Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2019

Glimpses into the “deep” past: what can vocal tract anatomy say about lost linguistic diversity?

Dan Dediu

Résumé

Present-day linguistic diversity is the result of complex interactions among many forces, constraints and affordances across time (Bentz, Dediu, Verkerk, & Jäger, 2018; Dediu, Janssen, & Moisik, 2017; Everett, Blasi, & Roberts, 2016; Lupyan & Dale, 2016). However, understanding the linguistic past is notoriously difficult, especially when we move beyond a “horizon” a few millennia ago (Renfrew, McMahon, & Trask, 2000), but new approaches and data might (despite issues and controversies) help shed new light on the deep past (Dediu & Levinson, 2012; Jäger, 2015; Pagel, Atkinson, Calude, & Meade, 2013). Here I suggest that biases (affordances and constraints) rooted in the anatomy of the vocal tract (VT), might add useful information. Due to our evolutionary past and demographic processes (Jobling, Hollox, Hurles, Kivisild, & Tyler-Smith, 2013), there is widespread inter-individual and inter-group variation (multivariate and distributed mostly continuously) in most aspects of our anatomy, including the VT (Dediu et al., 2017). This variation produces weak biases that are amplified by the repeated use and transmission of languages, with some examples being the influence of the alveolar ridge on click production (Moisik & Dediu, 2017), of the anterior hard palate on the North American English /r/ (Dediu & Moisik, 2019), and of food consistency on labiodentals (Blasi et al., 2019). Certain aspects of VT anatomy (such as the jaw, dentition, cervical vertebrae and hard palate) are relatively well conserved in the archeological record, and their past distribution in certain populations can be reconstructed from currently available data (Baetsen, 2016; Bosman, Moisik, Dediu, & WatersRist, 2017). Moreover, there are genetic influences on VT anatomy (even if a lot remains to be learned about the precise genes and mechanisms involved) and massive amounts of ancient DNA are becoming available across the world spanning from a few decades to hundreds of thousands of years ago (Reich, 2018), allowing probabilistic inferences from the genetic makeup of past individual to their VT anatomy. Knowing the VT variation in past populations, the biases these variations generate on language, coupled with the application of quantitative methods for understanding the linguistic past (Bouckaert et al., 2012; Dediu, 2011), should allow us to make (inherently probabilistic) inferences about the properties of past languages and patterns of linguistic diversity. Maybe we can say something about the pre-Bantu-expansion distribution of click languages? The emergence of the typologically intriguing properties of the Australian languages? What vowels Neanderthal languages might have predominantly used? When did labiodentals emerge and spread? Given how little we know about the linguistic past, we should not dismiss out-of-hand any potential source of information, vocal tract anatomy included.

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Dates et versions

hal-04919826 , version 1 (29-01-2025)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04919826 , version 1

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Dan Dediu. Glimpses into the “deep” past: what can vocal tract anatomy say about lost linguistic diversity?. 52nd Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea, Aug 2019, 2019-08-21, Germany. ⟨hal-04919826⟩
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