Skip to content

Marc F. Bellemare Posts

Published April 15, 2011

On the African Origins of Language

Today’s New York Times has an interesting article about the origins of language:

“Quentin D. Atkinson, a biologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, has shattered this time barrier, if his claim is correct, by looking not at words but at phonemes — the consonants, vowels and tones that are the simplest elements of language.  Dr. Atkinson, an expert at applying mathematical methods to linguistics, has found a simple but striking pattern in some 500 languages spoken throughout the world: A language area uses fewer phonemes the farther that early humans had to travel from Africa to reach it.”

The article has a very informative map showing how the number of phonemes decreases the further away a language is from southern Africa.

What I especially liked about the article is how careful Atkinson is in explaining how his findings only suggest that his hypothesis is true, avoiding causal claims. I wish more science reporting would emphasize this.

Published April 14, 2011

World Food Prize Laureates on Food Prices and Political Unrest

Last week, the Des Moines Register ran an article in which they asked a few World Food Prize laureates to discuss food prices.

As regards political unrest, 2003 World Food Prize laureate Catherine Bertini said:

“This is only the beginning.In 2008, over 30 countries had food riots — but those were in thecities, with people not as poor as most farmers, protesting the higherprices they have to pay. In many cases, the governments acted bycontrolling prices, which quieted some crowds, but made the poor farmers poorer. Yet there are almost a billion people, the vast majorityin rural areas, who cannot survive if they are much poorer. Some don’t survive already.”

The article is interesting throughout, as it pretty much encompasses all that one should know about why food prices fluctuate (e.g., climate change and policies encouraging biofuels production), and what the effects of those fluctuations are on the welfare of the poor. I am thinking of using that article as light reading when discussing food policy in my development seminar next fall.