Did Language Begin Once?

Nichols, Johanna.  “The Origin and Dispersal of Languages:  Linguistic Evidence.”  The Origin and Diversification of Language, Memoirs of the California Academy of Sciences 24, 127–170.  California Academy of Sciences.  Edited by Nina G. Jablonski and Leslie C. Aiello.  1998.  A chapter by a leading typologist that defines the "stock" as the oldest grouping the comparative method can prove, puts the oldest stocks at about 6,000 years, and explains that ceiling by vocabulary loss.  It then models how fast stocks multiply and finds that one ancestor would need at least 72,000 to 132,000 years to yield the world's stocks.  Every input of that model is calibrated on the mainstream ages of known families.

1. 1a.

   Page 128:  “After 6000 years of separation, two languages are expected to exhibit only 7% shared cognates; and 7% represents the lowest number of resemblant items that can safely be considered distinct from chance … Hence the 6000-year age of the oldest securely reconstructable language families is also the age after which, on binary tests, the incidence of cognates slips below the level of significance.” ↩ ↩

2. 1b.

   Page 141:  “The two polygenetic scenarios both imply multiple ancestors to modern languages, and the two monogenetic scenarios both imply a single ancestor.  There is of course no way of establishing the number of ultimate ancestral languages by tracing descent …” ↩ ↩

3. 1c.

   Page 130:  “Indo-European and Uralic are thought by many to be related, and Turkic, Mongol, and Tungusic are widely believed to be related. Proof, however, has not been offered, whereas for true stocks the genetic connection can be proved.” ↩

4. 1d.

   Page 138:  “Table 3 shows that the linguistic age of the entire world population of linguistic stocks is only 72,000 to 78,000 years — much too young, given that modern language is probably at least as old as anatomically modern humanity. Here, as with Africa, the discrepancy is due to patterns of extinction.” ↩

5. 1e.

   Page 139:  “If the world's language stocks descend from a single ancestor, then that ancestor began to diversify at least 132,000 years ago. This computation does not tell us whether the world's languages descend from a single ultimate ancestor.” ↩ ↩

6. 1f.

   Page 162:  “In my sample the number of language stocks in the American Pacific areas … is 44 … The age of such a group would be 48,000 years — much too early for any plausible entry to the Americas, let alone a relatively late entry.” ↩

Campbell, Lyle, and William J. Poser.  Language Classification:  History and Method.  Cambridge University Press.  2008.  The standard handbook on how language relationships are proved, by two historical linguists, and the classification standard Glottolog names as its own.  It accepts the comparative method and rejects multilateral comparison, glottochronology as a test of relationship, and global etymologies, on statistical grounds.  It is the strongest mainstream witness that no family older than about 8,000 years is demonstrated and that one origin of language can never be shown.

1. 2a.

   Page 366, note 3:  “while perhaps most linguists believe it is possible that there was a single original human language from which all others have developed, most further believe it is impossible on the basis of extant evidence ever to be able to show that this is the case. This means for some scholars that not only is monogenesis a possibility, so is polygenesis, but that we will never know for sure which is right.” ↩ ↩

2. 2b.

   Page 243, section 9.4:  “The Nostratic hypothesis has received considerable attention in recent years … It is better known than most other proposed macro-families, but it remains controversial. Most historical linguists either reject it (see Campbell 1998, 1999; Ringe 1995a; Trask 1999; Vine 1991) or ignore it.” ↩ ↩

3. 2c.

   Page 342:  “No established language family anywhere is really very old, the oldest being only c.8,000 years. This no doubt has to do with the fact that after such long periods of time and so much linguistic change so little original material remains that it becomes impossible to show that languages separated for so long are actually related.” ↩ ↩

4. 2d.

   Page 171:  Quoting Ringe 1999, p. 219;  the bracketed words are Campbell and Poser's.  “if we compare on 13 languages[,] the probability of finding a match is 1 — .481952 = .518048, or better than fifty-fifty, and if we compare 23 languages […][,] the probability is 1 — .086428 = .913572, or greater than 90%. Thus in comparing 23 wordlists we expect to find at least one CVC-match, on the average, for more than nine of every ten meanings on the list using these criteria for a match.” ↩

5. 2e.

