#linguistic evolution

[ˌaˈmi.raˌi.ɲaˌɲa.o] => Proto-Ancestral term, compound of [ˌaˈmi.raˌi] "Homeland of the Proto-Ancestral people" and [ˌɲaˈɲa.o] "language, speech".

[ˌa.ˈmi.ˌrae̯.ɲa.ˌɲau̯] => vowels in open syllables preceeding vowels merge, forming diphthongs.

[ˌa.ˈmi.rae̯.ɲa.ˌɲau̯] => secondary stress is lost in syllables preceeding a stressed syllable.

[ˌa.ˈmi.raːɲ.ˌɲau̯] => short vowels lost and diphthongs shorten in unstressed syllables. Pronunciation remains the same until Old Ancestral.

[a.ˈmiː.raːɲ.ˌɲau̯] => short vowels lengthen when preceeding voiced obstruents.

[æ.ˈmiː.raːɲ.ˌɲæu̯] => short vowels become lax in quality.

[æ.ˈmiː.raɲ.ˌɲæu̯] => long vowels shorten preceeding coda consonants.

[ə.ˈmɪː.rəɲ.ˌɲæu̯] => tense vowels become lax, then unstressed short vowels are lost and unstressed long vowels/diphthongs are shortened.

[ˈmɪː.rəɲ.ˌɲæu̯] => /ə/ is lost word-initially and finally.

[ˈmɪː.rɪːɲ.ˌɲæu̯] => /ə/ assimilates to bordering primary syllable vowel, or secondary if not near a primary. Pronunciation remains the same until Middle Ancestral.

[ˈmɪː.ɾɪːɲ.ˌɲæu̯] => /r/ becomes /ɾ/ intervocalically.

[ˈmɪː².ɾɪːɲ².ˌɲæu̯²] => syllables with long vowels, diphthongs, or coda consonants become heavy.]

[ˈmɪː́².ɾɪː́ɲ².ˌɲǽu̯²] => heavy syllables develop high pitch.

[ˈmɪː́².ɾɪː́².ˌɲǽu̯²] => consonants degeminate.

[ˈmɪː́.ɾɪː́.ˌɲǽu̯] => heavy syllable distinction is lost.

[ˈmɪ́.ɾɪ́.ˌɲǽu̯] => long vowels shorten.

"Anyway. . ."

An article by Kensy Cooperrider in Aeon about gestural theories for the origin of language. Excerpt: 

Proposals about the origins of language abound. And it’s no wonder: language is a marvel, our most distinctive capacity. A few slight movements of tongue, teeth and lips, and I can give you a new idea, whisk you somewhere else or give you goosebumps. Any thought a human can think, it would seem, can be shared on a puff of air. Explaining how this all started has been called the ‘hardest problem in science’ and it’s one that few can resist. Linguists, neuroscientists, philosophers and primatologists – not to mention novelists and historians – have all taken cracks at it.

Over this long and colourful history, one idea has proven particularly resilient: the notion that language began as gesture. What we now do with tongue, teeth and lips, the proposal goes, we originally did with arms, hands and fingers. For hundreds of thousands of years, maybe longer, our prehistoric forebears commanded a gestural ‘protolanguage’. This idea is evident in some of the earliest writings about language evolution, and is now as popular as ever. Yet even as the popularity of the ‘gesture-first’ theory has surged, its major weakness – a flaw some consider fatal – has become all the more glaring.

Today though, my roommate and I were talking about the evolution of the English language and how it grows by absorbing from every other language and how English speaking countries will develop completely different slang from each other. If all these countries where English was the primary language were more isolated from each other, eventually they would evolve into different languages. However, due to modern and ever expanding communication technology, we can all understand each other’s slang (even if as an American I don’t call a grill a barbie I know what New Zealanders and Aussies mean.) Therefore the ability for the language of multiple countries to evolve TOGETHER despite being on opposite sides of the world (for some of us) is unprecedented in our history. 

So back to the Sci Fi aspect: If your planet is at the technological point where you have casual space travel, your technology would have had to evolve to a point where global communications were instantaneous and flawless. Where cultural sharing and learning was the norm. As language evolves, so does the culture that speaks it. If multiple countries and cultures were all contributing to a shared language, it is likely that would morph into a shared culture for ease of cultural linguist context (Linguistic determinism. Part of the Sapir-Worf hypothesis). One language and one culture could then easily share one centralized government, especially when if you have the technology to casually travel through space you can OBVIOUSLY do so on your own planet and therefore there is no part of your world that is too far away to govern. 

We were talking about a different version of this theory after Mass on Sunday. The basic idea is that there needed to be a mutation between Neanderthals and humans that allowed for language acquisition. Noam Chomsky points out that such significant mutations would be rare, in only one or two people (e.g., Adam and Eve). This new theory suggests just what the mutation affected: prefontal synthesis.

"Numerous archeological and genetic evidence have already convinced most paleoanthropologists that the speech apparatus has reached essentially modern configurations before the human line split from the Neanderthal line 600,000 years ago. Considering that the chimpanzee communication system already has 20 to 100 different vocalizations, it is likely that the modern-like remodeling of the vocal apparatus extended our ancestors' range of vocalizations by orders of magnitude. In other words, by 600,000 years ago, the number of distinct verbalizations used for communication must have been on par with the number of words in modern languages.

"On the other hand, artifacts signifying modern imagination, such as composite figurative arts, elaborate burials, bone needles with an eye, and construction of dwellings arose not earlier than 70,000 years ago. The half million-year-gap between the acquisition of the modern speech apparatus and modern imagination has baffled scientists for decades.

"While studying acquisition of imagination in children, Dr. Vyshedskiy and his colleagues discovered a temporal limit for the development of a particular component of imagination. It became apparent that modern children who have not been exposed to full language in early childhood never acquire the type of active constructive imagination essential for juxtaposition of mental objects, known as Prefrontal Synthesis (PFS)..."

"The second predicted evolutionary barrier was a faster PFC maturation rate and, consequently, a shorter critical period. In modern children the critical period for PFS acquisition closes around the age of five. If the critical period in pre-modern children was over by the age of two, they would have no chance of acquiring PFS. A longer critical period was imperative to provide enough time to train PFS via recursive conversations.