Cool Linguistic Research

[Dr. Cheese]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/15/sc...e.html?_r=1&hp


This will be worth a good story in World History!

[hbarcat]

That is totally cool!

[Deluge Of Sound]

I remember reading a Terrence McKenna book that had a similar proposal.

Wacky stuff, but a very interesting idea.

[totallyfrozen]

NYTimes requires me to login to view the page. Oh well.

[IconBasser]

pretty cool! I wonder if there would ever be a way to prove it conclusively though.

[Relic]

One of my interests is languages and origins of particular languages. To be honest though, despite the fact that this seems really neat and downright fascinating, I'm thinking that it's one of those "well duh" things.... We already know the origins of modern man so it would only stand to reason that language would also have it's earliest roots in Africa. It's just highly cool though that they suspect that they found a particular target region of Africa. I'll be following this one for sure.

[bassybill]

This is totally fascinating. Thanks for posting.

It's amazing to note how closely this research matches in with other evidence from DNA studies. It's not so much the confirmation of our origins in Africa that's interesting - as Relic says, that's already well established beyond sensible dispute - but the fact that the distribution of something non-genetic (or very indirectly genetic) like language phoneme patterns matches so closely with that discovered by previous genetic investigations. Using two such diverse methods and evidence bases to investigate human ancestry and arriving at such similar conclusions is a big factor in scientists seeing this as so significant.

It also seems to be good evidence for the "language as we know it being invented just the once" argument. I've often thought that to be much more likely myself, as at the time it started humans weren't all that spread out and the concept of communication through language would very probably have spread around too quickly for different peoples all over the continent to conceive entirely separate languages independently. It could be that the truth is somewhere in between the two cases as there can't really be a sharp dividing line between having no language one day and having a language the next.

[PSPookie]

They were talking about this on The Takeaway this morning. Interesting stuff.

[bassybill]

Hmmm. I thought this might get more interest than it seems to have done. Read the linked article, folks. It's intriguing.

[Big_Daddy]

I was reading this this morning. It was something nice I could think about while at work today. It makes me want to go and read Guns, Germs & Steel (which I never finished).

[Vorago]

Not really a new idea, but fascinating none the less!

The debate on the origin of language is extremely interesting, but very complicated as well, because

1) there's only circumstantial evidence at best (imprints of a potential language centre inside a fossilized skull, use of certain tools, etc)

2) it is in essence an interdisciplinary one. To explain how language originated you need:

linguistics
anthropology
biology
archeology
paleontology
neurology
behavioral sciences
primatology
psychology
...

Each of these fields has it's own intern debates, oppositions and proponents of certain theories (the whole nature-nurture debate in linguistics to name one), which in turn influences how one would approach the origin of language debate.

Plus, in modern science the level of specialization is enormous, so a linguist could set forth a hypothesis that makes perfect sense from a linguistic point of view, but opposes recent findings in evolutionary biology (or vice versa).

So unless the linguist starts working together with the biologist, the anthropologist, etc etc, he'll never be able to formulate something that could be considered as a general explanation for the origin of language.

Interdisciplinary research is the key here, but this is easier said than done.

(I wrote my bachelor dissertation on the origin of language, don't ask which theory is the best, I didn't know then, and I don't know now

[Deluge Of Sound]

Originally Posted by Deluge Of Sound

I remember reading a Terrence McKenna book that had a similar proposal.

Wacky stuff, but a very interesting idea.

Found it:
Amazon.com: Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution (9780553371307): Terence McKenna: Books

In the beginning, McKenna tells us, there were protohumans with small brains and plenty of genetic competition, and what eventually separated the men from the apes was an enthusiasm for the hallucinogenic mushrooms that grew on the feces of local cattle. Claiming that psilocybin in the hominid diet would have enhanced eyesight, sexual enjoyment, and language ability and would have thereby placed the mushroom-eaters in the front lines of genetic evolution--eventually leading to hallucinogen-ingesting shamanistic societies, the ancient Minoan culture, and some Amazonian tribes today

As I said, a thoroughly trippy read. Undoubtedly an entertaining thought experiment.

IIRC, his main language argument comes from the fact that large doses of psilocybin causes glossolalia.

Which is true.

Or so I've heard.