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The Origins & Evolution Of Human Language / Languages

I think I could shoehorn this into the thread.

Thoughts within thoughts make us human
12:07 3 June 2011
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/cultu ... human.html

Cogito ergo sum - I think, therefore I am - was coined by René Descartes in 1637. He was struggling to find a solid philosophical basis for how we know about reality and truth.

This is also turns out to be of the most famous examples of recursion, the process of embedding ideas within ideas that humans seem to do so effortlessly. So effortlessly and so skilfully, in fact, that it's beginning to look like the one true dividing line between animals and humans that may hold up to close scrutiny.

That's the hope of Michael Corballis, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. His new book, The Recursive Mind: The origins of human language, thought, and civilization, is a fascinating and well-grounded exposition of the nature and power of recursion.

In its ultra-reasonable way, this is quite a revolutionary book because it attacks key notions about language and thought. Most notably, it disputes the idea, argued especially by linguist Noam Chomsky, that thought is fundamentally linguistic - in other words, you need language before you can have thoughts.


Chomsky's influential theory of universal grammar has been modified considerably since its origins in the 1960s, but it is still supported by many linguists. Its key idea is that the human mind has evolved an innate capacity for language and that all languages share some universal forms, constrained by the way we think. Corballis reckons instead that the thought processes that made language possible were non-linguistic, but had recursive properties to which language adapted: "Where Chomsky views thought through the lens of language, I prefer to view language though the lens of thought." From this, says Corballis, follows a better understanding of how humans actually think - and a very different perspective on language and its evolution.

So how did recursion help ancient humans pull themselves up by their cognitive bootstraps? It allowed us to engage in mental time travel, says Corballis, the recursive operation whereby we recall past episodes into present consciousness and imagine future ones, and sometimes even insert fictions into reality.

We are on our own with this degree of recursion. Chimps, bonobos and orangutans just don't tell stories, paint pictures, write music or make films - there are no great ape equivalents of Hamlet or Inception. Similarly, theory of mind is uniquely highly developed in humans: I may know not only what you are thinking, says Corballis, but also that you know what I am thinking. Most - but not all - language depends on this capability.

If he's right, Corballis's theories also help make sense of apparent anomalies such as linguist and anthropologist Daniel's Everett's work on the Pirahã, an Amazonian people who hit the headlines because of debates over whether their language has any words for colours, and, crucially, numbers. Corballis now thinks that the Pirahã language may not be that unusual, and cites the example of other languages from oral cultures, such as the Iatmul language of New Guinea, which is also said to lack recursion.

The emerging point is that recursion developed in the mind and need not be expressed in a language. But, as Corballis is at pains to point out, although recursion was critical to the evolution of the human mind, it is not one of those "modules" much beloved of evolutionary psychologists, many of which are said to have evolved in the Pleistocene. Nor did it depend on some genetic mutation or the emergence of some new neuron or brain structure. Instead, he suggests it came of progressive increases in short-term memory and capacity for hierarchical organisation - all dependent in turn on incremental increases in brain size.

But as Corballis admits, this brain size increase was especially rapid in the Pleistocene. These incremental changes can lead to sudden more substantial jumps - think water boiling or balloons popping. In mathematics these shifts are called catastrophes. So, notes Corballis, wryly, "we may perhaps conclude that the emergence of the human mind was catastrophic".

Let's hope that's not too prescient.

Book information
The Recursive Mind: The origins of human language, thought, and civilization by Michael Corballis
Princeton University Press
$29.95/£20.95
 
Mother tongue comes from your prehistoric father
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-09-mot ... ather.html

September 9th, 2011 in Other Sciences / Archaeology & Fossils

(PhysOrg.com) -- Language change among our prehistoric ancestors came about via the arrival of immigrant men - rather than women - into new settlements, according to new research.

The claim is made by two University of Cambridge academics, Peter Forster and Colin Renfrew, in a report to be published in Science on September 9.
They studied the instances of genetic markers (the male Y chromosome and female mtDNA) from several thousand individuals in communities around the world that seem to show the emergence globally of sex-specific transmission of language.

From Scandinavian Vikings who ferried kidnapped British women to Iceland – to African, Indian and Polynesian tribes, a pattern has emerged which appears to show that the arrival of men to particular geographic locations – through either agricultural dispersal or the arrival of military forces – can have a significant impact on what language is spoken there.
Professor Renfrew said: “It may be that during colonisation episodes by emigrating agriculturalists, men generally outnumber women in the pioneering groups and take wives from the local community.

“When the parents have different linguistic backgrounds, it may often be the language of the father which is dominant within the family group.”
Dr Forster also pointed to the fact that men have a greater variance in offspring than women – they are more likely to father children with different mothers than vice versa. This has been recorded both in prehistoric tribes such as the 19th and 20th century Polar Eskimos from Greenland and in historic figures like Genghis Khan, who is believed to have fathered hundreds of children.

Indeed, his Y chromosome is carried by 0.5 per cent of the world’s male population today.

Perhaps the most striking example of sex-biased language change however comes from a genetic study on the prehistoric encounter of expanding Polynesians with resident Melanesians in New Guinea and the neighbouring Admiralty Islands. The New Guinean coast contains pockets of Polynesian-speaking areas separated by Melanesian areas. The Polynesian mtDNA level (40-50%) is similar in these areas regardless of language, whereas the Y chromosome correlates strongly with the presence of Polynesian languages.
Past studies have shown similar findings in the Indian subcontinent among the speakers of Tibeto-Burman and among the immigrant Indo-European languages as opposed to indigenous Dravidian languages.

