How Diet May Have Changed the Way Humans Speak (go.com) 45
"Ancient hunter-gathererers often had front teeth that met together, unlike today's more common alignment where the upper front teeth 'overbite' the lower front teeth," writes Slashdot reader omfglearntoplay. "This malocclusion is a result of changes to the ancestral human diet and introduction of soft foods, according to a new study published in the journal Science." ABC News reports: More than 2,000 different sounds exist across the roughly 7,000 to 8,000 languages that humans speak today, from ubiquitous cardinal vowels such as "a" and "i" to the rare click consonants found in southern Africa. Scientists had long thought this range of sounds was fixed in human biology since at least the emergence of our species about 300,000 years ago. However, in 1985, linguist Charles Hockett noted that labiodentals -- sounds produced by positioning the lower lip against the upper teeth, including "f" and "v" -- are overwhelmingly absent in languages whose speakers are hunter-gatherers. He suggested tough foods associated with such diets favored bites where teeth met edge on edge, and that people with such teeth would find it difficult to pronounce labiodentals, which are nowadays found in nearly half the world's languages.
To explore Hockett's idea further, researchers developed computer models of the human skull, teeth and jaw in overbite, overjet and edge-on-edge bite configurations. They next analyzed the amount of effort these configurations needed to pronounce certain labiodental sounds. The scientists found that overbites and overjets required 29 percent less muscular effort to produce labiodental sounds than edge-on-edge bites. In addition, overbites and overjets made it easier to accidentally mispronounce bilabial sounds such as "m," "w" or "p," which are made by placing the lips together, as labiodental ones. The researchers also discovered that hunter-gatherer societies only have about 27 percent the number of labiodentals found in agricultural societies.
"Moreover, when they focused on the Indo-European language family -- which stretches from Iceland to the eastern Indian state of Assam and has records stretching back more than 2,500 years on how sounds in some of its languages were pronounced -- they found the use of labiodentals increased steadily following the development of agriculture," the report says. "All in all, they estimated that labiodentals only had a 3 percent chance of existing in the Indo-European proto-language that emerged about 6,000 to 8,000 years ago but are now found in 76 percent of the family's languages."
To explore Hockett's idea further, researchers developed computer models of the human skull, teeth and jaw in overbite, overjet and edge-on-edge bite configurations. They next analyzed the amount of effort these configurations needed to pronounce certain labiodental sounds. The scientists found that overbites and overjets required 29 percent less muscular effort to produce labiodental sounds than edge-on-edge bites. In addition, overbites and overjets made it easier to accidentally mispronounce bilabial sounds such as "m," "w" or "p," which are made by placing the lips together, as labiodental ones. The researchers also discovered that hunter-gatherer societies only have about 27 percent the number of labiodentals found in agricultural societies.
"Moreover, when they focused on the Indo-European language family -- which stretches from Iceland to the eastern Indian state of Assam and has records stretching back more than 2,500 years on how sounds in some of its languages were pronounced -- they found the use of labiodentals increased steadily following the development of agriculture," the report says. "All in all, they estimated that labiodentals only had a 3 percent chance of existing in the Indo-European proto-language that emerged about 6,000 to 8,000 years ago but are now found in 76 percent of the family's languages."
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Slashdot ate my non-English quotation mark start. The quote was supposed to be: "In the Trump Administration, Science Is Unwelcome. So Is Advice."
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Slashdot ate my non-English quotation mark start. The quote was supposed to be: "In the Trump Administration, Science Is Unwelcome. So Is Advice."
I wonder if eating your non-English quotation mark made /. talk any different?
Comme pour moi, Dave Lister's Chicken Vindaloo a la Red Dwarf always made me talk funny.
--
Holly : Jean-Paul Sartre said hell was being locked forever in a room with your friends.
Lister : Holly, all his mates were French.
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Slashdot ate my non-English quotation mark start. The quote was supposed to be: "In the Trump Administration, Science Is Unwelcome. So Is Advice."
Slashdot also dines on English typographic quotation marks, forcing you to use the same ASCII quotes that our hunter-gatherer forebears used in the nineteen hundreds. I suppose Jared Diamond would be proud.
"overjet" (Score:2, Informative)
From: https://www.metamorphosisorthodontics.com/blog/what-is-overjet-and-how-can-it-be-fixed [metamorpho...ontics.com]
What is ‘overjet’?
Overjet describes what happens when the top front teeth point outwards, or protrude, over the bottom teeth towards the lip. It is also known as ‘protrusion’. In the past it was common to call it ‘buck teeth’.
Protruded upper teeth are often due to having a lower jaw that’s underdeveloped in proportion to the upper jaw.
This condition can cause embarrassment an
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to the rare click consonants found in southern Africa.
They're not actually that rare, it's a purely artificial scarcity caused by de Beers cornering the mining sources and creating artificial scarcity to drive up demand. For example they have entire vaults full of click consonants in the major trading centres in places like Europe, but only release them to approved buyers.
Dammit. No mod points today.
Re: Ask an Aglophone to say "R". (Score:2, Interesting)
I thought it was illegal for you Germans to display this level of nationalism. Please don't make us come back to visit.
Puck you (Score:1)
Ebb words are for ebbheminate pruit eaters. I'm a carnibore, you insensitibe clod!
Wrong link (Score:5, Informative)
Wrong ABC link (something about colorado river) in the summary.
See: https://abcnews.go.com/Technol... [go.com]
Huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
The suggestion that tougher-food diets are better dealt with by edge-to-edge FRONT teeth (on which then a raft of speculation is floated) doesn't make sense?
The front teeth are for grabbing & portioning; that is, they hold food and then sever it for processing by other teeth. Therefore their primary task is to cut food (that they can; more durable foods are dealt with by the canines) not grind it.
The most efficient way of cutting cuttable things is SHEARING, meaning two adjacent cutting planes moving next to each other (Cf scissors)...ie the way our teeth are now. Pinch cutting ala wire-cutters is useful only with a fairly narrow range of substances above a certain thickness and rigidity.
In fact, the only teeth in mammals that are edge-edge are grinding molars, so unless he's suggesting that we had molars for front teeth, the whole theory collapses.
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Actually, I *DID* address that.
Tearing or ripping anything more than 'easy' is not typically done with the incisors; the tearing teeth are the canines...which ALSO shear-cut, they just just a) better leverage and b) are pointy, allowing better penetration of tough surfaces as well.
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I'm curios about the claim that agricultural society favored the condition. Middle-age skulls are much more likely to have no over-bite and it was suggested that the rougher food, i.e. stones in the flour was responsible of giving people normal skull development. Now this summary suggests that it is about genetics over much longer time periods instead of being a developmental problem of the recent centuries. How the information and times change.
Definitely true. (Score:4, Interesting)
Vegan diet gives them a condescending tone towards others.
Surprising! (Score:2)