This, as a matter of principle, for our ever silent linguists:
Quentin D. Atkinson, Andrew Meade, Chris Venditti, Simon J. Greenhill, Mark Pagel. 2008. Languages Evolve in Punctuational Bursts. Science 319(5863):588.
Abstract:
Linguists speculate that human languages often evolve in rapid or punctuational bursts, sometimes associated with their emergence from other languages, but this phenomenon has never been demonstrated. We used vocabulary data from three of the world's major language groups—Bantu, Indo-European, and Austronesian—to show that 10 to 33% of the overall vocabulary differences among these languages arose from rapid bursts of change associated with language-splitting events. Our findings identify a general tendency for increased rates of linguistic evolution in fledgling languages, perhaps arising from a linguistic founder effect or a desire to establish a distinct social identity.
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HERE for John Hawks’comments on this short paper.
Personally, I would suggest that anyone interested in the evolution of language should also give some attention to geographically smaller, less historically complex samples. I am thinking, for example, of the development of what has been called a “dialectical chain” that can be revealing of the variable spread of changes that characterized Athapaskan dialects across parts of Alaska, the Yukon, and the Northwest Territories, in the course of the Late prehistoric – Early Contact period/Early Historic period.
Jacques
Hi Jaques -
As with mt DNA haplogroups, language evolution will not be understood until impact events are taken into account. This isn't simply an opinion, as there are those big holes in the ground, some of them fairly recent, left over from when human population groups were split.
In the south, when human population groups were blown or washed off the face of the Earth, neighboring peoples moved in.
Your arctic data may give some information to the linguists on short term rates of change, but until they can track the population groups with some accuracy...
