Phonemes Part - 2

Phonemes are the distinct sounds used in languages and the number of sounds varies hugely from language to language and the number of distinct sounds in a language tends to increase the closer it is to sub-Saharan Africa. A brief sampling of Dr. Atkinson’s study of phonemes is presented here to show how he arrived at his conclusions. These are the phoneme counts of just 24 sample languages from various parts of the world.

Piraha: 11 (Brazil)        

Hawaiian: 13       

 Roro: 14 (Papua new Guinea)

Bandjalang: 16 (Australia)        

Japanese: 20

Bodo: 21 (Tibet)

Warao: 21 (Venezuela)

Inuit: 22 (Greenland)

Tagalog: 23 (Philippines)

Farsi: 30 (Iran)

Korean: 32

Mandarin: 32 (China)

French: 37

Russian: 38

German: 41

Bengali: 43

English: 46

Kurdish: 47 (Iraq)

Igbo: 59 (Nigeria)

Dahalo: 59 (Kenya)

Hadza: 62 (Tanzania)

Irish: 69

Archi: 91 (Dagestan, Russia)

Xu: 141 (South Africa)

Professor Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at Reading University, said the same effect could be seen in DNA.

Professor Pagel noted that modern-day Africans have a much greater genetic diversity than white Europeans who are descended from a relatively small splinter group that left 70,000 years ago. 'The further you get away from Africa, the fewer sounds you get.'

'People have suspected for a long time that language arose with the origin of our species in Africa and this is consistent with that view.' Professor Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist at Oxford University, said the origin of language could now be pushed back to between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago. 'The study also shows that ancestral language came from somewhere in Africa.'

This is important to note in colonization in that a single progenitor language has transformed into numerous languages, each with subsets, with subsets of those languages becoming new languages. In our colonization efforts in space the linguistic history presented above would indicate that the progenitor languages of Earth will also undergo changes within the interplanetary / lunar colonies.

NEXT