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Origin of every human language | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5321 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes  Speaks: German*, English | Message 25 of 77 16 April 2011 at 4:44pm | IP Logged | |||||
And how is what you're doing in this forum different from the scholars that you so despise? Edited by Doitsujin on 16 April 2011 at 4:45pm 7 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5382 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 26 of 77 16 April 2011 at 4:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
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We have written records of Sumerian and Akkadian from before AND after the date of 2300
BC you mention, and there doesn't seem to be any sudden change observed in these languages. If a sudden split occurred, it didn’t affect those two languages. During the 3rd millennium BC, there were various dialects of Sumerian spoken. We also know that dialect continuum -- the very process by which languages arise -- existed in Sumerian before AND after 2300 BC, it existed in Akkadian at least around that date and clearly after, and it existed in other languages such as Greek at least shortly after that date. There was also widespread bilingualism among Sumerian and Akkadian speakers around that time. The idea that all languages were made incomprehensible suddenly and purposely is difficult to justify (setting aside the supernatural cause you posit) when we know that dialect continuum existed without interruption before and after the time you mention and that bilingualism was widespread. On a local scale, at the very least, if such an event occurred, it failed. 11 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| JW Hexaglot Senior Member United States youtube.com/user/egw Joined 6123 days ago 1802 posts - 2011 votes 22 sounds Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Ancient Greek, French, Biblical Hebrew Studies: Luxembourgish, Dutch, Greek, Italian | Message 27 of 77 16 April 2011 at 5:19pm | IP Logged | |||||
I never said I despised all scholars or that there was anything wrong with scholarship per se. My issue is that, in debate, many people, who are not familiar with the primary sources, will cite a secondary source from a "scholar" and then assume that this settles the question. I think a good example is the Almah versus Bethulah discussion we had here: http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=22613&PN=0&TPN=1 You quoted that article where a scholar blithely stated that the Septuagint translation of Isaiah 7:14 was incorrect. However, when we actually went back to the primary source data and examined the actual Hebrew and Greek words, it certainly presented a different story. This is what should be done with secondary sources--take the "scholar's" analysis and then grapple with the primary source data to see if it should be accepted or rejected. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5321 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 28 of 77 16 April 2011 at 5:58pm | IP Logged | |||||
This only works if the primary source is based on science. You cannot use religious texts to explain science, but you can definitely use science to explain religion. I do respect your belief in biblical inerrancy, but you should also respect the interests of the other HTLAL members who visit this forum mainly to read about language related topics. 9 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Juаn Senior Member Colombia Joined 5346 days ago 727 posts - 1830 votes Speaks: Spanish* | Message 29 of 77 16 April 2011 at 6:31pm | IP Logged | |||||
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For anyone interested in ancient history, here is a standard collection of original sources.
Regarding the origin of languages, the thesis that all languages stem from a single source would raise very interesting questions. So far apparent grammatical differences between languages have been stressed by linguists and language learners, but aren't we missing the essential equivalence between them? 私の家 and mi casa pretty much express the same idea, even if by different means. Perhaps language and logic are indeed intrinsically connected, and two languages originating independently of each other wouldn't posses the same underlying logic. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5767 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 30 of 77 16 April 2011 at 7:12pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Back to the original topic, as I'm not in the mood for Grundsatzdisskussionen.
The shape and tempo of language evolution I haven't read that piece yet, just wanted to share it and put down that the articles I've read so far made me think of the tree model and of the belief of the first linguists that language develops from complex and expressive to simple and crude. (I don't know how this cognitive bias is called, I myself would call it Out-of-Eden-Bias :P) 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Mooby Senior Member Scotland Joined 6106 days ago 707 posts - 1220 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Polish | Message 31 of 77 16 April 2011 at 7:14pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Researchers from the Max Planck Institute have recently found that the evolution of
languages appears to depend on local cultural factors, rather than a universal biological factor that governs all languages in the same way. See here for more details: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13049700 Edited by Mooby on 16 April 2011 at 7:15pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Merv Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5274 days ago 414 posts - 749 votes Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 32 of 77 16 April 2011 at 8:36pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Well, for all those who are attacking the religious Tower of Babel hypothesis and think that secular science will
provide a better answer for the diversity of languages, I have some points to make: 1.) Constructed languages. Why are they all hybrids or mappings of existing languages? Their vocabularies are typically either a combinatoric mapping from a natural language, words borrowed from natural languages, or more rarely completely fabricated by one original founder. As for the grammars, they are likewise hybrid grammars or outright borrow wholesale features from natural language families. 2.) Nobody can deny the existence of language families. And yes, initially, Armenian sounds very different from Dutch, which sounds very different from Bengali, and Polish, and Italian. But even if the phonetics are different, the grammar is essentially the same. The concepts are the same. There is animacy and number and gender and tense and case and aspect and mood and pronouns and particles to help us along our way, but the logic is the same. And even there, there are some strong questions as to how the various branches of Indo-European arose, which despite analogous grammars and a small shared set of core vocabulary, often demonstrate widely different phonologies and the broader vocabulary is often totally different. Most bizarrely, perhaps, their evolution seems to be more like objects centrifugally spinning off of a wheel rather than a tree of diverging languages, since the cognates shared between Sanskrit and Latin may not be shared with Germanic, and likewise the Germanic-Latin cognates may not be shared with Sanskrit, and likewise the Sanskrit- Germanic cognates may not be shared with Latin, etc. The attempt to bunch together subfamilies has given us very weak links: Balto-Slavic, Greco-Aryan and the very dubious Italo-Celtic, but even these are quite controversial. 3.) To extrapolate the fact that languages within families indicate evolution from a common ancestor to all languages having arisen from a common ancestor is sheer nonsense. As has been noted many times before, the ancestral features that might link Sino-Tibetan to Afro-Asiatic to Indo-European to Uralic to Algic to Eskimo-Aleut are practically nonexistent. You may not like it (if you dislike the Tower of Babel hypothesis), but in all likelihood these families arose completely independently of one another. Yes, there may be common features linking different families as a result of areal contact, but by and large genetically they are distinct. That's a problem for the secularists, for it would mean that entire families of languages would have to arise independently over and over again in various locations. 4.) Given the fact that very brilliant individuals like Tolkien and Zamenhof, who were well read and literate and spoke many languages and were even linguists by training, were incapable of creating de novo new language families with completely distinct phonological, lexical, and most importantly completely new and distinct grammatical features - what makes you think that a bunch of primitive illiterates supposedly living in caves or forests would be able to come up with an entire language family on their own? It is language itself that enables us to think, to articulate, to organize ideas, to invent. How would people without a language have the intellectual capacity to invent one? Why would people with a present language decide to invent a completely different one? And we don't see any relationship between objective complexity of language and the civilization achievement of the cultures that communicate in it; some of the most complex languages, e.g. Navajo, were spoken by what were essentially Stone Age societies. That indicates to me that there is something else going on in language generation and evolution than merely human intellect. Edited by Merv on 16 April 2011 at 8:53pm 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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