How do animals communicate? How do humans acquire language? When humanities scholars and natural scientists join forces, groundbreaking answers to those questions become possible.
How do animals communicate? How do humans acquire language? When humanities scholars and natural scientists join forces, groundbreaking answers to those questions become possible. The new Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Language Evolution at UZH aims to deliver them.
“Did Dietary Changes Bring Us ‘F’ Words?” read a recent headline in the Science section of the New York Times. The subject matter for the ensuing article stemmed from a study published in the renowned journal Science by an interdisciplinary research group led by UZH linguists Balthasar Bickel, Damian Blasi, Steven Moran and Paul Widmer. In the published study, the researchers show that the “f” and “v” sounds that are common today in English, German and many other languages came into being relatively late in the course of human history.
The cause of that presumably was softer foods – vegetables and cereals – that entered into everyday human life during the transition from hunter-gatherer cultures to agrarian societies. Softer diets altered the configuration of the human bite over time, causing slight incisor overbites to evolve. This development enabled people to create new speech sounds called labiodentals, which are produced by pressing the lower lip against the upper incisors, as happens when the letter “f” is pronounced. Around half of the languages spoken around the world today employ labiodentals.
Read more at University of Zurich
