The deep history of the number words.
The deep history of the number words.
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数字词的深厚历史。
DOI：
10.1098/rstb.2016.0517
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发表时间：
2017
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Pagel M
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Pagel M
我们之前已经证明，在整个印欧(IE)语言中，“下限”数字词(从1到5)的词汇更新率非常低。在这里，我们在班图语和南岛语系中复制了这一发现，并使用了IE语言的新数据。数字词可以在1万到10万年内保持稳定，或者说，在Swadesh的基本词汇列表中，数字词的词汇更新率大约是平均更新率的3.5-20倍。有顺序的证据表明，在澳大利亚的帕玛-尼根语系中，数字词的词汇更替速度也很慢。我们提出了三个假说来解释这种缓慢的替换速度：(I)对数字的抽象语言-符号加工与与数字相关的进化保守的大脑区域有关；(Ii)数字词是明确的，因此具有较低的‘突变率’；(Iii)数字词占据了语音空间中相对完整的区域，因此抵抗变化，因为替代词不太可能像原始单词那样‘好’。本文是一个讨论‘数字能力的起源’的讨论的一部分。
We have previously shown that the ‘low limit’ number words (from one to five) have exceptionally slow rates of lexical replacement when measured across the Indo-European (IE) languages. Here, we replicate this finding within the Bantu and Austronesian language families, and with new data for the IE languages. Number words can remain stable for 10 000 to over 100 000 years, or around 3.5–20 times longer than average rates of lexical replacement among the Swadesh list of ‘fundamental vocabulary’ items. Ordinal evidence suggests that number words also have slow rates of lexical replacement in the Pama–Nyungan language family of Australia. We offer three hypotheses to explain these slow rates of replacement: (i) that the abstract linguistic-symbolic processing of ‘number’ links to evolutionarily conserved brain regions associated with numerosity; (ii) that number words are unambiguous and therefore have lower ‘mutation rates’; and (iii) that the number words occupy a region of the phonetic space that is relatively full and therefore resist change because alternatives are unlikely to be as ‘good’ as the original word.This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘The origins of numerical abilities’.