A study recently released reveals the
mystery of the origins of human language used. Issue of Science Magazine 15
April 2011 revealed that the language used by humans first emerged in southern
Africa. That's where this language then spread throughout the world.
Researchers from the University of
Auckland, New Zealand, Quentin Atkinson conducted a study to trace the track
record by breaking 504 languages into the language of the smallest components
called phonemes. Phoneme comes from the Latin meaning 'spoken voice'. Research
has shown, the more diverse phonemes of a language held by language that
indicates that the source of other languages have fewer phonemes.
His research came to the conclusion that
the more distant group of people traveled from Africa in a historical track
record, the fewer phonemes used in their language. This means that, as
predicted in the study, the languages of South America and Pacific Islanders
have the least amount of phonemes, whereas in African languages have phonemes
majority.
Apparently, this pattern also has
similarities with the study of human genetics. The described as a general rule, the farther a
person out of Africa, which is widely regarded as the origin of human
ancestors, the smaller the differences between individuals in the population of
the individual groups when compared with the diversity in the region of origin,
Africa.
Atkinson study itself uses the same cutting-edge
statistical methods to construct genetic trees based on DNA sequence. Regarding
the use of statistical methods is in finding the source of human language, a
language expert, Brian D. Joseph of Ohio University says a source of new
insights in the study in its field.
"I think we should pay attention to
this with serious, although there are still those who would reject it," said
Joseph.
For additional information, Atkinson's
study is unique because it tried to find the roots of the language from a very
ancient time. Subject age was the language is still a matter of debate because
on the other side while it was discovered that the language has reached the age
of 50,000 years, but on the other hand some other language experts are still
skeptical of the facts in the meantime. They found another factor that is 'the
development of words very quickly' so that the possibility of language itself
does not age over 10,000 years.