The original answer is not my own, I'll link to it and give a quote:
How did man create language at first? (Ron Brown's answer, 7 years ago)
https://www.quora.com/How-did-language-come-into-existence/answer/Ron-Brown-120
... It seems to me that how languages began is a mystery. Although I am not an evolutionary biologist, I’m not sure it is even understood how the physical mechanisms for human speech evolved. But given that we can utter the many phonemes that make up human speech, in a population of early humans, it’s still not clear how if one individual finally convinced another individual to think “rock” when he or she made a particular sound that it would lead to a language that would propagate through a population. ...
Now for the debates, and like myself, Ron Brown has no degree in linguistics, but Joseph Foster (retired) has been teaching it up to 2009, as for me, I've studied related subjects (a k a a few languages) but without degrees like PhD or even Phil. Lic:
- I
- 6 years ago
- Hans-Georg Lundahl
- 6 years ago
- As amateur linguist, I can second the Biblical story. It makes sense.
Emergent evolution of language does not.
- Holy Innocents
- 28.XII.2025
- Joseph Foster
- The Tower of Babel story makes no sense at all. It gets the separation and dispersal of societies and emergence of different dialects and languages backasswards with respect to cause and effect.
- Hans-Georg Lundahl
- You are confusing normal language splits by divergent evolution with a supernatural one.
Peleg was born 101–531 years after a universal Flood, leaving one language. If in Peleg’s day there were different languages that couldn’t understand each other, that was a miracle, not a parallel of Latin to French / Latin to Spanish.
You’d yourself be hard set to pretend Sumerian and Akkadian could have split that fast from a common ancestor, the mainstream would say Akkadian descends from a Proto-Afro-Asiatic spoken c. 8000–14,000 years prior to the first texts and that Sumerian does NOT descend from it, so if they had a common ancestor, it would have to be much further back.
The language split of Babel wasn’t about a common ancestor language, any more than the miracle of Cana about normal procedures in harvesting grapes, pressing them and allowing them to ferment over weeks.
That said, your input is totally irrelevant for what I said. The overall question and my answer were not about the emergence of language DIFFERENCES, but about the emergence of LANGUAGE tout court.
The Biblical story about that is in Genesis 1 and 2. Adam talked the same day God created him, and God eternal could talk before creating anything.
- Joseph Foster
- OK. I may have misunderstood you. I don’t know of any viable, checkable, supernatural explanations for either how languages diverge from a common linguistic ancestor nor of how language emerged or developed to start with.
- Hans-Georg Lundahl
- You don’t know how a thing is checkable from history? Speaking of the secondary topic, Babel.
Back to the first. You don’t know any natural explanation for how men supposedly descending from apes have a totally different deep structure in the communication system and it’s supposed to have developed gradually. Biologists don’t claim mammals descend from insects. In “ape” sentence = morpheme = phoneme, and the speech function is never notional. In “human” sentence = morpheme + morpheme + … AND morpheme = phoneme + phoneme + … and the speech function is typically notional, so that even non-notional speech functions borrow the way they are expressed from the notional one. It’s the natural explanation that makes no sense whatsoever.
- Joseph Foster
- The Adam - Eve story and Adam being given power to name things is not “checkable from history”, if that’s what you’re claiming. Indeed, “God did it” adduced as an explanation is not checkable. It’s not vulnerable to disproof.
- 29.XII.2025
- Hans-Georg Lundahl
- God did it is vulnerable to disproof, like “it didn’t happen in the first place” …
The part I’m speaking of is not Adam being authorised to name beasts. The part I speak of is, he was created with language. When God gave him the task, he understood what he was supposed to do.
Your preference for the “natural” explanation isn’t very vulnerable to disproof within Atheist circles. Every alternative leading to God did it will on your part be dismissed as “not vulnerable to disproof” …
The only natural explanation possible for man speaking is man always having spoken. Not just “for as long as man has existed” but literally always, so man had to always exist. Since we can know even the universe didn’t, that one is out.
- Joseph Foster
- Nope.
And natural, i.e. scientific explanations are always vulnerable to disproof / empirical discreditation.
“God did it.” is no explanation at all. It is generally used to choke off further investigation or search for explanation. It doesn’t have to be — we could still enquire after the means and processes by which it was done. But you don’t seem to want that further enquiry.
- Hans-Georg Lundahl
- “vulnerable to disproof / empirical discreditation.”
