From: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen
Message: 22440
Date: 2003-05-31
On Sat, 31 May 2003, fortuna11111 wrote:
[...]
> It is only possible to assume that at the early stages
> of human development language had not reached its level of complexity
> as of today. Yet this is almost impossible to prove, especially with
> the tools of comparative linguistics.
I hate to disagree with you, Eva, but I do think the tools of comparative
linguistics prove the opposite for the time spans we can bridge (which may
in fact not be what you are talking about, in which case there is no
disagreement). We are not dealing with some primitive pre-human with an
articulatory apparatus still in the making. It is not my impression tha
protolanguages are in any recurrent way different from languages actually
spoken today. Due to limitations of our knowledge, however, they may
appear both poorer (if we fail to reconstruct a fine opposition which has
been buried in "noise") and richer (if we make wrong combinations and want
to accomodate them all), but that is another matter. For all intents and
purposes I see simply the same factors operate in history and in recent
times. If we do not observe a change *dw- > erk- as in Armenian elsewhere,
it is simply because we do not sit down and wait 4000 years for it to grow
that strange.
Jens