eep.

I read an article last week about a new study on the origins of human language. (The paper is in Science, which is a decent-sized big deal; the article I read is in the Washington Post, here; it's also reported in the NY Times here, apparently, but I don't know what the current situation is w/r/t the Times and paid access and so on.) I read the article and thought "hmmm ...", as you do, I mean, it's interesting but I wasn't really convinced, was I, because it seems so simple, and that can't possibly be right. (In a nutshell, it says that the more speakers a language has, the richer its phonology - which is demonstrably true - and the older a language is, the more speakers it has (aha), so judging by the phonemic inventories of The Languages Of The World, we can tell that human language arose in southern Africa, the end.)

The article has been handed around at work, of course, and so has a reaction to it from Richard Sproat, a biggish phonologist (for whom I happen to have a certain respect on account of he assembled the corpora I looked at for my master's thesis), which begins, "A new paper out in Science magazine by Quentin Atkinson entitled 'Phonemic Diversity Supports a Serial Founder Effect Model of Language Expansion from Africa' goes a long way to show that what counts most in science these days is a good yarn." (Ouch.) Sproat was one of the pre-publication reviewers of the article, and had Some Things to say about it, which Science apparently didn't think as much of as he did. "I will merely place here for public consumption my review of Atkinson's paper for Science. Evidently my arguments were not compelling enough to get in the way of a pretty story."

I mean, on the one hand, people are entitled to disagree. Just because the author and the journal decided not to Stop What They Were Doing solely on account of one reviewer doesn't mean they're wrong. But on the other hand: he doesn't say "no, you're wrong"; he says "you haven't convinced me and here's why", and they didn't seem to mind much.

clicky!

I have just bought my tickets for the Stratford Festival. A shorter trip this year - Merry Wives of Windsor, Richard III, and Twelfth Night. Saving $45 (CAD, which is approximately the same, at the moment), by the way, for being willing - even glad - to sit by the sound board, which is a pricing decision that mystifies me but with which I am certainly not going to argue. (The seats immediately behind and alongside the sound booth are B-priced islands in an A+-priced sea. The sound board is open, and I suppose they've decided that people might find that distracting?, but me personally, I am much less distracted by a nearly-silent professional who is not in any way obstructing my view than I am by somebody's twelve-year-old son fidgeting unhappily or surreptitiously playing with his Gameboy. Put the mildly claustrophobic introvert in a seat where she only has to share one armrest with a complete stranger, and knock twenty-five bucks off the cost for her trouble? SOLD to the mildly claustrophobic introvert in Row K!)

Looks like I'll only have to stay one night in town, as well, which means I almost certainly won't run utterly out of things to amuse myself with. :-D