   Pages 365–366:  “We argue here … that such a scrutiny reveals that claims about Proto-World (based on assumed global etymologies) are bogus, and that, because they are wrong, they can teach us nothing about the origins of human language.” ↩

6. 2f.

   Page 365:  “a number of mainstream linguists have likened published claims about Proto-World to alchemy, cold fusion, and creationism.” ↩

7. 2g.

   Page 365, note 2:  “There are those, of course, who see the connection between creationism and Proto-World in just the opposite way, citing linguists' claims about Proto-World as self-evident support of the truth of the biblical story of creation and Babel (see, for an example, Jackson 1999; Salmons 1997 cites others).” ↩

8. 2h.

   Page 244:  “Greenberg still held that these and the other putative Nostratic languages are related, but more distantly … While there is considerable overlap in the members of Eurasiatic and Nostratic, there are also differences, and therefore both hypotheses cannot be correct where they make contradictory claims.” ↩

9. 2i.

   Page 236:  “While 'Altaic' is repeated in encyclopedias and handbooks, 'most specialists in the Altaic languages no longer believe that the three groups of traditional Altaic, Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungusic, are related' (Greenberg 1997:88).” ↩

Hammarström, Harald.  “Linguistic diversity and language evolution.”  Journal of Language Evolution 1(1):19–29.  2016.  A review by the editor of Glottolog that counts 424 families including isolates and tabulates them by continent.  It explains why the comparative method cannot see past about 10,000 years and notes that the density of families does not follow the age of settlement:  South America is as diverse as New Guinea, and Africa much less so.

1. 3a.

   Page 23:  “An estimate of time-depth is possible thanks to a number of calibration points, either historical, inscriptional or archaeological (in the rare event that one can convincingly argue a link between an archaeological entity and a (proto-)language). The deepest families recognized as 'demonstrated' in, for example, Hammarström et al. (2015) are expected not to exceed 10,000 years. Unless there is a breakthrough in the way language families are demonstrated—that goes beyond basic vocabulary—this time limit cannot be improved upon: if languages share too little vocabulary we would not accept they are related while if languages share a lot of vocabulary, we do not think the relation is old.” ↩ ↩

Ringe, Donald A. Jr.  “On Calculating the Factor of Chance in Language Comparison.”  Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 82(1).  American Philosophical Society.  1992.  A monograph that computes with binomial probabilities how many sound-and-meaning matches two unrelated languages will show by chance in a 100-word list.  Real families clearly exceed chance and languages not believed related do not, while comparing many lists at once finds systematic resemblances even among artificial ones.  It is the statistical core of the mainstream rejection of Amerind, Eurasiatic and Proto-World.

1. 4a.

   Page 80, section 11:  “(6) Comparison of the vocabularies of several languages at once normally yields a pervasive pattern of systematic similarities, even when the languages in question are artificial constructs (and thus necessarily unrelated). … of all the possible forms of comparison considered in this paper, multilateral comparison is the least reliable and the most likely to be positively misleading.” ↩ ↩

2. 4b.

   Page 1:  “The consensus of opinion among mainstream historical linguists is that while all human languages are likely to be genetically related, the remoter relationships cannot be demonstrated by reliable linguistic methods because the languages in question have diverged too much.” ↩ ↩

3. 4c.

   Page 1:  “Yet in this case common sense is wrong. The elementary mathematics of probabilities shows that any pair of languages can be expected to exhibit a non-negligible number of fortuitous similarities.” ↩

4. 4d.

   Page 80, section 11:  “(3) Investigation of real-language examples shows that resemblances between the basic vocabularies of languages commonly believed to be demonstrably related occur with clearly greater-than-chance frequency, while resemblances between the basic vocabularies of languages not commonly believed to be demonstrably related do not occur with greater-than-chance frequency.” ↩

Bengtson, John D., and Merritt Ruhlen.  “Global Etymologies.”  On the Origin of Languages:  Studies in Linguistic Taxonomy, 277.  Stanford University Press.  Edited by Merritt Ruhlen.  1994.  The fullest statement of Proto-World by its proponents:  a list of resemblant words, each found in at least six of 32 Greenberg-Ruhlen groupings, offered as proof that all languages share one origin because chance matches across so many families are improbable.  Ringe's computation, quoted by Campbell and Poser, shows that the chance of such matches is high, not low.

