Grammar Analysis Reveals Ancient Language Tree

Nature.com ^ | 9-22-2005 | Jennifer Wild

[blam]

Grammar analysis reveals ancient language tree

It's not the words, it's how you use them that counts.

Jennifer Wild

The languages used in Papua New Guinea have few common words, making it hard to determine their origins.

When it comes to working out the relationships between ancient languages, grammar is more enlightening than vocabulary, scientists say.

There are some 300 language families in the world today. Researchers have long studied similarities between the words in different languages to try to work out how they are related. But the rate of change in languages means that this method really only works back to 10,000 years ago.

Homo sapiens evolved more than a hundred thousand years ago and by 10,000 years ago had already settled around the globe. So researchers are keen to peer further back in time to see how language evolved and spread.

To do this, Michael Dunn and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Germany decided to look at grammar.

They took Papuan languages of people in the South Pacific as their challenge. Radiocarbon dating shows humans lived more than 35,000 years ago in Melanesia, a group of islands including Papua New Guinea. But the 23 languages that have evolved in this area share few, if any, common words. So the standard techniques cannot reveal much about the languages' histories.

The researchers made a database of 125 grammatical features in 15 Papuan languages. This included how word types, such as nouns and verbs, are ordered in a sentence, and whether nouns have a gender, as they do in languages such as German and French.

As a test case, the team did the same for 16 Austronesian languages - the languages of the Philippines, Indonesia and Southeast Asia - for which vocabulary analysis has already revealed evolutionary roots.

A computer program then analysed the data to determine ancestral language links. This produced up to 10,000 possible family trees and a 'consensus tree' that best fitted the data, the team reports in Science1.

The consensus tree for the Austronesian languages closely fitted the accepted lineage from previous study of vocabulary, which demonstrated the validity of the method. The consensus tree for the Papuan languages then revealed previously unknown relationships between those languages. The people of the Solomon Islands and Bougainville Island, for example, seem to be related in language. Perhaps these people were living in one community on a common land mass more than 10,000 years ago, the researchers suggest.

The tree will need further work before it can be validated, the researchers say. The team's next step is to apply this method to old languages in the Amazon.

[Artemis Webb]

"It was amazing to learn what an amalgam our language is!"

Yeah...and not only is English an amalgam...but it's got lots of different languages in it too! :)

[reformedliberal]

It is almost a full-time avocation to keep up w/this list!!

You guys could offer Internet courses, IMO. I certainly am learning a lot w/o having to read ALL the source references.

Many thanx!

[Right Wing Professor]

Probably best not to ping the list. The GGG guys would prefer if we kept the crevo discussion away from the GGG list, and I think that's a reasonable request. Yeah, it's relevant, but mention the E word, and you know what'll happen.

[PatrickHenry]

In the interest of comity among pinglists, I shall defer to blam.

[blam]

"The GGG guys would prefer if we kept the crevo discussion away from the GGG list, and I think that's a reasonable request. Yeah, it's relevant, but mention the E word, and you know what'll happen."

I appreciate that.

[Doctor Stochastic]

It's wrong to never split an infinitive.

[Plutarch]

So researchers are keen to peer further back in time to see how language evolved and spread.

These so-called “scientists” are using the unproven theory that languages “evolve”. The languages are actually due to Intelligent Design, as described in Genesis:

The Tower of Babel

1 And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.
2 And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.
3 And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar.
4 And they said, Go to, let us build us a city, and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
5 And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.
6 And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.
8 So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.
9 Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

[TomSmedley]

In many ways, English is a pidgin of Danish, Anglo-Saxon, and Norman French...

Actually, more of a "creole." Pidgen is a first-generation compromise trade/slave language. The children of pidgen speakers sythesize the grammar and speak a creole. The word "pidgen" comes from the English word "business" as modified for/by Chinese speakers doing business in the 19th century capitulations. The same time and place gave us the word "mandarin," derived from the Portugeuse verb mandero -- I command.

According to an old English professor, about 20% of our current vocabulary traces back to Anglo Saxon -- but those are the structural/skeletal words we use 80% of the time. English poetry is the most beautiful in the world, Dr. Stanley Ward explained, since our language is a shotgun wedding of conflicting traditions. Poets can draw from several different containers to find the most apt word. In common parlance, the only time a French equivalent is more common than the Anglo Saxon word is enemy/foe.

Kemal Atatürk, father of modern Turkish, ruthlessly purged his language of non-native words. The "Osmanli" he spoke got about 80% of its vocabulary from Arabic, Persian, and French. Today, that number is around 20% -- so Turkish kids can no longer read the "Nutuk," Atatürk's six day speech, in the language he used.

It can be argued that "language reform" is a revolutionary activity, designed to cut a people off from their roots, their traditions. Other examples of this process include "simplified Mao script," and the displacing of the King James Bible as the core of literate English.

[Question_Assumptions]

Good point about creole being a better word. As for the structural/skeletal words being Anglo-Saxon, I suspect that they change the least because they are learned the earliest by children. I also wonder if the "ask"/"aks" shift, which goes back to Anglo-Saxon ("asken" and "aksen"), as well as some other shifts in structural/skeletal words don't occur more commonly in certain lower classes when those structural/skeletal words aren't used or excercised as often. A child who isn't reminded to "ask" before they take something isn't going to be as practiced saying a word that is a bit of a tongue twister than a child who hears it and says it often. Basically, I suspect that children who don't properly learn the sometimes baroque mix of Anglo-Saxon core words when they are very young will tend to mess them up when they are old.

[livius]

And then there's Catalan, which has spawned a whole industry of people who sit around trying to think up replacements for Spanish (castellano) words that have been in use in Northern Spain for centuries and were probably even invented there. But once nationalism gets in, rationality goes out.

[LiteKeeper]

read later

[Ichneumon]

For balance: The development of languages is nothing like biological evolution

Well, now we can add the evolution of languages to the long list of things that Answers In Genesis either doesn't understand, or is willing to distort in order to attack biology.

Yeah, languages are "nothing like" biological evolution, once you ignore the most important factors like common descent, acquired characteristics, adaptation, intermixing, random drift, divergence of isolated subpopulations, and all the other most significant things that they have in common.

But then since AiG consistently misunderstands/misrepresents evolutionary biology, it's hardly any surprise that they wouldn't spot the obvious features in common between biological evolution and linguistic evolution (and/or attempt to deny the obvious).

(Warning! Frevolutionists! Do not click! Semi-technical!)

Thanks for the warning -- you're right, we "Frevolutionists" prefer things that are *actually* technical, instead of merely "semi" technical (which in this case would have been better described as "half-***ed").

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks!

[decimon]

Is that Right Wing Professor? ;-)

Yes. That is quite conservative for San Francisco.

[Spirited]

I second the "Many Thanx!" sentiment.

[SunkenCiv]

You're most welcome.

[dsc]

To: Right Wing Professor; PatrickHenry

"The GGG guys would prefer if we kept the crevo discussion away from the GGG list, and I think that's a reasonable request. Yeah, it's relevant, but mention the E word, and you know what'll happen."

I appreciate that.

27 posted on 09/27/2005 2:14:03 PM PDT by blam

[SunkenCiv]