Rousseau_CHN

Again, that smile which people think is universal.

I should caution you, though, that it may mean something else somewhere.

seanie

Another objection you haven't addressed is that human language is universal. An isolated community of humans has never been found lacking complex communication skills.

Your claim that when humans emerged from Africa they didn't possess language therefore means one of two things.

Either we had already evolved the capacity for language but simply didn't use it. It was only subsequent to the Out of Africa migration that people, including those still back in Africa, seperately developed language cultures, which they all just happened to do do to a highly complex degree.

Alternatively they hadn't already evolved the capacity for language. In which case, subsequent to the Out of Africa migration, in a short time from an evolutionary perspective, everyone, including those still in Africa, though geographically and genetically isolated from one another, coincidentally evolved a highly complex language capacity.

Neither sound terribly plausible to me.

happyboy

tower of babel, people, tower of babel. quit looking at your satanically-inspired science and realize God got nervous about people storming heaven, and so invented all languages......

happyboy, savior of the creationists

lpetrich

I agree with seanie here. It's a reasonable inference that our species has always had full-scale language. However, that language, sometimes nicknamed "Proto-World", may be unrecoverable.

However, it may be possible to reconstruct intermediates like Nostratic/Eurasiatic, which purportedly includes Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, Eskimo-Aleut, Korean, Japanese, and some others. And which was likely spoken ~10,000 years ago.

Rousseau_CHN

I forgot who said that, but somehow it implies that I have some ulterior motives or something.

Anyway, I started this post, because I believe it is quite reasonable to assume that there is a connection between languages provided we came from the same family.

It is probably the same idea that led the Israelites to create the myth of the Tower of Babel.

Because, as far as I see it, statistics is against you. 25,000 words--of which 5000 are commonly used...and not one remain true to its basic form, if not its purest form. That's not change--that's eradication. It's like a great flood occur or something and wiped out much of the human race. Men then have to start all over again.

A child from Africa would shout 'danger' when faced with a beast.
Should he survived, he would pass it on to his children, and so on and so forth.

Somehow, according to you because of time and changes, he would change the word 'danger' to ,well i don't know, ukeke. But why? Why should he change it to something else when sticking out with the word is most advantageous to him?

Why should he change it, when he needs it to be able to communicate to everyone the presence of harm?

pz

You know, I rather doubt that very many people would shout out "danger!" if they were in trouble. They'd yell "Help!" or "Watch out!" or "Duck!" or "Run!" or "Shit!"

Funny thing is...everyone would understand (well, at least us English speakers). In some ways, this is a lot like how genetic evolution would occur: there is a duplication which leads to redundancy, and then divergence. Different "words" (genes) can assume new primary functions. Some "words" can lose function and fade away.

You might have a case if there were no redundancy in language. There is, so your argument is silly.

seanie

The change in language is gradual.

You claimed that the Old English I posted would be intelligble to an English schoolboy. Well it isn't.

It's only decipherable if you have examples of English going back from modern times to the era of the poem. That way you can track how the language has changed over time, and use that knowledge to decipher the text.

And the change in language isn't intentional. It just happens. And the meaning doesn't change. If I pronounce danger slighlty differently from my father it doesn't matter. We can still understand one another. If my daughter pronounces it slightly differently from me it doesn't interfere with our communication. But over multiple generations those differences accumulate to radically transform the language. The concept of danger will still exist throughout that time but the sound attatched to that concept can change dramatically without impairing communication. This can be seen in written language.

A text written 50 years ago will probably read quite easily. Some words may have fallen out of favour and there may be stylistic flourishes that date it but it will be easy to read.

A book from 200 years ago will present a few more problems. 500 years even more so. And as we've seen a text from 1000 years ago is all but impenetrable on it's own.

It has a parrallel with evolution. Each generation of animal is pretty much like it's parents. But over time the tiny changes accumulate until the animals are radically different from their ancestors.

seanie

He only needs to be able to communicate with his contemporaries. Communication with his ancestors from a thousand years ago isn't really an issue.

Therefore there's no reason to stop language changing hugely over time by a series of gradual steps.

Answerer

Well guys, based on what most of you had said so far. I believed that I had good reasons to believe that Adam and Eve were ape-like humans( or a sub-human race).

seanie

And another thing.

We've already seen just how much written language can change over a comparatively short time. Contrary to what you claim Old English is close to unintelligble to a modern English speaker. Now written language developes and changes. It may contribute to change in the spoken language. But in one way it actually acts as a break on change. Because it introduces a degree of standardisation. It establishes an accepted 'correct' method of spelling etc. wheras spoken English is much less strictured. Written English poorly reflects the huge variety of dialects as it is spoken.

Once you've developed writing there's some value in not straying too far too rapidly from your predecessors language, so that you can still access the information they've recorded. But for most of human history language developed in a purely oral tradition. And in that tradition the only requirement was for the language to remain intelligible to your immediate family and neighbours. People neither knew nor cared how their great-great-great grandparents spoke. It was irrelevant because they were dead and gone. All that mattered was the ability to communicate with immediate kith and kin.

And as long as that was satisfied the language, in the long run, could go through wholesale transformation, until no trace of its origins remained, without the ability to communicate being impaired at all.