Hi, everyone! I'm back. Miss me? (boo, hiss, boo) I had midterms. Then I had
my midterm break so I drew out a bubble bath and sank in. The next few weeks
are a blur. Let me say, I'm feeling particularily sudsy today.
> The link to Stetsyuk's map of Nostratic languages didn't work.
> Here is Pat Ryan's article on Germanic and Semitic:
>http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2803/c-AFRASIAN-3_germanic.htm
Since when has Pat Ryan become a respectable authority on long-range
comparison? He's not. At all. I won't mince words about him. Pat (whose
alias may in fact be none other than Dizzy Cohen) is a lunatic. And I
seriously wonder about others who can't immediately see the logical
paradoxes involved in his "theory"... if we can indeed call it a theory
without laughing hysterically?
Let me explain. Pat assumes monogenesis. There is nothing wrong with this
idea because assuming ONE origin to language is simpler and more
Occam-compliant than assuming more than one origin. However, Pat then
quickly goes too far, in the lunatic style that only he can deliver. He
comes to the amazing revelation that the original language must have been
perfectly regular in every way like Esperanto. He doesn't once think that
maybe this "Proto-World" is not alone but rather the only surviving language
amongst many others that may have once existed tens of thousands of years
ago. He doesn't consider that maybe this Proto-World was as natural, as
perfectly IRREGULAR and as developed as modern languages now spoken. He
doesn't once think that sound on its own is abstract by nature, void of any
meaning, thereby providing any rational thinking person with the paradoxical
question: "... But, Pat? Where did your Proto-World come from in the first
place?" Time for a logic pill, folks!
To explain the origin of language (that is, _spoken_ language) we must
accept a slow, gradual evolution over millions of years. Language didn't
come from grunts and ughs, per se, although our ancestors probably happened
to grunt now and then :) Language slowly developed over an immense span of
time, far beyond the timespan of our human species. Even our primate
brethren have capacity for language (even my dog Spot understands language),
however these animals do not have the voicebox to initiate speech like we
can. One thing primates do have is hands, mobile hands, very functional
hands, that can contort and twist with dexterity... perfect for language.
It's been demonstrated that they CAN be used for language. This brings us to
the likeliest way I know of how our most primitive ancestors could "speak".
They would mostly use sign language - a more visual, less abstract language
form whose meaning is more readily understandable by someone else because
the symbolism is quite visual, not oral. Remember: It takes two to speak a
language and if the other one doesn't understand the gibberish you're
saying, you aren't communicating, are you.
Anyways, this early sign language was probably spoken with some vocal
accompaniment for emphasis or expressing emotion. As time went on, focus
could easily change from sign to spoken as our throats became better adapted
to speech and as the "vocal accompaniments" began to take on a meaning all
on their own.
There! Everything solved. No need for an esperantized ProtoWorld. No need
for Pat's website wonderland of insanity.
Now, I heard along the grape vine that geneticists and anthropologists take
it that there was a "bottleneck" in the human population. A point when the
human population took a mondo nosedive. The human species is some 200,000
years old but it would appear that somewhere within this time-frame, we
might have almost went extinct as a species. I was watching an interesting
program on "super-volcanoes" which provided a link between the bottleneck
and the explosion of some super-vulcano in Sumatra around 74,000 BCE which
would have crashed the world temperature by as much as five degrees because
of all the ash. This would also provide an excellent date for the
theoretical proto-world language. There were surely other humans that
existed besides our "Eve" but whose descendants didn't make it to the modern
day. This is exactly the same with language and so there should be no
awesome mystery to solve here.
Anyways, everyone, please forget about Pat. He doesn't even try to make
sense.
- gLeN
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