11–17 of 17 posts
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?
BASIC has a lot of different statement types (phonemes). It must be the mother of all languages!
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?
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?
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.
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 ph…
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.
Ubykh has the largest inventory of consonants outside Southern Africa.
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 ph…
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.