Africa the Birthplace of Human Language, Analysis Suggests

[n2doc]

ScienceDaily (Apr. 15, 2011) — Psychologists from The University of Auckland have just published two major studies on the diversity of the world's languages in the journals Science and Nature.

The first study, published in Science by Dr Quentin Atkinson, provides strong evidence for Africa as the birthplace of human language.

An analysis of languages from around the world suggests that, like our genes, human speech originated -- just once -- in sub-Saharan Africa. Atkinson studied the phonemes, or the perceptually distinct units of sound that differentiate words, used in 504 human languages today and found that the number of phonemes is highest in Africa and decreases with increasing distance from Africa.

The fewest phonemes are found in South America and on tropical islands in the Pacific Ocean. This pattern fits a "serial founder effect" model in which small populations on the edge of an expansion progressively lose diversity. Dr Atkinson notes that this pattern of phoneme usage around the world mirrors the pattern of human genetic diversity, which also declined as humans expanded their range from Africa to colonise other regions.


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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/04/110415165500.htm

[doc03]

1. So since Obama was born in Kenya that explains why

he is such a good speechifier.:tinfoilhat:

[Igel]

2. And I think phonologists should start publishing articles on psychology.

After all, they know at least as much as so-called experts.

Geesh. Give people computers and access to things like UPSID and they turn into freaking GIGO dancers. Or, in this case, GI-GOGO dancers (using a bit of reduplication to indicate durativity and intensity of action).

It's fairly well established that long-term isolation tends to build complex phoneme systems. Africa was rife with isolated communities. Austronesia? Not so rife, paradoxically enough. Spread was relatively recent and into virgin territories (or territories sufficiently virgin that we can't see previous occupants in the record). In many other places there was enough language mixing and levelling to dispose of quirky phonemic inventories, and often the overrunning and dissolution of entire families took place; isolates tended to assimilate quite a bit. Even a lot of language spreading in Africa tends to be a bit of a mystery; I haven't heard a good explanation as to how Tigrinya and Ge'ez managed to get where they are, but spread they obviously did.

There's also the problem of the distribution of documented languages. UPSID and like databases tend to have well-studied languages in them. Things like Swahili, probably creolized at some point (regardless of what some current nationalism-based advocates try to claim) get documented and included; Nweh doesn't.

It's also well established that entire language families tend to, for whatever reason, have oddball phonemic systems. Africa has the San languages. They're weird enough for several families, as far as their phonemic inventories. No weirder in size, however, than the Caucasian languages. And, in both cases, the entire question of "phonemic" is a problem: You pick your analysis, you get your inventory.

In any event, between isolation-induced and self-reinforcing (through contact) complexity in phonemic systems, you can easily overwhelm the patterns in linguistic typology.

Since somebody mentioned Kenya, take Luo. It's traditionally analysed as having vowels that are either +ATR and -ATR. On the other hand, it has tongue-root harmony for suffixes. So does this mean that +/- ATR is actually a phonemic property of vowels or of the entire word? Perhaps it's a property of the consonants? Segmental phonology doesn't "like" having features float; if we let the ATR properties float, we've just halved the phonemic inventory. In many San languages there's the question as to whether the vowels or the consonants bear certain features--and we tend to go with what is simpler, where "simpler" is often not based on a phoneme count but on theoretical elegance.

That said, given that language is a human trait the claim is well founded. It's just unclear that this particular article actually says much about it.

There's a long history of this sort of article. In almost every case the claims are accessible and hailed as meaningful. Then linguists look at the methodology and at the data, and within a year the overall linguistic-community consensus is that the research is shoddy and pathetic. Looks good at first, until you look at all the data. By then the public's assimilated the article and don't care about data. One from perhaps 2002 or 2003 comes to mind, where somebody did some sort of cladistic analysis and came up with some utterly meaningless conclusion. Got published in a reputable journal. It vanished, though, and didn't even merit a retraction--it's unclear the authors understood the critiques well enough to realize that their data was rubbish and their methodology overlooked some key facts about language contact.

[Phoonzang]

3. Um...if humankind originated from Africa, why would Africa not be the birthplace of language?