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Makoto Taniguchi · Guest

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 Hitler 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.

TWINBLUE · Guest

[quote]Anyhow, if we share a common ancestor, why would the linguistics
change so much?
[/quote]
What do you mean by "IF"?

TWINBLUE

Makoto Taniguchi · Guest

twinblue@aol.com (TWINBLUE) wrote in message news:<bp0d28$16fv$1@darwin.ediacara.org>...
[quote]Anyhow, if we share a common ancestor, why would the linguistics
change so much?

What do you mean by "IF"?

TWINBLUE
[/quote]
IF means maybe or probably.

William Morse · Guest

bartron2k2@hotmail.com (Makoto Taniguchi) wrote in news:botnv9$e3r$1
@darwin.ediacara.org:

[quote]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 Hitler 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.

[/quote]
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

Antony Quinn · Guest

bartron2k2@hotmail.com (Makoto Taniguchi) wrote in news:botnv9$e3r$1
@darwin.ediacara.org:

[quote]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 Hitler 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.
[/quote]
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
http://iiasnt.leidenuniv.nl/pie/ielangs/ielangs.html 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".

Red Dragon · Guest

[quote]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.
[/quote]
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.

Red Dragon · Guest

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

Anthony Campbell · Guest

On 2003-11-26, Red Dragon <tasek@pc.jaring.my> wrote:
[quote]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.

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.

[/quote]
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.

[quote]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.
[/quote]
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
http://www.acampbell.org.uk (book reviews and articles)
Email: replace "www." with "ac@"

Graham Clark · Guest

Anthony Campbell <me@privacy.net> writes:

[quote]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.
[/quote]
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.

[quote]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.
[/quote]
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.

[quote]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.
[/quote]
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.

TomHendricks474 · Guest

<< > The experience I find when bringing up a child is that, the first
[quote]vocabulary a child will learn will be Father and Mother
(snipped)[/quote]

I think we can go earlier by recognizing crying and smiling as vocal language.
Therefore there first real language is crying when something is wrong and
smiling/laughing when something is right. And for the most part - all other
language is an evolution of those two ideas IMO.

William Morse · Guest

"Red Dragon" <tasek@pc.jaring.my> wrote in
news:bq3dig$2p5v$1@darwin.ediacara.org:

[quote]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?
[/quote]
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 · Guest

On 2003-11-28, Graham Clark <zotz@bogusdomain.net> wrote:
[quote]
[/quote]
[snip]

[quote]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.

[/quote]
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:

http://www.turks.us/article.php?story=20031127172853225

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
http://www.acampbell.org.uk (book reviews and articles)
Email: replace "www." with "ac@"

Huck Turner · Guest

Anthony Campbell <me@privacy.net> wrote in message news:<bq5i4t$eva$1@darwin.ediacara.org>...
[quote]On 2003-11-26, Red Dragon <tasek@pc.jaring.my> wrote:
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.

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.

[/quote]
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'.

[quote]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.
[/quote]
Why would this be so remarkable?

[quote]
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.

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.

[/quote]
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')

[quote]AC
[/quote]

H.

---
Like-minds don>t notice shared mistakes. Talk to someone else.

C. P. Weidling · Guest

Anthony Campbell <me@privacy.net> writes:

[quote]On 2003-11-28, Graham Clark <zotz@bogusdomain.net> wrote:

[snip]

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:

http://www.turks.us/article.php?story=20031127172853225

...<snip>...[/quote]
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.


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