In the Americas, too, language replacement in the course of postulated farming dispersal has also been found to correlate for the Uto-Aztecan language family.

Added Forster: “Whether in European, Indian, Chinese or other languages, the expression ‘mother tongue’ and its concept is firmly embedded in popular imagination – perhaps this is the reason why for so many years the role of fathers, or more likely, specific groups of successful males, in determining prehistoric language switches has not been recognised by geneticists.”

“Prehistoric women may have more readily adopted the language of immigrant males, particularly if these newcomers brought with them military prowess or a perceived higher status associated with farming or metalworking.

“We’re very grateful to all those thousands of people across the world who participated in our DNA ancestry tests and thereby contributed to our research.”

Provided by University of Cambridge
 
Science decodes 'internal voices'
By Jason Palmer, Science and technology reporter, BBC News

Researchers have demonstrated a striking method to reconstruct words, based on the brain waves of patients thinking of those words.
The technique reported in PLoS Biology relies on gathering electrical signals directly from patients' brains.
Based on signals from listening patients, a computer model was used to reconstruct the sounds of words that patients were thinking of.
The method may in future help comatose and locked-in patients communicate.

Several approaches have in recent years suggested that scientists are closing in on methods to tap into our very thoughts.
In a 2011 study, participants with electrodes in direct brain contact were able to move a cursor on a screen by simply thinking of vowel sounds.

A technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging to track blood flow in the brain has shown promise for identifying which words or ideas someone may be thinking about.
By studying patterns of blood flow related to particular images, Jack Gallant's group at the University of California Berkeley showed in September that patterns can be used to guess images being thought of - recreating "movies in the mind".

Now, Brian Pasley of the University of California, Berkeley and a team of colleagues have taken that "stimulus reconstruction" work one step further.
"This is inspired by a lot of Jack's work," Dr Pasley said. "One question was... how far can we get in the auditory system by taking a very similar modelling approach?"

The team focused on an area of the brain called the superior temporal gyrus, or STG.
This broad region is not just part of the hearing apparatus but one of the "higher-order" brain regions that help us make linguistic sense of the sounds we hear.

The team monitored the STG brain waves of 15 patients who were undergoing surgery for epilepsy or tumours, while playing audio of a number of different speakers reciting words and sentences.
The trick is disentangling the chaos of electrical signals that the audio brought about in the patients' STG regions.

To do that, the team employed a computer model that helped map out which parts of the brain were firing at what rate, when different frequencies of sound were played.
With the help of that model, when patients were presented with words to think about, the team was able to guess which word the participants had chosen.
They were even able to reconstruct some of the words, turning the brain waves they saw back into sound on the basis of what the computer model suggested those waves meant.

"There's a two-pronged nature of this work - one is the basic science of how the brain does things," said Robert Knight of UC Berkeley, senior author of the study.

"From a prosthetic view, people who have speech disorders... could possibly have a prosthetic device when they can't speak but they can imagine what they want to say," Prof Knight explained.
"The patients are giving us this data, so it'd be nice if we gave something back to them eventually."

The authors caution that the thought-translation idea is still to be vastly improved before such prosthetics become a reality.
But the benefits of such devices could be transformative, said Mindy McCumber, a speech therapist at Florida Hospital in Orlando.
"As a therapist, I can see potential implications for the restoration of communication for a wide range of disorders," she told BBC News.
"The development of direct neuro-control over virtual or physical devices would revolutionise 'augmentative and alternative communication', and improve quality of life immensely for those who suffer from impaired communication skills or means."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16811042
 
It's an amazing coincidence that this technology should pop up, because I have recently been thinking about it and doing a little bit of low-key research of my own (I was thinking of writing a short story).
Now this tech is real, there seems to be little point in writing a science fiction story about it. Ahh, well...
 
So, maybe not out of Africa after all.


Out of Africa? Data Fail to Support Language Origin in Africa
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 143001.htm

Words. In the beginning was the word -- yes, but where exactly? (Credit: © vlorzor / Fotolia)

ScienceDaily (Feb. 15, 2012) — In the beginning was the word -- yes, but where exactly? Last year, Quentin Atkinson, a cultural anthropologist at Auckland University in New Zealand, proposed that the cradle of language could be localized in the southwest of Africa. The report, which appeared in Science, was seized upon by the media and caused something of a sensation. Now however, LMU linguist Michael Cysouw has published a commentary in Science which argues that this neat "Out-of-Africa" hypothesis for the origin of language is not adequately supported by the data presented. The search for the site of origin of language remains very much alive.

Atkinson based his claim on a comparative analysis of the numbers of phonemes found in about 500 present-day languages. Phonemes are the most basic sound units -- consonants, vowels and tones -- that form the basis of semantic differentiation in all languages. The number of phonemes used in natural languages varies widely. Atkinson, who is a biologist and psychologist by training, found that the highest levels of phoneme diversity occurred in languages spoken in southwestern Africa. Furthermore, according to his statistical analysis, the size of the phoneme inventory in a language tends to decrease with distance from this hotspot.

To interpret this finding Atkinson invoked a parallel from population genetics. Biologists have observed an analogous effect, insofar as human genetic diversity is found to decrease with distance from Africa, where our species originated. This is attributed to the so-called founder effect. As people migrated from the continent and small groups continued to disperse, each inevitably came to represent an ever-shrinking fraction of the total genetic diversity present in the African population as a whole.

So does such a founder effect play a similarly significant effect in the dispersal and differentiation of languages? Michael Cysouw regards Atkinson's finding as "artefactual." Cysouw, whose work is funded by one of the Starting Grants awarded by the European Research Council (ERC), heads a research group that studies quantitative comparative linguistics in LMU's Faculty of Languages and Literatures. He says he has no objection in principle to the use of methods borrowed from other disciplines to tackle questions in linguistics, but that problems arise from their inappropriate application.