1. 5a.

   Page 281:  “We believe that the failure of our critics to appreciate the truly minuscule probability of accidental similarities is the chief impediment to their understanding why all the world's languages must derive from a common origin. … Each of the etymologies we cite involves at least a half-dozen of the 32 supposedly independent families, precisely because the probability of finding the same accidental resemblance in six different families is close to zero.” ↩ ↩

2. 5b.

   Page 292:  “In the long run we expect the evidence for monogenesis of extant languages to become so compelling that the question will be not whether all the world's languages are related, but why it took the linguistic community so long to recognize this obvious fact.” ↩

Ruhlen, Merritt.  The Origin of Language:  Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue.  Wiley.  1994.  A popular book by Greenberg's chief collaborator arguing from multilateral comparison of basic words that all living languages share one origin, on an evolutionary timescale, and that historical linguists reject the idea for institutional reasons.  It is the main mainstream-trained witness for Proto-World, and its method is the one the specialists reject on statistical grounds.

1. 6a.

   Page 104:  “What you should have found, if you relied on common sense, is that there are many similarities among them, but that it is nonetheless difficult to discern larger subgroupings within what must certainly be a single huge language family. In other words, even this modest little table suggests a single origin for all extant human languages. … the conclusion that all human languages are ultimately related seems inescapable, no matter how unpalatable that idea might be to Indo-Europeanists.” ↩ ↩

2. 6b.

   Page 125:  “I have been at some pains, however, to admit that these proposals do not enjoy wide acceptance within the linguistic establishment, where, in fact, they are almost universally condemned as 'futile,' 'subversive,' or worse.” ↩

Heggarty, Paul.  “Ultraconserved words and Eurasiatic?  The 'faces in the fire' of language prehistory.”  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110(35):E3254.  2013.  A letter replying to Pagel and colleagues by a historical linguist, later the lead author of the IE-CoR dating.  It argues that the proto-words used are subjective reconstructions, that the correlation was built into the data, and that sound change, not meaning change, limits how far back relationships can be seen.  Mirror:  PMC

1. 7a.

   Paragraph 1:  “Yet their 'data'— claimed reconstructions of Proto-Eurasiatic wordforms in the Languages of the World Etymological Database (LWED)—are not actually data in any sense that either the natural sciences or mainstream linguistics would recognize. They are subjective interpretations, not amenable to independent validation or replication, and widely rejected as vacuous by specialists in language reconstruction”. ↩ ↩

2. 7b.

   Paragraph 2:  “In short, this is a case of correlation in, correlation out—and proof of nothing.” ↩

3. 7c.

   Paragraph 3:  “Stability in meaning is powerless against instability in sound. Even if cognacy may survive for tens of millennia, the ability to detect it at all depends on sound, whose decay clock ticks far faster (witness water : Latin [ak^wam] to French [o] in just two millennia). … Pagel et al.'s dating is based on just two calibration points, and neither is historically known; rather, they are just hypothetical matches with archaeology.” ↩

Pagel, Mark et al.  “Ultraconserved words point to deep language ancestry across Eurasia.”  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110(21):8471–8476.  2013.  A statistical test of the proposed Eurasiatic superfamily, using proto-words for seven families from the Moscow school's etymological database.  The meanings that database judges cognate across families are the slow-changing ones within Indo-European, and a dated tree of the seven families comes out about 14,450 years old.  Its data and its conclusion were rejected by Heggarty in the same journal.  Mirror:  PMC

1. 8a.

   Section Abstract:  “The search for ever deeper relationships among the World's languages is bedeviled by the fact that most words evolve too rapidly to preserve evidence of their ancestry beyond 5,000 to 9,000 y.”  “We derive a dated phylogenetic tree of this proposed superfamily with a time-depth of ∼14,450 y, implying that some frequently used words have been retained in related forms since the end of the last ice age.” ↩ ↩

2. 8b.

