{"id":1734,"date":"2011-04-15T08:29:07","date_gmt":"2011-04-15T12:29:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/?p=1734"},"modified":"2011-04-15T08:30:23","modified_gmt":"2011-04-15T12:30:23","slug":"on-the-african-origins-of-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/1734","title":{"rendered":"On the African Origins of Language"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Today&#8217;s <em>New York Times<\/em> has an interesting <a title=\"Phonetic Clues Hint Language Africa-Born\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2011\/04\/15\/science\/15language.html\" target=\"_blank\">article<\/a> about the origins of language:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">&#8220;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 \u2014 the consonants, vowels and tones that are the simplest elements of language.\u00a0 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.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The article has a very informative map showing how the number of phonemes decreases the further away a language is from southern Africa.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today&#8217;s New York Times has an interesting article about the origins of language: &#8220;Quentin D. Atkinson, a biologist at the University of Auckland in New&#8230;<\/p>\n<div class=\"more-link-wrapper\"><a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/1734\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">On the African Origins of Language<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1gPg8-rY","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1734","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1734"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1734\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1740,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1734\/revisions\/1740"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}