For example, he finds that if Atkinson's method is employed to examine other aspects of language, such as the construction of subordinate clauses or the use of the passive mood, the results "do not point in the same direction." Indeed, in their article in Science, Cysouw and his coauthors Steven Moran (LMU) and Dan Dediu of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen show that, depending on the features considered, Atkinson's method places the site of origin of language in eastern Africa or the Caucasus or somewhere else entirely. As Cysouw points out, linguists have long sought to throw light on the origin of language by analyzing patterns of language distribution. The problem is that such relationships can be reliably traced only as far back as about 10,000 years before the present.

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.
 
I think it contributes to this debate. i'm posting it in full as its free access only lasts for another 5 days and in any case you need to register to get to it.

In an interview with Noam Chomsky he talks about language, human nature and denialism in next weeks NS.


The story of language: culture not nature
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg2 ... ?full=true
16 March 2012 by Daniel Everett
Magazine issue 2855.

Video: Watch a clip from a new documentary about Daniel Everett's life and work

The cultural foundations of human language is a story very much in the making, because it must see off notions that language is innate

NOTHING sets Homo sapiens apart from other species more clearly than the possession of language and culture. Using features of language unique to our species we can communicate almost anything that pops into our heads. This capacity enables us to learn from and elaborate on the lessons of previous generations: we use values acquired earlier, plus trial and error, to improve our lives. The unbeatable combination of language and culture has made us rulers of the Earth.

The question for anthropologists and linguists, however, is not why language and culture are so great, but what makes them possible in the first place. p

We know that these two cognitive-social tools are related: the burning issue is to understand the nature of this relationship. Since Aristotle and Plato, there have been two main approaches. From the Platonic tradition comes the "nativist" idea that language is predetermined, having one immutable shape dictated by the genes (or the gods). It is a one-way street: language facilitates culture but culture's influence on language is minimal. Aristotelian ideas, however, argue that much of language is set by cultural conventions and that it serves our peculiar "social instinct".

For the past 50 years or so, the dominant theory followed Plato, asserting that language is an innate capacity of the human brain - and culture is at best peripheral to understanding the faculty of language. Throughout the 20th century, theorists such as Roman Jakobson and Noam Chomsky developed the hypothesis in extremely interesting ways. In Chomsky's version, individual languages are elaborations on a computational system (grammar) provided by the human genome. Culture is irrelevant for the core aspects of this system.

I must admit I am puzzled by the continued popularity of nativism. For decades, research supported the idea that language is formed by a number of independent factors, leaving little, if any, work for a "universal grammar" or "language instinct" to do. Some researchers go so far as to argue that universal grammar is nothing more than tautology: humans have language because humans have language.

It may be that nativism persists because it seems hard to falsify. However, according to Philip Lieberman, a cognitive scientist at Brown University, Rhode Island, it makes one testable, if paradoxical, prediction. According to universal grammar, not all features of language would in fact be universal. Under nativism, we would expect that some humans are incapable of learning some human languages. If we could find a population of humans who could learn one type of language but not another, we would have striking support for nativism.

How so? The potential inability of some humans to learn some languages follows from nativism because culture can affect genes. Genes always vary within a population due, among other reasons, to mutations. Culture, as part of the environment, exerts pressures that can favour one genotype over another. For example, genes for oxygen processing in some Tibetan populations have changed greatly in only the past 3000 years. If culture exerts selection pressure that favours some genes over others, it is unlikely that evolution would preserve an unvarying innate grammar across all populations when it would be much less costly for people to learn their local languages more easily by simply shutting off other options from their genotype. People could avoid the bulk of the language-learning process by drawing on innate grammatical information specific to their cultural niche.

So nativism predicts that some populations will be unable to learn all human languages. For example, a population might be unable to learn, say, Spanish, where the subject may be freely omitted in most sentences. Spanish is likely to have inherited this characteristic from Indo-European languages, which would mean the feature is at least 6000 years old - well within the time period of known genetic changes. Yet this prediction is not only false for all humans ever tested, it also seems highly unlikely that any normal human would not be able to learn any particular human language.

Some early American linguists such as Edward Sapir avoided the nativist pitfalls, arguing human language is a cultural artefact: an outgrowth of the interaction between intelligence and values, communicative need, tradition and conventions. In my latest book Language: The cultural tool, I have tried to develop a fuller account of the effects of culture on the form and meanings of human languages. For me, language is a good solution to the problem of human communication, the need to satisfy our "social instinct" and establish meaningful relations with others.

The Pirahã language of the Brazilian Amazon is just one of the world's 7000 languages, all of which show cultural effects on grammar. But Pirahã, which I studied for nearly 30 years, is very interesting because it contains much that is unusual for speakers of western languages. For example, while Pirahã has consonants and vowels just like any other language, it has one of the smallest sets of phonemes known - eight consonants and three vowels for men and seven consonants and three vowels for women. That's right, women have one fewer consonant than men. Where men have the phonemes "s" and "h", women have only the phoneme "h" (though some women use "s" in certain contexts).

Cultural sanction

Not only do Pirahã men have more phonemes than women, they have more culturally sanctioned "space" in which to form their sounds. Male pronunciation uses a more extensive articulatory space, with an unconstricted pharynx (in the upper throat area, sitting above the larynx or "voice box") and the tongue making contact with the roof of the mouth closer to the teeth. Women constrict their pharyngeal walls for the beginning closure of their "pharyngeal stop", resulting in a more guttural sound, and their tongues block the flow of air for "t" and "n" - their only tongue-articulated consonants - farther back from their teeth. The result is Pirahã women use fewer phonemes within a smaller articulatory space than men.

