Evolutionary Tools Help Unlock Origins Of Ancient Languages

Scientific American ^ | 9-23-2005 | Sarah Graham

[blam]

Evolutionary Tools Help Unlock Origins of Ancient Languages

The key to understanding how languages evolved may lie in their structure, not their vocabularies, a new report suggests. Findings published today in the journal Science indicate that a linguistic technique that borrows some features from evolutionary biology tools can unlock secrets of languages more than 10,000 years old.

Because vocabularies change so quickly, using them to trace how languages evolve over time can only reach back about 8,000 to 10,000 years. To study tongues from the Pleistocene, the period between 1.8 million and 10,000 years ago, Michael Dunn and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics developed a computer program that analyzes language based on how words relate to one another. They developed a database containing 125 "structural language features," which include traits such as verb placement within clauses, for two sets of languages. Sixteen Austronesian languages made up the first set; the second was composed of 15 Papuan languages. (The image above shows an outrigger sailing canoe in a region where languages from the two sets are spoken. Called Island Melanesia, it is east of Papua New Guinea and northeast of Australia.) When the researchers used the new approach to reveal historical connections between languages, the results for the Austronesian languages closely resembled previous results that were based on vocabulary.

In contrast, the vocabulary-based method could not yield results for the Papuan languages but the novel technique did. It suggests that the languages are related in ways that are consistent with geographic relationships between them. In an accompanying commentary, Russell Gray of the University of Auckland in New Zealand cautions that the new technique still has uncertainty. But he contends that the approach "is likely to be widely emulated by researchers working on languages in other regions. In the future we may see the development of Web-based databases for the languages of the world. " --Sarah Graham

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This @#$%^*! article is related to the topic.

Almost Before We Spoke, We Swore
by Natalie Angier
September 20, 2005

"The Jacobean dramatist Ben Jonson peppered his plays with fackings and "peremptorie Asses," and Shakespeare could hardly quill a stanza without inserting profanities of the day like "zounds" or "sblood" - offensive contractions of "God's wounds" and "God's blood" - or some wondrous sexual pun.

The title "Much Ado About Nothing," Dr. McWhorter said, is a word play on "Much Ado About an O Thing," the O thing being a reference to female genitalia.

Even the quintessential Good Book abounds in naughty passages like the men in II Kings 18:27 who, as the comparatively tame King James translation puts it, "eat their own dung, and drink their own piss."

[SunkenCiv]

similar story at the Slimes:

Linking of Languages May Speak Volumes
By NICHOLAS WADE
Published: September 27, 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/27/science/27lang.html

[SunkenCiv]

[SunkenCiv]

From Squeak to Syntax:
Language's Incremental Evolution
by Gary Marcus
April 11, 2006

Rather than emerging from scratch in the course of human evolution, FOXP2 has been evolving for several hundred million years -- in a way that placed it perfectly for evolving a critical role in language acquisition... FOXP2's lineage stems from a family of "forkhead" genes (named for a piece of the protein they produce). Forkhead genes have long been in the trade of managing the actions of other genes. (In the parlance of biology, they are "regulatory" genes.) In the forkhead lineage, many related genes emerged, each with a different function. FOXP2 evolved from a particular set of descendant genes that early in the history of vertebrates began to specialize for controlling muscles. Participation in motor control in turn placed FOXP2 in a prime position for evolving a role in vocal learning, as it did both in songbirds and in humans. FOXP2 is thus not a gene that was invented purely for the purpose of language... When tiny genetic differences are important -- when they correlate with survival -- they spread rapidly through the population, and that is exactly what has happened in the case of human FOXP2.

Forkhead genes have long been in the trade of managing the actions of other genes. And how does anyone know this? Because it has to be true, that's how! ;')

[SunkenCiv]

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