Onomatopoeia FTW

Given my ongoing fascination with languages, it's a little surprising that I didn't come across a paper published a while back in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences earlier.  Entitled, "Sound–Meaning Association Biases Evidenced Across Thousands of Languages," this study proposes something that is deeply astonishing: that the connection between the sounds in a word and the meaning of the word may not be arbitrary.

It's a fundamental tenet of linguistics that language is defined as "arbitrary symbolic communication."  Arbitrary because there is no special connection between the sound of a word and its meaning, with the exception of the handful of words that are onomatopoeic (such as boom, buzz, splash, and splat).  Otherwise, the phonemes that make up the word for a concept would be expected to having nothing to do with the concept itself, and therefore would vary randomly from language to language (the word bird is no more fundamentally birdy than the French word oiseau is fundamentally oiseauesque).

That idea may have to be revised.  Damián E. Blasi (of the University of Zürich), Søren Wichmann (of the University of Leiden), Harald Hammarström and Peter F. Stadler (of the Max Planck Institute), and Morten H. Christiansen (of Cornell University) did an exhaustive statistical study, using dozens of basic vocabulary words representing 62% of the world's six thousand languages and 85% of its linguistic lineages and language families.  And what they found was that there are some striking patterns when you look at the phonemes represented in a variety of linguistic morphemes, patterns that held true even with completely unrelated languages.  Here are a few of the correspondences they found:

• The word for ‘nose’ is likely to include the sounds ‘neh’ or the ‘oo’ sound, as in ‘ooze.’
• The word for ‘tongue’ is likely to have ‘l’ or ‘u.’
• ‘Leaf’ is likely to include the sounds ‘b,’ ‘p’ or ‘l.’
• ‘Sand’ will probably use the sound ‘s.’
• The words for ‘red’ and ‘round’ often appear with ‘r.’
• The word for ‘small’ often contains the sound ‘i.’
• The word for ‘I’ is unlikely to include sounds involving u, p, b, t, s, r and l.
• ‘You’ is unlikely to include sounds involving u, o, p, t, d, q, s, r and l.

"These sound symbolic patterns show up again and again across the world, independent of the geographical dispersal of humans and independent of language lineage," said Morten Christiansen, who led the study.  "There does seem to be something about the human condition that leads to these patterns.  We don’t know what it is, but we know it’s there."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons M. Adiputra, Globe of language, CC BY-SA 3.0]

One possibility is that these correspondences are actually not arbitrary at all, but are leftovers from (extremely) ancient history -- fossils of the earliest spoken language, which all of today's languages, however distantly related, descend from.  The authors write:

From a historical perspective, it has been suggested that sound–meaning associations might be evolutionarily preserved features of spoken language, potentially hindering regular sound change.  Furthermore, it has been claimed that widespread sound–meaning associations might be vestiges of one or more large-scale prehistoric protolanguages.  Tellingly, some of the signals found here feature prominently in reconstructed “global etymologies” that have been used for deep phylogeny inference.  If signals are inherited from an ancestral language spoken in remote prehistory, we might expect them to be distributed similarly to inherited, cognate words; that is, their distribution should to a large extent be congruent with the nodes defining their linguistic phylogeny.

But this point remains to be tested.  And there's an argument against it; if these similarities come from common ancestry, you'd expect not only the sounds, but their positions in words, to have been conserved (such as in the English/German cognate pair laugh and lachen).  In fact, that is not the case.  The sounds are similar, but their positions in the word show no discernible pattern.  The authors write:

We have demonstrated that a substantial proportion of words in the basic vocabulary are biased to carry or to avoid specific sound segments, both across continents and linguistic lineages.  Given that our analyses suggest that phylogenetic persistence or areal dispersal are unlikely to explain the widespread presence of these signals, we are left with the alternative that the signals are due to factors common to our species, such as sound symbolism, iconicity, communicative pressures, or synesthesia...  [A]lthough it is possible that the presence of signals in some families are symptomatic of a particularly pervasive cognate set, this is not the usual case.  Hence, the explanation for the observed prevalence of sound–meaning associations across the world has to be found elsewhere.

