

Lost languages leave traces on the brain - sanxion
http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/11/lost-languages-leave-traces-on-the-brain/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+arstechnica%2Findex+%28Ars+Technica+-+All+content%29

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walterbell
> _" There may also be implications for learning the lost languages: people
> with forgotten exposure to languages may be able to learn that language
> faster, or more completely, than people with no exposure at all."_

Coming soon: baby-upload immersion centers!

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ajuc
Baby-upload radios and websites more probably. Why bring baby to the sound if
you can bring sound to the baby.

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mitchtbaum
I enjoyed this article. It was quite different than what I expected.

By lost languages, I expected something along the lines of Proto-Indo-European
(PIE) or another protolingual system, which would be so cool to have left some
markers on our brains.

Here's an example of how PIE possibly sounded: How to Speak Proto-Indo-
European
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jlcV7DYL3o](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jlcV7DYL3o)

Does anyone know if there are vestigial neuronal constructs, similar to
vestigial organs or genes, which could help us better understand our
languages' origins through brain imaging studies? See also: Murray Gell-Mann:
The ancestor of language
[http://www.ted.com/talks/murray_gell_mann_on_the_ancestor_of...](http://www.ted.com/talks/murray_gell_mann_on_the_ancestor_of_language?language=en)

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rspeer
Historical languages would not leave any traces on the brain, because
languages evolve at a _much_ faster rate than biology. We believe that
language is a phenomenon that is 60,000 to 100,000 years old, which is an
evolutionary blink of an eye.

This is perhaps a problem with the theory of "universal grammar", which says
that language itself is an evolved instinct in the brain. When was the mass
extinction of humans without universal grammar? Shouldn't we be assuming that
the brain processes we use for language evolved in the slow, haphazard way
that everything else evolved, and asking what else we use this instinct for
besides language?

Those questions I'm asking are in fact hugely controversial in linguistics,
because UG has been an established theory of linguistics for decades, despite
that when you take it too literally it makes no evolutionary sense, and weaker
forms of it don't make enough testable predictions.

On the other hand, I believe Murray Gell-Mann is beyond controversial in
linguistics, as in no linguists who take themselves seriously take Gell-Mann
seriously. There's no evidence to tell us whether there was one "Proto-Human"
language or many, and there certainly is no data to support Gell-Mann's
conjectures about specific properties of Proto-Human.

It feels a bit wrong to conclude this with "argumentam ad cartoonist", but
here's SMBC lampooning Gell-Mann: [http://www.smbc-
comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2556#comic](http://www.smbc-
comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2556#comic)

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gtani
Interesting, i got switched to English language at age 5 or so. With the
article's emphasis on tone language as the first, "lost" language, maybe this
is related to early musical training[1]:

    
    
        enhanced white matter in the corpus callosum
    

[1]
[http://www.concordia.ca/cunews/main/releases/2013/02/12/earl...](http://www.concordia.ca/cunews/main/releases/2013/02/12/early-
music-lessons-boost-brain-development.html)

