The Wall Street has published a story today journal about a study in the journal Science, the all modern languages developed the linguistic version of out-of-Africa from the same source proto-language claims. Meanwhile, the BBC is reporting on a paper published in nature suggests the functions actually independently developed languages, encoded instead of concepts from biology in our brain are released.
I'm not sure whether these two sets of results can be compared easily with each other. The studies were very different answer questions so that you can use only one against the other row not. Depending on your point of view these results may be contradictory... but that's not necessarily the case. What I think is about these two studies interesting is the fact that both are based on research methods and theories, in the areas of evolutionary biology and genetic anthropology were born. For example, says in the Wall Street Journal article:
His research is based on phonemes, different units of the sound such as vowels and consonant sounds, and an idea borrowed from population genetics known as "Founder effect." This principle implies that if a very small number of individuals from a larger population break, there is a gradual loss of genetic variation and complexity in the breakaway group. Dr. Atkinson thought that if is a similar founder effect in phoneme could, it would support the idea that modern verbal communication on this continent comes and only then expand elsewhere.
And in the BBC story:
Lead author Michael Dunn, an evolutionary linguist at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands, said that the approach is related to the study of the pea plants by Gregor Mendel, which finally led to the idea of the heredity of traits. Modern phylogenetics studies might look at variations in animals, the known to be related, and of which work developed from specific structures. The team studied for their studies [language], the features of Word order in four language families: Indo European, UTO Aztec, Bantu and Austronesian.
I'm curious, how widespread is this interdisciplinary approach to Linguistics, and whether the most linguists think it is a reasonable way, language to study evolution. I would at the very least, think that you want to make changes. Finally in the Wall Street Journal article points out, work the forces to make the biological evolution form of which, the cultural evolution.
Dr. Atkinson's approach has its limits. Genes change slowly over many generations, while the diversity of the phonemes in the midst of a population such as language develops rapidly can change. While removal of Africa can explain up to 85% of the genetic diversity of the population, a similar distance measurement can explain only 19% of the variation in phonemic diversity. Dr. Atkinson said that the measure is still statistically significant.
Wall Street Journal: the mother of all languages
BBC: Language universal idea tested with biology method
Image: Some rights reserved by Bruce-asher
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