Tea at Trianon: What’s the World’s Oldest Language?

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, September 19, 2023

What’s the World’s Oldest Language?

From Scientific American:

The globe hums with thousands of languages. But when did humans first lay out a structured system to communicate, one that was distinct to a particular area? Scientists are aware of more than 7,100 languages in use today. Nearly 40 percent of them are considered endangered, meaning they have a declining number of speakers and are at risk of dying out. Some languages are spoken by fewer than 1,000 people, while more than half of the world’s population uses one of just 23 tongues.

These languages and dead ones that are no longer spoken weave together millennia of human interactions. That means the task of determining the world’s oldest language is more than a linguistic curiosity. For instance, in order to decipher clay tablet inscriptions or trace the evolution of living tongues, linguists must grapple with questions that extend beyond language. In doing so, their research reveals some of the secrets of ancient civilizations and even sparks debates that blend science and culture. (Read more.)

900,000 years ago....From Ancient Pages:

As the journal Science explained, scientists "developed a new statistical approach in this new study. To keep computing costs down and reduce errors that come with winding the clock so far back in time, their model only uses a subset of genes—such as those not subjected to forces like positive selection that would change the mutation rate—to estimate population sizes at different points in time.

Using this method, they tabulated when genetic changes had appeared in the previously sequenced genomes of 3154 individuals from 10 modern African populations and 40 modern non-African populations. Population size and history affect the accumulation of these changes, and scientists can analyze them to figure how many people lived at different points in time. Crunching the timelines, Pan and Li found a very steep decline—of roughly 99%—in the breeding population of our ancestors approximately 930,000 years ago.

The number of reproducing couples plummeted from at least 100,000 to 1280, they report. (Total population, including children and the elderly, would have been higher.) The low population numbers persisted until about 813,000 years ago, when the number of people began to rise again, the researchers report. It’s not clear what drove our species to the brink of extinction, but Pan and Li suggest long periods of glaciation, cooling sea surface temperatures, or droughts may have played major parts. (Read more.)