There is no linguistic reason for the contrast between men's speech and women's speech in Pirahã: it emerges from Pirahã values and culture, just as the speech of English-speaking men and women differs in many ways. For example, women often use different colour terms and descriptive phrases than men. The sentence: "I love that lavender top on you" would almost certainly have been uttered by a woman. Men use non-standard forms, so a man might say: "I went walkin' ", while a woman might say: "I went walking". Similarly, Pirahã culture distinguishes between men and women's pronunciation because it "wants to".

Another of the myriad ways culture and grammar interact lies in what seems to be the culturally unique lack of recursive structure in the Pirahã syntax. Recursion was claimed to be the innate core of human language in a famous Science paper published by Marc Hauser, Noam Chomsky and Tecumseh Fitch in 2002, "The faculty of language: what is it, who has it, and how did it evolve?".

A recursive process is a process that applies to its own output: it can make sentences non-finitely long, its hallmark being grammatical units of one type embedded in another of the same type, such as noun phrases within noun phrases ("John's brother's friend's wife's sister"), or sentences within sentences ("Peter said that Mary said that John said that Mortimer would be here tomorrow").

A language without recursion would be a counter example, and this I claim for Pirahã. Such a language would falsify the recursion claim even when, as with the Pirahãs, its speakers can learn recursion in other languages or show evidence of thinking recursively. If one language can exist without recursion then, in principle, all can. This is irreconcilable with the claim that recursion is the sine qua non of human communication.

The claim that Pirahã lacks recursion has recently been corroborated by cognitive scientists at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. And other studies are underway at the brain and cognitive sciences department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Still, the claim continues to be surprisingly controversial, as we show in a new documentary, The Grammar of Happiness, about my life and work. The fact that Pirahã lacks recursive syntax is an interesting discovery. More important, however, is the argument that this lack of recursion is imposed by Pirahã cultural values.

Pirahãs require evidence, something I call the "immediacy of experience principle". It requires, among other things, that all Pirahã sentences be "warranted" by evidence and that evidence is represented in the verb. There are three suffixes: "hearsay" (someone told you, you didn't see it yourself); "deduction" (you see the evidence, but did not see the act, as in "John left + deductive suffix", meaning something like, "John must have left, because his canoe is gone", or "... because I can see his footprints leading off into the jungle"); and "direct observation" (as in "John left. I saw him leave", where, unlike in English, the "I saw him leave", part of the sentence would be a suffix).

Nothing can be uttered unless it is warranted by one of these suffixes. The interesting consequence for Pirahã grammar (and theories of human language) is that this culturally based requirement for evidence makes recursion in the grammar impossible. This is because any grammatical category (noun, verb, sentence and so on) specified in a verb's meaning must be "authorised" by the evidential suffix and only categories so authorised may appear. A phrase buried within another phrase carries units that are not part of the meaning of the verb in which they are embedded and so they are not authorised by that verb's evidential marker.

For example, the verb "give" requires three nouns (or "arguments"): the giver, the thing given, and the goal of the giving. John (the giver) gave the book (the thing given) to Bill (the goal). It is not strictly grammatical in English to say only "John gave" or "John gave the book". Outside literature, you have to give all three arguments (or more) each time.

Pirahã is like this except that unlike English, Pirahã's cultural requirement on evidence allows only three arguments. To say: "John's sister's best friend gave Bill's father-in-law's buddy a book" would leave "sister's" and "father-in-law's" unwarranted because they are not found in the verb's three arguments (giver, given, goal). In my book, I explain in more detail how this cultural requirement for evidence rules out recursion in Pirahã.

This restriction on Pirahã's grammar and the grammar's peculiar form is cultural. So Pirahã represents a solid counter example to the idea that recursion is the principle genetic facilitator of human languages. It also shows that grammar in its most basic form can be profoundly shaped by the values of the culture of which it is part. Such considerations raise the question of how much work there is for a universal innate grammar to do.

Culture can affect more than the syntax and sound systems of languages. It can also profoundly constrain the meanings that languages can express. Thus Pirahã lacks terms for colour and numbers and has the simplest kinship system known (see diagram). It has very few words for time, it lacks all variants of the perfect tense (such as in the past perfect "I had already eaten"), and other characteristics once thought common to all languages.

It bears repeating that culture has similar effects on the grammar of all languages: it's just that Pirahã has ones that are easy to spot. Take literacy. As societies adopt a written language for cultural reasons, their grammars often change. Perhaps, more accurately, they begin to adopt a second grammar - a grammar of written versus spoken language. Many studies show written and spoken language differing in numerous, often profound, ways, such as sentence length, complexity of paragraphs and so on. The new features of the written language are caused by alterations in the expression of syntax, owing, ultimately, to the cultural decision to write the language.

No literacy here

That this is cultural is shown in an incident back in the early 1980s. After seeing me read and write, the Pirahãs thought they might like to learn to read and write their own language. I began to teach them the Pirahã orthography I had developed based on my analysis of their phonology. After several weeks, one day an entire houseful of Pirahãs read from my blackboard the word bigí or "ground" in their language. They all pronounced it accurately. I was delighted! I had taught them to read.

But they confused me by breaking out in raucous laughter. I asked why. "That sounds just like our word for 'ground'," they said. "But that is your word for 'ground'," I replied. "Oh, no, we don't write our language. Is that what you are doing? We don't want this." End of lessons. It turned out the Pirahãs did not allow literacy into their culture so its grammatical changes were also excluded - by choice.

