What makes one language more evolved than another?
I'm going to do several posts - some information that several others apparently 'could not be bothered with' from www.creationscience.com Part 1. Part 1 contains more than 1-2 anomolies with TOE (so don't shoot the messenger). This site is well researched. Anytime you see the lowercase letter (these subscripts do not appear above/below the line due to copy/paste problems) they provide more information to other books and articles.
13. Language
Children as young as seven months can understand and learn grammatical rules.a Furthermore, studies of 36 documented cases of children raised without human contact (feral children) show that language is learned only from other humans; humans do not automatically speak. So the first humans must have been endowed with a language ability. There is no evidence language evolved.b
Nonhumans communicate, but not with language. True language requires both vocabulary and grammar. With great effort, human trainers have taught some chimpanzees and gorillas to recognize a few hundred spoken words, to point to up to 200 symbols, and to make limited hand signs. These impressive feats are sometimes exaggerated by editing the animals’ successes on film. (Some early demonstrations were flawed by the trainer’s hidden promptings.c)
Wild apes have not shown these vocabulary skills, and trained apes do not pass their vocabulary on to others. When a trained animal dies, so does the trainer’s investment. Also, trained apes have essentially no grammatical ability. Only with grammar can a few words express many ideas. No known evidence shows that language exists or evolves in nonhumans, but all known human groups have language.d
Furthermore, only humans have different modes of language: speaking/hearing, writing/reading, signing, touch (as with braille), and tapping (as with Morse code or tap-codes used by prisoners). When one mode is prevented, as with the loss of hearing, others can be used.e
If language evolved, the earliest languages should be the simplest. But language studies show that the more ancient the language (for example: Latin, 200 B.C.; Greek, 800 B.C.; and Vedic Sanskrit, 1500 B.C.), the more complex it is with respect to syntax, case, gender, mood, voice, tense, verb form, and inflection. The best evidence indicates that languages devolve; that is, they become simpler instead of more complex.f Most linguists reject the idea that simple languages evolve into complex languages.g [See Figure 140 on page 263.]
If humans evolved, then so did language. Because all available evidence indicates that language did not evolve, then humans probably did not evolve.
Again from www.creationscience.com...
“It was Charles Darwin who first linked the evolution of languages to biology. In The Descent of Man (1871), he wrote, ‘the formation of different languages and of distinct species, and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process, are curiously parallel.’ But linguists cringe at the idea that evolution might transform simple languages into complex ones. Today it is believed that no language is, in any basic way, ‘prior’ to any other, living or dead. Language alters even as we speak it, but it neither improves nor degenerates.” Philip E. Ross, “Hard Words,” Scientific American, Vol. 264, April 1991, p. 144.