Where do languages comefrom? That is a question as old as human beings' ability to pose it. But it hastwo sorts of answer. The first is evolutionary： when and wherehuman banter was first heard. The second is ontological：how an individual human acquires the power of speech andunderstanding. This week, by a neat coincidence, has seen the publication ofpapers addressing both of these conundrums.
Quentin Atkinson, of the University of Auckland in New Zealand, has beenlooking at the evolution issue, trying to locate the birth place of the firstlanguage. Michael Dunn, of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics inthe Netherlands, has been ontology. Fittingly, they have published theirresults in the two greatest rivals of scientific journalism. Dr Atkinson'spaper appears in science, Dr Dunn's in Nature.
The obvious place to look for the evolutionary origin of language is the cradleof humanity, Africa. And, to cut a long story short, it is to Africa that DrAtkinson does trace things. In doing so, he knocks on the head any lingeringsuggestion that language originated more than once.
One of the lines of evidence which show humanity's African origins is that thefarther you get from that continent, the less diverse, genetically speaking,people are. Being descended from small groups of relatively recent migrantr,they are more inbred than their African forebears.
Dr Atkinson wondered whether the same might be true of languages. To find out,he looked not at genes but at phonemes. These are the smallest sound whichdifferfntiate meaning (like the ゛th゛in thin；replace it with ゛f゛or ゛s゛and the result is a different word). It has been knownfor a while that less widely spoken a language is, the fewer the phonemes ithas. So, as groups of people ventured ever farther from their African homeland,their phonemic repertoires should have dwindled, just as their genetic onesdid.
To check whether this is the case, Dr Atkinson took 504 languages and plottedthe number of phonemes in each (corrected for recent population growth, whensignificant) against the distance between the place where the language isspoken and 2,500 putative points of origin, scattered across the world. Therelationship that emerges suggests the actual point of origin is in central orsouthern Africa, and that all modern languages do, indeed, have a common root.
That fits nicely with the idea that being able to speak and be spoken to is aspecific adaptation - a virtual organ, if you like - that is humanity's killerapp in the struggle for biological dominance. Once it arose, Homo sapiensreally could go forth and multply and fill the Earth.
The details of this virtual organ are the subject of Dr Dunn's paper.Confusingly, though, for this neat story of human imperialism, his resultchallenges the leading hypothesis about the nature of the language organitself.
The originator of that hypothesis is Noam Chomsky, a linguist at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr Chomsky argues that the human braincomes equipped with a hard-wired universal grammar - a language instinct, inthe elegant phrase of his one-time colleague Steven Pinker. This would explainwhy children learn to speak almost effortlessly.
The problem with the idea of a language instinct is that languages differ notjust in their vocabularies, which are learned, but in their grammatical rules,which are the sort of thing that might be expected to be instinctive. DrChomsky's response is that this diversity, like the diversity of vocabulary, issuperficial. In his opinion grammar is a collection of modules, each containingassorted features. Switching on a module activates all these features at astroke. You cannot pick and choose within a module.
For instance, languages in which verbs precede objects will always haverelative clauses after nouns；a language cannot haveone but not the other. A lot of similar examples were collected by JosephGreenberg, a linguist based at Stanford, who died in 2001. And, thoughGreenberg himself attributed his findings to general constraints on humanthought rather than to language-specific switches in the brain, his findingsalso agree with the Chomskyan view of the world. Truly testing that view,though, is hard. The human brain cannot easily handle the connections that needto be made to do so. Dr Dunn therefore offered the task to a computer. And whathe found surprised him.
