CORRECTIONS:
1) There is some disagreement about whether Dutch/Flemish speakers can understand Afrikaans, according to comments in the forum. Some say they can understand, some say they can understand only some of it, some tell me they can’t understand or can just get the gist. It doesn’t change the premise that Afrikaans has split from Dutch and the two languages — if not mutually unintelligable — are certainly close to being mutually unintelligble. If you prefer another example, English split from Frisian over 1,000 years ago and the two languages are, to all intents and purposes, mutually unintelligable, even though English speakers can understand Frisian words here and there.
2) There is a controversy about whether phonemes are evidence of anything and whether language originated in Africa. See my notes and sources below.
SOURCES:
If you read Chinese, there are a couple of good sites that look at character etymology:
http://www.zdic.net/z/22/js/8345.htm
http://xh.5156edu.com/hzyb/a4785b47581c97319d.html
In English, here are a couple of good sites:
http://www.yellowbridge.com/chinese/character-etymology.php?zi=%E5%90%88
http://www.chineseetymology.org/CharacterEtymology.aspx?characterInput=%E9%80%A0
The Institute of Creation Research has a bullshit article about how Chinese characters tell Bible stories:
http://www.icr.org/article/genesis-chinese-pictographs/
And some of the videos I showed can be found at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7YjZMahFuk
My claim that two papers “confirm” a theory that language came from Africa got a bit of a roasting, and deservedly so. It would be more accurate to say they “support” the theory. My reason for saying this is not just one of the papers that I mentioned in the video:
“Phonemic Diversity Supports a Serial Founder Effect Model of Language Expansion from Africa” – Quentin Atkinson, Science, April 2011.
There is also fossil evidence that humans and neanderthals had a hyoid bone located in a position consistent with speech, which suggests they share a common ancestor who could speak — and the common ancestor of humans and neanderthals lived in Africa.I don’t know of any study — I may be wrong — that suggests language originated prior to 60,000 years ago, when the human diaspora began. Unfortunately since this was not the main topic of the video I didn’t research this too deeply or mention a lot of the supporting evidence or the controversy among linguists.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2012/03/28/votes-and-vowels-a-changing-accent-shows-how-language-parallels-politics/#.UMae6ndLNt4
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