Which I think is both astonishing and fascinating.  What possible reason could there be that the English word tree is composed of the three phonemes it contains?  The arbitrariness of the sound/meaning relationship seemed so obvious to me when I first learned about it that I didn't even stop to question how we know it's true.

Generally a dangerous position for a skeptic to be in.

I hope that the research on this topic is moving forward, because it certainly would be cool to find out what's actually going on here.  I'll have to keep my eyes out for any follow-ups.  But now I'm going to go get a cup of coffee, which I think we can all agree is a nice, warm, comforting-sounding word.

  

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The lenses of language

When we think of the word "endangered," usually what comes to mind isn't "languages," but there are a staggering number of languages for which the last native speakers will be gone in the next few decades.  Of the seven-thousand-odd languages currently spoken in the world, ten of them -- a little over a tenth of a percent of the total -- are the main language of 4.9 billion people, about sixty percent of the Earth's population.

It's easy to see why biological diversity is critical to an ecosystem; species can evolve such narrow niches that if they become extinct, that niche vanishes, along with everything that depended on it.  It's a little harder to put a finger on why linguistic diversity is critical.  If some obscure language spoken in the Australian Outback disappears, who (other than linguists) should care?

I choose Australia deliberately.  Since the first major contact between indigenous Australians and Europeans, in 1788 when the "First Fleet" of convicts from England and Wales landed in what is now Sydney Harbor, over half of the 250 or so indigenous languages have vanished completely.  About 110 are still in use, primarily by the older generation, and only twenty are in common usage and still being learned by children as their first language.

Language is such an integral part of cultural identity that this is nothing short of tragic.  But the loss goes even deeper than that.  The language(s) we speak change the way we see the world.  Take, for example, the Guugu Yimithirr language, spoken in one small village in the far north of Queensland, which has 775 native speakers left.  This language has the odd characteristic -- shared, so far as I know, only with a handful of languages in Siberia -- of not having words for left, right, in front of, and behind.  The position of an object is always described in terms of the four cardinal directions.  Right now, for example, my laptop wouldn't be "in front of me;" it would be "southeast of me."

When the Guugu Yimithirr people first came into contact with English speakers, they at first were completely baffled by what left and right even meant.  When it finally sunk in what the English speakers were trying to explain, the Guugu Yimithirr thought it was hilarious.  "Everything in the world depends on the position of your body?" they said.  "And when you turn your body, the entire world changes shape?  What an arrogant people you must be."

Every language lost robs us of a unique lens through which to see the universe.

The reason this rather elegiac topic comes up is because of another place that is a hotspot for endangered languages -- South America.  Last week it was announced that Cristina Calderón, of Puerto Williams in southern Chile, died at the age of 93.  Calderón, known to locals as Abuela Cristina, was the last native speaker of Yaghan, an indigenous language in Tierra del Fuego.  Not only was Yaghan down to a single native speaker, the language itself is a linguistic isolate -- a language that shows no relationship to any other language known.

So this isn't like losing a single species; it's like losing an entire family of species.

The government of Chile, in a well-meant but too-little-too-late effort, is funding the development of an educational curriculum in Yaghan, as well as a complete (or complete as it can be) Yaghan-Spanish dictionary.  The problem is -- as anyone who has learned a second language can attest -- there's a world of difference between second-language acquisition and learning your native language.  As Calderón put it, "I'm the last speaker of Yaghan.  Others can understand it but don't speak it or know it like I do."

As far as Yaghan's fascinating characteristics, the one that jumps out at me is the presence of rich sound symbolism.  This isn't onomatopoeia (like the words bang and boom in English), but is when a phonemic feature tends to show up in words with similar meanings.  Sound symbolism of some sort seems to be pretty universal.  The most famous example is the "kiki-bouba effect," discovered in 1929 by linguist Wolfgang Köhler.  Köhler made two simple drawings:

He then asked people of various linguistic and cultural backgrounds one question: a newly-discovered language has names for these two shapes.  One of them is called kiki and the other is called bouba.  Which is which?

