From: Andrew Howey
Message: 20005
Date: 2003-03-18
Hello, Glen:
I said "if" because there are so many opinions on the origin of language -- when did it originate? where did it originate? Is the origin of language tied to the "Out of Africa" theory? Were there multiple languages before the "Out of Africa" event and only the language that the (probably) small "Out of Africa" group spoke survive? Or, would "Out of Africa" only apply to non-African language families (Hamito-Semitic being considered non-African for the sake of simplicity)? Or, is there another explanation for the origin of language? These are basically rhetorical questions, by the way. You can answer them if you want, but I phrased them thus in order to try to show why it's hard to know what to believe.
AndyHowey
Glen Gordon <glengordon01@...> wrote:
Gerry:
>If there was such a language/family as Proto-World, [...]
I don't think one needs to question whether there was a "proto-
World" or not since surely all languages derive from some common
ancestor, no matter how old. It's outright inconceivable for a
vocal language to appear out of nowhere so a monogenesis
is pretty much a done-deal, afaic. Proto-World could be compared
in concept to the mitochondrial Eve. We don't question that there
was such a person, because quite obviously there must have been.
All humans are related afterall and, like vocal languages, people
can't pop up out of thin air.
That is seperate from whether Proto-World reconstructions have
any merit thus far in the linguistic world -- They don't.
- gLeN
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