| 1. |
- Arshamian, Artin, et al.
(author)
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The perception of odor pleasantness is shared across cultures
- 2022
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In: Current Biology. - : Elsevier BV. - 0960-9822 .- 1879-0445. ; 32:9, s. 2061-2066, e1-e3
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Humans share sensory systems with a common anatomical blueprint, but individual sensory experience nevertheless varies. In olfaction, it is not known to what degree sensory perception, particularly the perception of odor pleasantness, is founded on universal principles dictated by culture or merely a matter of personal taste. To address this, we asked 225 individuals from 9 diverse nonwestern cultures—hunter-gatherer to urban dwelling—to rank the monomolecular odorants from most to least pleasant. Contrary to expectations, culture explained only 6% of the variance in pleasantness rankings, whereas individual variability or personal taste explained 54%. Importantly, there was substantial global consistency, with molecular identity explaining 41% of the variance in odor pleasantness rankings. Critically, these universal rankings were predicted by the physicochemical properties of out-of-sample molecules and out-of-sample pleasantness ratings given by a tenth group of western urban participants. Taken together, this shows human olfactory perception is strongly constrained by universal principles.
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| 2. |
- Burenhult, Niclas, et al.
(author)
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Language history and culture groups among Austroasiatic-speaking foragers of the Malay Peninsula
- 2011
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In: Dynamics of human diversity: the case of Mainland Southeast Asia. ; , s. 257-275
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Book chapter (peer-reviewed)abstract
- The Malay Peninsula is a crossroads for people, languages and cultural influences, apparent in today's vibrant mix of Malay, Chinese, Indian, Thai and European. Yet this modern state of affairs all but conceals signals of much older situations of diversity. Thus, some 140,000 people grouped together under the label Orang Asli (Malay for 'aboriginal people') represent a range of cultural and biological adaptations and linguistic diversifications with roots far back in prehistory. These 20-plus ethnolinguistic groups represent a unique and vanishing window on the history of human diversity in the region, and they offer intriguing examples relevant to more general issues of the dynamics of human societies. By synthesising the current ethnographic, linguistic and genetic body of knowledge about these groups with our own quantitative analyses of new lexical data from 27 language varieties, we explore the local historical relationships and interaction between languages and cultures. Specifically, we look at the relationship between a particular subsistence mode, namely nomadic foraging, and the Aslian branch of the Austroasiatic language stock. While foraging has been considered in many previous accounts to have a historically close connection to one particular sub branch of Aslian (Northern Aslian), we highlight several mismatches in this correlation and take a step toward disentangling a complex picture of linguistic history and contact.
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| 3. |
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| 4. |
- Burenhult, Niclas, et al.
(author)
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The language of eating and drinking: a window on Orang Asli meaning-making
- 2016
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In: Malaysia’s original people : Past, present and future of the Orang Asli - Past, present and future of the Orang Asli. - 9789971698614 ; , s. 175-199
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Book chapter (other academic/artistic)abstract
- We make in this chapter a first probe into the lexical domain of eating and drinking as it is construed in the Aslian languages, a branch of the Austroasiatic language family spoken by a majority of the Orang Asli of the Malay Peninsula. Fundamental to human experience and representation, the domain of ingestion has received increased linguistic attention in recent years. Setting out from our own primary field data from several Aslian languages, collected over the past 25 years , we examine the form, meaning, and history of eating and drinking vocabulary and show that Aslian harbours unusual lexical strategies for ingestion. We place particular focus on ingestion events as expressed in the class of verbs. Moreover, in this seemingly restricted and mundane domain, we unpack semantic principles of wider significance to Aslian meaning-making, which speak directly to cultural distinctions within the Orang Asli sphere. In particular, we uncover a clear distinction in semantic categorisation strategies between foragers and non-foragers.
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| 5. |
- Dunn, Michael, et al.
(author)
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Aslian linguistic prehistory: a case study in computational phylogenetics
- 2011
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In: Diachronica. - : John Benjamins Publishing Company. - 0176-4225 .- 1569-9714. ; 28:3, s. 291-323
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This paper analyzes newly collected lexical data from 26 languages of the Aslian subgroup of the Austroasiatic language family using computational phylogenetic methods. We show the most likely topology of the Aslian family tree, discuss rooting and external relationships to other Austroasiatic languages, and investigate differences in the rates of diversification of different branches. Evidence is given supporting the classification of Jah Hut as a fourth top level subgroup of the family. The phylogenetic positions of known geographic and linguistic outlier languages are clarified, and the relationships of the little studied Aslian languages of Southern Thailand to the rest of the family are explored.
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| 6. |
- Dunn, Michael, et al.
(author)
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Time and place in the prehistory of the Aslian languages
- 2013
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In: Human Biology. - 1534-6617. ; 85:1-3, s. 383-399
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- The Aslian language family, located in the Malay Peninsula and southern Thai Isthmus, consists of four distinct branches comprising some 18 languages. These languages predate the now dominant Malay and Thai. The speakers of Aslian languages exhibit some of the highest degree of phylogenetic and societal diversity present in Mainland Southeast Asia today, among them a foraging tradition particularly associated with locally ancient, Pleistocene genetic lineages. Little advance has been made in our understanding of the linguistic prehistory of this region or how such complexity arose. In this article we present a Bayesian phylogeographic analysis of a large sample of Aslian languages. An explicit geographic model of diffusion is combined with a cognate birth-word death model of lexical evolution to infer the location of the major events of Aslian cladogenesis. The resultant phylogenetic trees are calibrated against dates in the historical and archaeological record to infer a detailed picture of Aslian language history, addressing a number of outstanding questions, including (1) whether the root ancestor of Aslian was spoken in the Malay Peninsula, or whether the family had already divided before entry, and (2) the dynamics of the movement of Aslian languages across the peninsula, with a particular focus on its spread to the indigenous foragers.
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| 10. |
- Kruspe, Nicole, et al.
(author)
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Mah Meri
- 2009
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In: Journal of the International Phonetic Association. - 0025-1003. ; 39:2, s. 241-248
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)
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