Across the board, people identified the left-hand one as kiki and the right-hand one as bouba.  Something about the /k/ and /i/ phonemes in kiki was associated with sharpness and angularity (and negative or harsh concepts), and the /b/ and /u/ phonemes in bouba with softness and roundness (and positive or pleasant concepts).  It shows up in English in words like screech and scream and creep, and bubble and bless and billow -- but it's an effect that has shown up in just about every language where it's been tested.

In Yaghan, the sound symbolism is much richer.  It's usually connected with the beginnings or ends of the words -- words ending in /m/ often connote something rounded or soft (think of lump and bump in English), while /x/ at the end often connects with something dry or brittle.  An initial /tʃ/ (pronounced like the first sound in the word chip) is frequently associated with objects with spines or thorns or sharp edges.  And so on.

How does this shape how a native Yaghan speaker sees, understands, and classifies the world?

I know that language extinction isn't really preventable, at least not in the larger sense; languages have been splitting and evolving and going extinct for as long as our ancestors have had the capacity for speech.  But I can't help but feel that the primacy a handful of languages have achieved over the thousands of other ways to communicate is robbing us of some of the depth of the human experience.  Especially when you consider that a significant component of that primacy has been the determination by colonizers to eradicate the culture of indigenous groups and replace it with their own.

So in the grand scheme of things, it may not mean all that much that the last native speaker of Yaghan is gone.  But I still feel sad about it.  It's only by looking at the world through a new lens that we find out how limited our own view is -- and how much that view can expand by observing our knowledge through a different one.

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In the long tradition of taking something that works and changing it so it doesn't work anymore, Amazon has seen fit to seriously complicate how content creators (i.e. people like me) incorporate affiliate links in their online content.  I'm trying to see if I can figure out how to get it to work, but until that happens, I am unfortunately going to suspend my Skeptophilia book-of-the-week feature.  If I can get it up and running again with the new system, I'll resume.  I'll keep you updated.

Easy as A, B, C

There's an unfortunate but natural tendency for us to assume that because something is done a particular way in the culture we were raised in, that obviously, everyone else must do it the same way.

It's one of the (many) reasons I think travel is absolutely critical.  Not only do you find out that people elsewhere get along just fine doing things differently, it also makes you realize that in the most fundamental ways -- desire for peace, safety, food and shelter, love, and acceptance -- we all have much more in common than you'd think.  As Mark Twain put it, "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.  Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime."

One feature of culture that is so familiar that most of the time, we don't even think about it, is how we write.  The Latin alphabet, with a one-sound-one-character correspondence, is only one way of turning spoken language into writing.  Turns out, there are lots of options:

• Pictographic scripts -- where one symbol represents an idea, not a sound.  One example is the Nsibidi script, used by the Igbo people of Nigeria.
• Logographic scripts -- where one symbol represents a morpheme (a meaningful component of a word; the word unconventionally, for example, has four morphemes -- un-, convention, -al, and -ly).  Examples include Egyptian hieroglyphics, the Cuneiform script of Sumer, the characters used in Chinese languages, and the Japanese kanji.
• Syllabaries -- where one symbol represents a single syllable (whether or not the syllable by itself has any independent meaning).  Examples include the Japanese hiragana script, Cherokee (more about that one later), and Linear B -- the mysterious Bronze-Age script from Crete that was a complete mystery until finally deciphered by Alice Kober and Michael Ventris in the mid-twentieth century.
• Abjads -- where one symbol represents one sound, but vowels are left out unless they are the first sound in the word.  Examples include Arabic and Hebrew.
• Abugidas -- where each symbol represents a consonant, and the vowels are indicated by diacritical marks (so, a bit like a syllabary melded with an abjad).  Examples include Thai, Tibetan, Bengali, Burmese, Malayalam, and lots of others.
• Alphabets -- one symbol = one sound for both vowels and consonants, such as our own Latin alphabet, as well as Cyrillic, Greek, Mongolian, and lots of others.

