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, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 16 2019, @12:33PM (3 children)
I really despise this stuff. It is great to come up with an explanation for something, but then you need to make a prediction and check it against new data before taking it seriously. This practice of confirming your "theory" on the same data used to develop it is really, really bad. And every single "science" news article does this.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 16 2019, @01:21PM (2 children)
Exactly right. But this is what passes for a "soft science" these days. Lots of guessing. They only have to look at places that have no "f" sound, like Philippines, yet they eat lots of soft food. So what gives?? Science already failed. And then in Germany they have problems between 'v' and 'f' - vier vs. fünf. The beginning sounds almost the same.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 16 2019, @03:13PM (1 child)
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
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.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Saturday March 16 2019, @01:20PM
I'm no dentist but from what I hear the bacterial plaque feed on the fermentable carbohydrates in grains so farming actually damaged our teeth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remineralisation_of_teeth#Tooth_decay_process [wikipedia.org]
compiling...
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Saturday March 16 2019, @01:31PM (6 children)
How, in a time before written language, can you say with any confidence at all what sounds people used? Natural languages are constantly evolving, and while cognates and linguistic research have given us some idea as to what a few people's languages might have sounded like in the last 5,000 years ago or so, that's still a long way from knowing what humans sounded like 50,000 years ago. Especially with hundreds if not thousands of languages dying out before anybody wrote them down.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(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
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 16 2019, @04:19PM
Please don't act as if a press release is a paper.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday March 16 2019, @01:34PM (2 children)
I can't remember the human evolution specialist who coined the term, but this sounds like what some call a "just so story." Evolutionary biology and particularly human evolution studies is plagued by speculative accounts that if something happened "just so" then it seems logical for X to evolve.
The problem is factors are often a lot more random than that in history. As one of the links in TFS points out, there are some languages with more rare linguistic features (e.g., clicks) that are harder to produce. Why? F/V sounds are also more rare in languages, but could they not just have developed by happenstance and spread to neighbors, like clicks?
There's an interesting point about a slight overbite ( "normal" modern human bite) making it possible to produce such sounds with less effort, compared to earlier human bites where teeth met more directly.
But I have an underbite. My lower jaw actually goes in front of my top teeth -- not a lot, since I had braces to correct it, though they never quite got my teeth to overlap in the "normal" slight overbite way. I have never had any speech problems, never had difficulty producing F/V sounds, and it's not in the least way uncomfortable nor requires effort. And my teeth are probably a couple millimeters in the "wrong" direction compared to the even smaller number of millimeters in alteration of human jaw patterns that this study is claiming make F/V more feasible in human language.
So, sure, maybe this happened "just so." Or maybe someone was chewing on her lip one day and made a sound, and other people around her imitated it. The hypothesis is plausible, but nearly impossible to test.
(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.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Saturday March 16 2019, @01:38PM (1 child)
Did diet bring us the F-word? Sure. I know I always curse a bit when there is no meat -- f*ck all these veggies and grain.
(Score: 3, Funny) by krishnoid on Sunday March 17 2019, @09:26PM
Plus what did they call it beforehand? Just 'ood'?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday March 16 2019, @02:58PM
When, exactly, did we invent fucking and farting?
(Score: 1) by Rupert Pupnick on Saturday March 16 2019, @04:40PM
Let’s hear it for the labiodental fricative!
(Score: 3, Funny) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday March 16 2019, @06:04PM (1 child)
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...
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 16 2019, @06:52PM
I say F-word did not exist before Legos (you now, cause when you step on one).