From: fournet.arnaud
Message: 58280
Date: 2008-05-02
----- Original Message -----
From: "david_russell_watson" <liberty@...>
>
>> To me, this raises the question: Is not all language ultimately
>> invented? I think language must have originated in deliberate,
>> premeditated manipulation of speech sounds for the purpose of
>> communication, i.e. was invented, like Damin. I don't think it
>> was just a natural automatic act like blinking or eating.
>My own thinking's the opposite. It's fairly clear that
>we're hardwired for language, evidenced by, among other
>things, the language universals we often discuss here.
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25% of the braincells dealing with muscles are dedicated to the mouth and
throat.
This can't have happened overnight.
If by hardwire, you mean some chomskyan LAD or whatever,
I disagree.
Arnaud
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>This means that, if there truly is an unbroken evolutionary
>chain between modern languages and the first human language
>ever spoken, that chain begins well before the first humans
>appeared, one corollary being that the reconstruction of
>the first link in the chain is even more improbable than
>the rational among us already realized it to be.
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Prejudices pretending to be science.
I don't think it's impossible.
there are at least two possibilities :
- we can reconstruct proto-human with one to one correspondences
the way PIE is reconstructed,
or
- we have to resort to matricial roots,
like dental stop + vowel + velar stop,
not all families having the same voice/glottal status for the stop,
In hyp 1, this tends to prove that Language had already reached its current
level,
from the start onward,
In hyp 2, this tends to prove that language developped while Human beings
were spreading.
These two hypotheses are provable or falsifiable.
but we don't have the knowledge to state which is best.
Arnaud
============
>Human language nowadays, and for some time back, has been
>subject to conscious manipulation, of course, but only to
>a certain, generally very superficial, extent.
===========
This is obviously wrong.
The invention of writing has had considerable impact,
especially in the invention of formal logic,
but even without writing,
don't tell me Homer or Rg Veda are not a conscious work.
French and German are obviously languages that have been consciously made to
be what they are.
Maybe the situation is different with English,
Arnaud
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