The Origin of Language

Do you know the tale of the Tower of Babel? And do you believe in it? 

Synopsis

There used to be a prosperous place where everyone spoke a single language. To flaunt their huge power, these people attempted to build a tower as high as heaven, using brick and asphalt. God, in anger with their arrogance, gave them a diversity of spoken languages in order to disturb their work. Mixed up with this interference, people couldn't manage to complete the construction and eventually scattered across the world. 

This is just an imaginary story, but it has been largely (at least in Japan) used to explain to children why people living in different places speak different languages. Ever wondered how your language emerged? In spite of years of study, the true answer to this question has not been revealed yet. To fill the linguistic gap, Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof, a Polish linguist, invented an artificial language called Esperanto, but this attempt has not fulfilled its ultimate goal of uniting the world with an identical language. Anyhow it has been a focus of interest in how languages differentiate.

Earlier this year, a study conducted by a biologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand suggested that from a phonemic perspective, the majority of modern languages seem to have originated from a singleton. This theory is interesting in that on contrary to the currently common views that each language locally emerged independently of others, it claims that there is a simple, yet significant phonic pattern which can be considered to have branched off from an African language. According to a review article, a longer migration distance from Africa decreases a language's diversity of phonemes; some African languages have more than a hundred phonemes whereas Hawaiian, toward the far end of the human migration route out of Africa, has only 13.

I think Atkinson's hypothesis is persuasive because australopithecus, the ancestors of Homo sapiens, were born in Africa and so it is natural to think that the language spoken in mother Africa is the mother tongue of the human race. 

Seems like the Tower of Babel existed in Africa. 

References

Phonetic Clues Hint Language Is Africa-Born — The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/15/science/15language.html

Atkinson, QD: Phonemic Diversity Supports a Serial Founder Effect Model of Language Expansion from Africa. Science 332(6027):346–349, 2011.

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/332/6027/346

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Occupy Wall Street

I once wrote about the unequal society. Now the lower class seems to have reached a breaking point of patience (I don't have the intention of discrimination by saying “lower class”; I just mean average people who do not earn an incredibly tremendous amount of money). On Wall Street in New York City, a large number of US citizens, mainly young people, have been performing a mass demonstration since a couple of weeks ago, blaming banks for causing the financial crisis. They are also calling for saving people from poverty. The US government and police are desperately seeking a way to calm down the demonstration. Of the thousands of participants, more than 700 have been arrested. Social media companies like Yahoo, Google and Twitter began inspecting online documents in order to filter out instigative posts and emails. However, this action is about to spread worldwide, as well as across the US. In addition to the subsequent protests that have been taking place in other major US cities including Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles, the leaders are appealing via the Internet to those living in internationally famous metropolises such as London and Tokyo to join an ensuing rally to “occupy” the hearts of their own cities as part of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Meanwhile, Europe is also suffering from a serious debt crisis. Germany, which runs a rather sound finance among the EU member countries, decided to provide a relief fund for Greece in case Italy and Spain may tumble into a chain reaction bankruptcy and subsequently plunge the whole world into the abyss, let alone Germany's foreign loans may turn to nothing due to Greece's default. However, this is just a temporary deal. Earlier today, the Belgian and French governments announced that the major Belgian bank Dexia fell into a bankruptcy and would be taken over by an official organization. Greece is still amid a long line of debt deadlines.  This emergency was triggered by the discovery of Greek's financial cheats of when it aimed to join the EU. As a consultant, the American bank Goldman Sachs gave the Greek government the sneaky tactic. I think Goldman should be punished and pay the losses with interests.

Apparently capitalism is facing a turning point. I hope everything will start to turn to a right direction.