Diffusion Frauke Skrobaschewsky Moving outwards

Diffusion

• Frauke Skrobaschewsky

Moving outwards

• roughly 75.000 years ago humans moved out of Africa and into Asia
• first to Asia Minor
• then westwards to Europe
• eastwards to the Far East and Australia

• the last continent to be populated was America
• crossed from northeastern Siberia into northwest Alaska
• went by boat via the Bering Strait
• smalls groups
• probably spoke dialects of the same language

The hunt for Universals

• language universals = features which occur in all languages
• any human can learn any language, so something must link all languages together
• a possible list of “narrow“ absolute universals:

All languages

• 1) have consonants and vowels
• 2) combine sounds into larger units
• 3) have nouns  words for people & objects
• 4) have verbs  words for actions
• 5) can combine words

All languages

• 6) can say who did that to who
• 7) can negate utterances
• 8) can ask questions
• 9) involve structure-dependance
• 10) involve recursions

• finding absolute linguistic universals is hard because they differ in details from language to language

Constraints

• language must have constraints which prevent it from flying apart in different directions
• constraints are hard to find  promising approach is the search for constraining links
• language constructions are often linked tp one another in implicational chains
• Noam Chomsky‘s ‘paramter setting‘  best known implicational theory

• Chomsky‘s parameter setting
• children have an inbuilt knowledge of some basic language principles
• in addition they are instinctively aware of some key ‘either/or‘ options
• they need to find out which options their own language selects
• the extra information follows automatically

The future

• there are about 6.000 languages spoken today
• in this century 90% of all languages will cease to exist
• 3.000 languages are ‘moribund‘: no longer learned as a first language by the new generation of speakers
• the few languages that will remain will spread across the world

Sources

• Aitchison, John. The seeds of speech – Language origin and evolution. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge: 1996.
• http://www.ucl.ac.uk/alumni/get-involved/world-map/world-map.gif