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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.
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 #1 Original Submission #2 Original Submission #3
(Score: 2, Touché) by khallow on Saturday March 16 2019, @03:35PM (4 children)
Really, even written language doesn't help. You need recordings of the voice. They were very delinquent about that.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday March 16 2019, @04:29PM
Not necessarily. For Latin, there's an author of the time (I forgot the name, unfortunately) who, for teaching purposes, made descriptions on how to correctly pronounce the language.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Saturday March 16 2019, @04:47PM (1 child)
There are other ways to get a pretty good idea, like:
- Onomatopoeia: When you encounter a word that means something and looks like it might sound like that something, it's a reasonably guess that they actually did make it sound something like that thing. As an example, if some future linguist thinks it's likely we're discussing bees, maybe because there's a picture of a bee nearby in whatever they're reading or because they've deciphered some of the words in the text, and then sees the word "buzz", it's not unreasonably to guess that "buzz" sounds something like a bee's noise.
- Rhyming and other poetic devices: Ancient poems use rhyme, rhythm, alliteration, and other similar techniques. So if two symbols are being regularly used in places where they ought to sound the same following the rules of poetry, then it's a reasonable guess that they sound the same. For instance, if you see "through" at the end of one line of a sonnet, and at the spot where you should see a rhyming word you see "too", you can conclude (correctly) that the sounds of "ough" in "through" sounds at least very similar to the sound of "oo" in "too".
- Spelling changes over time: If you're looking at older forms of English, and you keep seeing the symbol "þ" but you don't know what it sounds like, and later on you see the same word but "th" where there used to be "þ", then odds are pretty good that "þ" sounds a lot like the later "th".
- Comparison to nearby languages and alphabets: Let's say you're a future linguist studying current French, and you see in the middle of the text a reference to "un blue-jean". Now, that makes no sense in French in isolation, but it makes total sense in the context of "this is an English word or phrase the French borrowed and maybe accented slightly differently but basically sounds the same in French as it does in English."
Yes, it's imperfect. Yes, there's guesswork involved. But that's not the same as being completely blind. There have even been attempts to create dictionaries of languages that no longer exist and have no written examples [helsinki.fi].
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 16 2019, @05:22PM
So you saying there were no fffffucking mosquitoes back then?
(Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Saturday March 16 2019, @10:30PM
Not their fault. Disney still holds the copyright of those recordings.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford