Differential rates of change in consonant and vowel systems

Abstract

Consonants and vowels are processed differently and they seem to have distinct neural representations (Caramazza et al. 2000). Böe et al. (2017) insist that vowel-like systems must be inferred to the last common ancestor of Baboons and humans, 25mya. Unlike vowels, however, consonants appear to be a later innovation in the communication systems of Hominids. Primates, including chimpanzees and orangutans, employ a repertoire of voiceless calls (so-called raspberries), which show homology with voiceless consonants (Lameira et al. 2014). During the course of human evolution, smaller orofacial cavities, increased neuro-cognitive abilities, and more precise motor control of the articulators led to greater phonetic variation, particularly among consonants, which have become phonologized in many ways in different language families. In comparison to vowels, there are over three times as many consonant phonemes in the world's languages. Their number and diversity ranges greatly, from 6 in Rotokas to over 90 in !Xu (Maddieson 1984); compare vowel systems which range in size from 2 to 14. Why are there are so many more consonants in the world's languages?The answer to this question is complex, with factors involving a need for increased number of lexical contrasts in order to accommodate a growing vocabulary throughout the evolution of language, and the greater possibility for consonants rather than vowels to increase the number of contrastive sounds in a language through secondary articulations. Two strands of evidence support this conclusion. First, comparing a database of proto-language reconstructions (Marsico et al, accepted; n=100) with modern languages in UPSID (Maddieson 1984), Marsico (1999) notes an increase in the number of consonants in modern

Editorial: The adaptive value of languages: non-linguistic causes of language diversity, volume II

“…That is, by investigating colexification in Quechuan language family, whose speakers live at both low and high altitudes, Urban finds no support for adaptive processes within language families. This suggests that there are lineage-specific preferences for and against colexification, which supports previous claims that, for example, report differential rates of lexical change per language family with population size potentially playing a role (Greenhill et al, 2018) or that phonological systems exhibit differential rates of change in lineagespecific ways (Moran and Verkerk, 2018).…”

The adaptive value of languages: Non–linguistic causes of language diversity, Volume II

“…That is, by investigating colexification in Quechuan language family, whose speakers live at both low and high altitudes, Urban finds no support for adaptive processes within language families. This suggests that there are lineage-specific preferences for and against colexification, which supports previous claims that, for example, report differential rates of lexical change per language family with population size potentially playing a role (Greenhill et al, 2018) or that phonological systems exhibit differential rates of change in lineage-specific ways (Moran & Verkerk, 2018).…”

Phylogenetic signal in phonotactics

“…However, contrary to expectation, a recent study suggests that grammatical characters evolve faster than lexical data (Greenhill et al 2017). Differing rates of evolution are also found in phonology, specifically the rates of change in vowel inventories versus consonant inventories (Moran & Verkerk 2018;Moran et al 2020). An additional issue with grammatical characters is that the space of possibilities for a grammatical variable is Phylogenetic signal in phonotactics [3] often restricted.…”