Posted on 11/26/2011 5:48:41 PM PST by SunkenCiv
Others suspect Atkinson's analytical approach could be fruitful if informed by more sophisticated assumptions about how languages change. "I think many linguists would praise Atkinson's contribution if it weren't for the fact that his conclusions are so outlandish and contrary to linguistic intuition," says linguist Michael Cysouw of Ludwig Maximilians University Munich in Germany.
One problem lies in Atkinson's focus on frequencies of only one linguistic element, phonemes, to retrace language evolution. "That could be compared to tracking the history of vertebrates by counting the number of bones in their skeletons," Cysouw says.
The database of phonemes consulted by Atkinson incorrectly gives greater weight to vowels and tones than to consonants, inflating the estimated number of speech sounds in western Africa where people speak languages that include clicks, Cysouw adds. In an analysis of a linguistic database corrected for such issues, he and his colleagues find the most phoneme-heavy tongues in North America. Languages of West Africa, New Guinea and Australia contain the fewest sounds.
Using this database, Cysouw's team repeated Atkinson's technique and found two separate geographic origins for language, one in East Africa and another in West Asia's Caucasus region, with a large swath of the Middle East and South Africa also possible. Crucially, Cysouw's analysis suggests that none of these regions contain phoneme-rich languages that stand out as having far more speech sounds than any of the others.
Linguist Florian Jaeger of the University of Rochester in New York agrees with Cysouw's criticisms. Many languages that Atkinson folds into his analysis belong to families that don't display declining phoneme numbers among speakers located at increasing distances from Africa...
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencenews.org ...
NO UNIVERSALS -- A study looking at how different word-order features depend on one another (line thickness indicates connection strength) suggests that Austronesian and Indo-European language families follow different word-order rules. Among four features expected to be strongly correlated (shaded background), only one link showed up in both families.M. Dunn et al/Nature 2011, adapted by E. Feliciano
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| GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach | |
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This hasn't been a great week for getting things done, and I do apologize. |
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Just you wait. ;’)
I was thinking about language yesterday (only saw the thread today) and wondered about how the complexity of a language corresponds to the development of a nation. Just wondering.
I doubt that it has any correspondence. The main reason for the development of a nation is population growth; next in importance is military technology. :’)
Cunning linguists . . .
And yet they use dictionaries, go figure...
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