Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
World’s languages traced back to single African mother tongue: scientists.
New Zealand researchers have traced every human language — from English to Mandarin — back to an ancestral language spoken in Africa 50,000 to 70,000 years ago.
Scientists say they have traced the world’s 6,000 modern languages — from English to Mandarin — back to a single “mother tongue,” an ancestral language spoken in Africa 50,000 to 70,000 years ago.
New research, published in the journal Science, suggests this single ancient language resulted in human civilization — a Diaspora — as well as advances in art and hunting tool technology, and laid the groundwork for all the world’s cultures.
The research, by Quentin Atkinson from the University of Auckland in New Zealand, also found that speech evolved far earlier than previously thought. And the findings implied, though did not prove, that modern language originated only once, an issue of controversy among linguists, according to the New York Times.
Before Atkinson came up with the evidence for a single African origin of language, some scientists had argued that language evolved independently in different parts of the world.
Atkinson found that the first populations migrating from Africa laid the groundwork for all the world’s cultures by taking their single language with them. “It was the catalyst that spurred the human expansion that we all are a product of,” Atkinson said, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Atkinson traced the number distinct sounds, or phonemes — consonants, vowels and tones — in 504 world languages, finding compelling evidence that they can be traced back to a long-forgotten dialect spoken by our Stone Age ancestors, according to the Daily Mail.
Atkinson also hypothesized that languages with the most sounds would be the oldest, while those spoken by smaller breakaway groups would utilize fewer sounds as variation and complexity diminished.
The study found that some of the click-using languages of Africa have more than 100 phonemes, or sounds, whereas Hawaiian, toward the far end of the human migration route out of Africa, has only 13, the Times reported. English has about 45 phonemes.
The phoneme pattern mirrors the pattern of human genetic diversity as humans spread across the globe from sub-Saharan Africa around 70,000 years ago.
This gives me LIFE from people who insist all languages (ALL no matter what) derive from latin bases.
Reblogging this for three reasons:
1) It’s awesome and worth knowing
2) It makes sense when you think about, you know, the whole history of human development (from a NOT white supremacist perspective at least)
3) To add that if anyone ever tries to say that all languages are derived from Latin [insert choked sound of disbelief and anger] you can inform their ignorant (probably racist) asses of this: Latin, as far as languages go, is an INFANT. It’s part of a subset of Indo-European languages and MOTHERFUCKER EVEN ENGLISH ISN’T ONE OF ITS DERIVATIVES. (French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, and Portuguese are, as well as lots of their related languages and dialects, that’s it.) Latin isn’t even remotely old enough to be a mother language. It’s like saying alpacas were the original dinosaurs or some bullshit.
HUH! You dont FUCKING SAY?
WILL YOU LOOK THE FUCK AT THAT!
Not surprising, but this is cool information!
So I guess all you assholes who go around like /well white people invented iPods and PoC use them is that ~cultural appropriation~/ are feeling pretty stupid now.
sorry what was that
anyone who tried to correct me
This is so cool!!
Seriously though, when I was in high school, before my grandmother convinced me I should be a teacher (which I didn’t end up doing either, but that’s not the point) this is what I wanted to do. Find the start of language. Find the origin language! And this guy did it! How awesome is that? Now I just wish we could hear that language. I wish I could learn it! Wouldn’t that be awesome? To speak the original language? To know what the very first word for ‘earth’ or 'sky’ or 'rain’ or 'animal’ was? THAT WOULD BE AMAZING.
Think about this though, all languages evolved from this one language. All of them. Fucking do you see how different languages are now? Humanity has been playing a millennia long game of telephone, and it has resulted in languages so different from each other that they don’t even use the same letters or the same sounds.
Now I want to read a fic in which Daniel Jackson hears this news and gets super excited about it. And he goes over to Jack’s house, even though he knows Jack won’t care, because he will pretend to listen. And Daniel talks on and on all night about all the significances of this finding. By midnight Jack is just asleep on the couch, but Daniel is still talking.
