July 2024
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80 Reads
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July 2024
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80 Reads
July 2024
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193 Reads
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3 Citations
Science
Indigenous knowledge—although it contains empirical and cultural knowledge of great value—should be taught as a distinct subject or as aspects of other subjects, not “alongside” science in science classes. Placing science and Indigenous knowledge alongside each other does disservice to the coherence and understanding of both.
June 2024
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211 Reads
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2 Citations
The Philippines are central to understanding the expansion of the Austronesian language family from its homeland in Taiwan. It remains unknown to what extent the distribution of Malayo-Polynesian languages has been shaped by back migrations and language leveling events following the initial Out-of-Taiwan expansion. Other aspects of language history, including the effect of language switching from non-Austronesian languages, also remain poorly understood. Here we apply Bayesian phylogenetic methods to a core-vocabulary dataset of Philippine languages. Our analysis strongly supports a sister group relationship between the Sangiric and Minahasan groups of northern Sulawesi on one hand, and the rest of the Philippine languages on the other, which is incompatible with a simple North-to-South dispersal from Taiwan. We find a pervasive geographical signal in our results, suggesting a dominant role for cultural diffusion in the evolution of Philippine languages. However, we do find some support for a later migration of Gorontalo-Mongondow languages to northern Sulawesi from the Philippines. Subsequent diffusion processes between languages in Sulawesi appear to have led to conflicting data and a highly unstable phylogenetic position for Gorontalo-Mongondow. In the Philippines, language switching to Austronesian in ‘Negrito’ groups appears to have occurred at different time-points throughout the Philippines, and based on our analysis, there is no discernible effect of language switching on the basic vocabulary.
March 2024
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214 Reads
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2 Citations
Languages vary in how they signal “who does what to whom”. Three main strategies to indicate the participant roles of “who” and “whom” are case, verbal indexing, and rigid word order. Languages that disambiguate these roles with case tend to have either verb-final or flexible word order. Most previous studies that found these patterns used limited language samples and overlooked the causal mechanisms that could jointly explain the association between all three features. Here we analyze grammatical data from a Grambank sample of 1705 languages with phylogenetic causal graph methods. Our results corroborate the claims that verb-final word order generally gives rise to case and, strikingly, establish that case tends to lead to the development of flexible word order. The combination of novel statistical methods and the Grambank database provides a model for the rigorous testing of causal claims about the factors that shape patterns of linguistic diversity.
March 2024
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148 Reads
Evolutionary Human Sciences
Globally, human house types are diverse, varying in shape, size, roof type, building materials, arrangement, decoration, and many other features. Here we offer the first rigorous, global evaluation of the factors that influence the construction of traditional (vernacular) houses. We apply macroecological approaches to analyze data describing house features from 1900 to 1950 across 1000 societies. Geographic, social and linguistic descriptors for each society were used to test the extent to which key architectural features may be explained by the biophysical environment, social traits, house features of neighbouring societies, or cultural history. We find strong evidence that some aspects of the climate shape house architecture, including floor height, wall material, and roof shape. Other features, particularly ground plan, appear to also be influenced by social attributes of societies, such as whether a society is nomadic, polygynous, or politically complex. Additional variation in all house features was predicted both by the practices of neighboring societies and by a society's language family. Collectively, the findings from our analyses suggest those conditions under which traditional houses offer solutions to architects seeking to reimagine houses in light of warmer, wetter or more variable climates.
January 2024
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259 Reads
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1 Citation
Evolutionary Human Sciences
Jared Diamond suggested that the unique East-West orientation of Eurasia facilitated the spread of cultural innovations and gave it substantial political, technological, and military advantages over other continental regions. This controversial hypothesis assumes that innovations can spread more easily across similar habitats, and that environments tend to be more homogeneous at similar latitudes. The resulting prediction is that Eurasia is home to environmentally homogenous corridors that enable fast cultural transmission. Despite indirect evidence supporting Diamond's influential hypothesis, quantitative tests of its underlying assumptions are currently lacking. Here we address this critical gap by leveraging ecological, cultural, and linguistic datasets at a global scale. Our analyses show that although societies that share similar ecologies are more likely to share cultural traits, the Eurasian continent is not significantly more ecologically homogeneous than other continental regions. Our findings highlight the perils of single factor explanations and remind us that even the most compelling ideas must be thoroughly tested to gain a solid understanding of the complex history of our species.
