Question about linguistics

Quoted message said:

Anyhow, if we share a common ancestor, why would the linguistics change so much?

What do you mean by "IF"?

TWINBLUE

[email hidden] (Makoto Taniguchi) wrote in news:botnv9$e3r$1
@darwin.ediacara.org:

Quoted message said:

I was wondering, why is there so much diversity in languages? especially countries that live side
by side.

For example, Japanese, Korean, Inuit and Mongolian has been said to be in the Tungusic language
family. This makes me wonder why Cantonese and Mandrin has little to no similarity to the nearby
Tungusic speaking peoples.

The Chinese, Japanese Korean and Mongolians at one time must have evolved from a common ancestor
lets just call it a "master race" just like [censored] claimed... of course this time we don't know
who it is and no one is claiming that anyone is the master race.

Anyhow, if we share a common ancestor, why would the linguistics change so much?

This story is sort of similar when we're talking about the difference between French and German.
The countries are side by side but obviously the language family is completely different.

I think that the evidence is for an early split between Chinese and the other families mentioned-
the current geographic proximity does not reflect historic development ofthe languages and peoples.
But if you are interested, I suggest you check out the work of Cavalli-Sforza, who has studied this
question extensively. His "Genes, Peoples and Languages" is an excellent introduction.

Yours,

Bill Morse

[email hidden] (TWINBLUE) wrote in message news:<[email hidden]>...

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

Anyhow, if we share a common ancestor, why would the linguistics change so much?

What do you mean by "IF"?

TWINBLUE

IF means maybe or probably.

[email hidden] (Makoto Taniguchi) wrote in news:botnv9$e3r$1
@darwin.ediacara.org:

Quoted message said:

I was wondering, why is there so much diversity in languages? especially countries that live side
by side.

For example, Japanese, Korean, Inuit and Mongolian has been said to be in the Tungusic language
family. This makes me wonder why Cantonese and Mandrin has little to no similarity to the nearby
Tungusic speaking peoples.

The Chinese, Japanese Korean and Mongolians at one time must have evolved from a common ancestor
lets just call it a "master race" just like [censored] claimed... of course this time we don't know
who it is and no one is claiming that anyone is the master race.

Anyhow, if we share a common ancestor, why would the linguistics change so much?

This story is sort of similar when we're talking about the difference between French and German.
The countries are side by side but obviously the language family is completely different.

French and German are not "completely different". They may look and sound superficially different,
but their basic vocabulary and grammar are derived from a relatively recent common ancestor. The
same is true of most other languages in Europe, including English, Russian, Spanish, Greek and
Albanian (but excluding Basque, Hungarian and Finnish), as well as languages in the Near East and
northern India. See iiasnt.leidenuniv.nlielangs.htmlOpen ↗ for information on the Indo-
European languages.

In fact, all languages in the world belong to wider language groups or families, including Sino-
Tibetan (Chinese, Vietnamese), Altaic (Turkish, Mongolian, Uzbek) ...etc. This indicates a shared
cultural and/or genetic history.

Languages evolve far faster than genes so it is difficult to go back much beyond 8,000 years and
still obtain meaningful results. English and Dutch, for example, were mutually intelligible until
1000 years ago. Nevertheless, the data, however tenuous, suggest all languages in the world evolved
from a common ancestor, which supports the genetic evidence.

For a good account of how genes and languages are interrelated see "Genes, Peoples and Languages" by
Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and "Archaeology and Language" by Colin Renfrew.

Try Google searches on "Noam Chomsky", "Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza" and "comparative historical
linguistics".

Quoted message said:

Languages evolve far faster than genes so it is difficult to go back much beyond 8,000 years and
still obtain meaningful results. English and Dutch, for example, were mutually intelligible until
1000 years ago.

Nevertheless,

Quoted message said:

the data, however tenuous, suggest all languages in the world evolved from

a

Quoted message said:

common ancestor, which supports the genetic evidence.

Since all languages in the world evolved from a common ancestor, I would expect it to be the African
language of the people in the Rift Valley where it is said to be the Origin of Mankind.

I find that "Papa" and "Mama" is the term for Father and Mother for all the Languages I know. It is
true for English , Mandarin, Hokkien and Cantonese. In Indonesian it is " "Bapa" for Father and
"Ema" for mother In Tamil India it is " Apa" for Father and " Ama" for mother.

Therefore this is the evidence of the evolution of Language from the Common Ancestor.

The experience I find when bringing up a child is that, the first vocabulary a child will learn will
be Father and Mother and only then come body parts like eyes, mouth, hand and leg etc. So these
vocabulary are deeply embeded into the memory of the infant and will not suffer any distortion for
the rest of her life. Subsequently it will be passed on to her offspring.

