wait, this is common in American speakers as well... nevermind.
I do use a uvular r myself for "recht", which I think is becoming significantly more common in wide-use, while I don't think the same is true of the ich-laut and "sch" merge.
I stand corrected, sir.
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.
But the "evidence" is a statistical joke and it is based on patent assumptions about language evolution... There is a lot of stuff that would have be proved before this paper even has the strength of "evidence"... 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.
Actually, you're missing some details.
Most phonemes undergo shifts. Say, a language only has unvoiced plosives, but makes a distinction between aspirated and unaspirated. Then, a shift happens and the unaspirated plosives shift into being voiced unaspirated plosives, and then become voice aspirated plosives. This is the vast majority of phoneme change.
Next up, in the above phoneme shifts sometimes two phonemes end up colliding as a result of a shift. Say, interdental fricatives shift to being dental plosives, as a result "that" becomes "dat", but it's ok because the language doesn't have the voiced plosives yet. But then the unvoiced unaspirated plosives above turn into voiced unaspirated plosives, and now we have two consonants that have collided. But only the interdental plosives shifted in this block, so the velar fricative remains distinct from the voiced velar plosive. The language has "lost" a phoneme.
But there's another thing going on here. Phonemes are not rendered purely all the time, it is not uncommon at all for a phoneme to be expressed as an allophone. Which is an alternate pronunciation that is still yet identified as the phoneme in question. In the continued example, the alveolar unvoiced aspirated plosive is pronounced as an interdental fricative before a front vowel. The next generation comes along and contextualizes this into a distinct phoneme and begin treating it like its own phoneme, and as a result the language has now "gained" a phoneme.
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.
Which are different still from German, which is linguistically more intermediary between the two, but has sounds found in neither (such as uvular consonants)?
Huh? German doesn't have any uvular consonants as phonemes...
By contrast, I find the pronunciation of Japanese quite easy, but for the life of me, I can't find one obvious similarity between the vocabulary, structure, conceptualization, etc of the language.
"I have a book."
"Watashi wa hon ga arimsu." (Literally, Speaking of me, there is a book.)
"I have seen Paris." (A possible literal translation: I am in possession of the act of having seen Paris.)
"Watashi wa Parisu o mitte no ga arimasu." (Literal translation: Speaking of me, there is (the act of having seen Paris.))
And similarity in vocabulary? They're borrowing our words left and right. "kompyutaa" "mausu" "kiboodo" etc.
(I totally agree with your point though, just pointing out that you're likely not thinking broadly enough about relations between the languages... but then these relations follow through for ALL languages, in a brilliant display of Universal Grammar... so... it's kind of meaningless...)
Phonemes themselves are lost over time. This is less related to this so-called "founder effect" than on the existence of small, isolated groups of speakers. As these isolated speakers interact more and more, they are bound to lose specific phonemes, morphemes, even full words and syntatic structures (and possibly create novel forms of the same) as a result of common usage patterns. Elsewhere, these patterns may reflect different "choices" by different isolated groups which originally spoke the same language. Your Scandanavian example is a perfect representation of this commonly-seen phenomenon.
The idea is that isolated groups tend to lose much more than they gain. Eventually these groups may come in contact with outsiders, intermingle, and then split off into other isolated groups again, where the process can repeat.
Actually, language isolationists tend to preserve more than the original languages. Icelandic is much more similar to proto-North-Germanic than the Scandinavian languages. American English is closer to Victorian English than British English is...
The closer nit the language community is, the more likely it is to retain language features.
Finding the mother tongue in this linguistic equivalent to cold fusion.
Pretty much. This study doesn't even really seem to purpose a Proto-World, but rather just simply suggest that one existed, and it was likely from Africa... this is generally well accepted beliefs in linguistics already. We imagine that there was likely an original language, but we can't find or learn any evidence about it. Our inductive techniques for linking languages together reliably begins failing relatively recently in history...
So um... kudos? To this guy for "proving" what nearly every linguist thinks likely was the case already...
Babies "babble" in the full range of sounds a human can make.
Actually, babies "babble" in the full range of phonemes that they have heard their parents use. Even baby babbling is language dependent. Babies don't begin babbling until they are well exposed to the sounds of their parents, and in fact, while developing in the womb fetuses already are honing in on the phonemes used by their mothers, and are born with an innate interest towards the phonemes that their mother used as opposed to any other phonemes.
The simplest possible spoken language would be a single phoneme per meaning, correct?
Only if one limited it strictly to vowels, and syllabic consonants. Vowel distinction is incredibly hard, and typically in the range of 3 to maybe 10 pure vowels at most. The naive thoughts about what would be "simple" in a language is getting in the way here.
Thus the number of meanings, or words, you can produce are restricted to the number of phonemes sounds that can be physically produced.
Theoretically yes... but the vast array of phonemes in languages cannot exist all on their own, and require "carrier" signals upon which to be formed. The carrier signals are vowels, and the bumps and hisses around them are the consonants and typically carry the most amount of phonemic distinction.
Thus you would be creating as many unique sounds as possible to be able to express the maximum number of meanings, which is why the earliest languages had a huge number of phonemes.
This doesn't really hold... there are limits to the human ability to produce sounds, and even more so there are limitations on distinctive sounds that can be recognized. For instance, the likelihood that a language will distinguish from a dental "t" and a alveolar "t" is almost nonexistent, as they sound so incredibly similar.