The idea of language as a cultural tool makes it easier to see why after 100 years of research we still lack a noncontroversial set of structures found in all languages, a set that is predicted by a universal grammar. The idea of culture adapting language to its own needs helps us get beyond politically correct notions, for example, that all languages are "equally complex". No one knows what that would mean because there are so many ways to measure complexity, even though the claim is regularly asserted under the assumption that language is found in the genotype.

The moral of this tale is not that culture is responsible for everything in language. Not at all. Recent research by teams led by Ted Gibson of MIT and Steve Piantadosi at the University of Rochester, New York, reveals non-genetic factors that can shape the way information is structured, and why some word orders are more common than others. And their work on ambiguity shows it to be "a functional property of language that allows for greater communicative efficiency". What is important is that there is no need to appeal to nativism to understand this major part of linguistic meaning because it is motivated by non-linguistic and non-genetic factors.

Other work by, among others, Bill Croft of the University of New Mexico, has shown a role for the non-genetic factor of "iconicity", linguistic forms being shaped by meanings. For example, the more complex the idea, the more complex the linguistic structure: "the Devil made me do it" has more words than "the Devil did it" because the first sentence expresses causation, which is more complex than the simple transitiveness of the second.

In the end, the question that must worry those who argue there is a language instinct, a universal grammar and the like, is this: if language is shaped by communication, cultural values, information theory and the nature of the brain as a whole, what is there left for a universal grammar to do?

There are far too few studies of the effects of culture on grammar, though there are many on the effects of language on thought, cognition and culture. In future, I hope linguistic anthropologists, cognitive scientists and philosophers will consider more carefully Aristotle's social instinct and the problem it raises - the need to communicate. Language is a set of solutions to the problem forced on us by the social instinct, each solution shaped by a local culture.

Not so much a language instinct, then, as a social and communications instinct. This may sound like a small difference of emphasis in the story of language, but it is in fact nothing short of a completely different story.

Bibliography

NEXT WEEK: In an interview with Noam Chomsky he talks about language, human nature and denialism

Daniel Everett is Dean of Arts and Sciences at Bentley University, Massachusetts. Language: The cultural tool is published by Pantheon Books /Profile Books
 
Daily Mail types will have apoplectic attacks.

English language 'originated in Turkey'
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19368988
By Jonathan Ball
BBC News

Words in common use betray the language of our past

Related Stories

'Language universals' challenged
Monkey calls give language clues
'Oldest English words' identified

Modern Indo-European languages - which include English - originated in Turkey about 9,000 years ago, researchers say.

Their findings differ from conventional theory that these languages originated 5,000 years ago in south-west Russia.

The New Zealand researchers used methods developed to study virus epidemics to create family trees of ancient and modern Indo-European tongues to pinpoint where and when the language family first arose.

Their study is reported in Science.

A language family is a group of languages that arose from a common ancestor, known as the proto-language.

Linguists identify these families by trawling through modern languages for words of similar sound that often describe the same thing, like water and wasser (German). These shared words - or cognates - represent our language inheritance.

Continue reading the main story

Start Quote

Compared to the Kurgan hypothesis, this new analysis shows the Anatolian hypothesis as the clear winner”

Prof Mark Pagel FRS
University of Reading
According to the Ethnologue database, more than 100 language families exist.

The Indo-European family is one of the largest families - more than 400 languages spoken in at least 60 countries - and its origins are unclear.

The Steppes, or Kurgan, theorists hold that the proto-language originated in the Steppes of Russia, north of the Caspian Sea, about 5,000 years ago.

The Anatolia hypothesis - first proposed in the late 1980s by Prof Colin Renfrew (now Lord Renfrew) - suggests an origin in the Anatolian region of Turkey about 3,000 years earlier.

To determine which competing theory was the most likely, Dr Quentin Atkinson from the University of Auckland and his team interrogated language evolution using phylogenetic analyses - more usually used to trace virus epidemics.

Fundamentals of life
Phylogenetics reveals relatedness by assessing how much of the information stored in DNA is shared between organisms.


The researchers used methods developed for tracing virus epidemics
Chimpanzees and humans have a common ancestor and share about 98% of their DNA. Because of this shared ancestry, they cluster together on phylogenetic - or family - trees.

Like DNA, language is passed down, generation to generation.

Although language changes and evolves, some linguists have argued that cognates describing the fundamentals of life - kinship (mother, father), body parts (eye, hand), the natural world (fire, water) and basic verbs (to walk, to run) - resist change.

These conserved cognates are strongly linked to the proto-language of old.

Dr Atkinson and his team built a database containing 207 cognate words present in 103 Indo?European languages, which included 20 ancient tongues such as Latin and Greek.

Using phylogenetic analysis, they were able to reconstruct the evolutionary relatedness of these modern and ancient languages - the more words that are cognate, the more similar the languages are and the closer they group on the tree.

The trees could also predict when and where the ancestral language originated.

Looking back into the depths of the tree, Dr Atkinson and his colleagues were able to confirm the Anatolian origin.

To test if the alternative hypothesis - of a Russian origin several years later - was possible, the team used competing models of evolution to pitch Steppes and Anatolian theory against each other.


Cognate words represent our language inheritance
In repeated tests, the Anatolian theory always came out on top.

Commenting on the paper, Prof Mark Pagel, a Fellow of the Royal Society from the University of Reading who was involved in earlier published phylogenetic studies, said: "This is a superb application of methods taken from evolutionary biology to understand a problem in cultural evolution - the origin and expansion of the Indo-European languages.