But what puzzle me is that in the transmission from generation to generation, the structure of the
sentence can be changed. For example in English " The hungry man eat his food" In Japanese it is "
hungry that man his food eat" In Indonesian it is " man hungry that eat food his " In Mandarin it is
" hungry that man eat his that food"

So the arrangement of Subject, adjective, verb and Object got altered and rearranged.

Khoon.

The Chimpanzee speak in grunts and groan and has good intelligence. I saw on TV a scientist training
up Chimps to communicate using charts and drawings. . And the Chimp understand human speech. For
instance, the scientist say to the Chimp " What do you want to eat today?", she follows by showing
it a chart of pictures showing food, scenery and varities of toys and the chimp point to an apple. "
Where do you want to go ?" and the Chimp point to the playground .

The problem with Chimp is that it does not have a voice box. Is it possible to transplant a voice
box to a Chimp and teach it to speak?

Khoon

Red Dragon said:

Quoted message said:

Languages evolve far faster than genes so it is difficult to go back much beyond 8,000 years and
still obtain meaningful results. English and Dutch, for example, were mutually intelligible until
1000 years ago.

Nevertheless,

Quoted message said:

the data, however tenuous, suggest all languages in the world evolved from

a

Quoted message said:

common ancestor, which supports the genetic evidence.

Since all languages in the world evolved from a common ancestor, I would expect it to be the
African language of the people in the Rift Valley where it is said to be the Origin of Mankind.

I find that "Papa" and "Mama" is the term for Father and Mother for all the Languages I know. It
is true for English , Mandarin, Hokkien and Cantonese. In Indonesian it is " "Bapa" for Father and
"Ema" for mother In Tamil India it is " Apa" for Father and " Ama" for mother.

Therefore this is the evidence of the evolution of Language from the Common Ancestor.

It seems extremely unlikely that any modern language retains traces of the original human
"language", assuming that it makes sense speak of such a thing. I don't know how universal "Papa"
and "Mama" really are, but if they are widespread it could be simply a reflection of infant babbling
being picked up and reinforced by the parents.

An article in today's *Times* reports two Australian researchers who claim that all the Indo-
European languages derive from a Hittite language spoken 8000 years ago in what is now Anatolia.
This would be remarkable if true.

On the other hand, a few mavericks (Julian Jaynes, Nicholas Humphrey) suggest that language may be
much more recent than we suppose, and that even the people who produced the Neolithic cave paintings
need not necessarily have possessed language in the modern sense.

Quoted message said:

The experience I find when bringing up a child is that, the first vocabulary a child will learn
will be Father and Mother and only then come body parts like eyes, mouth, hand and leg etc. So
these vocabulary are deeply embeded into the memory of the infant and will not suffer any
distortion for the rest of her life. Subsequently it will be passed on to her offspring.

But what puzzle me is that in the transmission from generation to generation, the structure of the
sentence can be changed. For example in English " The hungry man eat his food" In Japanese it is "
hungry that man his food eat" In Indonesian it is " man hungry that eat food his " In Mandarin it
is " hungry that man eat his that food"

So the arrangement of Subject, adjective, verb and Object got altered and rearranged.

This is the kind of thing that Noam Chomsky has been going on about for years. For a popular
exposition, see Stephen Pinker, *The Language Instinct*. Not all languages, even Indo-European ones,
are based on word order. For example, classical Greek and Latin relied on case, not word order, to
make the meaning plain.

AC

--
Using Linux GNU/Debian - Windows-free zone acampbell.org.ukacampbell.org.ukOpen ↗ (book reviews and articles)
Email: replace "www." with "ac@"

"Red Dragon" <[email hidden]> wrote in
:"]news:[email hidden]:

Quoted message said:

The Chimpanzee speak in grunts and groan and has good intelligence. I saw on TV a scientist
training up Chimps to communicate using charts and drawings. . And the Chimp understand human
speech. For instance, the scientist say to the Chimp " What do you want to eat today?", she
follows by showing it a chart of pictures showing food, scenery and varities of toys and the chimp
point to an apple. " Where do you want to go ?" and the Chimp point to the playground .

The problem with Chimp is that it does not have a voice box. Is it possible to transplant a voice
box to a Chimp and teach it to speak?

No. While it is true that chimps can do some simple communication using symbols, their processing
abilities fall well short of speech, even if they had the vocal equipment.

