Archive for Evolution of language
June 27, 2025 @ 6:24 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Classification, Computational linguistics, Evolution of language
Alexei S. Kassian and George Starostin, "Do 'language trees with sampled ancestors' really support a 'hybrid model' for the origin of Indo-European? Thoughts on the most recent attempt at yet another IE phylogeny". Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 12, no. 682 (May 16, 2025).
Abstract
In this paper, we present a brief critical analysis of the data, methodology, and results of the most recent publication on the computational phylogeny of the Indo-European family (Heggarty et al. 2023), comparing them to previous efforts in this area carried out by (roughly) the same team of scholars (informally designated as the “New Zealand school”), as well as concurrent research by scholars belonging to the “Moscow school” of historical linguistics. We show that the general quality of the lexical data used as the basis for classification has significantly improved from earlier studies, reflecting a more careful curation process on the part of qualified historical linguists involved in the project; however, there remain serious issues when it comes to marking cognation between different characters, such as failure (in many cases) to distinguish between true cognacy and areal diffusion and the inability to take into account the influence of the so-called derivational drift (independent morphological formations from the same root in languages belonging to different branches). Considering that both the topological features of the resulting consensus tree and the established datings contradict historical evidence in several major aspects, these shortcomings may partially be responsible for the results. Our principal conclusion is that the correlation between the number of included languages and the size of the list may simply be insufficient for a guaranteed robust topology; either the list should be drastically expanded (not a realistic option for various practical reasons) or the number of compared taxa be reduced, possibly by means of using intermediate reconstructions for ancestral stages instead of multiple languages (the principle advocated by the Moscow school).
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May 29, 2025 @ 5:43 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Animal behavior, Animal communication, Communication, Evolution of language
The origins of language
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (May 9, 2025)
Summary:
Wild chimpanzees alter the meaning of single calls when embedding them into diverse call combinations, mirroring linguistic operations in human language. Human language, however, allows an infinite generation of meaning by combining phonemes into words and words into sentences. This contrasts with the very few meaningful combinations reported in animals, leaving the mystery of human language evolution unresolved.
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May 19, 2025 @ 7:03 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Artificial intelligence, Evolution of language, Grammar
Grammaticality Representation in ChatGPT as Compared to Linguists and Laypeople, Zhuang Qiu, Xufeng Duan & Zhenguang G. Cai, Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 12, no. 617 (May 6, 2025).
Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance across various linguistic tasks. However, it remains uncertain whether LLMs have developed human-like fine-grained grammatical intuition. This preregistered study (link concealed to ensure anonymity) presents the first large-scale investigation of ChatGPT’s grammatical intuition, building upon a previous study that collected laypeople’s grammatical judgments on 148 linguistic phenomena that linguists judged to be grammatical, ungrammatical, or marginally grammatical (Sprouse et al., 2013). Our primary focus was to compare ChatGPT with both laypeople and linguists in the judgment of these linguistic constructions. In Experiment 1, ChatGPT assigned ratings to sentences based on a given reference sentence. Experiment 2 involved rating sentences on a 7-point scale, and Experiment 3 asked ChatGPT to choose the more grammatical sentence from a pair. Overall, our findings demonstrate convergence rates ranging from 73% to 95% between ChatGPT and linguists, with an overall point-estimate of 89%. Significant correlations were also found between ChatGPT and laypeople across all tasks, though the correlation strength varied by task. We attribute these results to the psychometric nature of the judgment tasks and the differences in language processing styles between humans and LLMs.
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March 9, 2025 @ 6:47 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Accents, Artificial intelligence, Bibliography, Bilingualism, Cognitive science, Communication, Evolution of language, Grammar, Language and animals, Language and archeology, Language and biology, Language and genetics, Language and history, Language and religion, Phonetics and phonology, Prosody, Vocabulary, Words words words
Something for everyone
- "Cultural Nuances in Subtitling the Religious Discourse Marker Wallah in Jordanian Drama into English." Al Salem, Mohd Nour et al. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 12, no. 1 (March 6, 2025). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-025-04515-6.
- "Humpback Whale Song Shown to Be Structurally Similar to Human Language." PhysOrg, February 6, 2025. https://phys.org/news/2025-02-humpback-whale-song-shown-similar.html. Discussing "Whale Song Shows Language-like Statistical Structure." Arnon, Inbal et al. Science (February 7, 2025). https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adq7055, "Convergent Evolution in Whale and Human Vocal Cultures." Whiten, Andrew et al. Science 387, no. 6734 (February 6, 2025): 581-582. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adv2318, and "Language-like Efficiency in Whale Communication." Youngblood, Mason. Science Advances 11, no. 6 (February 5, 2025): eads6014. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ads6014.
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January 17, 2025 @ 2:20 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Evolution of language, Language and religion, Vernacular
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January 16, 2025 @ 8:23 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Evolution of language, Grammar
When I was in the British Museum bookshop several weeks ago, I was pleased by the numerous offerings of books on language. Two types stood out: those on the origins of speech and those on the origins of writing. As we would say in Mandarin, they are iǎngmǎshì 兩碼事 ("two different things"). The best stocked / selling one on scripts was Andrew Robinson's The Story of Writing, and its counterpart for speech was Daniel Everett's How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention.
In this post, I will focus on the latter volume and its author, with whom Language Log readers are well acquainted (see the bibliography below). I will not discuss his lengthy fieldwork among the hunter-gatherer Pirahã of the Lowland Amazonia region (to be distinguished from the piranha or piraña fish which has such a fearsome reputation and also lives in the Amazon), but will emphasize his radical theories of the origins of language.
