All Languages Linked To Common Source 318
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.
All Languages Linked To Common Source (Score:4, Funny)
Humans!
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A very wise man once pronounced:
"For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened that unleashed the power of the imagination. We learned to talk."
Must have been Ghandi or Jesus or someone.
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Re:All Languages Linked To Common Source (Score:5, Interesting)
The whole point of TFA is that this may well not be the case. It may well be the case that language is not the product of hard wired wetware, sometimes known as "the Language Instinct," but is rather the product of:
1. general symbolic intelligence, i.e., thought, coupled with:
2. the ability to make more complex sounds, due to a vocal tract modified from anthropoid ape ancestors by the shift of the relative positions of neck and head brought on by bipedalism, and:
3. cultural transmission, i.e., the ability to pass language on to the next generation due to the long childhood dependency of humans which, in turn, came about because our large heads won't fit through the birth canal at full size, so we are all effectively born premature - unable to walk, or even effectively grasp our mother's hair and cling to her.
Therefore, it is quite possible that once our ancestors developed sufficiently large and complex brains to think with more logical sophistication than, for example chimpanzees, we slowly over time dveloped more and more complex languages until we reached a plateau, specifically, the limit of children under the age of 6 or 7 to understand and learn the basic grammar and vocabulary of the language.
Any increased grammatical complexity beyond this point would immediately die out since the next generation could not learn it during childhood. Once this plateau was reached, presumably in southern Africa ca. 200,000 years ago, our ancestors had the cognitive "killer app," i.e., modern human language, that allowed them to successfully radiate across the planet.
Re:All Languages Linked To Common Source (Score:5, Informative)
Communication isn't "talking" though. Lots of animals can communicate - a pre-defined verbal code however is something else entirely. Also, there are plenty of documented cases where an infant was separated from human contact and never learned to talk. 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.
Re:All Languages Linked To Common Source (Score:4, Informative)
Jesus wouldn't say "For millions of years" because he believes his father only made us 4,000 years ago.
Actually, no place in the Bible comes right out and says what the age of the Earth is. The 6000 year figure comes from some people's (weak) interpretation of some verses.
Re:All Languages Linked To Common Source (Score:5, Insightful)
Not even that. The 6000 year figure is from an Anglican Archbishop who had too much time on his hands, and a poor grasp of mathematics (for instance, he assumed that if someone were mentioned as dying at age 112, that that meant he died on his 112th birthday.)
Why ANYONE would take an Anglican Archbishop's opinion as the unaltered word of God is beyond me. Though it's obvious why the militant atheists would (they think it makes the religious look dumb), though those of us who know where the figure comes from think that its use by militant atheists makes the militant atheists look dumb....
Re:All Languages Linked To Common Source (Score:5, Informative)
.... you do realise that the athiests aren't the ones claiming the world is 6000 years old right?
There's a decent number of people who genuinely believe it along with a lot of other very very silly things.
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> Jesus wouldn't say "For millions of years" because he believes his father only made us 4,000 years ago.
I was going to mod you down for ignorant but then you wouldn't know the reason why.
At the risk of being a prick: [citation required]
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that wasn't Hawking contributing to a Pink Floyd song. It was an old British Telecom commercial, which was sampled by Pink Floyd. The voice, of course, was Hawking.
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The words are those of Stephen Hawking speaking through his speech synthesiser. The phrases he speaks are sampled from a British Telecommunications commercial that Gilmour heard after the song was otherwise completed. Gilmour liked it so much (said it almost brought him to tears) that he asked BT if he could sample it.
you can here it here [youtube.com]
the original advert can be seen and heard here [youtube.com]
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Was it named Babel?
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Humans aren't special at all!
Re:All Languages Linked To Common Source (Score:4, Insightful)
That'd be the green plants, you know, the ones that released huge quantities of a poisonous gas, destroying 98% of life on earth.
Humans are pathetic by comparison.
Re:All Languages Linked To Common Source (Score:5, Insightful)
That'd be the green plants, you know, the ones that released huge quantities of a poisonous gas, destroying 98% of life on earth.
Humans are pathetic by comparison.
Awesome post! Please allow me to elaborate for those that didn't get it.
Oxygen IS pollution produced by photosynthesizing organisms. Before plants, the earths atmosphere was radically different than it is today. There was almost no free oxygen in our atmosphere. Once life began to photosynthesize for energy, oxygen was released as a byproduct of that process, just as CO2 is a byproduct of our respiration. Oxygen is actually plant pollution. That pollution killed off nearly all of the early life on earth, radically changed the climate, and gave rise to what we have today.
So it appears that releasing gas that fundamentally changes the atmosphere is a completely natural, 100% organic function. If anything, by driving SUV's we are actually restoring our planet to it's natural, original condition before photosynthesis came along and screwed it all up!
Eat that, GW hippies!
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Sure! All species equally have sent members of their own and others into space, built great telescopes to discover there are other worlds out there and to observe the CMBR and discover the origin of the universe. They have all cured many diseases and altered their environment to the point of allowing them to live pretty much anywhere on or in the Earth.
You say that like it's a good thing.
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Flipper commented on this story just a few hours ago. He is on record as saying, well there is no good text to document dolphin statements. But it roughly translated to, "What mother of all mother fucking languages can you trace this statement to bitches!".
Patent nonsense. (Score:5, Funny)
Everybody knows the original language is English, as used by God to write the Bible.
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Re:Patent nonsense. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Patent nonsense. (Score:4, Funny)
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Somebody modded this "flamebait".
Slashdot has reached a new low point, we have to pander to the feelings of the know-nothings.
Are you complaining that someone got offended at your joke that was meant to offend? Basically, what you did was equivalent to telling a racial joke with members of %race% in the crowd and then bitching because some of them booed you. I do agree with you that the moderation was incorrect. I think "Troll" would be a more accurate mod.
With that said, I thought the joke was mildly funny and took little offense to it. Although, I found the response to your post about Jesuses reading The Bible in Spanish was
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But (Score:2)
Re:But (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Considering that toddlers quickly lose the ability to perceive alien phonemes, this isn't such a bad idea really.
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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 thin
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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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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.
Here's to human unity (Score:3)
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).
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I wouldn't read too much into it.
We also share a common genetic origin with mushrooms.
Re:Here's to human unity (Score:4, Insightful)
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).
Just because two people share some distant, obscure ancestor doesn't mean they won't try to kill each other. Heck, even if they share the same parents it doesn't always stop them. If we want people to stop blowing each other up, unfortunately we need something better than family ties.
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Just because two people share some distant, obscure ancestor doesn't mean they won't try to kill each other. Heck, even if they share the same parents it doesn't always stop them.
I'm just imagining how much trouble could have been prevented if Abraham had just said to Ishmael and Isaac "If you don't stop bickering I'm going to pull this camel over right now!"
As far as how to stop people from blowing each other up, the only way I can think of is to run out of explosives, although you can also limit things by convincing the top leadership of any group considering blowing something up that it is their solemn duty to go serve in the front lines. This would especially take care of groups
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I'm not sure what the logic you're trying to apply here is. That we have a common origin doesn't mean that we at any point have been united, since the first sibling rivalry we've fought man against man - and monkey against monkey before that, tribe against tribe, city against city, nation against nation, empire against empire. The strong have survived, the weak have been eradicated. When we've stood together it is usually because outside forces have threatened us all, an alliance of need not unity.
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 don't s
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So BASIC, C, and Lisp are all related? (Score:5, Funny)
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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But they clearly are not derived from the mother tongue, they *must* have been written by aliens.
Have you seen the syntax they expect? We're being sabotaged, I tell you!
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Of course all programming languages came from alien sources. All our computing technology came from outer space. Otherwise, how could Jeff Goldblum have written a virus and uploaded it to the alien mothership, thereby saving the entire human race?
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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.
Nope, Algol is a descendent from FORTRAN loins. Here's a nifty graphic describing the family tree:
http://www.levenez.com/lang/lang_letter.pdf [levenez.com]
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Levenez is a Johnny come lately.
Go back to the original scripture of Jean Sammet: "Computer Languages: History and Fundamentals" for the lowdown.
Notice that Levenez doesn't have Autocode (1952) in a spurious attempt to bolster the FORTRAN heresy.
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No, Fortran and Algol are clearly evidence of separate evolution (I mean, Algol, the name isn't a clue?).
C is interesting, it's proof of the alien hybridisation conspiracy, after the catastrophe of PL/1 they finally came up with something thats almost viable.
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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.