To make things more complicated, scripts (like every other feature of language) evolve over time, and sometimes can shift from one category to another.  There's decent evidence that our own alphabet evolved from a pictographic script:

Note, for example, the evolution of our letter "A," from a cow's head (so presumably the symbol originally represented an actual cow or ox), becoming a stylized representation of a horned animal, and finally losing its pictographic character entirely and becoming a representation of a sound instead of an idea.

Not only do scripts evolve, they can be invented.  (Obviously, they're all invented, but most of the ones we know about are old enough that we don't know much about their origins.)  Cyrillic, for example, was an creation of the Bulgarian Tsar Simeon I, but he based it on three sources -- Greek, Latin, and Glagolitic (a script used to write Old Church Slavonic), so it wasn't an invention ex nihilo.  The syllabic Cherokee script, however, was invented in the early nineteenth century by the brilliant Cherokee polymath Sequoyah, to give his people a way to write down their own history (a script that became one of the first written languages of the Indigenous people of North America).  In fact, it's a recently-invented script that brought this topic up today; a paper last week in Current Anthropology looks at a writing system I'd never heard of, the Vai script of Liberia, invented by a collaboration of eight people in 1833 from motivation similar to Sequoyah's.  Like Cherokee, it's syllabic in nature:

The paper looks at the interesting fact that even in the short time since its invention, Vai has evolved -- the symbols have simplified, and the script has "compressed" -- similar-sounding syllables eventually being represented by the same symbol.

"Visual complexity is helpful if you're creating a new writing system," said the study's lead author, Piers Kelly, of the Max Planck Institute, in an interview with Science Alert.  "You generate more clues and greater contrasts between signs, which helps illiterate learners.  This complexity later gets in the way of efficient reading and reproduction, so it fades away."  Also, as more and more people learn the writing system, it becomes regularized and standardized -- something that happens even faster when people switch from pen-and-paper to some kind of technological means of reproducing text.

It's why the recent tendency for People Of A Certain Age to bemoan the loss of cursive writing instruction in American public schools is honestly (1) kind of funny, and (2) swimming upstream against a powerful current.  Writing systems have been evolving since the beginning, with complicated, difficult to learn, difficult to reproduce, or highly variable systems being altered or eliminated outright.  It's a tough sell, though, amongst people who have been trained all their lives to use that script; witness the fact that Japanese still uses three systems, more or less at the same time -- the logographic kanji and the syllabic hiragana and katakana.  It will be interesting to see how long that lasts, now that Japan has become a highly technological society.  My guess is at some point, they'll phase out the cumbersome (although admittedly beautiful) kanji, which requires understanding over two thousand symbols to be considered literate.  The Japanese have figured out how to represent kanji on computers, but the syllabic scripts are so much simpler that I suspect they'll eventually win.

In any case, it's fascinating to see how many different solutions humans have found for turning spoken language into written language, and how those scripts have changed over time (and continue to change).  All features of the amazing diversity of humanity, and a further reminder that "we do it this way" isn't the be-all-end-all of culture.

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Like many people, I've always been interested in Roman history, and read such classics as Tacitus's Annals of Imperial Rome and Suetonius's The Twelve Caesars with a combination of fascination and horror.  (And an awareness that both authors were hardly unbiased observers.)  Fictionalized accounts such as Robert Graves's I, Claudius and Claudius the God further brought to life these figures from ancient history.

One thing that is striking about the accounts of the Roman Empire is how dangerous it was to be in power.  Very few of the emperors of Rome died peaceful deaths; a good many of them were murdered, often by their own family members.  Claudius, in fact, seems to have been poisoned by his fourth wife, Agrippina, mother of the infamous Nero.

It's always made me wonder what could possibly be so attractive about achieving power that comes with such an enormous risk.  This is the subject of Mary Beard's book Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern, which considers the lives of autocrats past and present through the lens of the art they inspired -- whether flattering or deliberately unflattering.

