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…
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…
The rise of the word “weaponized”
The gratuitous use of the word “weaponized” really annoys me.
No vindication of Joseph Greenberg?
A reader pointed me to this critique of Nick Wades’ telling in The New York Times Reports that the recent Reich et al. paper on Native Americans is a vindication of Joseph Greenberg’s ideas on the languages of the Americas. 90-Year-Old Cons…
Has Dienekes Pontikos found the signature of the Indo-Europeans?
I don’t know the answer to the question posted in title above, and I’m moderately skeptical that he has. But I wanted to give him full credit in the public record if researchers confirm his findings in the next few years. You can read the f…
Language and serial founder effects
Mr. James Winters has finally offered his take on Phonemic diversity supports a serial founder effect model of language expansion from Africa. The Return of the Phoneme Inventories:
There are several assumptions made in the paper that I’ve already co…
A genealogy of alphabets
The Xibo are one of populations in the Human Genome Diversity Project data set, so you’ve probably seen them here and there. They’re a Tungusic group affiliated with the Manchus, which explains why their script is a modified form of the nea…
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. …
The African ur-language
Several people have emailed/tweeted at me about the new paper in Science, Phonemic Diversity Supports a Serial Founder Effect Model of Language Expansion from Africa:
Human genetic and phenotypic diversity declines with distance from Africa, as predict…
The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language
Short comment: An often forgotten gem in Steven Pinker’s oeuvre. More technical than The Blank Slate.
The rise (and fall?) of second-tier lingua francas
The New York Times has an interesting piece, As English Spreads, Indonesians Fear for Their Language. It is dense with the different strands of this story. Basically, upper and upper middle class Indonesians are switching from Bahasa Indonesian to English to give their children a leg up, and are sending their children to English-medium schools. […]