   Section Results, Proto-Words:  “The Languages of the World Etymological Database, part of the Tower of Babel project (LWED) (18) … records reconstructed proto-words for language families from around the world.” ↩

3. 8c.

   Section Introduction:  “proponents of long-range relationships have been unable to provide statistical verification that the resemblances they have found are beyond what would be expected by chance between unrelated languages”. ↩

Sicoli, Mark A., and Gary Holton.  “Linguistic Phylogenies Support Back-Migration from Beringia to Asia.”  PLoS ONE 9(3):e91722.  2014.  A phylogenetic study that takes Vajda's proposed Dene-Yeniseian link between the Yeniseian languages of Siberia and the Na-Dene languages of North America as given and asks which migration it implies.  It favours a spread out of Beringia, and it describes the link itself as received with cautious optimism, not as demonstrated.  Mirror:  PMC

1. 9a.

   Section Introduction:  “Using such methods a Dene-Yeniseian (DY) connection linking Asia to North America has been suggested for nearly 100 years [6], but only recently has a stronger case been made using methods of linguistic reconstruction [7], which has been peer reviewed with cautious optimism urging alternative methods for its evaluation [8], [9].” ↩

2. 9b.

   Section Introduction:  “Our goal here is not to address the validity of the Dene-Yeniseian hypothesis nor the type of linguistic data used to support it.” ↩

3. 9c.

   Section Materials and Methods:  “Estimates of time-depth based on lexical comparison are less than 8500 years [24], but the archaeology of Alaska shows temporal horizons well beyond 10,000 years”. ↩ ↩

Atkinson, Quentin D.  “Phonemic diversity supports a serial founder effect model of language expansion from Africa.”  Science 332(6027):346–349.  2011.  A regression of phoneme inventory size in 504 languages on speaker population and on distance from 2,560 candidate origins.  Inventories shrink with distance from a best-fit origin in central and southern Africa, which Atkinson reads as a serial founder effect.  The time depth it gives comes from the genetic literature, not from the phonemes, and it drew five critical comments in Science within a year.

1. 10a.

   Page 346:  “Here I show that the number of phonemes used in a global sample of 504 languages is also clinal and fits a serial founder–effect model of expansion from an inferred origin in Africa.” ↩ ↩

2. 10b.

   Page 346:  “This region could represent either a single origin for modern languages or the main origin under a polygenesis scenario. The best-fit model incorporating population size and distance from the origin explains 31% of the variance in phoneme inventory size”. ↩

3. 10c.

   Page 348:  “An origin of modern languages predating the African exodus 50,000 to 70,000 years ago puts complex language alongside the earliest archaeological evidence of symbolic culture in Africa 80,000 to 160,000 years ago (27, 28).” ↩

Cysouw, Michael et al.  “Comment on "Phonemic diversity supports a serial founder effect model of language expansion from Africa".”  Science 335(6069):657.  2012.  A re-run of Atkinson's method on actual phoneme counts from the UCLA database instead of binned categories.  It finds two best-fit origins, eastern Africa and the Caucasus, with a credible area that takes in the Middle East, and argues that phoneme inventories carry no reliable deep signal at all.

1. 11a.

   Paragraph 4:  “Notwithstanding this criticism, we replicated Atkinson's method using the UPSID data, but instead of a single origin in western Africa, we found two separate "origins," one in eastern Africa and one in the Caucasus (fig. S10). The BIC+4 range of possible origins covers a large area, including also the Middle East and southern Africa. Although this finding does not necessarily contradict an expansion from Africa, it does not provide clear support in its favor, either.” ↩ ↩

Hunley, Keith et al.  “Rejection of a serial founder effects model of genetic and linguistic coevolution.”  Proceedings of the Royal Society B 279(1736):2281–2288.  2012.  A test of all the predictions a serial founder process makes, on 908 phonemes in 725 languages and 614 microsatellites in 100 populations, by a genetic anthropologist and a historical linguist.  Every genetic prediction holds and most phonemic ones fail;  phoneme inventories record recent contact, not the ancient expansion.  Mirror:  PMC

1. 12a.

