
Study finds 'mother of all languages' (spoken in pre-historic Africa) - sebkomianos
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/38/20110415/twl-study-finds-mother-of-all-languages-6ae0455.html
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ximeng
This article is better:

[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870454760457626...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704547604576262572791243528.html)

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://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2010/04/01/rspb.2010.0051.full.pdf)

[http://www.isita-
org.com/jass/Contents/2010vol88/PDFonline/J...](http://www.isita-
org.com/jass/Contents/2010vol88/PDFonline/Jass2010_18_Atkinson.pdf)

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"

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Afton
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
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.

~~~
athom
_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.

~~~
Afton
Same problem. No reason to think that historical change is 'complexification'
either. Lots of evidence in both directions.

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rlpb
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?

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ebiester
So. One sound. "Danger!" Another sound. "Help!" Another sound. "Food!"

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.

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irickt
[http://gameswithwords.fieldofscience.com/2011/04/missing-
lin...](http://gameswithwords.fieldofscience.com/2011/04/missing-linking-
hypothesis.html) 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.

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hansengel
If 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...](http://www.amazon.com/Power-Babel-Natural-History-
Language/dp/006052085X)].

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nivertech
Ubykh has 84 consonants, a record high amongst languages without click
consonants, but only 2 vowels.

Ubykh has the largest inventory of consonants outside Southern Africa.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubykh_language>

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techtalsky
Study finds 'language with a lot of phenomes'.

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JoeAltmaier
BASIC has a lot of different statement types (phonemes). It must be the mother
of all languages!

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ppod
statements would be morphemes wouldn't they? I think characters would be
phonemes... perl?

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sp332
APL, no doubt.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_syntax_and_symbols#Monadic_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_syntax_and_symbols#Monadic_functions)
Here's a video that shows how to make Conway's Game of Life in a single line
of APL:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?fmt=18&v=a9xAKttWgP4](http://www.youtube.com/watch?fmt=18&v=a9xAKttWgP4)

