Tones related to genes?

davidhallgren
 May 29, 2007, 05:44 PM posted in General Discussion

Here is an article in Scientific American about a possible connection between the existence (or non-existence) of tones in languages and the human genome.

Link

 

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calicartel
 January 16, 2010, 08:48 AM

Very intriguing article indeed!

Note though that in English minimal pairs are differentiated by the opposition between voiced and unvoiced variants of the same consonants (pad vs. pat). Such minimal pairs are every bit (every bid? hey-hey) as difficult for some foreign learners as minimal pairs like hua1 vs. hua4 are to us.

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simonpettersson
 January 16, 2010, 09:18 AM

Very cool. If nothing else, it gives us a great excuse for our abysmal pronounciation. :)

I've always objected to the simplistic classification into "tonal" and "nontonal" languages, though. There's a lot of gray area there, for languages that distinguish some words by tone (such as Swedish and to some extent English) but not all.

Furthermore, both languages and genes are hereditary, after all, and both languages and genes are cropped off into new populations. You're likely to pass down both your language and your genes to your offspring. As such, it wouldn't have to be a huge coincidence for a certain gene pair to coincide with a certain type of language. The article doesn't go into enough detail to judge, though.

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changye
 January 16, 2010, 11:32 AM

Is that good news or bad news for us foreign learners of Mandarin?

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calicartel
 January 16, 2010, 07:30 PM

Languages (like religion) have been known to be hereditary but this article goes a step further and assumes language to have a genetic component. [See the difference between "genetic" and "hereditary".] I agree though that correlation is not causation.

Besides, if 5 Chinese children + 5 African children, all raised in a Chinese environment, learn Chinese to exactly the same extent, this would indicate that there's no inborn handicap in not having the genes in question as far as learning mandarin is concerned. I'm not too worried about not having them myself.