> >afme@... writes:
>
> <evolved human word style language, which took off around 6,000 BCE odd.
=== Thank you, could you give me the reason? And even if it is 60,000 [I'm
not that fussy about dates] what took place between 300,000 & 60,000, plus
or minus a few odd millenia? Wallis Budge, in his "Book of the Dead",
mentions in the preface that by at least 6,000 BC the scribes had no idea
what they copied, hence the adaptation into Demotic. Much the same happened,
if I date by Indian conventions in the matter, in the conversion from
Harappan script - stone age glyphs, I believe - into what one may crudely
label as Sanscrit syllabaric, took place around 9,000 BCE odd, whereas
Western conventions date that as around 1500 BC, as the emergence of the
Vedas in written form.
> -- this is a very odd idea. There's no reason to believe that language
has
> changed in any essential respect since the emergence of behaviorally
modern > human beings, c. 60,000 years ago.
=== I'm full of "odd" ideas, & hope that does not mean I'm crazy or
misinformed and merely somewhat out of line with memes and all that.
Besides dates are a rather vexed issue, especially when one does cross
comparisons in specialities and cultures. Have you any evidence that by
60,000 language is the same as it is now or is that an assumption?
> Contemporary hunter-gatherers, when first contacted, spoke which did not
> differ from ours in any essential respect. Innuit or San do not
communicate
> with gestures and grunts.
=== First, contemporary hunters doings don't prove a thing, next it was not
quite grunts that were used but highly complex onomatopoeic utterances, for
which there is not even an English word, and [3] I doubt you've ever hunted
or watched war movies as signs, signals and grunts is exactly what are used,
or what it looks and sounds like when one is not IN on the coding system.
The above sentence somewhat blithely skates, on the basis of current
observation, over some 300,000 years for about before 80,000 years of which
we hardly have any records. I suggest that one cannot interpret the past in
terms of the present without distortion nor park the past as it evolved into
the present. Read a series of grammar books going from Greek to modern times
and you will find some rather surprising changes.
> >that archaic languages had but around 40,000 words where ours has a
million and therefore were a shade more ambiguous
> -- no, they weren't. We have a larger vocabulary because we deal with a
> larger conceptual terrain.
=== Hmm, and by what means did such a vocab grow? In Rosamonnd Tuve, on
Elizabethan Rhetoric, in a small print footnote she remarks that our
antiquity was every bits as possessed of ideas as we were, although I won't
profess that's a verbatim quote, I read it, OH, in 1963, a while back now.
I'd fancy that it would be more like us making distinctions by means of
distinct words. One example, one of Ben Jonson's plays make a pun on the
"understanding groundlings", as in that theatre they stood below the level
of the stage and this demonstrates by by that time the meaning of stand
under and understand were not so distinguished. I rather doubt folk at that
time could not distinguish the difference, but saw no need to mark it in
writing. I've also attended the odd talk by translators and they have
exactly that problem.
For quite another example, I had a pure body language and gesture
conversation with a group of maoris here in New Zealand, right in front of a
white English speaker and we understood each other and he noticed not we all
agreed he was a fool. Speech tends to be more precise than writing, mainly
if not only because voice inflexions, body language and traditional gestures
amplify and qualify the words, which only goes to show that all words are
ambiguous, read Christine Brooke Rose, rather oldish now, on metaphor in
language. I suggest only jargon aims to be precise and all too often fails.
> These languages were just as precise as ours in terms of their own univers
e > of discourse; ie., the things they actually talked about.
=== Which languages? Hmm, doing the hattrick on Wallis Budge I found the
translation from Egyptian not exactly that precise. I also fancy that word
"precise" somewhat begs the issue. Champollion who transliteratated
Egyptian comments that its words included the universal, symbolic ,
metaphoric, simile of which a subset is the literal & defined. Thus one has
to read the entire textus and decide from context which is meant. So too
for Chinese, even unto pronunciation. Precise, is a latecomer to the scene
as I recall a rather tedious debate about quite what Aristotle, or one of
his pupils meant by that word catharsis, and I bethought, Could one ask
Aristotle and so who decides? Medieval Latin scholars invented footnotes
and text raissonez & variorum, to help the reader to the right meaning.
Doing a course on editing books I learnt that both editions and versions
differ widely, so I wonder where that "precise" comes from? As I gather it
arrives somewhere in Victorian times. The O.E.D p 1564 does not list it,
surprise, and I don't have an SOED handy, of course, so it might be even
more recent.
Besides your sentence there makes a verbal loop or tautology which begs the
point you make between precision of vocab and their own universe of
discourse. A speaker with a minimal vocab of say 300 words would be precise
in terms of their understanding of the world, but I'd have huge problems. I
shan't even discuss the attendant problems among cross cultural models but
Reading Carl Jung on the West, Daisetz Suzuki on the Japanese and Whorff on
Hopi would be a starter. You should read the scholarly quibbles around
translating Sumerian, or, for that matter start with an English text, get it
translated, there's lots around on I-net, into a variety of other languages
and then back to English and see what you get. Old English, for example,
fights with the enemy whereas we now fight against. Since we don't quite
know the nature and structure of other culture models or worldmaps how can
we show it is so?
Adrian