On Thu, 8 May 1997, Thomas R Jefferys wrote:

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.

Can you name one such?  I'm curious.

 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.

Are the Aborigines in Africa, the native Americans, and some of the
native Africans included in these highly primitive cultures?  If so,
their languages are very regular but highly complex, and it wasn't until
recently (historically speaking) that they had any great amount of
contact with other cultures.

 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.

But how different are these language families from one another?  And how
"old" are each of them?  Could they have sprung from one mother tongue,
and how long would it have taken them to differentiate?  And would they
still show all of the irregularities you claim they show, if they *had*
had the time to sufficiently differentiate from one another to make
classification into different language families necessary?

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.

I wonder *why* we didn't have written history until about 5000-6000
years ago.  And then, it just suddenly appeared out of nothing, nearly
fully developed.  Confusing, isn't it?

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).

So what happened to all of the more ancient languages, then?  That is,
if you're claiming they exist.  I'm not exactly sure whether you're
claiming they *did*, or that they *could have*.  Either way, this is
still highly suspect, to me.

Damon Casale, damoo@carmelnet.com
Spam, spam!  WONDERFUL spam!  ^_^