{"id":488,"date":"2007-05-29T09:54:11","date_gmt":"2007-05-29T09:54:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/afrikaansenuus.co.za\/?p=488"},"modified":"2007-05-29T09:54:11","modified_gmt":"2007-05-29T09:54:11","slug":"is-language-in-our-genes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/praag.co.za\/?p=488","title":{"rendered":"Is language in our genes?"},"content":{"rendered":"
Dif­fer­ences in our genes in­flu­ence the type of lan­guage we speak, lin­guists re­port. <\/font>
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“Ton­al” lan­guages such as Chin­ese use pitch changes to con­vey the mean­ing of words, while non-ton­al lan­guages such as Eng­lish don’t. <\/font>
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Dan Dediu and Rob­ert Ladd of the Un­ivers­ity of Ed­in­burgh found that groups of peo­ple who car­ry re­cently evolved ver­sions of two genes tend to speak non-ton­al lan­guages. The genes, be­lieved to af­fect brain de­vel­op­ment, are called ASPM and Mi­cro­ce­pha­lin. <\/font>
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The newer ver­sion of ASPM ap­peared an es­ti­mat­ed 5,800 years ago; Mi­cro­ce­pha­lin most re­cently changed about 37,000 years ago. The two are among a va­ri­e­ty of genes that have changed re­cently in hu­man evo­lu­tion—part of what one re­cent study has called a trend of quickly accelarating evolution in hu­mans.<\/font>
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Dediu and Ladd cal­cu­lat­ed sta­tis­ti­cal links be­tween 983 loca­t­ions in the ge­nome and 26 dif­fer­ent lin­guis­tic fea­tures in 49 dis­tinct popula­t­ions from around the Old World. They found that there is gen­er­ally no link be­tween genes and lan­guage fea­tures. But when bi­ases for ge­og­ra­phy and his­to­ry were re­moved, a pat­tern emerged be­tween in which ton­al lan­guage speak­ers lacked the more re­cently evolved forms of ASPM and Mi­cro­ce­pha­lin.<\/font>
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The gene-lan­guage rela­t­ion­ship in this case “can­not be ex­plained by his­tor­i­cal and geo­graph­i­cal fac­tors, thus strength­en­ing the claim of a caus­al rela­t­ion­ship be­tween them,” the re­search­ers wrote in this week’s early on­line is­sue of the re­search jour­nal Pro­ceed­ings of the Na­tio­n­al Aca­de­my of Sci­en­ces<\/em>. <\/font>
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The study in­tro­duces a new meth­od­ol­o­gy “for stu­dying the rela­t­ion­ship be­tween ge­net­ic and lin­guis­tic di­vers­i­ties,” they wrote. They added that they hope fu­ture ex­pe­ri­ments will re­veal how these genes in­flu­ence in­di­vid­ual brains and, ul­ti­mate­ly, the lan­guage pref­er­ences of whole popula­t­ions.<\/font><\/div>\n

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Dif­fer­ences in our genes in­flu­ence the type of lan­guage we speak, lin­guists re­port.  “Ton­al” lan­guages such as Chin­ese use pitch changes to con­vey the mean­ing of words, while non-ton­al lan­guages such as Eng­lish don’t.  Dan Dediu and Rob­ert Ladd of the Un­ivers­ity of Ed­in­burgh found that groups of peo­ple who car­ry re­cently evolved ver­sions of … Continue reading “Is language in our genes?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62],"tags":[21098,427,607],"class_list":["post-488","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-c51-international-news","tag-s19-english","tag-international-news","tag-is-language-in-our-genes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=488"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/praag.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}