Lost languages leave traces on the brain | Hacker News Reader

Lost languages leave traces on the brain

arstechnica.com

45 pointssanxion5 comments

> "There may also be implications for learning the lost languages: people with forgotten exposure to languages may be able to learn that language faster, or more completely, than people with no exposure at all."

Coming soon: baby-upload immersion centers!

Baby-upload radios and websites more probably. Why bring baby to the sound if you can bring sound to the baby.

I enjoyed this article. It was quite different than what I expected.

By lost languages, I expected something along the lines of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) or another protolingual system, which would be so cool to have left some markers on our brains.

Here's an example of how PIE possibly sounded: How to Speak Proto-Indo-European http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jlcV7DYL3o

Does anyone know if there are vestigial neuronal constructs, similar to vestigial organs or genes, which could help us better understand our languages' origins through brain imaging studies? See also: Murray Gell-Mann: The ancestor of language http://www.ted.com/talks/murray_gell_mann_on_the_ancestor_of...

Historical languages would not leave any traces on the brain, because languages evolve at a much faster rate than biology. We believe that language is a phenomenon that is 60,000 to 100,000 years old, which is an evolutionary blink of an eye.

This is perhaps a problem with the theory of "universal grammar", which says that language itself is an evolved instinct in the brain. When was the mass extinction of humans without universal grammar? Shouldn't we be assuming that the brain processes we use for language evolved in the slow, haphazard way that everything else evolved, and asking what else we use this instinct for besides language?

Those questions I'm asking are in fact hugely controversial in linguistics, because UG has been an established theory of linguistics for decades, despite that when you take it too literally it makes no evolutionary sense, and weaker forms of it don't make enough testable predictions.

On the other hand, I believe Murray Gell-Mann is beyond controversial in linguistics, as in no linguists who take themselves seriously take Gell-Mann seriously. There's no evidence to tell us whether there was one "Proto-Human" language or many, and there certainly is no data to support Gell-Mann's conjectures about specific properties of Proto-Human.

It feels a bit wrong to conclude this with "argumentam ad cartoonist", but here's SMBC lampooning Gell-Mann: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2556#comic

Interesting, i got switched to English language at age 5 or so. With the article's emphasis on tone language as the first, "lost" language, maybe this is related to early musical training[1]:

    enhanced white matter in the corpus callosum

[1] http://www.concordia.ca/cunews/main/releases/2013/02/12/earl...

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