Lingua e Geni

Scientists discover links between genes and language 


Anthropology, ArchaeoHeritage, Archaeology, Breakingnews, Genetics, Linguistics 


Academics at the University of York have discovered a correlation between genetic and linguistic diversity and concluded that at least in Europe people who speak different languages are also more likely to have a different genetic make-up. 

Multilingual Europe, showing the genealogy of the languages, together with  the alphabets and modes of writing of all peoples by Gottfried Hensel 

 [Credit: WikiCommons] 

The study, led by Professor Giuseppe Longobardi  in York’s Department of Language and Linguistic Science, in collaboration with geneticists and linguists at the Universities of Ferrara and Modena and Reggio Emilia in Italy, has discovered that language proves a better predictor of genetic differences than the geographical distribution of population. As part of his study he observed significant correlations between genetic and linguistic diversity across the Indo-European and non-Indo-European-speaking populations of Europe. 
Professor Longobardi said: “To a very large extent linguistic differences correspond to genetic differences in the relevant populations.  So, if a population speaks French and another speaks Russian they have a certain degree of linguistic diversity, that we can now measure with unprecedented precision and the degree of genetic diversity is proportional. “Is it the case that the French and Italians and Spanish, who speak very close languages, are really similar to each other in genetic terms?  
Is it really the case the Japanese, and say a population from Sub Saharan Africa, are really very different  both in terms of language and in terms of their genetic ancestry ? 
To some extent our answer, based on the published study and further work in progress, is yes: at least as a general historical rule.” 
However, Professor Longobardi said there are exceptions, as to many rules, and the exception in Europe is the Hungarians,  who are genetically very similar to Slavic and Germanic populations. 
“That’s one case where some populations of central Europe  just picked up a new language  which was brought in to Hungary by a small group of conquerors. 
“But apart from that exception the distribution of languages and the distribution of the genetic structure of the populations in Europe tend to correspond to each other,” he added. The study, published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, suggests that migrating populations carried their genes alongside their language, rather than just a cultural diffusion of linguistic features from one population to another. 
The project involved studying around 15 European languages but researchers are turning their attention to other languages, extending potentially to a global scale. 
The research could eventually help scientists pinpoint when and how Indo-European languages were brought into Europe and potentially help geneticists in the future. Professor Longobardi added: “Ultimately being able to identify the ancestry of a population just on the simple basis of the language they speak may benefit identifying genetic properties of these populations, which could ultimately be of practical use even for medical research.” 


Source: University of York [July 03, 2015]

Lingua e Migrazioni.

Una 'terza' ondata, sconosciuta...


European languages linked to migration from the east 


 A mysterious group of humans from the east stormed western Europe 4,500 years ago — bringing with them technologies such as the wheel, as well as a language that is the forebear of many modern tongues, suggests one of the largest studies of ancient DNA yet conducted. Vestiges of these eastern émigrés exist in the genomes of nearly all contemporary Europeans, according to the authors, who analysed genome data from nearly 100 ancient Europeans. 

Artifacts similar to these pottery vesssels from Sweden are found across northern Europe,  and give the Corded Ware culture its name. Ancient DNA suggests that the group was  related to the Yamnaya people who lived in present-day Russia  [Credit: DEA/G. Dagli Orti/De Agostini/Getty] 

The first Homo sapiens to colonize Europe were hunter-gatherers who arrived from Africa, by way of the Middle East, around 45,000 years ago. 
(Neanderthals and other archaic human species had begun roaming the continent much earlier.) 

Archaeology and ancient DNA suggest that farmers from the Middle East started streaming in around 8,000 years ago, replacing the hunter-gatherers in some areas and mixing with them in others. 
But last year, a study of the genomes of ancient and contemporary Europeans found echoes not only of these two waves from the Middle East, but also of an enigmatic third group that they said could be from farther east. 

Ancient genes 

To further pin down the origins of this ghost lineage, a team led by David Reich, an evolutionary and population geneticist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, analysed nuclear DNA from the bodies of 69 individuals who lived across Europe between 8,000 and 3,000 years ago. 
They also examined previously published genome data from another 25 ancient Europeans, including Ötzi, the 5,300-year-old 'ice man' who was discovered on the Italian-Austrian border. 
Their analysis confirmed the arrival of Middle Eastern farmers in Europe between 8,000 and 7,000 years ago. 
But the team also found proof of a previously unknown migration, beginning several thousand years later. 
DNA recovered from steppe herders that lived in western Russia around 5,000 years ago closely matched that of 4,500-year-old individuals from Germany, who were part of a group known as the Corded Ware culture.

