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Can this be true?
But one feature—whether a language uses pitch as well as vowels and consonants to convey word meanings—stood apart. Those, such as Chinese, that encipher meaning in pitch are called “tonal languages”. Those that do not, like English, are “non-tonal”. And it was versions of Dr Dediu's and Dr Ladd's two microcephaly-related genes that matched the 49 populations along tonal and non-tonal lines.
Language Log (one of the best blogs) has excellent commentary.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on June 3, 2007 at 05:01 AM in Science | Permalink
Comments
see also Gene Expression (one of the best blogs, too)
http://www.gnxp.com/
Posted by: Luis Enrique at Jun 3, 2007 8:55:24 AM
From looking at the discussion on LL (not the paper- sadly I don't have time for it) it would be worth noting that there will also be a pretty high, maybe even higher, correlation between average eye shape and ability to speak chinese. The methods here make for very easy book-cooking, as the LL folks point out very cautiously, and until there are causal mechanisms postulated that can be tested it's always more reasonable to expect this to go the way of the 'gay gene' and other figments of researchers immagination that arrose by starting with something unusual and working backwards in a way that's bound to find correlations whether there is any casaul mechanim or not. This might well be a case where you'd expect a causaul mechanism and can imagine how it would work, so it seems more plausible than many cases but since so many of these stories don't play out it's always worth being skeptical at the early, and even the middle, stages.
Posted by: Matt at Jun 3, 2007 9:10:12 AM
Not to act like I know more than people who have apparently studied this a lot more than I have, but ...
In English you do decipher meaning from pitch. For example, you have to raise the pitch at the end of a statement to turn it into a question. You have to raise the pitch on a part of a statement to shift the focus to it. Example:
"I paid Sally from the credit union account." (as opposed paying to someone else)
"I paid Sally from the credit union account." (as opposed to someone else paying)
Why do native English speakers feel the need to put emphasis (*'s, italics, etc.) in their writing? Think about it.
Posted by: Person at Jun 3, 2007 11:07:02 AM
Thanks person. I never thought of that before. I find myself putting words in bold online when I want to try to recreate verbal emphasis in written form. Not everyone gets it though and some find it annoying and tend to think the person doing it is an idiot. They might even be right in my case....
Posted by: happyjuggler0 at Jun 3, 2007 1:11:52 PM
Keeping in tune with person's post, I've read that one of the things people have trouble with when learning Chinese is in fact changing tone properly to account for different emotional intent for example. Tone changes not only for different parts of a word in Chinese, but also in much the same way it changes in English when we ask a question, or are scared or happy and so on. Thus there is an added layer of tonal subtlety that many Chinese as a second language learners never master.
Posted by: happyjuggler0 at Jun 3, 2007 1:16:45 PM
Yes yes, you do decipher meaning from pitch in English, but the words themselves are not changed by pitch. Saying "mean" in a higher register doesn't change it to "check".
I don't understand Tyler's question. Why would Tyler be surprised to find out genes are responsible for how our brains manage information, or that evolution took different paths, or that some evolutionary traits are better than others, or whatever it is that surprised him?
Posted by: anonymous at Jun 3, 2007 2:35:23 PM
It's going to be hard to distinguish which way the arrow of correlation is going here since language tends to be passed down within genetic families.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Jun 3, 2007 10:30:37 PM
I'm with Steve here: causality could just as easily run from language-use as to it. Specifically, if a group of families tend towards tonality, those who could not distinguish and emulate the subtleties would be considered less desirable for mating. Those who excelled would be prefered.
I'm also with anonymous. Tonal languages change the meaning of individual words, which English never does. We use tone (and usually emphasis) merely to abbreviate.
Posted by: Nathan Zook at Jun 4, 2007 8:58:58 AM
Nathan_Zook and anonymous: That's fine, until you realize Chinese doesn't have "words" in the sense that
English does.
Posted by: Person at Jun 4, 2007 9:09:47 AM
Why would Jerry bring anything?
Posted by: Jim Outen at Jun 4, 2007 9:38:24 AM
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Posted by: afasdf at Jun 4, 2007 10:24:20 AM
When Chinese people get angry, everything becomes fourth tone.
Posted by: Matt at Jun 4, 2007 11:34:27 AM
"We use tone (and usually emphasis) merely to abbreviate."
No. English uses an alternation in stress - "emphasis" to disitinguish
nouns from verbs in affixed words such as "break up" or "process"
1) Verb: "Do you think they will break UP?"
Noun: "That was a really nasty BREAK up."
2) Verb: "They will proCESS the length of the nave."
Noun: "It's a very involved PROcess."
and then the noun can be zero-derived inot a verb, but in that case it
retains its noun-like stress pattern:
Verb: "I've got to PROcess all these applications in one hour."
Anyway, at LL they seem to be treating tones in Chinese as if they are all
the same thing. They aren't. Mandarin has contour tone, which I find
really easy, and Cantonese has pitch tone - three distinct level tones,
high, low and medium, along with some others, while Shanghai and maybe the
other Wu dialects have only two tones, with rules to reduce the tones of
following morphemes in a groups to the contrasting tone. The other languages
in the Sinitic group probably have their own and different arrangements.
If this gentic correlation they discuss is so significant, I wonder how it
applies in West Africa or Meso-America, where tonal languages are also
the norm.
Posted by: Jim at Jun 4, 2007 4:49:01 PM
Jim, you're confusing tone with context. In those examples, you don't understand the meaning of the word purely because of the emphasis or sound, but because of the context of the word in a sentence or phrase. In fact, just read what you typed: you don't need to hear anything to understand the meaning.
From my understanding - which admittedly is very rudimentary - this is not a good analogy for how a tonal language works.
I found this amusing:
http://www.learningthai.com/tones/index.html
Posted by: fustercluck at Jun 5, 2007 10:25:46 PM
Fuster:
Jim is not confusing tone with context. He's not even talking about tone in fact, but about stress. Process and process are different depending on the stress. You don't need context to tell them apart.
Posted by: LJS at Jun 8, 2007 2:36:24 AM
"you don't understand the meaning of the word purely because of the
emphasis or sound,"
Actually there is no change in the meaning, but only in the syntactic
category of the word. As far as relying on context for the meaning, if
context were sufficient, there would be no purpose for the systematic contrast in stress patterns, and the pattern would begin to be ignored and finally dropped.There are examples where the stress contrast reflects a semantic distinction, eg. to conTRACT -
shrink up; catch a disease vs. to CONtract - make up a contract. This stress distinction exists for some reason; it is clearly not just a phonological fossil.
Stress and tone are different but not unrelated. Some languages have pitch
stress, such as Swedish and Japanese. In the case of Swedish, almost all
syllables have equal stress, but historically stressed syllables are
pronounced with a different tone than historically unstressed syllables. I
don't know how pitch stress developed in Japanese, but I can't think of
even one theory that has Japanese deriving from any language or combination
of languages with stress distinctions, so there you have the same feature
occurring twice with different origins.
I was speaking of stress rather than tone, but the principle is the same.
They are both supersegmental contrastive features in this particular case.
Posted by: Jim at Jun 8, 2007 2:00:11 PM