Why, yes! Of course they are related. And Common Lisp is the mother of all [wikipedia.org].
language (Score:4, Funny)
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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Phoneme counts (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Phoneme counts (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Phoneme counts (Score:5, Informative)
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...
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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...
Founder effects can occur with large groups, too. Think of two towns that speak the same language but have some noticeable variation between the two, for example, in one town they use the voiceless dental plosive, the other they use both the interdental fricative and the voiceless dental plosive. If these towns become isolated from each other evolving distinct languages, one will have fewer phonemes than the other. This is the founder effect.
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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.
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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
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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 plosive
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I realize that the number of phonemes doesn't have anything to do with intelligence, but what I'm talking about is the formation of a language from nothing. The simplest possible spoken language would be a single phoneme per meaning, correct? Thus the number of meanings, or words, you can produce are restricted to the number of phonemes sounds that can be physically produced. Thus you would be creating as many unique sounds as possible to be able to express the maximum number of meanings, which is why th
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Language didn't come from nothing, it evolve along with use.
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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
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Re:Phoneme counts (Score:5, Informative)
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?
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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.
will have more variations where it came about, and it actually makes intuitive sense. That's because the rate of change of will be slower than the rate of movement of the carriers (in this case people.) Example: Where are the most variations of English found? That's right, England. Go around on a train and talk to the locals, each area has it's own distinct accent. Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester. Very near each other, but different accents.
Go to America, and talk to people. They mostly came from a few
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Obviously, shouldn't have used the corner brackets. I should have written (Things that evolve) to start with. And "That's because the rate of change of (the thing) will"
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How did you come up with this startling theory.
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I'd be much more convinced if they had explanations for not just the lack of vocabulary between major language families, but the entirely different conceptions on sentence structure, concepts of what the language can represent readily and what it can't, etc, rather than just a rather flimsy, weak "number of phonemes" correlation. You know, as a native English speaker, I find the pronunciation of Icelandic pretty difficult (ég á erfitt með tannbergsmælt sveifluhljóð!), but you
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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 think
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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...
Re:Phoneme counts (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Great, another bad movie plot... (Score:2)
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...
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Been there, done that.
Spoiler: It was a 1:4:9:16 black monolith. (What, you think it stops at three dimensions?)
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Spoiler: It was a 1:4:9:16 black monolith. (What, you think it stops at three dimensions?)
You listed four... oh.
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You had me at "hot chick."
Cradle of Life & Language (Score:3, Insightful)
The "cradle of life" was apparently the same place that language originated?!
Astounding!
Africa gave us life and language, and now look at her =(
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- Look, a lion! Run.
- Fuck, it's hot around here!
- Damn, look at that ass!
- Gross, why do elephants have to shit so big?
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Dear Language Users of The World... (Score:3)
XOXOXO,
The Ancestral Ur Language.
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Whoosh [slashdot.org] (or maybe you got it - but for the sake of those who didn't).
Don't quite understand the premise (Score:3)
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.
Archeology and Religion too (Score:2)
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.
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Christians, Jews and Muslims place the origin to the Garden of Eden. Where that is or was isn't exactly placed, but is somewhere between Egypt and Assyria(Iraq). That's a great distance away from Southern Africa.
If you actually believe this guy and think that the "root" language came from africa and isn't what NotSanguine pointed out then you might want to see this [youtube.com].
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We still came from Africa. If we have Neandertal genes, it just means some part of our genome left Africa earlier than other parts.
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Neandertals descended from H. erectus, which did come out Africa. Your analogy is crap.
are languages complexifying or simplyfing? (Score:2)
Please dont cite computer languages as an example, because everyone knows that answer
Just a warning (Score:3)
Just a warning: if a crudely rendered naked chick opens a scroll at you DO NOT LOOK AT THE SCROLL!
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Clearly that will not be a problem for most of the people on this site.
Clearly thats when the Acent ... (Score:2)
Mother Tongue (Score:2)
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.
half a model? (Score:2)
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 mig
Shouldn't we be the group not to fall for this? (Score:2)
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 linguist
Neal Stephenson (Score:2)
I guess he was wrong when he posited Sumerian as the first language...
The Language Instinct (Score:2)
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 [amazon.com]
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 th
Re:Not what the Bible says. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Not what the Bible says. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Chimps (Score:5, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org], 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 [wikipedia.org] 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.