 The herders, named the Yamnaya, lived in present-day Russia and Ukraine and represent “a massive migration into the heartland of Europe from its eastern periphery”, Reich and his team say in a paper posted on the bioRxiv preprint server on 10 February. 
Yamnaya ancestry survives in varying degrees in the genomes of contemporary Europeans, with northern groups such as Norwegians, Scots and Lithuanians maintaining the strongest link. 
The geographical extent of the Yamnaya migration is not clear, nor is its nature. But Reich's team says it is possible that the eastern migrants completely replaced existing populations in Germany. 

Linguistic spread 

The Yamnaya, the researchers also contend, imported at least part of the Indo-European language family into Europe. 
The origin of these languages — which include Germanic, Slavic and Romance languages as well as many of the languages spoken on the South Asian subcontinent — is mired in controversy. 
Some researchers say that the tongues were spread by Middle Eastern farmers around 8,500 years ago. 
But Reich and his team say that their data are more consistent with the 'steppe hypothesis' favoured by other researchers, according to which herders living around the Black and Caspian Seas spread the languages around 6,000 years ago, after horse domestication and the invention of the wheel allowed them to start travelling great distances. 

"It’s wonderful work. It’s a big leap forward in many respects," says Stephan Schiffels, a population geneticist at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, UK, who studies ancient DNA. 
"We can now sequence whole populations from the past, not just single individuals.” Pontus Skoglund, a population geneticist at Harvard Medical School who works with Reich but is not a co-author of the latest study, says that the link between the Yamnaya and the Corded Ware people is a “smoking gun”. 
“You don’t need any fancy genetic profiling. It’s as direct evidence as you could hope for.” Less clear is whether all Indo-European languages derive from this group, or whether just a subset do, says Paul Heggarty, a linguist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. 
He suspects that the Yamnaya spoke a language that later developed into Slavic, Germanic and other northern European tongues, but he doubts that they imported the predecessor of southern European languages such as ancient Greek, or those of eastern Indo-European languages such as Sanskrit. 
Carles Lalueza-Fox, a palaeogeneticist at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona, Spain, says that the study also supports the idea that the first farmers to reach Europe were a homogeneous bunch, with little genetic variation. 
“Things start changing with the arrival of metallurgic technologies,” he says. 
“Then, there are dramatic population movements and turnovers, probably related to technical improvements in tools and warfare.” 

Author: Ewen Callaway | Source: Nature [February 12, 2015]

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Lessico degli odori

Le lingue occidentali sono  carenti in vocaboli per descrivere gli odori. Basta farci caso: esse   
ricorrono a metafore, a similitudini e mancano di espressioni astratte dedicate agli aromi.

I linguisti dell'Istitutp Max-Plank hanno trovato che in una tribù di cacciatori- raccoglitori (in cui è molto più importante descrivere correttamente gli odori), esistono 15 differenti espressioni astratte riferite agli odori.
Tra i Maniq ed i Jahai tailandesi gli odori sono classificati secondo la loro piacevolezza e il loro grado di pericolosità, la loro capacità di calmare e di eccitare. 
In un ambiente più primitivo e naturale, gli odori sono di capitale importanza per ogni cosa, a partire dalla salute e passando per la possibilità di cacciare e quindi per la sopravvivenza in generale.
Negli ambienti occidentali - invece - gli odori hanno perso la loro importanza, tant'è che persino la frutta e la verdura si producono per l'aspetto e non per l'odore. 
Invece, in una società nella quale gli odori sono una componente centrale, la partecipazione psico-affettiva è molto più grande, tanto da proibire - addirittura - di parlare dei cattivi odori. 
C'è da chiedersi quanto abbiamo perduto.
Non si tratta solamente di avere la disponibilità, l'uso e sentire la necessità di alcuni vocaboli (come per la neve degli esquimesi, che è il fattore dominante nel loro ambiente).

Il Latino Classico aveva poco meno del doppio dei vocaboli per definire i Valori Morali: questo vuol dire che l'elemento morale non ci appartiene più.


An odour lexicon: 

Nomadic hunter-gatherers in Thailand

 have multiple words for smells 




"A sweet, flowery and oriental composition of scents with jasmine and May rose absolute" – this is how a well-known cosmetics manufacturer describes one of its most successful women's perfumes.
 A very sophisticated means of expression, one might think. 
Far from it: Western languages appear to lack vocabulary devoted to express the variety of existing smells. 
They rely on metaphors and similes. 

