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The highly diverse Nilo-Saharan languages, first proposed as a family by Joseph Greenberg in 1963 might have originated in the Upper Paleolithic. [1] Given the presence of a tripartite number system in modern Nilo-Saharan languages, linguist N.A. Blench inferred a noun classifier in the proto-language, distributed based on water courses in the Sahara during the "wet period" of the Neolithic ...
The origin of language, its relationship with human evolution, and its consequences have been subjects of study for centuries.Scholars wishing to study the origins of language draw inferences from evidence such as the fossil record, archaeological evidence, contemporary language diversity, studies of language acquisition, and comparisons between human language and systems of animal ...
In terms of evolutionary theory, historical linguistics (as opposed to research into the origin of language) studies Lamarckian acquired characteristics of languages. This perspective explores how languages adapt and change over time in response to cultural, societal, and environmental factors.
Cladistic representation of the Mayan linguistic family, going back 4000 years.(The numbers represent proposed historical dates in the Common Era).. In historical linguistics, the tree model (also Stammbaum, genetic, or cladistic model) is a model of the evolution of languages analogous to the concept of a family tree, particularly a phylogenetic tree in the biological evolution of species.
Linguistic geography can also refer to studies of how people talk about the landscape. For example, toponymy is the study of place names. [1] Landscape ethnoecology, also known as ethnophysiography, is the study of landscape ontologies and how they are expressed in language. [2] There are two principal fields of study within the geography of ...
A second linguistic tradition is that of The American Society of Geolinguistics which interprets geolinguistics to be "An academic discipline involving the analysis and implications of the geographical location, distribution and structure of language varieties within a temporal framework, either in isolation or in contact and/or conflict with ...
The adaptational view of language is advocated by various frameworks of cognitive and evolutionary linguistics, with the terms 'functionalism' and 'Cognitive Linguistics' often being equated. [31] It is hypothesised that the evolution of the animal brain provides humans with a mechanism of abstract reasoning which is a 'metaphorical' version of ...
The gradual disuse of Latin opened an uneasy transition period as more and more works were only accessible in local languages. Many national European languages held the potential to become a language of science within a specific research field: some scholars "took measures to learn Swedish so they could follow the work of [the Swedish chemist] Bergman and his compatriots."