It's a fascinating look at how the search for power has driven history, and the cost it exacted on both the powerful and their subjects.  If you're a history buff, put this interesting and provocative book on your to-read list.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The universal language

Sometimes I have thoughts that blindside me.

The last time that happened was three days ago, while I was working in my office and our elderly coonhound, Lena, was snoozing on the floor.  Well, as sometimes happens to dogs, she started barking and twitching in her sleep, and followed it up with sinister-sounding growls -- all the more amusing because while awake, Lena is about as threatening as your average plush toy.

So my thought, naturally, is to wonder what she was dreaming about.  Which got me thinking about my own dreams, and recalling some recent ones.  I remembered some images, but mostly what came to mind were narratives -- first I did this, then the slimy tentacled monster did that.

That's when the blindside happened.  Because Lena, clearly dreaming, was doing all that without language.

How would thinking occur without language?  For almost all humans, our thought processes are intimately tied to words.  In fact, the experience of having an experience or thought that isn't describable using words is so unusual that we have a word for it -- ineffable.

Mostly, though, our experience is completely, um, effable.  So much so that trying to imagine how a dog (or any other animal) experiences the world without language is, for me at least, nearly impossible.

What's interesting is how powerful this drive toward language is.  There have been studies of pairs of "feral children" who grew up together but with virtually no interaction with adults, and in several cases those children invented spoken languages with which to communicate -- each complete with its own syntax, morphology, and phonetic structure.

A fascinating new study that came out last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, detailing research by Manuel Bohn, Gregor Kachel, and Michael Tomasello of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, showed that you don't even need the extreme conditions of feral children to induce the invention of a new mode of symbolic communication.  The researchers set up Skype conversations between monolingual English-speaking children in the United States and monolingual German-speaking children in Germany, but simulated a computer malfunction where the sound didn't work.  They then instructed the children to communicate as best they could anyhow, and gave them some words/concepts to try to get across.

They started out with some easy ones.  "Eating" resulted in the child miming eating from a plate, unsurprisingly.  But they moved to harder ones -- like "white."  How do you communicate the absence of color?  One girl came up with an idea -- she was wearing a polka-dotted t-shirt, and pointed to a white dot, and got the idea across.

But here's the interesting part.  When the other child later in the game had to get the concept of "white" across to his partner, he didn't have access to anything white to point to.  He simply pointed to the same spot on his shirt that the girl had pointed to earlier -- and she got it immediately.

Language is defined as arbitrary symbolic communication.  Arbitrary because with the exception of a few cases like onomatopoeic words (bang, pow, ping, etc.) there is no logical connection between the sound of a word and its referent.  Well, here we have a beautiful case of the origin of an arbitrary symbol -- in this case, a gesture -- that gained meaning only because the recipient of the gesture understood the context.

I'd like to know if such a gesture-language could gain another characteristic of true language -- transmissibility.  "It would be very interesting to see how the newly invented communication systems change over time, for example when they are passed on to new 'generations' of users," said study lead author Manuel Bohn, in an interview with Science Daily.  "There is evidence that language becomes more systematic when passed on."

Because this, after all, is when languages start developing some of the peculiarities (also seemingly arbitrary) that led Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf to develop the hypothesis that now bears their names -- that the language we speak alters our brains and changes how we understand abstract concepts.  In K. David Harrison's brilliant book The Last Speakers, he tells us about a conversation with some members of a nomadic tribe in Siberia who always described positions of objects relative to the four cardinal directions -- so my coffee cup wouldn't be on my right, it would be south of me.  When Harrison tried to explain to his Siberian friends how we describe positions, at first he was greeted with outright bafflement.

Then, they all erupted in laughter.  How arrogant, they told him, that you see everything as relative to your own body position -- as if when you turn around, suddenly the entire universe shifts to compensate for your movement!

[Image available under a license at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Human_Language_Families_Map.PNG]

Another interesting example of this was the subject of a 2017 study by linguists Emanuel Bylund and Panos Athanasopoulos, and focused not on our experience of space but of time.  And they found something downright fascinating.  Some languages (like English) are "future-in-front," meaning we think of the future as lying ahead of us and the past behind us, turning time into something very much like a spatial dimension.  Other languages retain the spatial aspect, but reverse the direction -- such as the Peruvian language of Aymara.  For them, the past is in front, because you can remember it, just as you can see what's in front of you.  The future is behind you -- therefore invisible.

