Language is naturally divergent around sound as is quickly learnedwhen comparing usage over both time and space. This feature hasdominated the debate. Yet today, the advent of mass communicationhas changed all that and language is now convergent to a single normin the form of English which has massively expanded to accommodatemultiple needs.
The result will be a steadily improving English usage and uniformitycombined with cultural bilingualism established to preserve andsupport all archaic languages. This leads naturally to the supportof the related arts.
Yet in the past the only drive towards any form of convergence was inshared grammars. This I suspect was a natural artifact of naturallogic and limited options.
It is actually astonishing just how quickly a language can be givenup once the societal need evaporates. It is also difficult for a newlanguage to be taken up, yet it certainty happens often enough. Thegood news is that all natural languages are on the way to be properlyachieved and if lost, been partially recovered. Yet it is a museumif never used at all.
Study shows ancientrelations between language families
Posted byTANNAnthropology, Breakingnews, Linguistics1:30 PM
http://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.ca/2012/09/study-shows-ancient-relations-between.html
How do languagefamilies evolve over many thousands of years? How stable over timeare structural features of languages?Researchers Dan Dediu andStephen Levinson of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics inNijmegen introduced a new method using Bayesian phylogeneticapproaches to analyse the evolution of structural features in morethan 50 language families.
Their paper 'Abstractprofiles of structural stability point to universal tendencies,family-specific factors, and ancient connections between languages'will be published online on Sept. 20 in PLoS ONE.
Languageis one of the best examples of a cultural evolutionary system. Howvocabularies evolve has been extensively studied, but researchersknow relatively little about the stability of structural propertiesof language -- pholonoly, morphology and syntax. In their PLoSONE paper, Dan Dediu (MPI's Language and Genetics Department) andStephen Levinson (director of MPI's Language and CognitionDepartment) asked how stable over time the structural features oflanguages are -- aspects like word order, the inventory of sounds, orplural marking of nouns.
"If atleast some of them are relatively stable over long time periods, theypromise a way to get at ancient language relationships," theresearchers state in their paper. "But opinion has beendivided, some researchers holding that universally there is ahierarchy of stability for such features, others claiming thatindividual language families show their own idiosyncrasies in whatfeatures are stable and which not."
Ancientrelations between language families
Using a largedatabase and many alternative methods Dediu and Levinson show thatboth positions are right: there are universal tendencies for somefeatures to be more stable than others, but individual languagefamilies have their own distinctive profile. These distinctiveprofiles can then be used to probe ancient relations between what aretoday independent language families.
"Usingthis technique we find for instance probable connections between thelanguages of the Americas and those of NE Eurasia, presumably datingback to the peopling of the Americas 12,000 years or more ago,"Levinson explains. "We also find likely connections between mostof the Eurasian language families, presumably pre-dating the splitoff of Indo-European around 9000 years ago."
Universaltendencies and distinctive profiles
This work thushas implications for our understanding of differential rates oflanguage change, and by identifying distinctive patterns of change itprovides a new window into very old historical processes that haveshaped the linguistic map of the world. It shows that there is noconflict between the existence of universal tendencies and factorsspecific to a language family or geographic area. It also makes thestrong point that information about deep relationships betweenlanguages is contained in abstract, higher-level properties derivedfrom large sets of structural features as opposed to just a fewhighly stable aspects of language. In addition, this work introducesinnovative quantitative techniques for finding and testing thestatistical reliability of both universal tendencies and distinctivelanguage-family profiles.
"Ourfindings strongly support the existence of a universal tendencyacross language families for some specific structural features to beintrinsically stable across language families and geographicregions," Dediu concludes.
Source: Max-Planck-Gesellschaft [September20, 2012]
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