"This paper conclusively shows that the Indo-European languages are at least 8-9,500 years old, and arose, as has long been speculated, in the Anatolian region of what is modern-day Turkey and spread outwards from there."

Commenting on the inclusion of ancient languages in the analyses, he added: "The use of a number of known calibration points from 'fossil' languages greatly strengthens the conclusions."

However, the findings have not found universal acceptance. Prof Petri Kallio from the University of Helsinki suggests that several cognate words describing technological inventions - such as the wheel - are evident across different languages.

He argues that the Indo-European proto-language diversified after the invention of the wheel, about 5,000 years ago.

On the phylogenetic methods used to date the proto-language, Prof Kallio added: "So why do I still remain sceptical? Unlike archaeological radiocarbon dating based on the fixed rate of decay of the carbon-14 isotope, there is simply no fixed rate of decay of basic vocabulary, which would allow us to date ancestral proto-languages.

"Instead of the quantity of the words, therefore, the trained Indo-Europeanists concentrate on the quality of the words."

Prof Pagel is less convinced by the counter-argument: "Compared to the Kurgan hypothesis, this new analysis shows the Anatolian hypothesis as the clear winner."
 
I still think there is a grain of truth in the Tuatha Dé Danann legends of Ireland. As the Tuatha Dé Danann came through England on the way to Ireland, they would have left remnants of culture behind - including language.
According to legend, the Tuatha Dé Danann came from Turkey.
 
Humans like other social creatures have to communicate in order to coordinate tasks. I've always imagined that vocal communication evolved in order to facilitate hunting - - a way to signal each other when there's no line-of-sight. But it could just as well have come out of any other cooperative activity - gathering food in a forest, building shelters. Over time certain sounds come to mean certain things.

Someone above mentioned music and dance. To me this is a very deep mystery. Why do we make music? Why does it affect us so? Other animals make music too. Why? It's purpose seems to be to communicate emotional states and glue us together socially. My bet would be that we were making music before we were using language.
 
ramonmercado said:
Compared to the Kurgan hypothesis, this new analysis shows the Anatolian hypothesis as the clear winner”

Is this the Kurgan hypothesis that 'There can be only one!'?
 
theyithian said:
ramonmercado said:
Compared to the Kurgan hypothesis, this new analysis shows the Anatolian hypothesis as the clear winner”

Is this the Kurgan hypothesis that 'There can be only one!'?

Dunno if anyone else got that joke, but it made me laugh.
 
gncxx said:
theyithian said:
ramonmercado said:
Compared to the Kurgan hypothesis, this new analysis shows the Anatolian hypothesis as the clear winner”

Is this the Kurgan hypothesis that 'There can be only one!'?

Dunno if anyone else got that joke, but it made me laugh.

Heads up for that.
 
ramonmercado said:
gncxx said:
theyithian said:
ramonmercado said:
Compared to the Kurgan hypothesis, this new analysis shows the Anatolian hypothesis as the clear winner”

Is this the Kurgan hypothesis that 'There can be only one!'?

Dunno if anyone else got that joke, but it made me laugh.

Heads up for that.

Or heads off. :)
 
theyithian said:
ramonmercado said:
Compared to the Kurgan hypothesis, this new analysis shows the Anatolian hypothesis as the clear winner”

Is this the Kurgan hypothesis that 'There can be only one!'?

He has something to say, it's better to burn out than to fade away.
 
IamSundog said:
Humans like other social creatures have to communicate in order to coordinate tasks. I've always imagined that vocal communication evolved in order to facilitate hunting - - a way to signal each other when there's no line-of-sight. But it could just as well have come out of any other cooperative activity - gathering food in a forest, building shelters. Over time certain sounds come to mean certain things.
You wouldn't want to use speech when hunting - it would alert the prey.

In fact this argumen thas been used to explain why men are often less communicative than women - while the men are away (silently) hunting, the women would be involved in communal activities (food preparation, cooking, child-care, etc) and chattering away nineteen to the dozen! 8)
 
Uhhh, right you are.

Actually I think a better theory is that women developed speech so that they could harangue men.
 
IamSundog said:
Actually I think a better theory is that women developed speech so that they could harangue men.
"You've been off hunting for three days, and all you bring home is one measly rabbit! You're ruddy useless, you are!" :twisted:
 
ramonmercado said:
Compared to the Kurgan hypothesis, this new analysis shows the Anatolian hypothesis as the clear winner”

I don't understand what the authors of this study meant exactely, but their methodology and conclusions seem seriously flawed.
I don't know if they put in evidence that the Anatolian branch of Indo-European family is the closest to its root, but if so it would be pointless. Linguists already knew, and have known for a very long time that the Anatolian sub-family is the most primitive of all in the Indo-European tree.

I don't know if we learn much, if anything, from this study. Multiple features show that other Indo-European languages diverged from a single common ancestor after they had diverged from the Anatolian languages. Their biggest mistake is to try to jump to a geographical conclusion, because it relies on a mistaken assumption that languages were always where we find them. The Anatolian languages were not indigenous in Anatolia, whose own language was Hattic, that shares no relationship with the Indo-European family. There is also good evidence that the Indo-European people of Anatalia shared a past of nomadic shepherds like other Indo-European people. They had to come from somewhere else.

So the Kurgan hypothesis remains a good contender.
 
More grist to the mill.

