This article is better:<p><a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704547604576262572791243528.html" rel="nofollow">http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870454760457626...</a><p>Comments from someone who reviewed the paper and was skeptical of the findings are available at:<p><a href="http://www.cslu.ogi.edu/~sproatr/newindex/atkinson.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.cslu.ogi.edu/~sproatr/newindex/atkinson.html</a><p>There are links to some of his other papers on the guy's home page (<a href="http://www.psych.auckland.ac.nz/uoa/quentin-atkinson/" rel="nofollow">http://www.psych.auckland.ac.nz/uoa/quentin-atkinson/</a>), here's two on related topics:<p><a href="http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2010/04/01/rspb.2010.0051.full.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2010/04...</a><p><a href="http://www.isita-org.com/jass/Contents/2010vol88/PDFonline/Jass2010_18_Atkinson.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.isita-org.com/jass/Contents/2010vol88/PDFonline/J...</a><p>Interesting quote from the second paper, which looks at vocabulary changes in languages:<p>"Recent work has also shown that rates of lexical change are predictable based on the frequency of use and part of speech (Pagel et al. 2007) and that some meanings have a lexical ‘half-life’—the time after which there is a 50 per cent chance that the word is replaced—in excess of 20 000 year"
gah!<p>"He analysed the number of phonemes found in 504 world languages, and hypothesized that languages with the most phonemes were the oldest. Also, the dialects furthest away from the 'mother tongue' were found to be less complicated."<p>I'd like to see the original study, since this sounds like simplistic analysis and circular reasoning.<p>long-story short: there's no reason to think that we started out with lots of phonemes and that these have been whittled away over time. Historical change shows lots of instances of new phoneme generation in languages. This 'historical change is simplification' meme is either wrong or contentless.
I had assumed that the first language would only have one sound (say for "danger") and thus only one phoneme. Why would the first language develop the most phonemes, and then lose them as people migrate out of the area?
<a href="http://gameswithwords.fieldofscience.com/2011/04/missing-linking-hypothesis.html" rel="nofollow">http://gameswithwords.fieldofscience.com/2011/04/missing-lin...</a> raises some questions about the reasoning. In short, while it's a very interesting data set and a plausible conclusion, a number of conjectures need to be studied further. AKA the progress of science.
If you're into this sort of stuff, John McWhorter describes this theory and many others in his introductory book to (mostly historical) linguistics, The Power of Babel [<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Power-Babel-Natural-History-Language/dp/006052085X" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Power-Babel-Natural-History-Language/d...</a>].
Ubykh has 84 consonants, a record high amongst languages without click consonants, but only 2 vowels.<p>Ubykh has the largest inventory of consonants outside Southern Africa.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubykh_language" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubykh_language</a>