August 2023
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352 Reads
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17 Citations
Science Advances
Many recent proposals claim that languages adapt to their environments. The linguistic niche hypothesis claims that languages with numerous native speakers and substantial proportions of nonnative speakers (societies of strangers) tend to lose grammatical distinctions. In contrast, languages in small, isolated communities should maintain or expand their grammatical markers. Here, we test these claims using a global dataset of grammatical structures, Grambank. We model the impact of the number of native speakers, the proportion of nonnative speakers, the number of linguistic neighbors, and the status of a language on grammatical complexity while controlling for spatial and phylogenetic autocorrelation. We deconstruct "grammatical complexity" into two separate dimensions: how much morphology a language has ("fusion") and the amount of information obligatorily encoded in the grammar ("informativity"). We find several instances of weak positive associations but no inverse correlations between grammatical complexity and sociodemographic factors. Our findings cast doubt on the widespread claim that grammatical complexity is shaped by the sociolinguistic environment.
July 2023
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8,215 Reads
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36 Citations
Science
**To download free**, follow the info at: https://iecor.clld.org — The origins of the Indo-European language family are hotly disputed. Bayesian phylogenetic analyses of core vocabulary have produced conflicting results, with some supporting a farming expansion out of Anatolia ~9000 years before present (yr B.P.), while others support a spread with horse-based pastoralism out of the Pontic-Caspian Steppe ~6000 yr B.P. Here we present an extensive database of Indo-European core vocabulary that eliminates past inconsistencies in cognate coding. Ancestry-enabled phylogenetic analysis of this dataset indicates that few ancient languages are direct ancestors of modern clades and produces a root age of ~8120 yr B.P. for the family. Although this date is not consistent with the Steppe hypothesis, it does not rule out an initial homeland south of the Caucasus, with a subsequent branch northward onto the steppe and then across Europe. We reconcile this hybrid hypothesis with recently published ancient DNA evidence from the steppe and the northern Fertile Crescent.
April 2023
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1,071 Reads
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62 Citations
Science Advances
While global patterns of human genetic diversity are increasingly well characterized, the diversity of human languages remains less systematically described. Here, we outline the Grambank database. With over 400,000 data points and 2400 languages, Grambank is the largest comparative grammatical database available. The comprehensiveness of Grambank allows us to quantify the relative effects of genealogical inheritance and geographic proximity on the structural diversity of the world's languages, evaluate constraints on linguistic diversity, and identify the world's most unusual languages. An analysis of the consequences of language loss reveals that the reduction in diversity will be strikingly uneven across the major linguistic regions of the world. Without sustained efforts to document and revitalize endangered languages, our linguistic window into human history, cognition, and culture will be seriously fragmented.
March 2023
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538 Reads
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1 Citation
The Philippines are central to understanding the expansion of the Austronesian language family from its homeland in Taiwan. It remains unknown to what extent the distribution of Malayo-Polynesian languages has been shaped by back migrations and language leveling events following the initial Out-of-Taiwan expansion. Other aspects of language history, including the effect of language switching from non-Austronesian languages, also remain poorly understood. Here we apply Bayesian phylogenetic methods to a core-vocabulary dataset of Philippine languages. Our analysis strongly supports a sister group relationship between the Sangiric and Minahasan groups of Northern Sulawesi on one hand, and the rest of the Philippine languages on the other, which is incompatible with a simple North-to-South dispersal from Taiwan. We find a pervasive geographical signal in our results, suggesting a dominant role for cultural diffusion in the evolution of Philippine languages. However, we do find some support for a later migration of Gorontalo-Mongondow languages to Northern Sulawesi from the Philippines. Subsequent diffusion processes between languages in Sulawesi appear to have led to conflicting data and a highly unstable phylogenetic position for Gorontalo-Mongondow. In the Philippines, language switching to Austronesian in ‘Negrito’ groups appears to have occurred at different time-points throughout the Philippines, and based on our analysis, there is no discernible effect of language switching on the basic vocabulary.
... On one hand, graduate students are encouraged to engage in collaborative practices by changes to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council funding priorities which emphasize collaborative work with Indigenous peoples [13] and the growth of Indigenous scholarship on Indigenous and collaborative research methodologies [3,5]. On the other hand, University programs can present road blocks such as continued emphasis on fast project completion rates and the continued lack of attention to creating funding models that include funds for research dissemination to community partners, despite this being pointed out as problematic since the early 1980s [26,41]. Sandra Harding, in an address to the University of Toronto in 2015, suggested that "the real sticking point here is [that] researchers have to give up control of the research project . . . the design and management of the research project has to be negotiated with the people who are the major stakeholders in the questions being asked . . . ...
July 2024
Science
... The Austronesian expansion refers to the movement of Austronesian language speakers from Taiwan into the Philippines and the rest of the Asia Pacific around 4 kya [34][35][36][37][38]. Linguistic support for this expansion includes similarities in extant languages [39], with Filipino groups sharing varying genetic affinities with Austronesian-speaking groups in Taiwan and in the Asia Pacific [31,35,36]. The period of the initial peopling of the Philippines, estimated to be about 50 kya [40] and subsequent interaction with other groups, local and foreign, significantly influenced the selection of their so-called 'ancestral land', which is an integral part of the life history of ICC/IPs [41]. ...
