Maybe of interest.
Linguistics ping.
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.
I wonder of the term “c*nt” has its roots in “kunv”?
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.
‘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
New Family Tree Is Constructed For Indo-EuropeanUsing a new computer program, or algorithm, the scientists at the University of Pennsylvania have sifted through the myriad possibilities and come up with what they believe is the general shape of the tree. According to their picture, the first to split off from Proto-Indo-European was Anatolian, an extinct group of languages, including ancient Hittite, which were once spoken in Turkey... Dr. Melchert cautioned that the data fed into such a model were always open to interpretation and dispute. He, for one, strongly disagrees that the scientists have verified that Anatolian was the first to split away from Proto-Indo-European. This theory, the Indo-Hittite hypothesis, has been debated for years... Dr. Ringe noted that before this study, he believed, contrary to his findings, that the Indo-Hittite hypothesis was wrong. "It might even be fair to say that I was biased against it," he said. "So you can imagine how startled I was when the algorithm kept turning up Anatolian as one first-order branch of the family, and everything else as the other first-order branch -- exactly what the hypothesis says." ...The first surprise was that in all four trees, the Anatolian language group immediately split away from Proto-Indo-European, just as the Indo-Hittite hypothesis has held.
by George Johnson
The New York Times
January 2, 1996
Bull. Tens of thousands of years ago, populations only a few dozen miles apart might have had so little contact with one another that a common language would not have developed.
These “scientists” make stuff up to obtain further “study” grants. Beats having to produce anything useful or meet a payroll, you know!
Sanskrit echoes around the world
Christian Science Monitor | July 5, 2007 | Vijaysree Venkatraman
Posted on 07/06/2007 3:18:56 AM EDT by Lorianne
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1861604/posts
Y'know, other than 400,000 year old artifacts which are routinely dismissed on a priori grounds, i.e., the conclusions fit the original assumptions, just by coincidence. What good is language, anyway? :')Anthropology: No Last Word on Language OriginsUnfortunately, "speech does not fossilize," notes anthropologist John Shea of the State University of New York, Stony Brook. Writing appears 6000 years ago, and there is scant evidence for the existence of notation before 13,000 years ago. How long might language have been around before that? The only evidence is indirect, and it suggests two wildly different answers... "Everybody would accept that by 40,000 years ago, language is everywhere," says Stanford University archaeologist Richard Klein... "At one extreme there are people who think that all hominids are 'little people' and at the other that the really 'human' things about human behavior are really very late," says Alan Walker of Pennsylvania State University in University Park. Judging from anatomy alone, speech of some sort--although not like that of modern humans -- has probably been around for at least a million years, says Philip Lieberman of Brown University... Meanwhile, the other precondition of modern language, a big brain, was also emerging... By at least 200,000 years ago, says anatomist Jeffrey Laitman of Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City, African hominids had cranial bases "identical to [those of] modern humans." ...Even though modern humans were equipped to talk up a storm, there are few definitive signs, for tens of thousands of years, of any of the behaviors anthropologists associate with language: complex tool technology and other signs of conceptualization and planning, trade, ritual, and art.
by Constance Holden
The Origin of Language:
Tracing the Evolution
of the Mother Tongue
by Merritt RuhlenA Guide to the
World's Languages:
Volume I,
Classification
by Merritt RuhlenOn the
Origin of Languages:
Studies in
Linguistic Taxonomy
by Merritt Ruhlen
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Great post. Thanks.
