afme@... writes:
>And even if it is 60,000 [I'm not that fussy about dates] what took place
between 300,000 & 60,000
-- we don't know. We probably never will. Entropy has swallowed the
information.
>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.
-- there weren't any scribes in 6000 BCE. Writing hadn't been invented yet.
Sumerian cuneiform was developed after 3500 BCE and Egyptian hieroglyphs
somewhat later.
The demotic Egyptian script later still.
>in the conversion from Harappan script - stone age glyphs, I believe
-- Bronze Age, actually; 3rd-2nd millenium BCE.
The Harappan script vanished with the civilization and when literacy returned
to India, it was using scripts derived from further west; ultimately from the
Semitic alphabets.
>whereas Western conventions date that as around 1500 BC, as the emergence of
the Vedas in written form.
-- no, the Vedas were not written down until much later and in a script
ultimately derived from Aramaic. They were probably _composed_ some time in
the 1000's BCE. Transmission was oral.
>Hmm, and by what means did such a vocab grow?
-- people invent words as needed.
>Which languages?
-- all languages are of roughly equivalent semantic efficiency. Vocabulary
aside, there's nothing that can be said in one that can't be said in another.
>Thus one has to read the entire textus and decide from context which is
meant.
-- you're confusing the script and the language. The first writing systems
were less efficient than alphabetic scripts; but that does not apply to the
languages themselves.