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October 26, 2023 @ 10:40 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Evolution of language, Reconstructions
From Hiroshi Kumamoto:
Old Iranian Languages
Proto-Iranian
Old Persian
Avestan
Middle Persian
Parthian
Sogdian
Alanian
Khotanese
Bactrian
Khwarezmian
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April 23, 2022 @ 6:41 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Evolution of language, Language and biology, Language change
New article by Johnson in The Economist (4/23/22):
On the origin of languages
It is tempting to think that they have clear beginnings. They don’t
First two paragraphs:
IN A CHURCH hewn out of a mountainside, just over a thousand years or so ago, a monk was struggling with a passage in Latin. He did what others like him have done, writing the tricky bits in his own language between the lines of text and at the edges. What makes these marginalia more than marginal is that they are considered the first words ever written in Spanish.
The “Emilian glosses” were written at the monastery of Suso, which was founded by St Aemilianus (Millán, in Spanish) in the La Rioja region of Spain. Known as la cuna del castellano, “the cradle of Castilian”, it is a UNESCO world heritage site and a great tourist draw. In 1977 Spain celebrated 1,000 years of the Spanish language there.
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February 26, 2022 @ 3:41 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Esthetics, Etymology, Evolution of language, Language and economics, Language and food
Figuring out the etymologies of words has always been one of my favorite things in life, almost as much as eating flavorful food. All the way back in second grade of primary school, my Mom gave me a Merriam-Webster dictionary, and I treasured it above all my other belongings because of its etymological notes. Much later, when The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language became available, I was euphoric, since then I was able to trace words to their Indo-European and Semitic roots.
In between, though, I came up against the pseudo-science of Chinese character etymology, which should better be called "Chinese character construction". Despite almost universal misunderstanding to the contrary, Chinese characters have no direct connection to the sounds and meanings of words. If you want to analyze the history of the development of how individual Chinese characters acquired their shapes and sounds, all well and good, but that's a different matter from how the sounds and meanings of Chinese words evolved through time. Always and ever, I emphasize over and over the primacy of sounds for conveying meaning, the same as with all other living, spoken languages. The writing systems are only there as a makeshift, always catching up and inevitably imperfect means for recording the sounds of the languages.
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December 30, 2021 @ 8:24 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Changing times, Data bases, Environment and ecology, Evolution of language, Language and culture, Language and science, Language and society, Language change
New article in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America), "The rise and fall of rationality in language", Marten Scheffer, Ingrid van de Leemput, Els Weinans, and Johan Bollen (12/21/21)
118 (51) e2107848118; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2107848118
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November 25, 2021 @ 3:15 pm· Filed by Mark Liberman under Evolution of language
Below is a guest post by Mark Dow, consisting of an interview with Cory Stade.
Cory Stade is a cognitive archaeologist interested in "how Palaeolithic material culture can inform our understanding of the origin and evolution of language." Formerly a Visiting Fellow at the University of Southampton at the Centre for the Archaeology of Human Origins (CAHO), she received a BA in linguistics from Simon Fraser University in Canada, with a minor in archaeology; a Masters degree in Palaeoanthropology and Palaeolithic Archaeology at University College London; and a PhD in Archaeology at Southampton in 2017 with a thesis addressing "the different modes of culturally transmitted lithic material made experimentally by novice modern knappers." She currently runs an academic proofreading business and, with her partner, a jewelry business called the Stone Age Ceramic Studio.
In her 2020 article "Theory of mind as a proxy for Paleolithic language ability," Stade argues as follows:
The development of "theory of mind" (the term for our ability to infer the mental states of others) in typical human children can be mapped onto the evolution of cognition in humans by examining the stone tool fossil record. This, in turn, can teach us about the evolution of language because of the extent to which theory of mind and language ability are intertwined and predictive of each other.
This interview was conducted via email in the Spring of 2021.
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April 1, 2020 @ 7:30 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Etymology, Evolution of language, Language and culture
[This is a guest post by Pamela Crossley]
I was recently doing something with my old undergraduate major, Old English, and was reminded of the word Salmonath (Solmonath), which put me in mind of this old conversation on your blog:
"Mud season in Russia: Putin, Rasputin" (3/31/18)
So you’ll like this one. Like the others we were discussing before, the Anglo-Saxons referred to a mud season, specifically the “muddy month” of February — Salmonath or Solmonath. There has been a lot of confusion about exactly what Salmonath means. A passage in Bede has been interpreted as saying that he translated “Salmonath” as “cake month,” but I think the passage only means that people also called Salmonath “cake month.” Somebody else said it was “Sol” as in the sun, obviously silly. Virtually everybody eventually agrees it means “muddy month” but they don’t go any further with what this “Sal” or “Sol” is supposed to be. The most illuminating discussion I have now read is in Wedgwood, A Dictionary of English Etymology (1865), Vol III, pp. 25-256, which you can now read online. Turns out, this word is very well attested in other Germanic languages. It is only very distantly related, if at all, to “soil,” which comes to English from French; “soil”’s original meaning was place, spot, ground, that kind of thing. Solid.
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October 30, 2019 @ 7:15 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Evolution of language, Historical linguistics, Language change, Phonetics and phonology
A Korean student was just in my office and saw this book on my table: mal-ui segyesa 말의 세계사.
She said, "Oh, a world history of words!"
But I knew that couldn't be right because the book is a world history of horses. It's actually a Korean translation of this book by Pita Kelekna:
The Horse in Human History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)
So what happened? Did the student make a mistake?
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