First Words

Welcome back readers! We'd like to take a minute today to highlight a controversial development in linguistics that could change much of our understanding of language. It has provocative implications for everything from Chomsky's language theory to the biblical story of the Tower of Babel.

As the biblical story goes, there was once a single mother, or "proto" language, that all people spoke, before they were scattered and the languages confused. Many modern linguists dismissed this idea, arguing that the first expressions of language most likely occurred in different places in different times. Linguists pointed out that, among the languages we could best trace, there were still several different language families. Well, a recent study published in the New York Times may have let researches reach back in time, and the results suggest language emerged only once - that there really was a single mother tongue.

Dr. Dunn, of the Max Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics, who worked with Dr. Atkinson on the study, used what's called the Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method to go back in time. In layman's terms, this means he told a computer the language rules he knew, then made a random language history. Then, he created a second random history, and the program chose the one that fit the rules better. Repeated until no new history proved better, this method created an informed guess about the earliest language - and it showed only one.

Linguists are going back and forth on the issue now. We only recently learned that languages have fewer possible sounds the farther speakers traveled from their original lands. What many are disagreeing about, however, is the categorizing of those sounds, and if a Khoisan click takes the same phoneme (language sound) place as, say, an English "th." The answer could alter the study. We're sure to visit this again some time in the future, so stay tuned!

In the meantime, if you haven't pried your phonemes from your phonetics, and could use a hand separating your syntax from your semantics, pick up a copy of Linguistics For Beginners, the easy-to-use layman's introduction to language, and follow along with us! If you're feeling ambitious, grab Chomsky For Beginners too - it makes a great companion, laying plain many accomplishments of that leader of modern language study, Noam Chomsky.