Posted on 04/19/2006 3:57:51 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
Exactly. Of course language evolution was known long before biological evolution.
Nice!
More like 5 or 6!
This is one area where the fundamentalists and radical environmentalists seem to agree. The world would be better off if occasional plagues decimated the population.
Oh?
What we REALLY mean is if all those who oppose die!
We want you dead, your wives, your children to be our slaves, your animals for our food and your land plowed under and salted. We want your feeble names erased from all history and your monuments reduced to dust.
THEN we will be triumphant in our realization of Eden2!
There may be some Chinese folks in prison you could discuss this with.
SHOW ME WHO I CALLED A NAZI!
"There may be some Chinese folks in prison you could discuss this with."
That won't help explain why people in western society think that modern medicine is satanic.
That should obviously have been *some people*.
Andrew seems to believe that only those countries burning fossil fuels as if there was no consequence to doing so should 'heat up'. The term 'Global' climate change doesn't seem to mean anything.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-backroom/1617533/posts?page=1036#1036
Quite a shotgun target, in affirming your agreement by way of a reply to editor-surveyors: the US Government, and it would seem anyone involved in teaching evolution, are the targets of your glib, mindless and flippant slander.
Do you have any conception of how your pathetic 'parallel' between Nazis and teachers must read to the survivors--and there are still millions--who underwent unspeakable nightmares at the hands of Nazis?
Or are you really content to simply spam and bloviate away? Perhaps if you spent as much time thinking about the content of some of your posts as you do with the html formatting, your contributions would be more worthwhile and more welcome.
I though Ross was the palaeontologist on Friends?
There's been more than one????
Well, there was Betsy, and her Japanese cousin, Atta.
Also, there is nothing preventing borrowing words from utterly different languages; the analogous process in biology is much rarer.
Neither is there anything corresponding to natural selection. Language change is all drift and loan words.
A similarity is that the "transitional" languages are what creationists would call "full formed". From Proto Indo European, to Proto Germanic, ... to English, at every step along the way there was a totally usable, communicative, language.
It is hard to imagine how to get smoothly from one language type to another, but it happens.
A very interesting difference is that whereas no biologist doubts common descent from one organism, the corresponding linguistic hypothesis ("monogenesis") is controversial and rejected by most linguists. Joseph Greenberg and others have found evidence for it however: for example, the word for "finger" in Proto Sapiens was something like "tik" or "dik" (English digit, toe, index, decimal), the word for "woman's private parts" was something like "puto" (English p*ssy, Spanish "puta"), etc. Words with similar meanings and sounds are found virtually worldwide, in African, Australian, Amerindian, etc etc. languages.
I recall reading, years ago, about a study of words for numbers -- one, two, three, etc. The idea here is that such words should have remained rather stable during transitions from one language to another. And such is the case for Latin-based languages. But (if I recall correctly) it's totally different for distant language groups, e.g., Japanese.
Or onomatopoiea.
Or onomatopoiea.
thanks, I shouldn't try this sort of thing from memory.
Instead the *grammar* may have singular, dual, trial, paucal and plural instead of a simple singular/plural like English.
Here's Glenn Morton showing the distribution of **tik and **akwa ("water" - which I think may be onomatopoetic gurgling)
And here's a version of Ruhlen's list.
I find all this fascinating.
Notice that the second reference I posted mentions the hypothesis that all extant languages had a common ancestor on the order of 50,000 - 100,000 years ago. This fits nicely with the genetic "bottleneck" 70,000 years ago.
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