   Section Abstract:  “All aspects of the genetic pattern are consistent with the predictions of SFE. In contrast, most of the predictions of SFE are violated for the phonemic data. We show that phoneme inventories provide information about recent contacts between languages. However, because phonemes change rapidly, they cannot provide information about more ancient evolutionary processes.” ↩ ↩

2. 12b.

   Section 2, Results:  “In contrast to the genetic pattern, the number of phonemes is highest on average in Eurasia; a Eurasian origin produced the lowest correlation, and an Oceanic location produced the highest correlation (figure 3d).” ↩

Jaeger, T. Florian et al.  “Comment on "Phonemic diversity supports a serial founder effect model of language expansion from Africa".”  Science 335(6072):1042.  2012.  A simulation test of Atkinson's method that reshuffles the languages' locations 10,000 times.  Shuffling languages within families leaves the African cline intact every time, so the signal is carried by where families sit, not individual languages;  shuffling families finds some significant decline in 20.7% of samples against the nominal 5%.

1. 13a.

   Section Simulation 1:  “This shows that, contrary to a literal interpretation of the serial founder hypothesis, the effect observed by Atkinson is independent of the distance of individual languages to the origin. As long as the centers of language families order geographically as in the original sample, the predicted effect is obtained.” ↩ ↩

Wang, Chuan-Chao et al.  “Comment on "Phonemic diversity supports a serial founder effect model of language expansion from Africa".”  Science 335(6069):657.  2012.  A re-analysis by four Fudan University geneticists using exact, unbinned phoneme counts for 510 languages.  On those counts the decline from central Asia or Europe fits marginally better than from Africa, in the third decimal place of the correlation;  with the binning Atkinson used, Africa wins again.

1. 14a.

   Section Final paragraph:  “Thus, we demonstrated that WALS's data simplification has distorted Atkinson's results. Apparently, the results without simplification should be more reliable. Therefore, Asia (where the Babel was supposed to be) might be a more appropriate best-fit origin for modern languages if modern languages have a common origin.” ↩ ↩

2. 14b.

   Paragraph 6:  “Interestingly, stronger negative correlation was observed when choosing central Asia (the exact locus was Ashgabat) (Pearson correlation, r = –0.4413) or Europe (r = –0.4391) as the origin than choosing Africa (r = –0.4386) (Fig. 2B).”  Paragraph 7:  “Africa never exhibited strongest correlation unless the data were simplified (table S3).” ↩

Creanza, Nicole et al.  “A comparison of worldwide phonemic and genetic variation in human populations.”  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112(5):1265–1272.  2015.  A comparison of 2,082 phoneme inventories with microsatellite data from 246 populations.  Genetic and phonemic distance both rise with geographic distance, but phoneme inventory size does not fall with distance from Africa;  its best-fit centre is in the far north of Europe, which the authors say does not mark where language began.  Mirror:  PMC

1. 15a.

   Section Results, The Signature of Ancient Population Divergence on Genes and Languages:  “For both databases, the geographic center with the most support for this model (lowest Akaike Information Criterion, AIC) was in northern Europe (Fig. 3) (Ruhlen 67.6684°, 36.2°; PHOIBLE 77.1614°, 16.4°)”.  “Although our analysis identifies a Eurasian center as the best-fit origin, we do not claim that a serial founder effect is an appropriate model for language expansion: phoneme inventory size is a coarse summary statistic, and phoneme loss does not necessarily occur with reduced population size or geographic isolation.” ↩ ↩

2. 15b.

   Section Discussion:  “This suggests that phoneme inventories are affected by recent population processes and thus carry little information about the distant past (e.g., ref. 23); in contrast to genes, phoneme inventories in our analyses did not follow the predictions of a serial founder effect out of Africa.” ↩

Senghas, Ann et al.  “Children creating core properties of language:  evidence from an emerging sign language in Nicaragua.”  Science 305(5691):1779–1782.  2004.  A comparison of the gestures of ten hearing Spanish speakers with three cohorts of ten signers of Nicaraguan Sign Language, which arose after a school for deaf children opened in Managua in 1977.  Children, not adults, introduced its discrete, combinatorial structure within about two decades.

1. 16a.

