Modelling Social Structures and Hierarchies in Language Evolution

Language evolution might have preferred certain prior social configurations over others. Experiments conducted with models of different social structures (varying subgroup interactions and the role of a dominant interlocutor) suggest that having isolated agent groups rather than an interconnected agent is more advantageous for the emergence of a social communication system. Distinctive groups that are closely connected by communication yield systems less like natural language than fully isolated groups inhabiting the same world. Furthermore, the addition of a dominant male who is asymmetrically favoured as a hearer, and equally likely to be a speaker has no positive influence on the disjoint groups.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures, 1 table. In proceedings of AI-2010, The Thirtieth SGAI International Conference on Innovative Techniques and Applications of Artificial Intelligence, Cambridge, England, UK, 14-16 December 201

An Algorithm For Building Language Superfamilies Using Swadesh Lists

The main contributions of this thesis are the following: i. Developing an algorithm to generate language families and superfamilies given for each input language a Swadesh list represented using the international phonetic alphabet (IPA) notation. ii. The algorithm is novel in using the Levenshtein distance metric on the IPA representation and in the way it measures overall distance between pairs of Swadesh lists. iii. Building a Swadesh list for the author\u27s native Kinyarwanda language because a Swadesh list could not be found even after an extensive search for it. Adviser: Peter Reves

Beyond writing: The development of literacy in the Ancient Near East

Previous discussions of the origins of writing in the Ancient Near East have not incorporated the neuroscience of literacy, which suggests that when southern Mesopotamians wrote marks on clay in the late-fourth millennium, they inadvertently reorganized their neural activity, a factor in manipulating the writing system to reflect language, yielding literacy through a combination of neurofunctional change and increased script fidelity to language. Such a development appears to take place only with a sufficient demand for writing and reading, such as that posed by a state-level bureaucracy; the use of a material with suitable characteristics; and the production of marks that are conventionalized, handwritten, simple, and non-numerical. From the perspective of Material Engagement Theory, writing and reading represent the interactivity of bodies, materiality, and brains: movements of hands, arms, and eyes; clay and the implements used to mark it and form characters; and vision, motor planning, object recognition, and language. Literacy is a cognitive change that emerges from and depends upon the nexus of interactivity of the components

A Cross-Generational View of Contact-Related Phenomena in a Philippine Language: Phonology

The Philippines is a treasure house for the study of the effects of language contact. The extensive borrowing that occurred from Chinese and Malay-speaking traders (Wolff 1973-1974), prior to the coming of the Spanish in 1521, and from other foreign languages such as Spanish and English since then are well-known and often described (Wolff 1976). However, the influence of local Philippine languages on one another is another rich source of data on language contact, and one which has not often been as carefully explored. Probably all Philippine languages have large sets of lexical items which have been borrowed from one or another of the widely-spoken languages such as Filipino (Tagalog), Ilokano, Cebuano, Hiligaynon or Magindanao. The recognition of such borrowings though is sometimes obscured because of the similarity between the phonologies of the source languages and the donor languages. The primary purpose of this paper is to characterize and account for some of the massive changes that have taken place in the phonological system of one of the dialects of Central Bontok, that spoken in barangay Guinaang, over the last fifty years, primarily as a result of literacy in English, and the massive influx of Ilokano (and Tagalog) loanwords in the language

The apicolabial shift in Nese

Nese is one of a dozen or so languages/dialects spoken in the south Santo—north Malakula area of Vanuatu that reflect original simple bilabials before nonround vowels as apicolabials. In some of these languages, the apicolabials subsequently became dentals/alveolars. Nese is unusual, however, in the inconsistency of its reflexes: the most frequent reflex of Proto-Oceanic *b in this environment is indeed the apicolabial stop b, but the most common reflex of *m is alveolar n, while with *p both apicolabial v and labiodental v occur with roughly equal frequency. This paper attempts to explain this variation, and also attempts to explain why *p behaved far less consistently across a range of languages in this area than did *b and *m