Going On About Language

Speech and sun: New research on climate and how we speak

Aug 2023, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2023-08-speech-sun-climate.html

They evaluated  humidity, altitude, temperature, precipitation and density of vegetation across 1,000 globally distributed languages, documented over 300 years. How were these environmental conditions affecting speech over time?

"The representation of a diversity of languages were scattered geographically over the widest possible range of global environments," Benedict said. "Ian went to great lengths to specifically build the linguistic data set to provide that geographic diversity. We tried to be intentional about making sure that we had languages in all environmental areas that are implicated in the potential development of these linguistic features."

• greater reliance on vowels in areas with high temperature and humidity,
• more use of ejective consonants within higher altitude areas,
• more complex tone systems in humid areas,
• fewer complex consonants used in areas with more precipitation and a higher temperature.

"If we think about time scales of a century or more of habitual mask use in areas where diseases are common, or you know, air quality is such that it's a standard practice, I would expect to see changes in the way that we communicate with each other," Benedict said.

"There's some research on bird song which shows that with birds that live in both urban and rural settings, the birds that live in urban areas tend to pitch their songs a little higher to get above the background noise of cars and things like that," Maddieson said. "We know that some species do adapt to these relatively recent changes because the lifespan of a bird is much less than human lifeform."

via University of New Mexico's Department of Linguistics and College of University Libraries and Learning Sciences: Ian Maddieson et al, Demonstrating environmental impacts on the sound structure of languages: challenges and solutions, Frontiers in Psychology (2023). DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1200463

https://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1200463

Image credit: AI Art - Von Neumann-Morgenstern Rationality Axiom Geometrical Shapes - 2023

Speech study finds classic Georgia accent fading fast

Sep 2023, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2023-09-speech-classic-georgia-accent-fast.html

The analysis was carried out with recordings of white individuals native to Georgia, born from the late 19th century to the early 2000s. The researchers focused on the way the recorded speakers pronounced vowels. The team found that older Georgians pronounced the word "prize" as prahz and "face" as fuh-eece, but the youngest speakers use prah-eez and fayce. These are distinctive features of the traditional Southern drawl. (These are called dpithong by the way, when a one-syllable word seems to have two syllables.)

"Using transcribed audio, we can use a computer to estimate where you put your tongue in your mouth when you pronounce each vowel, which gives us a quantitative metric of accent.")

via University of Georgia and Georgia Tech: Margaret E. L. Renwick et al, Boomer Peak or Gen X Cliff? From SVS to LBMS in Georgia English, Language Variation and Change (2023). DOI: 10.1017/S095439452300011X

https://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S095439452300011X

AI Art - Cosmic Rainbow - 2023

Social vs. language role: Researchers question function of two brain areas

Sep 2023, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-09-social-language-role-function-brain.html

Ouch, just got way more complicated:

"A research team led by Prof. Lin Nan from the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences found that during sentence processing, the neural activity of two canonical language areas—the left ventral temporoparietal junction (vTPJ) and the lateral anterior temporal lobe (lATL)—is associated with social-semantic working memory rather than language processing per se."

These regions were sensitive to sentences only if the sentences conveyed social meaning. 

These findings are likely to force a major reconsideration of the functional organization of the cortical language network

via Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences: Zhang, G. et al, A social-semantic working-memory account for two canonical language areas, Nature Human Behaviour (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-023-01704-8.

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01704-8

Post Script: For smell-related language, it gets even more complicated because social smells are already confusing but now there's two kinds of language also, "regular" and "social".

Why all languages have words for 'this' and 'that'

Oct 2023, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2023-10-languages-words.html

First, things you didn't know you needed to know: Languages around the world have words for "this" and "that" 

But better, "this" means within reach and "that" means outside of reach.

via University of East Anglia: Spatial Communication Systems Across Languages Reflect Universal Action Constraints, Nature Human Behaviour (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-023-01697-4

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01697-4

The Universal Flavor Network Emerges

Flavor pyramids for North American and East Asian cuisines, credit - Barabasi Labs, 2011

Global diets are converging, with benefits and problems
Jan 2020, phys.org

They found what sounds like a two-way shift between Asian and Western countries, where Asia is eating more animals and the West eating less.

This idea of the global diet reminds me of the Flavor Networks of 2011, where they took all the molecules in all the ingredients of all the recipes ever (56,498), and linked them together. You can see one of their network graphs above, and the rest in the paper.

The graph shown above is the part related to this global diet shift. You can see that Western recipes are populated by animals, bread and butter, and Eastern cuisine is likely to have more vegetables.

There is another way to look at this which includes the homogeneity of the ingredients. Western recipes rely on similar ingredients. Cows and their butter are related. Wheat, which is a grass, is eaten by cows, so it's in their meat and their butter. If these are the staple foods, and staple flavors of the West, then  it would make sense that those recipes are more closely related, like family.

For the East, there is less focus on animals and more on vegetables. Flavorwise, it's a more adversarial arrangement. Think onions and garlic and sesame oil and of course soy sauce. Note that soy sauce actually gets its strong animal-like flavor not from an animal but from the complex of fermented by-products that develop as a result of the browning reactions that occur after purposefully-inoculated molds and bacteria have digested and transformed the soy-energy for a long time.

The vegetables aren't eating each other and becoming part of each other's bodies like cows and grass. They aren't related in that way, so their flavors are different, and they have to stand out from each other.

And one step further, consider Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel idea. In it he points out that Asia has less medium-sized domesticable animals as compared to Western Europe. This matches the respective diets we're talking about. He also points out that the West had wheat and the East had rice as the staple grain. Finally, he reminds us that the East is predominantly north-south in its axis and the West (both Europe and America) are more on an east-west axis.

Who cares? Plants care. Plants in the north need a very different algorithm than plants in the south, because of the change in day length. Those plants will be different, and any culture that lives on a north-south axis, eating lots of different plants, will produce a diet like the one described above.

The side-to-side shape of the West allows all the plants to be on the same daylight schedule, and thus similar algorithms overall, similar plants, similar flavors.

It might be interesting to compare some data from global trade over the past 50 years to see how it matches with these diet changes (because we've pretty much obliterated any east-west or north-south biases of a culture).

Post Script:
Soylent Green is people mixed with soy and lentils and fed back to people.

Russian space lettuce was grown on the International Space Station for astronauts.

Notes:
Multidimensional characterization of global food supply from 1961 to 2013.
James Bentham, Gitanjali M Singh, Goodarz Danaei, Rosemary Green, John K Lin, Gretchen A Stevens, Farshad Farzadfar, James E Bennett, Mariachiara Di Cesare, Alan D Dangour & Majid Ezzati. Nature Food volume 1, pages 70–75 (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s43016-019-0012-2.

Flavor network and the principles of food pairing.
Yong-Yeol Ahn, Sebastian E. Ahnert, James P. Bagrow & Albert-Laszlo Barabasi. Scientific Reports, published 15 December 2011. DOI: 10.1038/srep00196

FurFuryl Mercapton, Abstract Foods, and Flavor Networks
Network Address, 2012