It's about complexity. The complexity can either lie in the physical production of sounds, or in the combination of multiple sounds together. The former is a physical and more primitive process, while the latter is a more mental process (which also requires greater auditory discernment as well). So my point is simply that it makes sense that primitive humans would have sided with physical complexity over mental complexity when first applying meaning to sounds.
Actually, the former process requires the great auditory discernment than the later. The more sounds made the better we have to be able to distinguish the various parts apart from each other. The human mind however is incredibly good at generalizing everything, and as a result merges similar sounds incredibly quickly, and eventually a person develops a solid lock on the distinctive sounds that they can recognize.
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.
Spoiler: It was a 1:4:9:16 black monolith. (What, you think it stops at three dimensions?)
You listed four... oh.
The number of phonemes in a language has nothing to do with intelligence. In theory, the more modern languages have fewer phonemes because of the "founder effect". If you think about this in terms of vocabulary, it is obvious -- no-one knows all the words in any language, so if a small group set off to start their own colony, the language of that colony won't have the words that none of the founders knew. New words may be invented to substitute for the missing words but they will be different. It is the same with sounds (and genetic diversity, where this was first observed). Since new sound formation is a very slow process, the signal remains for a long time.
Your argument for the founder effect works for words, but not necessarily for phonemes. In order for a phoneme to be dropped by founder effect, the phoneme would have to occur in none of the words that the founders brought over. The idea of a phoneme rare enough in a vocabulary large enough for use by a small colony seems unlikely...
Plus, the Scandanavian languages lost the interdental fricative, while the colony of Iceland kept the interdental fricative... poor standing for your "founder effect" notion...
I read this earlier, and at first glance it's counter-intuitive. Why would older languages have more phonemes and not less?
This is a good question and in fact it's right on the money as a way to argue against this study. Languages change, this is true, but they don't change in a monotonic way. Some languages gain phonemes, some languages lose phonemes. That's how linguistic change works. In the same way, some languages have a complex synthetic syntax, and some have a relatively simple creole-like isolating syntax. When languages become too simplified, children learning the language create novel complications to fill out niches.
As an example Hungarian has only about 11 irregular verbs, but this is because their verb system is complex and unwieldy, meanwhile English with its incredibly simple verbal patterns has numerous (and in fact no single authoritative count) of irregular verbs.
Chinese has a limited syllable construction pattern, and as a result has picked up tones to make distinctions between words, while Japanese with a similarly limited syllable construction pattern uses longer words, and Hawai'ian with even more strict syllable construction rules and phonemes has gone for yet longer words. (I was surprised to realize that "Meli Kalikimaka" is literally "Merry Christmas" pounded into the strict Hawai'ian phonemic rules.)
So, while I think his ideas might have interest, and could be intriguing, there is also the fundamental problem that he's making a deep assumption of monotonic language "growth" that is not supported by reality. I imagine it's similar to measuring which animal has more evolutionary change by it having more teeth. But everyone wants to be the person to prove that all the world languages are related, right?
Guy sounds like the height of arrogance... "zOMG, you're not doing it my way, the way I think, therefore it is wrong."
Really, his demonstration is just a paper-like source document with a paper-like side document of related or identical material... there's nothing new or interesting about it... and the navigation in 3D of the paper-like documents looks clumsy and ill-conceived...
I like the idea of having parallel text that can be expanded on the fly, but I was thinking about that before I even saw this steaming pile of turds called Xanadu...
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread685706/pg1
Did some more research.... apparently this was declassified in the 70s and published in several books from that time. I don't know how much I would read into it.
Reading the message myself, it sounds like a "we got a report from someone else, and didn't look into it." I'm sure you could find dozens of "reports of UFO activity" in police and FBI call logs throughout the entire time it became popular.
Plus, he got it from an Air Force informant? Whoop dee doo, We already had a public Air Force informant telling the public that we recovered a UFO, who was later overruled by the rest of the military.
The whole memo reads like a damned telephone game. "I heard from Jessica that Barbra told her that Jill likes Henry"... awesome.. thanks for the info...
Not just any people, but government workers
No, *any* people not just government workers. In the case of threats, no one is 'special'.
The later part of the paragraph corrects this oversight. Government clerks actually do have special provisions for protection against threatening and belligerent behavior while at their job. This protection is greater and above that of the protections for other people.
(Yelling at a Social Security clerk is illegal, while for the average person it is not.)
if you flash a gun at me like you intend to do me harm, you just committed a crime... doesn't matter who I am.
Right, it only matters who I am. If I work for the government, I can do that with impunity.
And cops can speed, and drive through red lights... we've authorized and licensed police to break various laws so long as it is done under color of law. In fact, undercover cops usually get licenses to break nearly any law short of murder regardless of circumstances or appearances.
They cannot legally do it "with impunity" or without good reason, but courts do grant them a wide latitude in this charge, because holding them to a strict accountability would impede their functionality. There is a good argument that restricting them so much would make them ineffective... and whether said argument is true or not, just like a superstition of rubbing a teammate's head before playing a game, there is sufficient psychological pressure to keep the habit in place... because what are you going to do? Risk ineffective cops, or losing the game? An appeal to consequences can be a totally valid reason when consequences are sufficiently serious... even if the argument supported by the appeal to consequences is wrong, the fallacy and risk of consequences keeps people from risking them.
It's actually much cheaper than Propecia too. I got a doc to write me a prescription for finastride and I used a pill cutter to take a quarter pill a day. It was 10x cheaper per mg than Propecia.
The obvious statement here is, "generics are cheaper than brand name pills"... Propecia is Finastride...