Mandarin takes the spatial axis and turns it on its head -- the future is down, the past is up (so the literal translation of the Mandarin expression of "next week" is "down week").  Asked to order photographs of someone in childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age, they will place them vertically, with the youngest on top.  English and Swedish speakers tend to think of time as a line running from left (past) to right (future); Spanish and Greek speakers tended to picture time as a spatial volume, as if it were something filling a container (so emptier = past, fuller = future).

All of which underlines how fundamental to our thinking language is.  And further baffles me when I try to imagine how other animals think.  Because whatever Lena was imagining in her dream, she was clearly understanding and interacting with it -- even if she didn't know to attach the word "squirrel" to the concept.

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This week's book recommendation is a fascinating journey into a topic we've visited often here at Skeptophilia -- the question of how science advances.

In The Second Kind of Impossible, Princeton University physicist Paul Steinhardt describes his thirty-year-long quest to prove the existence of a radically new form of matter, something he terms quasicrystals, materials that are ordered but non-periodic.  Faced for years with scoffing from other scientists, who pronounced the whole concept impossible, Steinhardt persisted, ultimately demonstrating that an aluminum-manganese alloy he and fellow physicists Luca Bindi created had all the characteristics of a quasicrystal -- a discovery that earned them the 2018 Aspen Institute Prize for Collaboration and Scientific Research.

Steinhardt's book, however, doesn't bog down in technical details.  It reads like a detective story -- a scientist's search for evidence to support his explanation for a piece of how the world works.  It's a fascinating tale of persistence, creativity, and ingenuity -- one that ultimately led to a reshaping of our understanding of matter itself.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The origin of Antarctican

Here's a bit of writing that should be familiar to most of you.

Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum; Si þin nama gehalgod to becume þin rice gewurþe ðin willa on eorðan swa swa on heofonum.  Urne gedæghwamlican hlaf syle us todæg, and forgyf us ure gyltas swa swa we forgyfað urum gyltendum; and ne gelæd þu us on costnunge ac alys us of yfele soþlice.

Recognize it?

It's the Lord's Prayer in English as it was spoken only a thousand years ago.  My guess is a lot of you had no idea what it was (although I have a number of regular readers who, like me, are aficionados of obscure languages; y'all don't count).  There are a few words that haven't changed in that time -- in this passage, only "us" and "and" -- but most have changed dramatically.  There are even a couple of letters that don't exist in Modern English, strikingly ð (pronounced like the first consonant in there) and þ (the first consonant in thin), both of which are written as "th" in Modern English.

Languages change, and they change at different rates.  Old Norse and Modern Icelandic are really more like different dialects of the same language than they are like different languages, even though just as much time has passed between Old Norse and Modern Icelandic as between Old English and Modern English.  There are sometimes sudden jumps -- the Norman Conquest in the 11th century and the Great Vowel Shift in the 15th are the two best-known examples from English, although the Viking Invasions of the 9th and 10th centuries had a significant effect, too, not only on vocabulary and pronunciation, but on place names.  (The subject of my master's thesis was how the Vikings affected Old English and Old Gaelic, which should win an award for research with no practical applications whatsoever.)

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons M. Adiputra, Globe of language, CC BY-SA 3.0]

These huge leaps are uncommon, however, and most language change progresses slowly and gradually.  The parallels to biological evolution are obvious, and the argument over whether language change is smooth or goes by fits-and-starts is just as silly as the corresponding argument over evolutionary gradualism vs. punctuated equilibrium.  It's not that one is the correct model and the other is not; both are correct, just in different circumstances.

