Study finds 'mother of all languages' (spoken in pre-historic Africa) | Hacker News Reader

Study finds 'mother of all languages' (spoken in pre-historic Africa)

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39 pointssebkomianos16 comments

This article is better:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870454760457626...

Comments from someone who reviewed the paper and was skeptical of the findings are available at:

http://www.cslu.ogi.edu/~sproatr/newindex/atkinson.html

There are links to some of his other papers on the guy's home page (http://www.psych.auckland.ac.nz/uoa/quentin-atkinson/), here's two on related topics:

http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2010/04...

http://www.isita-org.com/jass/Contents/2010vol88/PDFonline/J...

Interesting quote from the second paper, which looks at vocabulary changes in languages:

"Recent work has also shown that rates of lexical change are predictable based on the frequency of use and part of speech (Pagel et al. 2007) and that some meanings have a lexical ‘half-life’—the time after which there is a 50 per cent chance that the word is replaced—in excess of 20 000 year"

gah!

"He analysed the number of phonemes found in 504 world languages, and hypothesized that languages with the most phonemes were the oldest. Also, the dialects furthest away from the 'mother tongue' were found to be less complicated."

I'd like to see the original study, since this sounds like simplistic analysis and circular reasoning.

long-story short: there's no reason to think that we started out with lots of phonemes and that these have been whittled away over time. Historical change shows lots of instances of new phoneme generation in languages. This 'historical change is simplification' meme is either wrong or contentless.

Put that way, it sounds like a scene from Pygmalion where the doctor can distinguish a bunch of distinct vowel sounds in a continuous "eeeooouuu" sound, and is therefore esteemed an expert in spoken languages - at least by himself. If your summary is true, it's a bit more like this parody: http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=280

there's no reason to think that we started out with lots of phonemes and that these have been whittled away over time

I suspect the reasoning is more along the lines of languages picking up more phonemes over time, such that older languages, having been around longer, would have picked up more phonemes.

Same problem. No reason to think that historical change is 'complexification' either. Lots of evidence in both directions.

I had assumed that the first language would only have one sound (say for "danger") and thus only one phoneme. Why would the first language develop the most phonemes, and then lose them as people migrate out of the area?

So. One sound. "Danger!" Another sound. "Help!" Another sound. "Food!"

Coming up with a new sounds becomes progressively more difficult, not to mention the problems with similar sounds when in a loud area (IE rushing river, the hunt). Some protohuman gets the idea to combine two phonemes. Well, that's going to make things simpler later on, but you already have all these phonemes, you're going to use them.

As people move, they encounter more needs for words (new animals, etc) so each group figures out the phonemes that work best for their combinations (The clicks go out of style) but stagnant groups tend not to change as much. Thus, the phonemes stay in sub-Saharan Africa, and disappear elsewhere.

http://gameswithwords.fieldofscience.com/2011/04/missing-lin... raises some questions about the reasoning. In short, while it's a very interesting data set and a plausible conclusion, a number of conjectures need to be studied further. AKA the progress of science.

If you're into this sort of stuff, John McWhorter describes this theory and many others in his introductory book to (mostly historical) linguistics, The Power of Babel [http://www.amazon.com/Power-Babel-Natural-History-Language/d...].

Ubykh has 84 consonants, a record high amongst languages without click consonants, but only 2 vowels.

Ubykh has the largest inventory of consonants outside Southern Africa.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubykh_language

Study finds 'language with a lot of phenomes'.

BASIC has a lot of different statement types (phonemes). It must be the mother of all languages!

statements would be morphemes wouldn't they? I think characters would be phonemes... perl?

Assembler then - hundreds of opcode mnemonics. And you could actually make a case for it being the mother language.

APL, no doubt. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_syntax_and_symbols#Monadic_... Here's a video that shows how to make Conway's Game of Life in a single line of APL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?fmt=18&v=a9xAKttWgP4

I'm sorry, but that award goes to another: PL/1

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