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Saturday, April 16, 2011

Quentin Atkinson on human expansion and phoneme diversity

I believe in holding a fair amount of skepticism even when faced with a claim that could be legitimate to some degree. So I will have to personally look into the following claim before speculating on it any further:

"Human genetic and phenotypic diversity declines with distance from Africa, as predicted by a serial founder effect in which successive population bottlenecks during range expansion progressively reduce diversity, underpinning support for an African origin of modern humans. Recent work suggests that a similar founder effect may operate on human culture and language. Here I show that the number of phonemes used in a global sample of 504 languages is also clinal and fits a serial founder–effect model of expansion from an inferred origin in Africa. This result, which is not explained by more recent demographic history, local language diversity, or statistical non-independence within language families, points to parallel mechanisms shaping genetic and linguistic diversity and supports an African origin of modern human languages."

- Quentin D. Atkinson (source: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/332/6027/346.abstract)

I will update you when I have looked into this further. Though I am aware of a few isolated cases that support this theory (such as those mentioned only vaguely in this article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/15/human-language-africa_n_849809.html), I will reserve a few doubts because:

1. Even if there is some basic truth to it, this claim could be oversimplified-- not that I think Atkinson necessarilly meant it to be interpretted that way. You cannot expect this claim to be 100% accurate down to the very ratio of kilometers from Africa to the number of phonemes in a language, like a ripple effect in which a certain location in Africa is the origin and the expanding migration "rings" simply lose their phonemes as they keep going outwards. Migrations did not work that way. The same group could have, over hundreds and thousands of years, gone east, then north, and then divided themselves with one group going back west and the other continuing south.

2. What languages did Atkinson base his studies on? How do we know his research was not unbalanced?

3. There may be other factors involved than the actual distance from Africa (such as time or environment).

But despite a few doubts, I leave space in my imagination for this interesting possibility. If there is in fact a significant amount of accuracy to this claim, then the next question is why do languages lose phonemes when migrations expand outwards from Africa?

Monday, April 11, 2011

Sign Pidgins and Creoles

I have lately been reading about sign languages, something I had not really looked into much before. In the course of my readings, I became aware of not only linguistically-relevent processes of sign language development, but also on historical issues faced by the deaf and/or their communities. I have learned a little more also on how the two impact one another.

In the Nicaraguan case, deaf individuals were often sheltered, neglected, and isolated from other deaf persons. They were kept at home, and their families were embarrassed by them. This meant that: 1. they did not have a community to communicate with, which meant that 2. they did not develop grammar in early childhood when it is the opportune time to do so, which meant that 3. for the rest of their lives, they could no longer communicate fluently with anyone, not even other deaf people, except through crude mimickry.

After the Sandinista Revolution of the 1970s, a school for the deaf was established in Managua for the first time. Though Spanish-language immersion was not always a success, an astonishing new occurance was taking place: by simply bringing deaf people together, which was never the case in prior decades, deaf people began communicating with each other for the first time.

Each student brought with them from home his or her own signs from home. From that, the children began incorporating these into a signed pidgin.

Because this was still a makeshift language of crude signs, these first-generation deaf signers did not develop grammar either. But this was just a crucial first step for the generations that would follow. Where there was no grammar, no fluidity of signing, the younger children gave it both and as a result came up with their own language.

Other cases like Martha's Vineyard and the Bedouin village of Al-Sayyid, the developped in the same way, were different in that deaf people were an integral and accepted part of the otherwise hearing community. In both cases, an unusually high rate of hereditary deafness is/was present in society. All people, hearing and deaf alike, can and do sign.

As any of Al-Sayyid's 3,500 villagers will tell you, their ancestor married an Egyptian woman and settled in Palestine. They had five children, two of whom were deaf. All of the people of Al-Sayyid are descended from the deaf brothers.

Evidence for the fact that Al-Sayyid is a very recent new language: it only has two color words, "white" (white, reds, oranges, yellows) and "black" (black and cool colors). This is significant because, according to established linguistic research, there is a timeline for color-word development in languages. New languages have a white-black color categorizing system. The next step is normally a white-black-red system. And so more color words become standard as the language gets older. The fact that there are only two set color-words indicates that Al-Sayyid's sign language is a fairly recent language, as it's ancestral story also indicates.

In more recent years, the deaf children of Al-Sayyid have attended an Israeli school for the deaf, where they pick up words from Israeli Sign Language and bring them home; they even have words like "purple" and "green" that are unknown to older deaf generations. While conducting research in the village, linguists have had to pair hearing children with non-hearing children to observe their communication, so that there would be no interference from ISL (the hearing child, not having attended the school for deaf children, will only know the native sign language of his village, and the deaf child will then have to only use the native sign language to communicate with a hearing person).

We have discussed the immersion of signed creoles/fluent sign languages from signed pidgins. Now I will give an example of the opposite, a sort of ignorant repression of language.

Gallaudet University, openned in the 1800s, is the first school in the United States that was established for deaf students, and which employed deaf instructors. At some point, the university came under the control of hearing people who then subjected the school to Victorian biases about deafness and sign language. There were countless arguments that sign language was an inferior language, and many forced efforts to assimilate deaf people into hearing society. Deaf professors were replaced with hearing ones, who failed to communicate with their students.

The hearing professors of Gallaudet, upon observing their subjects, noticed the vivaciousn use of facial gestures. The professors tried to stop the deaf students from using face gestures while signing, deeming it innapropriate (they still did it on their own terms outside of the classroom). What these instructors just did was to remove all grammar from the language (while the hands sign words, the face carries grammar in many of the world's sign languages). Stripped of all grammar, the result was a rough language that had a lessened ability to communicate effectively. A creole had been irregularly demoted to a cruder form of signed pidgin* at Gallaudet University; despite their good intentions the instructors were doing very little to help their students.

Victorian-age prejudices were such that deaf people simply could have a real language. It was best if they learn to integrate and don't produce more deaf children.

In cases like Al-Sayyid, the attitudes towards deafness are absolutely reverse. It is not only common, but quite unremarkable for someone to be deaf. In a village where it is rare to marry anyone from outside of the village, and where cousin-marriage is a strategic way to preserve land ownership, inheritted deafness crops up frequently in families and stays in these families. Because of this accepted fact of life, deaf people have never been alienated in this society, and their language has become embraced rather than repressed.

(*: Remember, the term "pidgin" when used in a scientific (linguistic) context means a makeshift communication system that lacks grammar (often as a result of speakers of different languages needing to communicate with one another), whereas a "creole" differs in that it has a complete grammar system that had been deveolopped from and applied to the former pidgin. In the real world (non-linguistic/scientific language), these terms may be used a little more loosely, and there is nothing wrong with that. I just want to make the distinction between my use of words in a "real-world" or a scientific context, so as not to be horribly misunderstood.)