Odours play a central role in the everyday life of the Maniq. The langue researcher Ewelina Wnuk visited the Maniq over several years and compiled a lexicon of olfactory language of this hunter-gatherer tribe in the Thai tropical rainforest 
[Credit: © E. Wnuk] 

According to linguists at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen in the Netherlands, however, there are languages that have a specific vocabulary for odours. 

The Maniq, a group of hunter-gatherers in southern Thailand, can describe smells using at least 15 different abstract expressions. 
They categorise odours according to their pleasantness and dangerousness. 
The linguists' results show that human language is perfectly capable of expressing the variety of smells in our environment. 
This probably reflects how important a sense of smell was for survival over the course of human history, something that is greatly underestimated today. 
Faced with the choice of having to do without one of their five senses, most people consider the sense of smell dispensable. 

Many scientists believe that the sense of smell is a relic of evolution and attribute little importance to it. This belief is reflected in the fact that many languages do not have a dedicated repertoire for describing smells. 
Flowery, earthy, vanilla or musky – most languages in the Western world use objects that have particular smells as the basis for expressions to describe odours; they do not have abstract terms to describe the smells. 

On the other hand, in the world of colours, for example, words like red or green do not refer to specific objects. Other cultures clearly have more options for describing smells: the Maniq, for example, a population of a few hundred hunter-gatherers in southern Thailand, whose language has been largely unexplored. 
Two linguists, Ewelina Wnuk and Asifa Majid, have drawn up a list of 15 abstract terms that the Maniq use to describe odours – more than in almost any other known language. The expressions do not belong to a single word class. They include nouns and so-called stative verbs, the closest translation of which would be "smell like X, Y, Z, ...", e.g. "smell like a mushroom, old shelter, rotten wood, etc.". 

Unlike other languages, such as German or English, these expressions are not derived from one single specific object. Instead, the Maniq language contains terms that represent a smell that can originate from several sources. Thus, the Maniq have an expression for the smell of the sun, but the same expression also refers to the air or smoke coming from the sun. 
The word for the smell of an old shelter is also the same word used for the smell of mushrooms, the skin of a dead animal or drinking from a bamboo tube. "Their language encompasses a rich vocabulary with which they can describe smells. These terms express only smells and are not applicable across other sensory domains," explains Ewelina Wnuk, who visited the Maniq over several years in the Thai tropical rainforest and studied their olfactory language. 
According to the researchers' results, the Maniq lexicon of smells has a two-dimensional structure. Odours are differentiated along two dimensions: pleasantness and dangerousness. 

"It thus has a structure that is quite similar to the lexicon for expressions of feelings, in which a distinction is also made between pleasant/unpleasant and exciting/calming. 

This correlation probably expresses the close connection between smells and feelings," says Wnuk. The extensive vocabulary and structure of the lexicon indicates the importance of odours for the Maniq. 
They evaluate their surroundings through their nose; after all, in an environment that is still largely untouched by humans, they are surrounded by smells at all times. 
They use their sense of smell to identify animals that they can hunt, and to recognise objects or events, such as spoiled food, that can pose a danger. 
Odours are also very important to the Maniq from a medical perspective. 
Many of their medicinal herbs have an intense aroma, on which the healing success is based: the pleasant scent of the plant penetrates into the body and drives out disease.

Jewellery therefore frequently consists of necklaces, headbands and wristbands made of fragrant-smelling herbs. The Maniq also make sure that they are surrounded by positive smells and avoid negative odours. 
These findings are not only interesting for linguists, neuroscientists can also draw valuable conclusions from the information. The structure of the Maniq lexicon of smells could indicate, for example, that pleasant and dangerous smells are processed differently in the brain. 
In addition to Maniq, researchers have also analysed a second language – Jahai, spoken by a neighbouring hunter-gatherer population – in which odours also play a key role. It is certainly no coincidence that in both cases the languages are spoken by populations in tropical rainforest regions with a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, as smells are vital in order to survive in nature. 
"People in Western societies have demoted olfaction. Fruit and flowers, for example, are cultivated for their appearance, not their fragrance," says Asifa Majid, a professor at the Max Planck Institute in Nijmegen, who compares how different cultures express smells in their languages. 
It can even be an absolute taboo in some cases to talk about bad smells. 
"The world of odours was perhaps more significant earlier in human history, but today there do not appear to be any remnants of it in Western languages," says Majid. 
The study has been published in the jounal Cognition. 


