Re: IE, AA, Nostratic and Ringo

Etruscan            Hungarian           Finnish             

 

ais(ar)                isten                   jumala               (god)

apa                    apa                     isä                   (father)

avil                     év                       vuosi                (year)

eca                    ez                       tämä/nämä       (this)

hud                    hat                      kuusi                (six)

Based on this list, it seems like Etruscan and Hungarian are related, but they are not - these words just happen to resemble each other, there are no known connections between these languages. On the other hand, Finnish and Hungarian are known to be related, but the same five words make them look like two languages with nothing in common. (I've borrowed this list from an earlier post by John Croft and added the Finnish words - I hope you'll excuse this, John!)

 

Language complexity:

You seem to believe that language complexity develops according to the law of thermodynamics, from languages with a complex grammar and many inflected forms, downhill to languages like modern English where most inflected forms have been lost. This is not the same thing as the thermodynamic development from order to chaos (modern English is not chaotic, it obeys a lot of rules) - it could rather be seen as a development from one form of order (based on grammatical inflexions) to another form of order (where prepositions, auxiliary verbs etc. do the job that was earlier done by inflected forms). My own guess is that languages must have started simple, then grown in grammatical complexity, then losing many of the inflected forms (but still growing in other ways: modern English probably has a larger vocabulary than Old English). Proto-IE was a complex language, with many verbal and noun inflexions - there must have been older languages, which are lost to us, that were much simpler, all the way back to the state when we were still animals. I imagine the development of language to have been a very gradual process, even if we had access to all the linguistic data from the last 100,000 or one million years, we would probably not be able to draw the line and say: "This is the first human language, before it there was just monkey gibberish."

 

And then the Proto-World guys, like Patrick C. Ryan. In his essay at http://tied.narod.ru he claims he is able to reconstruct a language that was spoken 100,000 years ago "from general linguistic principles".  There's no humbleness or uncertainty in his essay, he knows what this proto-language must have been like. He knows it had a vocabulary of 45 monosyllables (not 46 or 44). He tells us that "the first area of interest for children is the human body; it was a primary focus of interest for the earliest speakers also; consequently, the earliest primary referents of these 45 monosyllables were bodily parts" and that "---it is obvious that phenomena such as "odor", which we would consider inanimate, were considered animate by the speakers of the Proto-Language." The oldest written evidence of any language is dated about 1800 BC - before that we know nothing at all, still, Ryan believes that "some languages (Egyptian, Sumerian) that were recorded very early offer tantalizing hints" of this 100,000 year old language. He could just as well say that modern English offers these "tantalizing hints" - a couple of thousand years more or less mean nothing when we're talking 100,000 years of linguistic changes. How can anyone take these claims serious? Perhaps he is also able to take a look at a chessboard after the game has been finished and from the positions of the remaining pieces reconstruct how the game was played, move by move. The rules of chess are fully known, unlike the rules of language formation, which are to a large extent still unknown or disputed, so I guess this would be a piece of cake for him!

All the best,

 

Hakan