The big jumps, of course, are easier to detect.  The effects of the Norman Invasions of England were profound, as words were adopted from French and then bent to conform to English phonological rules.  It's why we have so many pairs of words for food, one for its living farmyard state and the other for when it's on the table.  Cow/beef; sheep/mutton; pig/pork; chicken/poultry; calf/veal.  In each case, the first is from Old English (because the lower socioeconomic class Anglo-Saxons were the ones on the farm raising the animals) and the other from French (because their Norman overlords only saw the animal after being cooked).

But the similarity between language evolution and biological evolution runs a lot deeper than its pace.  Like evolutionary change in populations, language "speciation" not only needs small changes (corresponding to genetic mutations), selection (some forms succeeding and others disappearing), and some form of isolation.  Isolated populations take off on their own paths, often very different from the parent population, and because of the small number of individuals often do so more quickly than a large group would -- a sort of linguistic genetic drift.  (A good example is the Cornish language, which branched off from Welsh as a dialect in Roman times; by the 13th century, when the earliest extant examples of Cornish were written down, the two had evolved into two no longer mutually intelligible languages.)

This topic comes up because of some recent amazingly cool research by Jonathan Harrington, Michele Gubian, Mary Stevens, and Florian Schiel of the University of Munich, in which linguists have -- perhaps for the first time -- seen the beginnings of a dialect forming as it happens.  In "Phonetic Change in an Antarctic Winter," published last month in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, we find out about a study of the people who were isolated at the field station of the British Antarctic Survey during the long, frigid Antarctic winter, and about whom the researchers found something astonishing.

They started with a variety of accents, coming as they did from different English-speaking regions, but over the six months they were isolated, their accents began to converge into a distinct way of speaking unlike any of the "parent" accents.  Vowel sounds, especially, merged.  As an example, some of the speakers started out pronouncing the vowel sound in the word food as a front vowel (this is more common in British English), whereas others used a back vowel (more common in American English).  After only six months, the two sounds had converged, and everyone pronounced the sound as a middle vowel about halfway between the two extremes.

The authors write:

An acoustic analysis was made of the speech characteristics of individuals recorded before and during a prolonged stay in Antarctica.  A computational model was used to predict the expected changes due to close contact and isolation, which were then compared with the actual recorded productions.  The individuals were found to develop the first stages of a common accent in Antarctica whose phonetic characteristics were in some respects predicted by the computational model.  These findings suggest that the phonetic attributes of a spoken accent in its initial stages emerge through interactions between individuals causing speech production to be incrementally updated.

Of course, since the field station isn't permanently occupied by the same people, it's pretty likely that when the eleven test subjects went back to their homes (eight from various regions of England, one from the United States, and the other two -- who were not native speakers -- to Iceland and Germany) their accent reverted to the pronunciations typical for their milieu.

But it does give us a lens into how dialects form in other less contrived situations, and you can easily see how -- given enough time -- you might end up with modes of speaking so different that they would no longer be mutually intelligible.

Even, perhaps, to the point that "Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum" becomes "Our Father, who art in heaven."

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This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is brand new; Brian Clegg's wonderful Dark Matter and Dark Energy: The Hidden 95% of the Universe.  In this book, Clegg outlines "the biggest puzzle science has ever faced" -- the evidence for the substances that provide the majority of the gravitational force holding the nearby universe together, while simultaneously making the universe as a whole fly apart -- and which has (thus far) completely resisted all attempts to ascertain its nature.

Clegg also gives us some of the cutting-edge explanations physicists are now proposing, and the experiments that are being done to test them.  The science is sure to change quickly -- every week we seem to hear about new data providing information on the dark 95% of what's around us -- but if you want the most recently-crafted lens on the subject, this is it.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Universal languages

If we are ever lucky enough to contact intelligent extraterrestrial life, one of the difficulties will be communicating with them -- or even understanding what they say (whatever form that takes) as intelligent communication.

The problems with such contact, between not just different cultures but different species, were addressed in one of the most iconic episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation -- "Darmok."  (If you don't believe me about its iconic status, go up to any fan of science fiction and say, "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra."  I can nearly guarantee you that they will respond, "Shaka, when the walls fell."  Or possibly "Gilgamesh and Enkidu at Uruk."  And if they say the latter, they will follow it up by bursting into tears.  Amirite, Trek fans?)

