Who doth speaketh the mleccha bhasha?
A question post in the comments: how plausible is that much of South Asia today is dominated by languages that were introduced agro-pastoralists in the period between 2000 and 1500 BCE? (the proposition put forward in The formation of human populations in South and Central Asia). This is not a peculiar question. It seems that …
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 19: Historical Linguistics
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 19: Historical LinguisticsThis week on The Insight (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and Google Podcasts) we discuss the historical linguistics Dr. Asya Pereltsvaig. The author of Languages of the World and T…
The evolution of languages
Map of language families of the world todayThe story in the Bible about the “Tower of Babel” was the explanation that the ancient Hebrews gave for why there was so much linguistic diversity in the world around them. Ancient people were curious and obse…
Muslims and Urdu in India
The plot above shows the % Urdu speakers vs. % Muslim in states where Muslims are 4% or more of the population. The data is from Census 2011 (thanks for Vikram of the language data). There are some interesting trends. Assuming that the vast majority of Urdu speakers are Muslim, it seems that in India … Continue reading “Muslims and Urdu in India”
African ur-language reconsidered
Mark Liberman at Language Log has looked through the Science paper Phonemic Diversity Supports a Serial Founder Effect Model of Language Expansion from Africa. Overall he seems to think it is an interesting paper, but he has some pointed criticisms. …
Knowledge is not value-free
This isn’t The New Yorker, and I’m not writing twenty page essays which flesh out all the nooks and crannies of my thought. When I posted “Linguistic diversity = poverty” I did mean to provoke, make people challenge their presuppositions, and think about what they’re saying when they say something.
I think knowledge of many languages […]
Linguistic diversity = poverty
In yesterday’s link dump I expressed some dismissive attitudes toward the idea that loss of linguistic diversity, or more precisely the extinction of rare languages, was a major tragedy. Concretely, many languages are going extinct today as the older generation of last native speakers is dying. This is an issue that is embedded in a […]
Language goes extinct, human race to follow….
Last speaker of ancient language of Bo dies in India:Professor Anvita Abbi said that the death of Boa Sr was highly significant because one of the world’s oldest languages – Bo – had come to an end….”It is generally believed that all Andamanese langu…
Monkeys & language
The paper is out, Campbell’s monkeys concatenate vocalizations into context-specific call sequences. Nicholas Wade and Ed Yong review the evidence. One of the issues is that chimps don’t seem to have syntax, so how can a monkey? But since domesticated …
FOXP2 in Nature
Human-specific transcriptional regulation of CNS development genes by FOXP2:…It has been proposed that the amino acid composition in the human variant of FOXP2 has undergone accelerated evolution, and this two-amino-acid change occurred around the ti…