Subject: [total spam] on languages (was Re: [FFML] Magick)
From: wyrm@mail.utexas.edu (Thomas R Jefferys)
Date: 5/8/1997, 11:34 AM
To: Damon Casale
CC: fanfic@fanfic.com

But my point was, a primitve culture's language is highly complex *and
also* highly regular, nowadays.

No, there are plenty of languages in primitive cultures that are highly
irregular. They're mostly cultures that civilized man has barely touched.

 A more advanced culture's language is
regular but simple, grammatically speaking.  Over time, the languages of
the more advanced cultures tend to simplify faster than the languages of
the more primitive ones.

The reason for this, I think, is quite obvious. The speakers of an advanced
culture's languages have an easy time getting in contact with one another.
They have a very consistant grammar (which is easier to maintain if it's
structurally simple). The less advanced cultures that still have a
considerable amount of communication between populations have more complex
but regular grammars. Primitive cultures that have almost no contact with
other speakers are very highly irregular.

Ie, the complexity to which a language evolves is proportional to the
isolation of the populations that speak it. As communication increases,
languages tend to even out as a more uniform standard is needed. A language
is also tend to be good at what the culture regularly deals with.

 So, right around several thousand years ago,
you start off with approximately 100 languages (since linguists are
guessing that there are about 100 families of languages in existence
nowadays) all highly regular, highly complex, and highly *different*
>from one another.

Actually, there are approximately seven major language families and a
number of orphaned languages in existance. Indo-European is one, and it's
the language family that English belongs to. Proto-Indo-European is the
ancestor of English, French, Greek, German, heck, even Hittite and
Sanskrit. PIE got complex and fragmented into different language before
those languages got simple.

And I still stress that Homo sapiens has been talking since we got our
current larynx design. Remember, the only advantage that our larynx has
over a chimp's is that it enables us to speak (at the cost of choking
easier), and we have two areas of our cerebrum dedicated to language; we're
built and wired to speak. Such features will not evolve before the
development of languages, they're a waste of energy and a danger to health
unless they're used immediately.

Sure, there are seven major families + a number of orphaned languages now,
but that doesn't mean that that's all there was. Today's languages may only
be few thousand years old, but that doesn't mean that there weren't
preexisting langages. Languages can and do become extinct. And thousands of
years ago, we didn't write, so these languages vanished without a trace.

This does not spell "a product of evolution" to me.  But then, that's
just me.  *shrug*

All this shows is that man has started speaking these languages a finite
time ago. This neither means that these languages were the first languages
nor that languages don't spring up spontaneously (they do).

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