Tower of Babel.
Next thing, CNN—ABC—NBC—CBS all will be telling us that Barry’s ancestors werethe start of ‘language’.
They still have not “proven” that man came from the African continent, just pure conjecture. Remember “Lucy”? These so called experts, as one freeper pointed out need more grant money so they come up with the latest whack-a-doo theory and further their career by a few more years. I choose to believe in the Word of God and not some whatever professor in line for some tribute or money.
When the government asks me my race, I say “African American”, because after all, it is only a matter of when my ancestors left Africa.
We are all Egyptians.
More Pan-Africanism here I see.
let's see...if you believe we all came from africa, what is the great astonishment that the root language might be from there??? duh
I’m thinking we’re all native Babelonians.
Which, of course, explains television...
Seems someone was way ahead of these people. I read in a book that has been around for a few thousand years that the whole world at one time spoke one language.
All we can do is for these poor lost souls that initiate and believe this kind of garbage; that they find salvation in the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Simply too many things which no theory of human language evolution could begin to explain. For instance the IndoEuropean (Japhetic) and Semitic groups show no meaningful racial differences and could not plausibly have split up more then four or five thousand years ago; yet the languages are totally unrelated other than for a handful of borrowed words. By way of contrast, Slavic and Germanic languages split up three or four thousand years back and are still strongly related. Words for many if not most basic things (numbers, earth, air water, milk, wine, family members, knives, forks, spoons...) are highly similar. The weirdest thing in Russian to many people's minds is the simple word to go (идти), nonetheless, it turns out that English has entirely related words like iterate or itinerary, so that if you think "I iterate myself to the store" then a Russian saying "Я иду в магазин" doesn't seem that weird.
But no such relationships exist between any IE and any Semitic language.
Worse are the Baltic languages. Lithuanian for instance may contain a dozen or two dozen things you'd recognize as IndoEuropean roots, probably borrowed, but 99.9% of Lithuanian looks like it came straight from Mars. I mean, Lithuanians have blue eyes and yellow hair and have sat right there between the Germanic and Slavic worlds forever and by all rights their language should be halfway between German and Russian. But in real life, English is a whole lot closer to Russian than Lithuanian is and there's no explaining that via any theory of language evolution.
The basic reality is that the old Bible story of the tower of Babel comes closer to matching up with real evidence than any theory of language evolution does. What we actually see is what we'd expect if human communication had been via some entirely different modality until some very recent point, four or five thousand years back and not 50,000 or 500,000; and then, whatever that old system of communication was stopped working on a single day and never worked again afterwards, and the kinds of spoken languages we use now were devised out of dire necessity over a period of a hundred or a couple of hundred years.
Given that thesis, the only thing needed to explain the IndoEuropean/Semitic divide is that the two groups were living on opposite sides of the Caucasus mountains during that critical period of one or two centuries during which modern languages were being developed.
An “evolutionary psychologist”...then it must be true. Did he have on a white lab coat? A white lab coat is always the final authority. And if he had glasses, well then, there’s just no arguing with that.
Except for arabic, which originated with the world's vultures.
How does language “evolve” in the sense of evolution? Language isn’t genetic. There’s nothing for natural selection to work on.
having studied old english a good bit and other ancient languages more cursorily, I am always amazed that the declension system developed apparently thousands and thousands of years ago. Just the thought of the (illiterate) human brain working out a system for essentially conjugating nouns, adjectives, and adverbs based on role vs. the verb or context of a sentence, with 3 genders, 3 quantity-cases( single dual plural), and having it be learnt from birth, just keeps my head spinning.