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Origin of every human language | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Merv Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5274 days ago 414 posts - 749 votes  Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 49 of 77 16 April 2011 at 10:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
Lots of handwaving, no evidence. 2 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 50 of 77 16 April 2011 at 10:57pm | IP Logged | |||||
Are you implying that this simple, commonsensical explanation is less logical than a supernatural being poofing languages into existence? 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tractor Tetraglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5454 days ago 1349 posts - 2292 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, Catalan Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 51 of 77 16 April 2011 at 10:58pm | IP Logged | |||||
First part: I agree that the desire to create an artificial language that could compete with natural languages could be a big motivation. So could creating a robot as complex as as a human being. The fact that no one has yet succeeded, doesn't prove nor disapprove the existence of God nor the validity of scientific explanations. Two thousand years ago Caesar could encrypt his messages simply by rotating the letters by three in the alphabet (a=d, b=e). During WWII Navajo was sufficient as a cipher. There was no need, and probably no time, to create a complex artificial language when Navajo worked perfectly well. Second part: I accept that we can't explain everything scientifically today, but science is evolving constantly. A lot of things that couldn't be explained scientifically two thousand years ago, five hundred years ago or fifty years ago, has now been understood in a scientific manner. Religion has always filled the gap giving explanations to what is hard to understand by simple observation. From my atheist point of view it seems that religious explanations are gradually, although slowly, being pushed back by scientific explanations. But, in the end, you may be right. Edited by tractor on 16 April 2011 at 11:01pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| HMS Senior Member England Joined 5108 days ago 143 posts - 256 votes Speaks: English* | Message 52 of 77 17 April 2011 at 1:08am | IP Logged | |||||
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If language was bestowed upon us by a supreme being, and not as a result of many different, fragmented and isolated cultures all evolving and developing means of communication - Then did this supreme being give the whales & dolphins their language also? Is there an oceanic equivilent of Babel?! Did this being teach the bees how to "dance"?
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 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 53 of 77 17 April 2011 at 8:28am | IP Logged | |||||
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This could have become a discussion about the origin of languages and the possibilitites of knowing something about a hypothetical common ancestor, but it has turned into a discussion about religion. And that is squarely against the rules of this forum, so with some regret I'll have to close the thread.
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| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 54 of 77 27 April 2011 at 11:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
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For reasons explained in a thread in the Senior member's subforum, this thread is now reopened "on parole" in the hope that the honoured members of this forum somehow can discuss the subject matter without getting stuck in the same old trench war.
But it is difficult to see how you can get a meaningful discussion between people who think that the current language groups were created in a flash some 5000 years ago or so and those who think that the last common ancestor for today's languages must predate at least the end of the Ice age, where the connection between Siberia and Alaska across the Bering Strait was severed. How could an event that may or may not have happened in Mesopotamia some 5000 years ago or so have had any impact on languages in America or Australia? And if those language families appeared suddenly and as fully-grown mature languages, why have they been obstinately evolving since then? At least that part of the history of languages is so welldocumented that it would be difficult* to deny it. You are welcome to claim that all languages except one suddenly appeared at a certain moment within historical times (due to events that took place at one specific location), but then they appeared with all the characteristica that normally would indicate that they already had an immensely long history behind them. And they appeared all over the globe, not only within sight of the Bable tower. (edited to remove some expressions that have been justly criticized) Edited by Iversen on 28 April 2011 at 6:25pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6583 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 55 of 77 28 April 2011 at 11:02am | IP Logged | |||||
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Okay, I haven't butted in on this discussion before, but I'd like to speculate for a bit. Here are a number of thoughts, in no particular order:
1: It seems to me that independent origin of languages and common ancestor are both plausible without needing to invoke religious arguments. Here are some ways we can speculate about this: When was the earliest time we can know with some confidence that there were different languages? How long after the "Out of Africa" movement was this? How likely is a language to develop in a group of humans where none had existed before? How long would this take? How long time did languages have to separate and change before we notice these wildly different languages? Which factors affect the speed of language change? There are lots of questions here that can be illuminated by good research. We might never find out whether there was truly a common ancestral language, but we can get some headway on the question of how probable that is. Is it nearly impossible? Very likely? 2: It seems logical to me that a newly created language, evolved from the simple warning sounds used by so many animals, would be a grammatically very complex one. If we start with a sound that means "There is a predator coming" and another that means "There's food here" and then evolve them a bit, we might get one sound meaning "There is a predator coming from in front" and another meaning "There's a predator coming from behind", both related to the prior "There is a predator coming" sound. More sounds start to adapt to this pattern ("There is food in front of us") and new words, which are naturally going to be nouns and verbs, adapt to the same patterns. And now we have a complex grammatical system of declensions and conjugations. But evolving words like "to" or "the" or "for" from a one-word-means-one-thing proto-language seems more far-fetched. This seems more reasonable to come from simplifying an existing language and adapting it to more abstract reasoning So I find it logical that languages evolve first with complex grammars where one word contains lots of information, and then lose these features as they evolve to cope with new environments. This is all speculative, but I mean to illustrate that I don't find the concept of early languages being grammatically complex to be counter-intuitive. 3: The research that started this discussion seems a bit like a journalist exaggerating a finding. The graph wasn't very impressive at all and I wouldn't assume that the findings aren't just a fluke. If they are not, however (I'm not a scientist), then they're very compelling. All in all, I find the view that languages have evolved independently in several places to be more plausible than that of common origin, with the evidence we have at our disposal at the moment. New evidence may surely change that opinion. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Romanist Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5283 days ago 261 posts - 366 votes Studies: Italian | Message 56 of 77 28 April 2011 at 11:39am | IP Logged | |||||
I hesitate to get involved in this train-wreck of a thread. However I do have a couple of honest (perhaps even naive) questions for Iversen.
You're right - within the (relatively short) period for which any kind of records exist, languages have been been evolving in the sense that they have been getting ever less complex. e.g. Old Norse into Modern Norwegian. Could you therefore explain, Iversen, why languages would evolve from "ground zero" into something fantastically complex, nuanced, inflected, etc - but then go into "reverse gear" and start getting less complex? According to your beliefs, understanding, etc, do you think that this shows that mankind is regressing in some way?
Interesting. Could you quantify this statement? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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