   Section Abstract:  “A new sign language has been created by deaf Nicaraguans over the past 25 years, providing an opportunity to observe the inception of universal hallmarks of language.”  “Thus, children naturally possess learning abilities capable of giving language its fundamental structure.” ↩ ↩

Sandler, Wendy et al.  “The emergence of grammar:  systematic structure in a new language.”  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 102(7):2661–2665.  2005.  A linguistic description of Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language, which arose in the last 70 years in one Negev clan after hereditary deafness appeared.  Within one generation of signers it developed a fixed Subject-Object-Verb order found in none of the languages around it, so a language with grammar can come into being fast among people who have the faculty.  Mirror:  PMC

1. 17a.

   Section Abstract:  “This report contains a linguistic description of a language created spontaneously without any apparent external influence in a stable existing community.”  “In the space of one generation from its inception, systematic grammatical structure has emerged in the language.” ↩ ↩

2. 17b.

   Section Results:  “S–O–V word order is not characteristic of any language that ABSL signers may have had contact with. The basic word order in the spoken Arabic dialect of the hearing members of the community, as well as in Hebrew, is S–V–O.” ↩

Crowley, Terry.  An Introduction to Historical Linguistics.  Oxford University Press.  2nd edition.  1992.  A standard textbook of historical linguistics, and the one Duursma cites for the rate of word loss.  It states the comparative method's horizon and gives a real case of fast lexical change in a creole.

1. 18a.

   Page 303:  “such as proto-Indo-European and proto-Austronesian are not much more than 5000 years old, and certainly no older than 10,000 years old. The comparative method cannot take us further back in time for a very simple reason. Given that languages gradually lose vocabulary over time … they will have only a very small proportion of shared vocabulary”. ↩

Robbeets, Martine et al.  “Triangulation supports agricultural spread of the Transeurasian languages.”  Nature 599:616–621.  2021.  A Bayesian dating of 98 Japonic, Koreanic, Tungusic, Mongolic and Turkic varieties as one "Transeurasian" family, combined with archaeology and genetics.  It gets a root about 9,181 years old, but it assumes the grouping it dates, which Glottolog and most specialists do not accept, and its calibrations are linguists' estimates of proto-language ages rather than texts.  Mirror:  PMC

1. 19a.

   Section Methods, Bayesian phylogenetics:  “Language family node ages were informed by age priors (Japonic 2100 bp ± 175, Koreanic 800 bp ± 175, Turkic 2100 bp ± 175, Mongolic 750 bp ± 50, Tungusic 1900 bp ± 275). These calibrations are supported by chronological estimations proposed in linguistic literature (Supplementary Data 18).” ↩

Duursma, K. J.  “The Tower of Babel account affirmed by linguistics.”  Journal of Creation 16(3):27–31.  Dec 2002.  The fullest young-earth linguistic case found.  It takes about twenty families from the lumpers' classification, holds that Babel was a miracle making about a dozen languages, and uses glottochronology's rate to set a 10,000-year horizon on reconstruction.  It is also the only young-earth source found that proposes faster word loss in isolated post-Babel groups.

1. 20a.

   Section Timing consistent:  “Moreover, recent findings, as we have seen, suggest that Ket is related to the Na-Dene languages. … Wieland points out that 'to have such close correlation's still existing makes little sense if the migrations were as much as 11,000 years ago, as is commonly believed. From the biblical record, they would have been less than some 4,000 years ago'.”  Duursma quoting Carl Wieland's "Siberian links for Amerindians", Creation 21(3), 1999. ↩

Van Tuyl, Rory, and Asya Pereltsvaig.  “Comment on "Phonemic diversity supports a serial founder effect model of language expansion from Africa".”  Science 335(6069):657.  2012.  A comment by an independent scholar and a Stanford linguist showing that, plotted continent by continent, phoneme scores decline with distance nowhere outside Africa, and that rechecking ten African languages against other sources erased the slope there too.

1. 21a.

