Tag: language origin

Neanderthal language revisited: speech old and shared with archaic humans

palaeolithic_neanderthal

Neanderthal language revisited: not only us, by Dediu and Levinson, Curr Opin Behav Sci (2018) 21:49–55.

Abstract:

Here we re-evaluate our 2013 paper on the antiquity of language (Dediu and Levinson, 2013) in the light of a surge of new information on human evolution in the last half million years. Although new genetic data suggest the existence of some cognitive differences between Neanderthals and modern humans — fully expected after hundreds of thousands of years of partially separate evolution, overall our claims that Neanderthals were fully articulate beings and that language evolution was gradual are further substantiated by

… Read the rest “Neanderthal language revisited: speech old and shared with archaic humans”

Language evolution and language change related to ancient DNA

language-change-east-west

An interesting special issue of the journal Language Evolution has appeared, dedicated to Ancient DNA and language evolution.

Also, check out the preprint at BioRxiv, Geospatial distributions reflect rates of evolution of features of language, by Kauhanen et al. (2018).

Abstract:

Different structural features of human language change at different rates and thus exhibit different temporal stabilities. Existing methods of linguistic stability estimation depend upon the prior genealogical classification of the world’s languages into language families; these methods result in unreliable stability estimates for features which are sensitive to horizontal transfer between families and whenever data are aggregated

… Read the rest “Language evolution and language change related to ancient DNA”