
Foods from agricultural lifestyles may have made it easier to form some sounds - Hooke
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/14/science/language-origins-agriculture.html
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Rotten194
Definitely interesting -- I haven't read the paper so I can't comment too
much, but I remember from my phonetics class in college that (IIRC) there
isn't a language that pronounces labiodentals with the bottom teeth against
the top lip, even though it's totally possible. The trend of overbites could
help explain this?

Definitely nothing to read into wrt the deeper development of language, though
-- having a greater variety of sounds doesn't actually correlate with any
higher-level information density or anything (languages with smaller, easier
to distinguish sound inventories that are less information-dense on a phonetic
level are in turn pronounced faster -- see
[http://rosettaproject.org/blog/02012/mar/1/language-speed-
vs...](http://rosettaproject.org/blog/02012/mar/1/language-speed-vs-density/))

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CharlesColeman
> For those living on a hunter-gatherer diet, overbites in the jaws and teeth
> in youth were often replaced in adulthood by what are called edge-to-edge
> bites, where front teeth sit atop one another. But with a softer diet,
> overbites may persist into adulthood.

This post from the other day goes into that aspect in more depth:

> Why Are Human Teeth So Messed Up? (2017) (sapiens.org):

>
> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19415973](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19415973)

After reading it, I was thinking if I have kids I'd try to feed them a tougher
diet so they wouldn't have so many teeth and bite issues. Now, after reading
this NYTimes article, I'm not so sure. The necessity of the cultural
adaptation to these bite issues seem to be far more important than avoiding
the negative anatomical changes that enabled them.

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sneakernets
"Some sounds", submitter?

Don't eat so many beans!

~~~
dang
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?

