Oldest attested languages in the Near East reveal deep transformations in the distribution of linguistic features
Efrat-Kowalsky, N.; Ranacher, P.; Neureiter, N.; Widmer, P.; Bickel, B.
Show abstract
It is an unresolved question to what extent the current frequency distributions of linguistic features inform us about what is representative of the language faculty and does not instead result from historical contingencies. We probe this question by leveraging unique data from the oldest attested languages, those preserved through writing from up to 5,000 years ago in the Ancient Near East. We examine 70 grammatical features for which there is sufficient evidence in the available records. After controlling for relatedness we find robust deviations of two of the oldest languages, Hurrian and Sumerian from both the ancient languages and the modern distribution. The spatial and temporal placement of these two languages reveal a divergent distribution of features in the region in prehistory, suggesting massive transformations of the linguistic distributions in the past few millennia. This challenges inferences about general characteristics of language based on modern distributions.
Matching journals
The top 6 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.
Similar papers in this journal
Similar papers in this journal
- Early hominin arrival in Southeast Asia triggered the evolution of major human malaria vectors 91%
- Gene-flow from steppe individuals into Cucuteni-Trypillia associated populations indicates long-standing contacts and gradual admixture 90%
- Genetic continuity of Indo-Iranian speakers since the Iron Age in southern Central Asia. 90%
Similar papers in this journal
- The antique genetic plight of the Mediterranean monk seal (Monachus monachus) 91%
- Long-range sequential dependencies precede complex syntactic production in language acquisition 91%
- The interaction of climate history and evolution impacts alpine biodiversity assembly differently in freshwater and on land 90%
Similar papers in this journal
- The Genomic portrait of the Picene culture: new insights into the Italic Iron Age and the legacy of the Roman expansion in Central Italy. 93%
- Evolutionary dynamics of pseudoautosomal region 1 in humans and great apes 92%
- Medieval genomes from eastern Iberia illuminate the role of Morisco mass deportations in dismantling a long-standing genetic bridge with North Africa 92%
"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.