Language Use Is Simpler Than Previously Thought, Study Suggests
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 143555.htm

New research suggests that language is actually based on simpler sequential structures, like clusters of beads on a string. (Credit: © N-Media-Images / Fotolia)

ScienceDaily (Sep. 25, 2012) — For more than 50 years, language scientists have assumed that sentence structure is fundamentally hierarchical, made up of small parts in turn made of smaller parts, like Russian nesting dolls.

A new Cornell study suggests language use is simpler than they had thought.

Co-author Morten Christiansen, Cornell professor of psychology and co-director of the Cornell Cognitive Science Program, and his colleagues say that language is actually based on simpler sequential structures, like clusters of beads on a string.

"What we're suggesting is that the language system deals with words by grouping them into little clumps that are then associated with meaning," he said.

Sentences are made up of such word clumps, or "constructions," that are understood when arranged in a particular order. For example, the word sequence "bread and butter" might be represented as a construction, whereas the reverse sequence of words ("butter and bread") would likely not.

The sequence concept has simplicity on its side; language is naturally sequential, given the temporal cues that help us understand and be understood as we use language. Moreover, the hierarchy concept doesn't take into account the many other cues that help convey meaning, such as the setting and knowing what was said before and the speaker's intention.

The researchers drew on evidence in language-related fields from psycholinguistics to cognitive neuroscience. For example, research in evolutionary biology indicates that humans acquired language (and animals did not) because we have evolved abilities in a number of areas, such as being able to correctly guess others' intentions and learn a large number of sounds that we then relate to meaning to create words. In contrast, the hierarchy concept suggests humans have language thanks only to highly specialized "hardware" in the brain, which neuroscientists have yet to find.

Research in cognitive neuroscience shows that the same set of brain regions seem to be involved in both sequential learning and language, suggesting that language is processed sequentially. And several recent psycholinguistic studies have shown that how well adults and children perform on a sequence learning task strongly predicts how well they can process the deluge of words that come at us in rapid succession when we're listening to someone speak. "The better you are at dealing with sequences, the easier it is for you to comprehend language," Christiansen said.

The study by Christiansen and his colleagues has important implications for several language-related fields. From an evolutionary perspective, it could help close what has been seen as a large gap between the communications systems of humans and other nonhuman primates. "This research allows us a better understanding of our place in nature, in that we can tie our language ability, our communication abilities, more closely to what we can see in other species. It could have a big impact in terms of allowing us to think in more humble terms about the origin of language in humans," Christiansen said.

The research could also affect natural language processing, the area of computer science that deals with human language, by encouraging scholars to focus on sequential structure when trying to create humanlike speech and other types of language processing, Christiansen said. He pointed out that machines already successfully perform such tasks as translation and speech recognition thanks to algorithms based on sequential structures.

The study, "How hierarchical is language use?" was published Sept. 12 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. The research was funded by the European Union, the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research and the Binational Science Foundation.

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Cornell University. The original article was written by Susan Kelley.

Journal Reference:

S. L. Frank, R. Bod, M. H. Christiansen. How hierarchical is language use? Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2012; DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2012.1741
 
If there’s one thing that distinguishes humans from other animals, it’s our ability to use language. But when and why did this trait evolve? A new study concludes that the art of conversation may have arisen early in human evolution, because it made it easier for our ancestors to teach each other how to make stone tools—a skill that was crucial for the spectacular success of our lineage.

Researchers have long debated when humans starting talking to each other. Estimates range wildly, from as late as 50,000 years ago to as early as the beginning of the human genus more than 2 million years ago. But words leave no traces in the archaeological record. So researchers have used proxy indicators for symbolic abilities, such as early art or sophisticated toolmaking skills. Yet these indirect approaches have failed to resolve arguments about language origins.

Now, a team led by Thomas Morgan, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, has attacked the problem in a very different way. Rather than considering toolmaking as a proxy for language ability, he and his colleagues explored the way that language may helps modern humans learn to make such tools. The researchers recruited 184 students from the University of St. Andrews in the United Kingdom, where some members of the team were based, and organized them into five groups. The first person in each group was taught by archaeologists how to make artifacts called Oldowan tools, which include fairly simple stone flakes that were manufactured by early humans beginning about 2.5 million years ago. This technology, named after the famous Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania where archaeologists Louis and Mary Leakey discovered the implements in the 1930s, consists of hitting a stone “core” with a stone “hammer” in such a way that a flake sharp enough to butcher an animal is struck off. Producing a useful flake requires hitting the core at just the right place and angle. ...

http://news.sciencemag.org/archaeol...ay-have-evolved-help-our-ancestors-make-tools
 
Mysterious Indo-European homeland may have been in the steppes of Ukraine and Russia

What do you call a male sibling? If you speak English, he is your “brother.” Greek? Call him “phrater.” Sanskrit, Latin, Old Irish? “Bhrater,” “frater,” or “brathir,” respectively. Ever since the mid-17th century, scholars have noted such similarities among the so-calledIndo-European languages, which span the world and number more than 400 if dialects are included. Researchers agree that they can probably all be traced back to one ancestral language, called Proto-Indo-European (PIE). But for nearly 20 years, scholars have debated vehemently when and where PIE arose.

Two long-awaited studies, one described online this week in a preprint and another scheduled for publication later this month, have now used different methods to support one leading hypothesis: that PIE was first spoken by pastoral herders who lived in the vast steppe lands north of the Black Sea beginning about 6000 years ago. One study points out that these steppe land herders have left their genetic mark on most Europeans living today.

