Comment on "phonemic diversity supports a serial founder effect model of language expansion from Africa"

Science

Volumn 335, Issue 6069, 2012, Pages

  Van Tuyl, Rory ^a   Pereltsvaig, Asya ^b  

^a Independent Scholar   (United States)

^b STANFORD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

AFRICA; ASIA; CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY; LANGUAGE; NOTE; PHONEME; PRIORITY JOURNAL; HUMAN; PHONETICS;

HUMANS; LANGUAGE; PHONETICS;

EID: 84856984560     PISSN: 00368075     EISSN: 10959203     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1126/science.1209176     Document Type: Note

References (10)

1. Q. D. Atkinson, Science 332, 346 (2011).
2. Triangulation of published data.
3. www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/332/6027/346/DC1.
4. Overall fit to data is about 7% better to the segmented trend line shown (s = 0.473) than to an overall linear trend line (s = 0.505). The differences between mean values for adjacent continents are statistically significant between African and all non-African languages (t test; P = 0.000) and between North and South American (t test; P = 0.004), but not between north Asian and North American (t test; P = 0.175).
5. I. Maddieson, in The World Atlas of Language Structures Online, M. S. Dryer, M. Haspelmouth, Eds. (Max Planck Digital Library, Munich, 2011); chaps. 1, 2, and 13 (accessed 5/21/2011); http://wals.info.
6. Tones make up 59%, vowels 40%, and simple consonants 1% of the African regression slope.
7. Alternate data were obtained from Wikipedia Articles (accessed 5/23/2011) on the following languages: Swahili, Zulu, Ju|'hoan, Sandawe, Khoekhoe, Maasai, Dinka, Luo, Igbo, and Yoruba. We do not assert these data to be correct; we merely note that they are different from the WALS data and reveal variation in phoneme counts between sources. Alternate data for the entire language set were not available and may not exist.
8. The language is !Xóõ. It has more than five times the average number of consonants, but fewer than five vowels [WALS (5), chapter 1].
9. D. M. Behar et al.; Genographic Consortium, Am. J. Hum. Genet. 82, 1130 (2008).
10. B. M. Henn et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 108, 5154 (2011).