Phonemes in languages around the world (2)

PART - 2

Phonemes are the distinct sounds used in 504 languages from around the world. The number of sounds varies hugely from language to language.

The number of distinct sounds in a language tends to increase the closer it is to sub-Saharan Africa, according to the study.

Piraha: 11 (Brazil)
Hawaiian: 13
Roro: 14 (Papua new Guinea)
Bandjalang: 16 (Australia)
Japanese: 20
Bodo: 21 (Tibet)
Warao: 21 (Venezuela)
Inuit: 22 (Greenland)
Tagalog: 23 (Philippines)
Farsi: 30 (Iran)
Korean: 32
Mandarin: 32 (China)
French: 37
Russian: 38
German: 41
Bengali: 43
English: 46
Kurdish: 47 (Iraq)
Igbo: 59 (Nigeria)
Dahalo: 59 (Kenya)
Hadza: 62 (Tanzania)
Irish: 69
Archi: 91 (Dagestan, Russia)
Xu: 141 (South Africa)

Professor Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at Reading University, said the same effect could be seen in DNA.

Modern-day Africans have a much greater genetic diversity than white Europeans who are descended from a relatively small splinter group that left 70,000 years ago.

'The further you get away from Africa, the fewer sounds you get,' he said.

'People have suspected for a long time that language arose with the origin of our species in Africa and this is consistent with that view.'

Professor Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist at Oxford University, said the origin of language could now be pushed back to between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago.

'The study shows that ancestral language came from somewhere in Africa,' he said.

Consider for a moment what has been said here. Linear A may have beginnings in the much older languages and some of the more modern languages have their roots in Linear A and B.

DNA has its roots in Africa and the further from Africa people and their languages go, the less developed and diverse they became.