But it is also true that one should not underestimate the amount of communication between chimps,
even if most of it is non-verbal. It is now recognized that chimps do have rudiments of culture. I
also believe it has been shown that dogs can recognize human non-verbal signals better than humans,
perhaps because humans have become specialized to focus on verbal communication.

Yours,

Bill Morse

Anthony Campbell said:

It seems extremely unlikely that any modern language retains traces of the original human
"language", assuming that it makes sense speak of such a thing.

Last common ancestral language? As far as I can tell from asking people who actually understand
this, I think you're right, although some people have suggested that some things are common enough
to be remnants. I think most people consider that speculative.

Quoted message said:

I don't know how universal "Papa" and "Mama" really are, but if they are widespread it could be
simply a reflection of infant babbling being picked up and reinforced by the parents.

I think you'd find agreement on that. I've heard it said (in a TV documentary) that the word for
water in the common ancestral language might have been something like "agua", but I asked someone
with a degree in it and hesaid there was nowhere near enough evidence to go making that sort of
statement.

Quoted message said:

An article in today's *Times* reports two Australian researchers who claim that all the Indo-
European languages derive from a Hittite language spoken 8000 years ago in what is now Anatolia.
This would be remarkable if true.

As far as I know from talking to linguists(/linguisticians/whatever you call people who study
linguistics), this is a fairly uncontroversial statement (except that the language wouldn't
actually be Hittite, but would have been closer to that than any other language most people have
ever heard of). A friend did a PhD on this sort of thing, and she reckoned 10000 years ago and
just north of the Black sea (as opposed to south), but that's not a huge difference.

G.

Anthony Campbell <[email hidden]> wrote in message news:<[email hidden]>...

Quoted message said:

Red Dragon said:

Quoted message said:

Languages evolve far faster than genes so it is difficult to go back much beyond 8,000 years
and still obtain meaningful results. English and Dutch, for example, were mutually intelligible
until 1000 years ago.

Nevertheless,

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

the data, however tenuous, suggest all languages in the world evolved from

a

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

common ancestor, which supports the genetic evidence.

Since all languages in the world evolved from a common ancestor, I would expect it to be the
African language of the people in the Rift Valley where it is said to be the Origin of Mankind.

I find that "Papa" and "Mama" is the term for Father and Mother for all the Languages I know. It
is true for English , Mandarin, Hokkien and Cantonese. In Indonesian it is " "Bapa" for Father
and "Ema" for mother In Tamil India it is " Apa" for Father and " Ama" for mother.

Therefore this is the evidence of the evolution of Language from the Common Ancestor.

It seems extremely unlikely that any modern language retains traces of the original human
"language", assuming that it makes sense speak of such a thing. I don't know how universal "Papa"
and "Mama" really are, but if they are widespread it could be simply a reflection of infant
babbling being picked up and reinforced by the parents.

The near universality of 'mama' and 'papa' probably has something to do with them being easy to
pronounce. Repeated consonant vowel sequences like these are among the first proper speech sounds
that infants make. They start to produce streams of consonant vowel pairs like 'mamamama...' and
'papapapa...' from about six months old. Prior to this their vocalisations basically consist of
things like raspberries and sustained vowels. Their first referential words are spoken at about
12 months.

By the way, I seem to remember from linguistics classes that in some languages the 'papa' variant
means 'mother' and 'mama' means 'father'.

Quoted message said:

An article in today's *Times* reports two Australian researchers who claim that all the Indo-
European languages derive from a Hittite language spoken 8000 years ago in what is now Anatolia.
This would be remarkable if true.

Why would this be so remarkable?

Quoted message said:

On the other hand, a few mavericks (Julian Jaynes, Nicholas Humphrey) suggest that language may be
much more recent than we suppose, and that even the people who produced the Neolithic cave
paintings need not necessarily have possessed language in the modern sense.

Quoted message said:

The experience I find when bringing up a child is that, the first vocabulary a child will learn
will be Father and Mother and only then come body parts like eyes, mouth, hand and leg etc. So
these vocabulary are deeply embeded into the memory of the infant and will not suffer any
distortion for the rest of her life. Subsequently it will be passed on to her offspring.

But what puzzle me is that in the transmission from generation to generation, the structure of
the sentence can be changed. For example in English " The hungry man eat his food" In Japanese
it is " hungry that man his food eat" In Indonesian it is " man hungry that eat food his " In
Mandarin it is " hungry that man eat his that food"

So the arrangement of Subject, adjective, verb and Object got altered and rearranged.

This is the kind of thing that Noam Chomsky has been going on about for years. For a popular
exposition, see Stephen Pinker, *The Language Instinct*. Not all languages, even Indo-European
ones, are based on word order. For example, classical Greek and Latin relied on case, not word
order, to make the meaning plain.

