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Via LanguageHat

Juliette Blevins
Evolutionary Phonology : The Emergence of Sound Patterns
Cambridge University Press, 2004

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G / 2005 (7)

February 18th, 2005

Natural Selection As We Speak

Shared
properties of human languages are not the result of universal grammar
but reflect self-organizing properties of language as an evolving system

The
forces of variation and selection which shape human language have
become issues of extensive research. Documentation of sounds and sound
patterns, and their evolution over the past 7000-8000 years allows
linguists to quantify the important role of human perception,
articulation and imperfect learning as language is passed from one
generation to the next. At this year’s AAAS conference in Washington,
DC, Juliette Blevins, senior scientist at the Max Planck Institute for
Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, presents a new approach to the
problem of how genetically unrelated languages across the world often
show similar sound patterns, without invoking innate mechanisms
specific to grammar. Languages as far apart as Native American,
Australian Aboriginal, Austronesian and Indo-European show similar
patterns of vowel and consonant inventory and distribution, but
exceptions to sound patterns regarded as universal show that these
similarities are best viewed as the result of convergent evolution.

A new model of sound change shows that evolutionary principles can account for striking phonetic similarities across unrelated languages, as well as the rarity of certain sounds. German and Russian are not the only languages in the world where sounds like b, d, and g lose their characteristic vocal fold ‘buzz’ at the end of the word. Dozens of unrelated languages, from Afar on the sands of Ethiopia, to Ingush in the northern Caucasus have similar sound patterns. Why are these patterns found in unrelated languages? Why do languages favour silent p t k sounds over noisy b d g sounds at the end of the word? And why are these sounds common, while clicks have arisen only once in human history? Dr. Juliette Blevins, Senior Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, provides answers to these and many other phonological puzzles in a symposium on Evolutionary Phonology at the 2005 AAAS Annual Meeting, in Washington, DC. This entry was posted on Monday, February 28th, 2005 at 12:06 pm and is filed under Research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. Edit this entry. Leave a Reply Name (required) Mail (will not be published) (required) Website If the above Image does not contain text, use this secure code: GcHHkL Security code (from image above) Shadow is proudly powered by WordPress Entries (RSS) and Comments (RSS). Copyright Disclaimers: This site publishes original text contents in HTML and a small number of original graphic/multimedia materials. With a few exceptions, all images you are seeing on your browser are retrieved from other content providers, with your consent, by your browser. Let's be clear: I never provided a bit of those images from my server, nor do I have copies of these images on my server. I simply provided links to images of interest using appropriate HTML IMG tags. By using a graphic web browser, and with "Display Images" option turned on, YOU -- not me -- gave explicit or implicit consent to let your browser automatically retrieve the images and display them on this page. The third-parties may or may not hold the copyright of the displayed images, and you may or may not have violated someone's copyright by allowing your browser to display the image here. If you fear some big fat lawyers might be after you, you should turn off the "Display Images" option.