[blam]

GGG Ping.

[reformedliberal]

Interesting, especially when there are so many distinct languages in Papua. Every valley is different, although I no longer recall how many languages there actually are (there are thousands, though). I always wondered, if they could cross the intervening ridges/mountains to wage war, then why wouldn't there be some linguistic correlation? They surely captured some of the opposition, since raiding for women, pigs and pearlshell was right up there w/payback as a casus belli.

I usually find your posts, but go ahead and add me to the ping list, please.

[Betis70]

Tower of Babel bookmark.

[sionnsar]

ping

[cloud8]

> Because vocabularies change so quickly, using them to trace how languages evolve over time can only reach back about 8,000 to 10,000 years. To study tongues from the Pleistocene, the period between 1.8 million and 10,000 years ago...

OK...there is a methodology for comparing living languages and the written record of dead languages to describe how an ancestral proto language may have worked within its family of related languages.

We can't go back much further than 5000 BC. There are no inscriptions, no surviving linguistic artifacts, no records other than cave paintings, nothing, nada, zilch from before that. There is no evidence to reconstruct a language from "the Pleistocene, the period between 1.8 million and 10,000 years ago."

[Amish with an attitude]

Uh, I'll take "Carbon dating that phoneme" for a thousand, Alex.

[FairOpinion]

GGG PING.


(I am pinging for SunkenCiv for a couple of days)

[LiteKeeper]

YEC INTREP

[Junior]

A "practical use for evolution" ping.

I'd also like to comment on the contempt with which I hold the reading comprehension of the average poster to these threads. So far, at least two posters have managed to completely misread this relatively "dumbed-down for popular consumption" article.

[Ciexyz]

btt

[SunkenCiv]

This @#$%^*! article is related to the topic.

Almost Before We Spoke, We Swore
by Natalie Angier
September 20, 2005

"The Jacobean dramatist Ben Jonson peppered his plays with fackings and "peremptorie Asses," and Shakespeare could hardly quill a stanza without inserting profanities of the day like "zounds" or "sblood" - offensive contractions of "God's wounds" and "God's blood" - or some wondrous sexual pun.

The title "Much Ado About Nothing," Dr. McWhorter said, is a word play on "Much Ado About an O Thing," the O thing being a reference to female genitalia.

Even the quintessential Good Book abounds in naughty passages like the men in II Kings 18:27 who, as the comparatively tame King James translation puts it, "eat their own dung, and drink their own piss."

[SunkenCiv]

similar story at the Slimes:

Linking of Languages May Speak Volumes
By NICHOLAS WADE
Published: September 27, 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/27/science/27lang.html

[SunkenCiv]

[SunkenCiv]

From Squeak to Syntax:
Language's Incremental Evolution
by Gary Marcus
April 11, 2006

Rather than emerging from scratch in the course of human evolution, FOXP2 has been evolving for several hundred million years -- in a way that placed it perfectly for evolving a critical role in language acquisition... FOXP2's lineage stems from a family of "forkhead" genes (named for a piece of the protein they produce). Forkhead genes have long been in the trade of managing the actions of other genes. (In the parlance of biology, they are "regulatory" genes.) In the forkhead lineage, many related genes emerged, each with a different function. FOXP2 evolved from a particular set of descendant genes that early in the history of vertebrates began to specialize for controlling muscles. Participation in motor control in turn placed FOXP2 in a prime position for evolving a role in vocal learning, as it did both in songbirds and in humans. FOXP2 is thus not a gene that was invented purely for the purpose of language... When tiny genetic differences are important -- when they correlate with survival -- they spread rapidly through the population, and that is exactly what has happened in the case of human FOXP2.

Forkhead genes have long been in the trade of managing the actions of other genes. And how does anyone know this? Because it has to be true, that's how! ;')

[SunkenCiv]

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