The Tamarians, it turns out, always speak in myth-based metaphor; the classic phrase "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" is from a story of their culture and represents two people coming together to fight a common foe.  If you don't know the myths, though, the phrase makes no sense -- just as Deanna Troi points out, that if you know Shakespeare, "Juliet on the balcony" might represent doomed love, but if you don't know the play, it's completely without meaning.

Much as I love this episode -- and, like most TNG fans, ugly cry at the end of it -- as a linguist, it's always struck me as a little off.  It's hard to see how a race that speaks entirely in metaphor could become technological.  If to say, "Hand me the torque wrench" you had to come up with some kind of arcane analogy from a folk tale, fashioning anything more complicated than a slingshot would be pretty much out of the question.

A more realistic take on the alien communication thing (but in my opinion, not nearly as good a story) was the 2016 movie Arrival, in which the alien race "speaks" by drawing patterns in the air that are a little reminiscent of Circular Gallifreyan from Doctor Who.  A linguist (played by Amy Adams) is hired to decipher what they're trying to say, and head off a war -- the typical human assumption being, "If I don't know your motives, they must be bad."  The cool thing about this scenario is that the movie's creators came up with a mode of communication that's really alien, that shares essentially nothing with human speech (and damn little with human writing).

This comes up because of a paper by Christine Cuskley in Nature that looks at the human capacity for elucidating patterns, both from spoken or written language and from stimuli that aren't generally considered language at all (such as the tones of a slide whistle), when we have no referent at all for meaning.   Repeated experiments using a variety of different types of communication show that we're pretty good at abstracting and generalizing patterns from what we're given.  One example of the many given -- and you really should read the original paper, because it's freakin' cool -- is that in a test where people are given words for geometric shapes of different types, colors, and movements, within short order the test subjects figured out that if the word ended with the suffix -plo it designated a shape that was bouncing.

Cuskley writes:

A cornerstone of experimental studies in language evolution has been iterated artificial language learning: studies where participants learn of artificial ‘alien’ languages, and the product of their learning is then passed onto other participants successively.  Results over the last decade show that some defining features of human language can arise under these experimental conditions, which use iteration to simulate processes of cultural transmission...  These results have implications for how forms and modalities might constrain language systems, and demonstrate how the use of truly novel alien forms might be extended to address new questions in cultural and linguistic evolution.

All of which makes me hopeful that if we ever are confronted with something like the scenario in Arrival, we might actually have some hope of figuring out what the aliens are saying.  Can you imagine how exciting that would be?  Not just deciphering a non-human language -- something that gives linguistics geeks like me multiple orgasms -- but being able to find out what goes on in the brains (or whatever equivalent they have) of a species that shares no commonality with terrestrial biology at all?

Man, if we find it hard to conceive how people from other cultures on Earth think, this would stretch our capacity to the limit.  And it would knock us even further off our idea, which persists despite everything science has discovered, that humans are somehow special creations, and our thoughts, needs, desires, and hopes somehow lie at the very center of the universe.

Which is all to the good.  Our species could use a little more humility.  Maybe it'd allow us to take our place in the cosmos with a little more grace.

Who knows?  Maybe we'd even be able to say, "Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel."  And mean it.

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is from an author who has been a polarizing figure for quite some time; the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.  Dawkins has long been an unapologetic critic of religion, and in fact some years ago wrote a book called The God Delusion that caused thermonuclear-level rage amongst the Religious Right.

But the fact remains that he is a passionate, lucid, and articulate exponent of the theory of evolution, independent of any of his other views.  This week's book recommendation is his wonderful The Greatest Show on Earth, which lays out the evidence for biological evolution in a methodical fashion, in terminology accessible to a layperson, in such a way that I can't conceive how you'd argue against it.  Wherever you fall on the spectrum of attitudes toward evolution (and whatever else you might think of Dawkins), you should read this book.  It's brilliant -- and there's something eye-opening on every page.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]