Hommag

Babel

The Tower of Babel Story

(Genesis 11,6-7)

Behold, the people is

one, and they have all
one language; and
this they begin to do;
and now nothing will
be restrained from
them, which they have
imagined to do.
Go to, let us go
down, and there
confound their
language, that they
may not understand
one anothers
speech.

Diversity of Languages
Numbers of languages (raw numbers in a given

area)
Continent (e.g., Africa=2,029; Europe=239)
Country (e.g., Democratic Republic of Congo=214)

Numbers of different types of languages (not

genetically related)
Types of word order (e.g., SOV, SVO)
Types of word formation (e.g., simple, complex)

Numbers of language families (genetically related)

Caucasian (Caucasus mountains)=38
Dravidian (southern India)=73

Countries & Languages

Japan
Cameroon
Indonesia
Mexico
Nepal
Nigeria
Peru
Sudan
Papua N.G

3
280
742
297
125
516
94
134
820

Types of languages
Word formation (morphology)
Simple (i.e., analytic)
Comlplex (i.e., polysynthetic)

Word order (of subject, verb, object)

SOV
SVO
VSO
OSV
OVS
VOS

A
polysynthetic
language

Blackfoot (7,000
speakers)
Mipaxkxinisikpokmipumins.
Montana, USA

Your lice have a very bad, dirty taste.

(a typical insult in Blackfoot)

Kivungoa Bantu language (southern Africa)

A polysynthetic language
Each unit has one grammatical or lexical meaning.
The sentence cannot be broken down to smaller units.

nkmlya

The World Atlas of Language Structures

www.wals.info

Canonical Word OrderSOV, SVO, VSO

Canonical Word OrderVOS, OVS, OSV

Statistical DistributionWord Order

40.7
SO
lang
%
35.5
%

82.7%

__________

OS lang
6.5%
3.1%

__________

2.1%
0.7%

Distribution of SO Languages (82%)

Distribution of OS Languages (3.1%)

Language Families (genetic)

over 200 families!
Altaic
Indoeuropean
Uralic
Afro-Asiatic
Niger-Congo
Sino-Tibetan
Etc

Family Tree
of the
Indo-European
Languages
Genetic
Classification

Major Language Families of the World

The History of Human Migration

As Told by Human Genes

Hidden patterns in the geography of Europe shown

by the first five principal components, explaining
respectively 28%, 22%, 11%, 7%, and 5% of the total
genetic variation for 95 classical polymorphisms (1,
13, 14).
Cavalli-Sforza L L PNAS 1997;94:7719-7724

1997 by The National Academy of Sciences of the USA

Human Populations
&
Language Families

Coherence between a genetic tree

derived from 42 populations with
120 classical polymorphisms (Left)
and what is known of the linguistic
tree (Right), including two recently
reconstructed superfamilies (shown
at the extreme right)
Cavalli-Sforza L L PNAS 1997;94:7719-7724

1997 by The National Academy of Sciences of the USA

THE END!!