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posted by mrpg on Saturday March 16 2019, @12:21PM   Printer-friendly
from the fun-feast-for-five-families dept.

Did Dietary Changes Bring Us ‘F’ Words? Study Tackles Complexities of Language’s Origins

The New York Times has published an interesting story:

Thousands of years ago, some of our ancestors left behind the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and started to settle down. They grew vegetables and grains for stews or porridge, kept cows for milk and turned it into cheese, and shaped clay into storage pots.

Had they not done those things, would we speak the languages and make the sounds that we now hear today? Probably not, suggests a study published Thursday in Science.

“Certain sounds like these ‘f’ sounds are recent, and we can say with fairly good confidence that 20,000 or 100,000 years ago, these sounds just simply didn’t exist,” said Balthasar Bickel, a linguist at the University of Zurich and an author of the new research.

The study concluded that the transition to eating softer foods changed how bites developed as people aged. The physical changes, the authors said, made it slightly easier for farmers to make certain sounds, like “f” and “v.”

Food innovations changed our mouths, which in turn changed our languages

Submitted via IRC for soysheep9857

The overbite that comes from eating soft food may make "ffff" sounds more common.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/03/food-innovations-changed-our-mouths-which-in-turn-changed-our-languages/

Food Innovations Changed Our Mouths, Which in Turn Changed Our Languages

Submitted via IRC for chromas

Food innovations changed our mouths, which in turn changed our languages


Original Submission #1Original Submission #2Original Submission #3

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 16 2019, @03:13PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 16 2019, @03:13PM (#815473)

    But this is what passes for a "soft science" these days. Lots of guessing.

    Yes, and there is nothing wrong with guessing. When criticized this way they think you are criticizing their particular guess or something.

    Guessing is great, but that is only the first step of science. They need to do steps two and three of deriving a testable prediction from their guess (the more surprising the better) and then comparing that to new data.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 16 2019, @06:03PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 16 2019, @06:03PM (#815529)

    Scientific theory has 2 things.

    1. it must account for current state of things
    2. it must predict something testable that must be tested

    but it fails with #1 already and since #2 cannot happen, it just remains at that. A guess.