Study finds 'mother of all languages' (spoken in pre-historic Africa)
1–10 of 17 posts
Re: Study finds 'mother of all languages' (spoken in pre-historic Africa)
#2gah!
"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.
Re: Study finds 'mother of all languages' (spoken in pre-historic Africa)
#3If 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...].
Re: Study finds 'mother of all languages' (spoken in pre-historic Africa)
#4Study finds 'language with a lot of phenomes'.
Re: Study finds 'mother of all languages' (spoken in pre-historic Africa)
#5This 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"
Re: Study finds 'mother of all languages' (spoken in pre-historic Africa)
#6http://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.
Re: Study finds 'mother of all languages' (spoken in pre-historic Africa)
#7BASIC has a lot of different statement types (phonemes). It must be the mother of all languages!
Re: Study finds 'mother of all languages' (spoken in pre-historic Africa)
#8gah! "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 ph…
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
Re: Study finds 'mother of all languages' (spoken in pre-historic Africa)
#9I 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?
Re: Study finds 'mother of all languages' (spoken in pre-historic Africa)
#10BASIC 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?