June 2024
... The unevenness of this underlying landscape makes some mutations more probable and frequent than others, leading to a reliance on the reuse of old forms to serve new functions. Emergentist accounts in this area have emphasized the ways in which language, society and cognition have undergone co-evolution (MacWhinney 2002) based on the linking of dynamic systems. To trigger this co-evolutionary advantage, changes in linguistic abilities must arise in parallel with advances in cognitive or social abilities. ...
Reference:
The emergence of linguistic form in time
November 2013
... At the same time, new forms of spirituality, such as New Age beliefs and secular humanism, have emerged in response to the complexities of modern life. The evolution of religion in the contemporary world reflects a diverse tapestry of beliefs, practices, and worldviews, highlighting the ongoing quest for meaning, purpose, and transcendence in an ever-changing society (Bulbulia, J., (2013). [4]). ...
November 2013
... Additionally, languages originating from the same regions often tend to be influenced by common factors, further complicating the analysis [49][50][51]. While we have included language family, macro-area and country as factors to account for the genealogical and geographic relatedness of languages in our prior paper, this approach ignores variation within language families and geographical units as pointed out in several recent studies [49][50][51][52][53]. To address this issue, we develop two quantitative approaches: (i) a semiparametric machine learning estimation method capable of simultaneously controlling for document-and language-specific characteristics while directly modelling potential effects due to phylogenetic relatedness and geographic proximity; (ii) a multi-model multilevel inference approach designed to test whether cross-linguistic outcomes are statistically associated with sociodemographic factors, while accounting for phylogenetic and spatial autocorrelation via the inclusion of random effects and slopes. ...
August 2023
Science Advances
... 6,500 years BP (Gimbutas 1970;Mallory, 1989;Anthony, 2007) The alternative "Anatolian" hypothesis proposes that the expansion originated from Anatolia region and occurred much earlier, around 9,500-8,500 years BP (Renfrew, 1987;Bellwood, 2005). In addition to that, one of the recent studies proposed a hybrid model: here, the primary homeland is seen south of the Caucasus (as in the "Anatolian" hypothesis) while the later secondary homeland is located in the steppe region (in line with the "Steppe" hypothesis) (Heggarty et al., 2023). As for development of the languages that are of primary importance for our study, it is widely accepted that the Baltic languages grew out of the Balto-Slavic branch of the Proto-Indo-European, while the Indo-European languages of India are surely known to have evolved from the Indo-Iranian branch. ...
July 2023
Science
... We present the two sources per language in Table 2. In order to make GATA maximally compatible with other cross-linguistic databases, we adopt the Cross-Linguistic Data Formats (CLDF) 29,30 . This framework supports sharing, re-use and comparison of data in a cross-linguistic framework. ...
January 2022
... The languages are evaluated as more similar if their phoneme distributions are alike. In the typology-based similarity assessment, we examine how similar the typological features are using the Grambank dataset [20], which numerically records the typological characteristics of languages. In this study, we primarily utilize corpus-based similarity assessment, while typology-based similarity evaluation is employed as a supplementary method to examine how well it aligns with the similarity evaluation of data within the same language family. ...
April 2023
Science Advances
... For decades, researchers debated the curious juxtaposition of the Tepiman and Opata-Cahitan branches of the larger southern Uto-Aztecan family that intermingle in this region. Most now accept Tepiman speakers as later arrivals, but their presence is sufficiently ancient that we should assume both groups were regionally resident for the entirety of the concerned period (Greenhill et al. 2023), ca. A.D. 1000-1500. ...
March 2023
Language
... Also other domains of language, such as phonology (Blaxter, 2017), phonotactics (Baumann & Matzinger, 2021;Napoleão de Souza & Sinnemäki, 2022) and syntax (Benítez-Burraco, S. Chen, Gil, Gaponov, et al., 2024) have been shown to be influenced by societal factors, such as language contact. At the same time, there is still discussion if and how language contact causes morphological simplification, from both experimental (Cuskley et al., 2015;De Smet, Rosseel, & Van De Velde, 2022) and quantitative cross-linguistic studies (Kauhanen, Einhaus, & Walkden, 2023;Koplenig, 2019;Lupyan & Raviv, 2024;Shcherbakova et al., 2023). In any case, instead of just looking at correlations between proportions of L2 speakers and morphological complexity, it is worthwhile to study which specific language-internal and sociodemographic factors mediate the relationship between social and language structure (Sinnemäki, 2020;Sinnemäki & Di Garbo, 2018). ...
February 2023