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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: 3, Funny) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday March 16 2019, @06:04PM (1 child)

    by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Saturday March 16 2019, @06:04PM (#815530) Journal

    Getting up at night to have a wee and stubbing your toe on the furniture gave us F words. And many others besides.

    --
    I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
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  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 16 2019, @06:52PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 16 2019, @06:52PM (#815543)

    I say F-word did not exist before Legos (you now, cause when you step on one).