Article

2016-09-13 Science & Technology

Humans may speak a universal language, say scientists

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Posted by Besoeker 2016-09-13 01:21|| || Front Page|| [11126 views ] Top

#1 Many words have onomatopoeic roots. Hardly surprising they are similar in different languages.

Posted by phil_b 2016-09-13 04:54|| 2016-09-13 04:54|| Front Page Top

#2 A barking chien, eh?

Posted by g(r)omgoru 2016-09-13 06:54|| 2016-09-13 06:54|| Front Page Top

#3 Golly so the Tower of Babel 8sn'the just some cool story in the end?

Whoda thunk it?

Posted by Flusing Platypus6789 2016-09-13 07:13|| 2016-09-13 07:13|| Front Page Top

#4 "There does seem to be something about the human condition that leads to these patterns. We don't know what it is, but we know it's there."

You know Sherlock, if you walk to the next building or across the commons, there's an office with title like anthropology department. They have this theory about an African diaspora in where hunter gathers migrated (before a wall could be built) out of the continent to populate the world. That would imply all the basics and knowledge needed by hunter gathers and a language to communicate them. Given the population wasn't yet even near millions*, we can speculate that their vocabulary wasn't either.

*See - Population Bottleneck.

Posted by Procopius2k 2016-09-13 09:41|| 2016-09-13 09:41|| Front Page Top

#5 Does Director Christiansen include languages outside the major lingustic families, languages like Piraha, spoken only by an isolated tribe in the Amazonian jungle, described as:

Unrelated to any other extant tongue, and based on just eight consonants and three vowels, Pirahã has one of the simplest sound systems known. Yet it possesses such a complex array of tones, stresses, and syllable lengths that its speakers can dispense with their vowels and consonants altogether and sing, hum, or whistle conversations.

...The Pirahã, Everett wrote, have no numbers, no fixed color terms, no perfect tense, no deep memory, no tradition of art or drawing, and no words for “all,” “each,” “every,” “most,” or “few”—terms of quantification believed by some linguists to be among the common building blocks of human cognition. Everett’s most explosive claim, however, was that Pirahã displays no evidence of recursion, a linguistic operation that consists of inserting one phrase inside another of the same type, as when a speaker combines discrete thoughts (“the man is walking down the street,” “the man is wearing a top hat”) into a single sentence (“The man who is wearing a top hat is walking down the street”). Noam Chomsky, the influential linguistic theorist, has recently revised his theory of universal grammar, arguing that recursion is the cornerstone of all languages, and is possible because of a uniquely human cognitive ability.

Contrariwise, what Procopius2k said.

Posted by trailing wife 2016-09-13 10:09|| 2016-09-13 10:09|| Front Page Top

#6 Yeah, linguists.
When my dogs(dachsund, shar-pei, labs) bark, they sound the same. Must be the American kennels, eh?

Posted by Skidmark 2016-09-13 10:15|| 2016-09-13 10:15|| Front Page Top

#7 "Excuse me, I speak Jive"

Posted by Frank G 2016-09-13 19:11|| 2016-09-13 19:11|| Front Page Top

#8 Yeah the language is 'Sex'.

Next question?

Posted by CrazyFool 2016-09-13 19:25|| 2016-09-13 19:25|| Front Page Top

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