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.”
Submitted via IRC for soysheep9857
The overbite that comes from eating soft food may make "ffff" sounds more common.
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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 16 2019, @04:27PM (1 child)
It's testable, just grossly unethical to do so.
I would love to know what would happen if we dropped a breeding population of newborns into a recreation of the EEA*, provided just barely enough support to keep them alive long enough to breed, and sat back for a couple of centuries, occasionally injecting some new idea when we figure we've a good grasp of their current state. And then do it fifty more times simultaneously so we can collect decent stats.
Unfortunately putting humans in their natural environment isn't ethical, even if they're free to leave.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday March 16 2019, @08:50PM
No, that still isn't likely to work. Even supposing you created some sort of artificial environment (where is it? How is it isolated? What happens if one of the subjects tries to leave or figures out they're in this weird self-contained environment? Will that ruin the results?) and ran it for many centuries, you can't just drop a bunch of newborns in the wild and expect them to survive. (What the hell is a "breeding population of newborns," anyway?? Newborns can't breed.)
At a minimum, you'd need to provide some care for a while, and studies show even infants quickly absorb and learn to discriminate phonemes in language spoken around them.
So yeah, setting aside ethics, it's practically infeasible, or as I put it before, "nearly impossible to test" even with a huge amount of resources. And why we'd even consider doing something like that to find out where F and V sounds come from?? It's preposterous, even setting ethics aside.