Posted on 07/23/2007 7:02:45 AM PDT by BGHater
A controversial research project is trying to trace all human language to a common root.
Around 50,000 years ago, something happened to our ancestors in Africa. Anatomically modern humans, who had existed for at least 150,000 years prior, suddenly began behaving differently. Until then, their conduct scarcely differed from that of their hominid cousins, the Neanderthals. Both buried their dead; both used stone tools; and as social apes, both had some form of communication, which some think was gestural.
But then, "almost overnight, everything changes very rapidly," says Merritt Ruhlen, a lecturer in the Anthropological Sciences Department at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif. Humans began making much better stone tools. They started burying their dead with accouterments that suggested religion. And perhaps most telling, Homo sapiens, the "wise" apes, began creating art.
"People started having imagination at this time much more than they had earlier," says Dr. Ruhlen.
Many scientists think that fully modern human language enabled this "great leap forward." Language enabled abstract thought, the deciding factor in archaic humans becoming – well, us. And because scientists surmise that language arose only once, they believe that before leaving Africa to colonize the world, all humankind spoke one language. Linguists have dubbed it "proto-world" or "proto-sapiens."
(Excerpt) Read more at csmonitor.com ...
Maybe of interest.
Feel the need to brush up on your Esperanto? LOL
It’s all just a bunch of Babel to me.
Linguistics ping.
Modern German: Königin
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
Let’s see. We started as one woman, and one man.
Nope, we never all spoke alike. Ever.
Does it bother anyone else that the history types insist on using the present tense when the past tense would be correct?
My high school historty professor pointed this out to us about 50 years ago.
I think the quoted sentence doesn't make any sense.
The theory of evolution doesn’t work any better for human languages than it does for animals. Amongst other things, there’s no reasonable way to explain the non-relation between IE and Semitic languages with “nostratic” type theories. the two groups of people are not racially different in any meaningful way and could not have split up more than a few thousand years back; the languages should be strongly related.
The problem with that is that it uses the common German feminizing ending -in. The root word is König for king.
I wonder of the term “c*nt” has its roots in “kunv”?
Also look at Eskimo-Aleut - *aGina.
The group of Amerindian languages called Algonquin all have something like ‘e-quae’ or ‘es-quae’ or ‘s-quae’ for ‘women’ -— i.e. ‘squaw.
But 16,000 years ago is far too late for a root language, it seems more logical that it would have been more like years ago.
ML/NJ
‘Oldest Sculpture’ Found In Morocco (400K Years Old)
BBC | 5-23-2003 | Paul Rincon
Posted on 05/23/2003 8:52:37 AM EDT by blam
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/916512/posts
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