The studies’ conclusions emerge from state-of-the-art ancient DNA and linguistic analyses, but the debate over PIE’s origins is likely to continue. A rival hypothesis—that early farmers living in Anatolia (modern Turkey) about 8000 years ago were the original PIE speakers—is not ruled out by the new analyses, most agree. Although the steppe hypothesis has now received a major boost, “I would not say the Anatolian hypothesis has been killed,” says Carles Lalueza-Fox, a geneticist at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain, who participated in neither of the new studies. ...

http://news.sciencemag.org/archaeol...land-may-have-been-steppes-ukraine-and-russia
 
Origin of language lies in song
Chris Knight of the Radical Anthropology Group examines one of science’s most intriguing unsolved problems. This is an edited transcript of a talk given to Communist University in August 2015


Jerome Lewis is that rare thing: an anthropologist who has had years of experience conducting fieldwork with a group of hunter-gatherers in the Congo. He has become especially interested in the way the Bayaka forest people sing and he argues that their polyphonic singing is an expression of their egalitarianism, their communistic way of life.

There is much improvisation, with frequent switching between melodies, but no-one is organising this. Jerome describes the way in which this kind of singing acts as a sort of blueprint for these people’s style of government: they enjoy ‘government from below’. Just as they organise their singing, so they organise everything else. Building on Jerome’s fieldwork, the two of us have been working together in recent years to try to solve one of science’s great remaining mysteries: the evolutionary emergence of language in our species.

Many Marxists might wonder why this should be considered a mystery. Didn’t Engels solve it long ago, when he wrote that people began developing language from the moment they had something to say to one another? Surely when people need to cooperate in labour tasks they must communicate with each other, and that is how language develops?

I agree that this is a fairly accurate description, but we need to do quite a lot more. Many animals cooperate in all sorts of ways and, of course, they communicate. But language in the human sense, with its grammatical rules and its digital structure, is radically different from anything known in the animal world. So Engels’s explanation, although basically correct, would not in itself satisfy any scientist today. It is hardly detailed enough to qualify as a scientific theory.

So why is the origin of language one of the most difficult questions in science? Let me explain some of the paradoxes.

Darwin and Chomsky
I shall start with Darwin’s theory, which he himself described as “descent with modification”. Fish have fins, but animals have legs. The point here is that the fin provided a starting point. Over millions of years, as certain fish became stranded on mud-flats, their fins became more stubby, more bony, and the eventual result was legs. “Descent with modification” only works if there is a precursor: had there been no fins for evolution to work on, legs could not have evolved. ...

http://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1091/origin-of-language-lies-in-song/

Further reading
C Knight and J Lewis, ‘Vocal deception, laughter and the linguistic significance of reverse dominance’, in D Dor, C Knight and J Lewis (eds) The social origins of language Oxford 2014, pp297-314.
 
An utterly fascinating article, thanks so much for having posted it, @ramonmercado .
Needs to be reread- in the morning, for me, prior to work.

(I think that this piece will be of particular interest to @Krepostnoi , amongst others)
 
An utterly fascinating article, thanks so much for having posted it, @ramonmercado .
Needs to be reread- in the morning, for me, prior to work.

(I think that this piece will be of particular interest to @Krepostnoi , amongst others)
Thanks for the tag. Still waiting for the equerry. I have to confess I'm more of an applied linguist than a theoretical one, although there's a porous border between the two domains. That said, I have an abiding appreciation of the irony that Chomsky - a theoretical linguist of Einsteinian genius - is such a lousy communicator. I mean, seriously, have you read his stuff? I know I haven't, and it's not for want of trying.

It's an interesting theory - it certainly sounds more plausible than cosmic rays - but I'm not entirely sure I buy it wholesale: I'm particularly sceptical of the apparent assertion that human primates are more likely to trust the utterances of their fellows than non-human primates are. It strikes me this misses a lot of research into our ability to read extremely subtle non-verbal signals, such as micro-expressions. [Stepping further away, why do so many of us seem to take such pleasure in the deadpan delivery of a joke?] I'd also like to hear more about the role of the "profound social and political change" mentioned in the last line.
 
I have found Chomsky to be hard going, ironic but somehow fitting. Bet his lectures were fun, for undergrads....

Also...last year I mischeviously-appended a piece about Mithin's 'Singing Neanderthals' (a topic I read about on FTMB about a decade ago, and more recently elsewhere) which does have many resonances with the proto-liguistic emergences being considered here.

I'm intrigued by your deadpan humor delivery observation. How universal is this?
 
I have found Chomsky to be hard going, ironic but somehow fitting. Bet his lectures were fun, for undergrads....

Also...last year I mischeviously-appended a piece about Mithin's 'Singing Neanderthals' (a topic I read about on FTMB about a decade ago, and more recently elsewhere) which does have many resonances with the proto-liguistic emergences being considered here.

I'm intrigued by your deadpan humor delivery observation. How universal is this?
You flatter me by calling it an observation - it's more speculation. I'm confident it applies to Anglophone culture, and I've seen enjoyment of it in Russia, but I have no scholarly citations for it anywhere, I'm afraid. Where it is applicable, is it simply the contrast between delivery mode and content that delights us? Expressed otherwise, the subversion of our sophisticated ability to determine communicative intent? Regardless, in ways I can't yet clearly formulate, it strikes me as arguing against the implicit trust the prof seems to be arguing for, assuming I understand him correctly.

Meanwhile, I am away to read about singing Neanderthals.
 
Thank you, very interesting. I have read about this basal common origin for all language before, utterly-gripping as a concept....Pinker obviously with 'Language Instinct', and Crystal in some detailed areas have touched on this a number of times.

If only we could go back and look via a time machine viewer. All these time travel ideas are fraught with problems (too many time paradox cliches....we'd need to go back to a pre-HG Wells era, and start again).

Viewing (and listening) to the past would suit me just fine...
 
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