YSM Issue 97.1
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CAN WE TRACE THE<br />
EVOLUTION OF SIGN<br />
LANGUAGE?<br />
&<br />
CAN NEMO COUNT?<br />
By Alex Dong & Malia Kuo<br />
Had Nemo’s siblings survived, maybe there would’ve<br />
been a fight for dominance over his anemone. Alas,<br />
we’ll never know.<br />
Nemo and his family are anemonefish, also known as clownfish,<br />
characterized by their unique white bar patterning and territorial<br />
behavior over their host anemones. Notably, the thirty identified<br />
anemonefish species have a different number of bars on their<br />
bodies, ranging from zero to three. In a recent study published<br />
in the Journal of Experimental Biology, Japanese researchers from<br />
the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology examined how<br />
anemonefish could use these bars to differentiate between species<br />
and identify potential intruders. Their question became, can<br />
anemonefish distinguish the number of bars on other individuals?<br />
The researchers presented —a species of<br />
anemonefish displaying three white bars—with four different<br />
fish models (zero, one, two, and three bars). attacked<br />
the three-bar model with a much higher frequency than any of<br />
the other models, suggesting that anemonefish count white bars<br />
to fend off primarily same-species competitors for their host<br />
anemone. These fish weren’t messing around: the alpha fish—<br />
the largest fish in the colony—battled eighty percent of threebarred<br />
fish for up to three seconds, and even stared down one<br />
intruder for eleven seconds.<br />
Coming next from Pixar: Fighting Nemo—Nemo engages in a<br />
scientifically accurate ninety-minute standoff against another<br />
three-barred clownfish. ■<br />
By Kelly Chen<br />
The use of hand gestures for communication has a long<br />
history, dating as far back as 5 B.C.E. in ancient Greece.<br />
Despite having existed for a long time, gestural signals,<br />
which would eventually become sign languages (SLs), have<br />
historically been less well documented than oral languages due<br />
to challenges with recording visual gestures and the lack of<br />
widely used written systems for SL.<br />
To address this, researchers created a computer program to trace<br />
the history of nineteen contemporary SLs. Signs corresponding to<br />
the same set of core vocabulary words were taken from each of<br />
these languages as the input data. Phonetic parameters and patterns<br />
of the signs such as handedness (one- or two-handed signs),<br />
handshape, location of the sign, and movement were encoded as<br />
metadata to be used for comparison between the languages.<br />
Using this program, the researchers separated SLs into two<br />
independent language families by region: European and Asian.<br />
A lack of historical reports corroborated the hypothesis that<br />
these two SL families had little to no influence on each other in<br />
the past. Some SLs within the European SL family were grouped<br />
into subfamilies consistent with geopolitical history, namely<br />
the central European subfamily and the Eastern European<br />
subfamily with ties to the history of the Russian Empire and the<br />
Soviet Union. The Asian SL family consisted of two subfamilies:<br />
Japanese/Taiwan and Chinese/Hong Kong SL. As seen above, the<br />
use of computational phylogenetic methods only foreshadows<br />
the discovery of more connections across the linguistic history<br />
of sign language. ■<br />
4 Yale Scientific Magazine March 2024 www.yalescientific.org