History of Language

[Betsy, co-mod]

Interesting article in NYT (from "Science") about a new theory on the history of language:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/15/sci...

[David]

Very interesting--thanks, Betsy!

[Cheryl]

Ok, interesting article - but what gets me is that language might be about 100,000 years old (I did not know that at all). Home Sapiens is said to be at least 250,000 years old, and the hominids at least 2 million years old. So - when we think we're special because we have language, and we get all uptight because we have limited success when trying to teach chimps and gorillas language... aren't we being inconsistent? Or what am I misunderstanding?

[Ibis3]

Thanks. As an historian (by education if not current profession), I was very intrigued by that article. Certainly, it seems fertile ground for further research.

I haven't done much reading on the subject of language acquisition, but if someone had asked me, I would have thought it would have been roughly coaeval with the speciation of H. sapiens if not even earlier (could Neanderthals or even H. erectus have spoken a proto-language? I wonder...)

[Sandra]

My friend Greg, and ardent follower of things linguistic, sent me the following analysis of the phoneme article in Science and I thought it would be of interest here:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/...