   Paragraph 2:  “A plot of data (3) for the human migration path from Africa to South America (Fig. 1) shows a better fit when data are linearly regressed continent by continent, revealing none of the downward slope associated with an SFE for any continent but Africa (4). An SFE must surely have existed in settling the vast expanse of Eurasia and the Americas, but there seems to be no evidence of it in these data.” ↩

Atkinson, Quentin D.  “Response to comments on "Phonemic diversity supports a serial founder effect model of expansion from Africa".”  Science 335(6069):657.  2012.  Atkinson's reply to the 2012 comments.  He shows that Wang and colleagues' central-Asian result rests on four related South-East Asian outliers and that without them Africa fits best again, by margins he himself calls not decisive over Europe.

1. 22a.

   Page 657:  “Removing these nonindependent outlier languages again favors an origin in Africa (r = –0.471, P < 0.001) over central Asia (r = –0.455, P < 0.001) or Europe (r = –0.461, P < 0.001).”  “Wang et al.'s data also favors an African origin [Bayesian information criterion (BIC) = 776.9), over central Asia (BIC = 787.4), or Europe (BIC = 777.7)], although the improvement over a European origin is not decisive.” ↩

Tomkins, Jeffrey P.  “Out of Babel, Not Africa.”  Institute for Creation Research.  Feb 16, 2015.  A short news piece from the Institute for Creation Research on Creanza and colleagues' 2015 comparison of phoneme and genetic variation.  It is the only young-earth use found of the phoneme-diversity debate, and it reads the absence of a phoneme founder effect as evidence for separate origins at Babel.

1. 23a.

   Paragraph 1:  “Newly published research combining genetic, language, and demographic data challenges the idea of a single lineage of languages and human populations evolving out of Africa. Instead, the data supports the idea that multiple people groups have independent origins—a condition one would predict if the confusion of languages at the Tower of Babel happened as described in the Bible.” ↩

Rana, Fazale.  “Speaking of Adam and Eve:  Study of Languages Supports Biblical Account of Human Origins.”  Reasons to Believe.  Aug 23, 2011.  A short article by a biochemist at the old-earth ministry Reasons to Believe that reads Atkinson's phoneme gradient as confirming an origin of humanity in Africa about 100,000 years ago, near Eden.  It was written before the 2012 critiques and does not discuss Babel.

1. 24a.

   Section Opening paragraph:  “In doing so, he provided independent confirmation of the Out-of-Africa model for human origins, and with it, support for the biblical creation model.” ↩

Perreault, Charles, and Sarah Mathew.  “Dating the origin of language using phonemic diversity.”  PLoS ONE 7(4):e35289.  2012.  An attempt to use phoneme inventories as a clock, calibrated on the assumption that mainland South-East Asia and the Andaman Islands were settled at one moment 45,000 to 65,000 years ago.  It dates language to 112,000 to 232,000 years ago, and the authors stress that its premise is not widely accepted and that its rate rests on a single case.  Mirror:  PMC

1. 25a.

   Section Abstract:  “We use a natural experiment, the colonization of Southeast Asia and Andaman Islands, to estimate the rate at which phonemic diversity increases through time. Using this rate, we estimate that present-day languages date back to the Middle Stone Age in Africa.” ↩

2. 25b.

   Section Introduction:  “An assumption underlying the empirical parametrization of the model is that human populations have lost phonemes through a drift-loss process during their expansion across the world [16]. However, this hypothesis is not widely accepted among linguists.” ↩

3. 25c.

   Section Discussion:  “Furthermore, our estimate of the rate of phoneme accumulation is based on a single historical case.” ↩

From Perreault and Mathew's own figures:  the five African click and non-Bantu inventories average 71.4 phonemes, mainland South-East Asia 41.21 and the Andamans 24.  Starting from 11 phonemes, the African inventories need (71.4 - 11) / (41.21 - 24) = 60.4 / 17.21 = 3.5 times as long to build as the South-East Asian and Andaman gap took to open;  starting from 29, (71.4 - 29) / 17.21 = 2.5 times.  Their own 159,000 years against 45,000 gives the same 3.5.  If both regions were settled after Babel and phonemes accumulate at one rate everywhere, language would need to be 2.5 to 3.5 times older than the settlement of the Andamans.  That scale reading is this article's;  no young-earth writer proposes a date for the Andamans. ↩