Source: Max Planck Society 

[May 05, 2014]

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Manoscritto di Voynich

Stefen Bax, professore di linguistica applicata dell'Università inglese di Bedfordshire, asserisce di avere decodificato 10 possibili parole del Manoscritto di Voynich*. Chissenefrega, direte voi - amici miei falsari e ciarlatani - 10 parole significa praticamente nulla.

Tanto più che alcuni studiosi (di quelli veri!) sospettano trattarsi di un falso rinascimentale.

Invece, no. 

Sembra che il Manoscritto (250 pagine in pergamena di capretto, molto illustrate,  scritte con un'elaborata scrittura sconosciuta) sia un documento autentico: scoperto in Italia ed acquistato da Wilfied Voinich presso i Gesuiti di Villa Mondragone nel 1912, anche le datazioni con radiocarbonio - fatte nel 2011 dll'Università dell'Arizona - lo attribuiscono al Medioevo (1404/1428), tanto che è custodito con ogni cura presso la Biblioteca dei Libri Rari dell'Università americana di Yale.

La notizia più confortante è anche la più recente, e proviene dall'autorevole Rivista PLOS ONE: il 'Voinichese' risulta - ad un esame scientifico linguistico - essere aderente a precise regole linguistiche.

Questo - miei cari amici falsari e ciarlatani * - deve anche essere la vostra sfida per il futuro: riuscirete a fare in modo che le vostre immonde pappecotte superino lo stesso scoglio?  Far sì che i vostri scritti falsi risultino aderenti a precise regole linguistiche?Un ronzio di mosche mi assicura di no, perché siete tromboni stupidi e pieni di birra. 

Buon lavoro, comunque!

E ricordate la massima: 

Chi sostiene 'tesi' provatamente false 

o è in palese e grossolano errore 

(e prima o poi dovrà essere chiamato ad ammetterlo!)  

oppure è un falsario anch'egli...

Non esiste una terza possibilità.

Ten words in mysterious Voynich Manuscript decoded



A researcher claims he's decoded 10 possible words in the famously unreadable Voynich manuscript, which has eluded interpretation for a century. 

 Detail from page 78r of Voynich Manuscript depicting the "biological" section [Credit: WikiCommons] 

The book's 250 vellum pages are filled with writings in an unknown alphabet and elaborate drawings depicting a range of subjects from female nudes to medicinal herbs to Zodiac symbols. 
The medieval text was discovered by an antique book dealer in 1912, and it has been rather stingy in giving up its secrets ever since. 
Now Stephen Bax, a professor of applied linguistics at the University of Bedfordshire in England, says he's deciphered 14 characters of the script and can read a handful of items in the Voynich text, such as the words for coriander, hellebore and juniper next to drawings of the plants. He says he's also picked out the word for Taurus written beside an illustration of the Pleiades, a star cluster in the constellation Taurus.  "I hit on the idea of identifying proper names in the text, following historic approaches which successfully deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs and other mystery scripts, and I then used those names to work out part of the script," Bax said in a statement. "The manuscript has a lot of illustrations of stars and plants," Bax added. "I was able to identify some of these, with their names, by looking at mediaeval herbal manuscripts in Arabic and other languages, and I then made a start on a decoding, with some exciting results." The Voynich manuscipt now sits in a rare books library at Yale University. Carbon dating proved that it dates back to the 15th century, and researchers believe it was written in Central Europe. 
While some scholars have written it off as a Renaissance-era hoax full of nonsense text, others say the pattern of the letters and words suggest the book was written in a real language or at least an invented cipher. A recent statistical study published in the journal PLOS ONE found that "Voynichese" adheres to linguistic rules. Bax notes that the manuscript is still a long way from being understood, and that he is coming forward with what he's found thus far in the hopes that other linguists will work with him to crack the code. For now, he thinks the book is "probably a treatise on nature, perhaps in a Near Eastern or Asian language."

 Author: Megan Gannon | Source: LiveScience [February 20, 2014]

* Altre notizie disponibili, interessanti, misteriose e avventurose nei siti: http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manoscritto_Voynich
in inglese: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript



* Naturalmente, mi riferisco a voi, prodi guerrieri della #armatabrancaleoneshardariana.
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