Tag: Christiansen Kirby

Return of the Language Evolution Tree

A while ago, some collegues and I noticed that two prominent books on Language Evolution -Christiansen & Kirby’s Language Evolution and Fitch’s Evolution of Language – both included a picture of an acacia tree in the sunset on their covers.  On closer analysis, it turned out that they were the same tree:

Thus began the Acacia Tree Hypothesis of Language Evolution.

Following this up, I was thinking about Dediu & Ladd’s discovery that linguistic tone is has certain genetic correlates. Here’s the map of languages with linguistic tone:

However, I suspected the devious influence of acacia trees and so I found some information on their geographic distribution:

As I suspected, countries in which the acacia tree Acacia nilotica grows are significantly more likely to have tonal languages:

Tone No Tone
Acacia Trees 163 117
No Acacia Trees 104 237

(Chi-squared with Yates’ continuity correction = 47.1, df = 1, p < 0.0001, data from Crop Protection Consortium and the World Atlas of Language Structures).

The plot thickens …

 

Dediu, D., & Ladd, D. R. (2007). Linguistic tone is related to the population frequency of the adaptive haplogroups of two brain size genes, Microcephalin and ASPM. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104, 10944–10949.

Fitch, W. T. 2010 The evolution of language. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Christiansen, M. and Kirby, S. (2003). Language Evolution. Oxford University Press.

 

Update:

I’ve added the images David mentioned to the post:

Also, The Babel’s Dawn blog banner

The 20th Anniversary of Steven Pinker & Paul Bloom: Natural Language and Natural Selection (1990)

The day before yesterday Wintz mentioned two important birthdays in the field of language evolution (see here): First, Babel’s Dawn turned four, and second, as both Edmund Blair Bolles and Wintz pointed out, Steven Pinker‘s and Paul Bloom‘s seminal paper “Natural Language and Natural Selection” (preprint can be found here) has its 20th anniversary.
Wintz wrote that he planned on writing
“a post on Pinker and Bloom’s original paper, and how the field has developed over these last twenty years, at some point in the next couple of weeks,”
and I thought I’d also offer a short perspective on the paper, by reposting an slightly edited post I wrote on the paper in 2008 (yes I know, I do a lot of reposting of old material, but I’m planning on writing more new stuff as well, I promise 😉 ).
So here we go: