On phonemic diversity and the origin of language in Africa

Pericliev, Vladimir

doi:10.1515/lity.2011.016

Cited by 4 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…These results clarify two objections that have been raised against Atkinson's proposal of a phonemic serial founder effect [ 5 ]. First, as noted by Pericliev [ 38 ], ‘one wonders why the number of phonemes must diminish in a founder population (…) A group of people will quite probably carry the WHOLE phonemic inventory to the new place of residence, and not only part of this inventory’ (see also pp. 150–151 in the criticism by Bybee [ 39 ]).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Can a linguistic serial founder effect originating in Africa explain the worldwide phonemic cline?

Fort

Pérez-Losada

2016

J. R. Soc. Interface.

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It has been proposed that a serial founder effect could have caused the present observed pattern of global phonemic diversity. Here we present a model that simulates the human range expansion out of Africa and the subsequent spatial linguistic dynamics until today. It does not assume copying errors, Darwinian competition, reduced contrastive possibilities or any other specific linguistic mechanism. We show that the decrease of linguistic diversity with distance (from the presumed origin of the expansion) arises under three assumptions, previously introduced by other authors: (i) an accumulation rate for phonemes; (ii) small phonemic inventories for the languages spoken before the out-of-Africa dispersal; (iii) an increase in the phonemic accumulation rate with the number of speakers per unit area. Numerical simulations show that the predictions of the model agree with the observed decrease of linguistic diversity with increasing distance from the most likely origin of the out-of-Africa dispersal. Thus, the proposal that a serial founder effect could have caused the present observed pattern of global phonemic diversity is viable, if three strong assumptions are satisfied.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Can a linguistic serial founder effect originating in Africa explain the worldwide phonemic cline?

Fort

Pérez-Losada

2016

J. R. Soc. Interface.

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“…These discrepancies notwithstanding, it is important to note that Atkinson's analysis has not held up to scientific scrutiny. See the technical comments and reanalyses in Science (Cysouw, Dediu, and Moran 2012;Van Tuyl and Pereltsvaig 2012;Wang et al 2012) and in Linguistic Typology (Bybee 2011;Dahl 2011;Donohue and Nichols 2011;Jaeger et al 2011;Maddieson et al 2011;Pericliev 2011;Ringe 2011;Ross and Donohue 2011;Sproat 2011) . In summary, the main criticisms and issues are:…”

Section: Theoretical Objectionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…-Large communities sizes favor medium size phoneme inventories -Small community sizes favor either small or large phoneme inventories Trudgill maintains that one should not expect to find a meaningful correlation between phoneme inventory size and population size given what is known about phonological change. Pericliev (2004) tests the observations by Trudgill (2004) and whether there is a positive correlation between speaker community size and phoneme inventory size using the UPSID sample of 451 languages (Maddieson and Precoda 1990) together with modern day population figures from the Ethnologue. Pericliev finds no correlation between the size of a community speaking a language and the size of the phonological inventory of that language.…”

Section: There Is No Positive Correlation Between Population Size Andmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Therefore, any "diversity" lost to migration would be phonetic, not phonemic, due to the reduction of contact among the number of dialect speakers.This means that the relevant level for diversity reduction is at the phonetic level, not the phonemic one (Bowern 2011;Maddieson et al 2011;Pericliev 2011) . As such, Bybee (2011) suggests that looking for causal mechanisms that relate the number of phonemes in an inventory to population size requires looking at sound change.…”

Section: The Processes Involved In How Phoneme Inventories Changementioning

confidence: 99%

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Languages, evolution and statistics: human sound systems were shaped by changes in bite configuration.Response to Tarasov & Uyeda (2020)

Blasí

Moran

Moisik

et al. 2020

Preprint

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In Blasi et al. (2019) we have shown, through a series of statistical analyses and models, that human sound systems have been affected by a transition in bite configuration starting from the Neolithic. Tarasov and Uyeda (2020) (henceforth T&U) raise a number of observations in relation to our article. We appreciate T&U's engagement with our work and their sharing of the code and data of the analyses reported. In brief, their technical comment involves five analyses: Binomial Causal Models (BCM) 2. Linear Regression of across-area variation in labiodentals and subsistence 3. Predictive Posterior Simulations (PPS) 4. Poisson Linear Regression (PLR): model comparison 5. Phylogenetic AnalysesIn what follows, we show that the discrepancies they report between our findings and theirs are due mostly to ill-specified models, weak (or missing) statistical evidence, and a misinterpretation of our results. After these issues are addressed, we conclude that T&U's claims do not hold.

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“…Pericliev [ 33 ], Sproat [ 29 ] and Bowern [ 34 ] raised concerns about the application of a SFE to explain the global phonemic cline, because of a lack of direct analogy between phonemes and genes. Indeed, the same language is shared by all individuals of a population, but they do not have the same genes.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A serial founder effect model of phonemic diversity based on phonemic loss in low-density populations

Pérez-Losada

Fort

2018

PLoS ONE

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It has been observed that the number of phonemes in languages in use today tends to decrease with increasing distance from Africa. A previous formal model has recently reproduced the observed cline, but under two strong assumptions. Here we tackle the question of whether an alternative explanation for the worldwide phonemic cline is possible, by using alternative assumptions. The answer is affirmative. We show this by formalizing a proposal, following Atkinson, that this pattern may be due to a repeated bottleneck effect and phonemic loss. In our simulations, low-density populations lose phonemes during the Out-of-Africa dispersal of modern humans. Our results reproduce the observed global cline for the number of phonemes. In addition, we also detect a cline of phonemic diversity and reproduce it using our simulation model. We suggest how future work could determine whether the previous model or the new one (or even a combination of them) is valid. Simulations also show that the clines can still be present even 300 kyr after the Out-of-Africa dispersal, which is contrary to some previous claims which were not supported by numerical simulations.

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On phonemic diversity and the origin of language in Africa

Cited by 4 publications

References 4 publications

Can a linguistic serial founder effect originating in Africa explain the worldwide phonemic cline?

Can a linguistic serial founder effect originating in Africa explain the worldwide phonemic cline?

Languages, evolution and statistics: human sound systems were shaped by changes in bite configuration.Response to Tarasov & Uyeda (2020)

A serial founder effect model of phonemic diversity based on phonemic loss in low-density populations

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