To be completely accurate, languages with rich case systems (a modern example is Russian) have *more
flexible* word orders, but it is not true to say that anything goes in these languages. It is also
not true that case marking correlates perfectly with semantic roles or even with relations like
subject/object.

Evidence: "She hit HIM" vs "HE was hit" (he/him have different case markings but the same semantic
role - the individual who was hit rather than the individual doing the hitting)

"She forced HIM to eat cake" vs. "HE ate cake" (he/him have different case markings but in both
sentences appear as the subject of 'eat'😉

Quoted message said:

AC

H.

---
Like-minds don't notice shared mistakes. Talk to someone else.

Graham Clark said:

[snip]

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

An article in today's *Times* reports two Australian researchers who claim that all the Indo-
European languages derive from a Hittite language spoken 8000 years ago in what is now Anatolia.
This would be remarkable if true.

As far as I know from talking to linguists(/linguisticians/whatever you call people who study
linguistics), this is a fairly uncontroversial statement (except that the language wouldn't
actually be Hittite, but would have been closer to that than any other language most people have
ever heard of). A friend did a PhD on this sort of thing, and she reckoned 10000 years ago and
just north of the Black sea (as opposed to south), but that's not a huge difference.

Yes, I think this is true; ideas of this kind have been around for quite a time. As I understand,
the new announcement is in line with the theory advanced previously by the archaeologist Colin
Renfrew, who believes that the proto-Indo-European language was spread by Anatolian farmers
rather than by Kurgan warriors on horseback, and that this puts the origins of these languages
back from c. 6000 to 8000 years ago. But I haven't seen the article in *Nature*; just summaries.
See, for example:

turks.usarticle.phpOpen ↗

Quote:

"Dr Russell Gray and Dr Quentin Atkinson, from the University of Auckland borrowed tools
usually used by biologists to construct an evolutionary tree for living things.

They used a technique called "glottochronology" which relies on the premise that, in common
with the language of our genes, DNA, the words used in language also undergo "mutations" at
a constant rate.

This makes it possible to track a series of changes back to a common origin at a certain
time, pointing to the common root of all Indo-European tongues being the extinct Anatolian
language Hittite.

The origins are too early to back a rival theory that the first Indo-European language
emerged 6,000 years ago from nomadic Kurgan horsemen who made incursions from the Asian
steppes into Europe and conquests south and east."

--
Using Linux GNU/Debian - Windows-free zone acampbell.org.ukacampbell.org.ukOpen ↗ (book reviews and articles)
Email: replace "www." with "ac@"

Anthony Campbell said:

Graham Clark said:

[snip]

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

An article in today's *Times* reports two Australian researchers who claim that all the Indo-
European languages derive from a Hittite language spoken 8000 years ago in what is now
Anatolia. This would be remarkable if true.

As far as I know from talking to linguists(/linguisticians/whatever you call people who study
linguistics), this is a fairly uncontroversial statement (except that the language wouldn't
actually be Hittite, but would have been closer to that than any other language most people
have ever heard of). A friend did a PhD on this sort of thing, and she reckoned 10000 years
ago and just north of the Black sea (as opposed to south), but that's not a huge difference.

Yes, I think this is true; ideas of this kind have been around for quite a time. As I understand,
the new announcement is in line with the theory advanced previously by the archaeologist Colin
Renfrew, who believes that the proto-Indo-European language was spread by Anatolian farmers rather
than by Kurgan warriors on horseback, and that this puts the origins of these languages back from
c. 6000 to 8000 years ago. But I haven't seen the article in *Nature*; just summaries. See, for
example:

turks.usarticle.phpOpen ↗

...<snip>... I have a book somewhere at home, I don't remember the exact title but I think it
might have "Secrets of the Past". I bought it at a garage sale years back, and it had articles
(from Scientific American) about various mysteries of the past. One article was about the origins
of the Indo-Europeans. It devoted some space to the Kurgan theory, then knocked it down. The
conclusion of the article was that the most likely origin was somewhere in the Danube River
Basin. The reasons were that, first all the topological place names were Indo-European. When Indo-
Europeans spread elsewhere, they would keep some of the local place names, (Scandinavia for
instance is a word of non Indo-European origin).

The second reason is that, the river basin could have supported a large population by the standards
of those times from fishing, so a large population of people speaking this proto-Indo-European
language could have been built up to spread in various directions. Of course, it's possible that the
people who moved up the Danube came from Anatolia, which could account for the 'DNA' evidence.