Re: Language evolves in fits and starts In Brief (Pagel 2008)

--- On Thu, 10/2/08, mkelkar2003 <swatimkelkar@...> wrote:

> From: mkelkar2003 <swatimkelkar@...>
> Subject: [tied] Language evolves in fits and starts In Brief (Pagel 2008)
> To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
> Date: Thursday, October 2, 2008, 7:06 PM
> New Scientist; 2/9/2008, Vol. 197 Issue 2642, p19-19, 1p
>
>
> "An evolutionary tree connecting the major language
> families charts
> their divergence from one mother tongue into hundreds of
> different
> languages
>
> LANGUAGES evolve in fits and starts rather than gradually,
> an
> analysis of the Bantu, Indo-European and Austronesian
> families of
> languages reveals.
>
> Mark Pagel of the University of Reading, UK, and colleagues
>
> constructed an evolutionary tree for each of these language
> families.
> The "length" of each branch back to the root of
> the tree records how
> different a descendant language is from its ancestral root,
> in terms
> of how many words were replaced.
>
> The team found that in each language family there was
> significantly
> more lexical change along branches in which more new
> languages had
> emerged, suggesting periods of abrupt evolution in which
> each new
> language created a burst of words (Science, vol 319, p
> 588)."
>
> posted by M. Kelkar

Yes, it's called Punk Eek and it's the bomb among biologists as an evolutionary model --or at least it was a few years back.
The idea is to fill niches and take advantage of changed environmental/economic/political conditions --so Japanese has gobbled up tons of English words and invented its own. So it's no surprise and not really anything new --others have brought up Punk Eek.