Except among atheists when the thing credited BY the empirical discreditation is God did it.
“But you don’t seem to want that further enquiry.”
There isn’t any “further enquiry” on the naturalistic and evolutionist side. Not on the question I posed. I checked with Tomasello who refused to answer, so far.
That’s why it’s only on the Atheist (including Methodologically Atheist) side that the gradual emergence of language isn’t disproven, because in that ideology, naturalism as such isn’t vulnerable to disproof.
- Joseph Foster
- “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.” may or may not be “true”. It is not a scientific theory or explanation.
- Hans-Georg Lundahl
- If it is factually true, it is an explanation, and specifically ruling it out as an explanation in “science” means wedding that “science” to the ideology of Methodological Atheism.
You have stated it. You haven’t argued it. And you most definitely have not shown it could conceivably account for the difference between human and ape communication with the added assumption of man developing from an ape creature, ancestral to both man and chimp.
Perhaps your memory is becoming somewhat short. Here is the actual problem you are skitting away from:
In “ape” sentence = morpheme = phoneme, and the speech function is never notional. In “human” sentence = morpheme + morpheme + … AND morpheme = phoneme + phoneme + … and the speech function is typically notional, so that even non-notional speech functions borrow the way they are expressed from the notional one.
As you are a linguist, none of the terms should need any explanation. And if you had missed the problem, you’d probably have answered with some answer to a different one.
- II
- 6 years ago
- Ray Oberhardt
- 6 years ago
- They didn’t learn a language, it was given to them. The new language replaced the old one. The original language was most likely Hebrew.
- Joseph Foster
- Not possible. Hebrew could not have been an “original”, let alone “the” original human language. Hebrew is a member of the Semitic Family of languages, related to some other languages including Arabic, Aramaic, Amharic, and some others. That means it shares a common prehistoric ancestor language with them — we call it Proto-Semitic. So Proto-, or Common, Semitic antedates Hebrew.
And for your claim, it gets worse. Semitic is a Branch of a larger language family we call Afro-Asiatic. So Proto-AfroAsiatic is even older, that is, earlier.
- Hans-Georg Lundahl
- “Hebrew … shares a common prehistoric ancestor language”
Or, at Babel, God as a conlanger mimicked divergent language evolution for some of the languages he knew were going to neighbour the Hebrews.
- Joseph Foster
- Right.
That was the night they were frightened by flying pigs.
- 29.XII.2025
- Hans-Georg Lundahl
- Or it was the night before the morning when in sign language different groups of workers decided to leave each other and bury Göbekli Tepe in sand.
Like, a writing system being the same does not necessarily mean speech is the same (confer English and German having comparable spelling systems), and a writing system being different doesn’t necessarily mean the speech is different (confer Serbian being spelled in Latin and Cyrillic characters). But a writing system being the same goes in the direction of a shared language.
Carbon dates earlier than Göbekli Tepe, what we find reminiscent of written language are 32 symbols dug up by Genevieve von Petzinger, the same ones from Spain to Indonesia. The hashtag is one of them.
Carbon dates later than Göbekli Tepe, we see rise of comparably very localised writing systems (like the Vinča symbols).
Or one of the nights close to the birth of Peleg, as recorded by those keeping the records of Genesis 11 and Genesis 10 (later put into their now specific order by Moses).
These two alternatives to your somewhat amusing theory are not mutually exclusive.
- Joseph Foster
- “..a writing system being the same goes in the direction of a shared language.”
No, not necessarily. The first known and datable example of written Rumanian was in 1521 and is in Cyrillic writing. Rumanian was generally written with the Cyrillic alphabet until the early 1860s, was in Moldova until into the 1990’s, and still is in Transnistria. But it’s a Romance, i.e. Italic Branch, language, not a Slavic Branch one, to cite just one of many counterexamples. To take another of completely different language families, the Cherokee syllabary has a number of graphic symbols that resemble letters from the English / French alphabet. But those are alphabets and the Cherokee writing is a syllabary and Cherokee is a very very different language from English or from French. And the latter two are Indoeuropean, different major branches, while Cherokee is in the Iroquoian Language Family.
You might see von Petzinger’s “signs” as “reminiscent” of “written language” but I don’t. You might want to find some reviews of her First Signs:….
But writing really has nothing to do with this. That there is a Semitic Family (and an AfroAsiatic family of which Semitic is a branch) of Languages is helped by some early writing. It is/was not determined to be true by it. It was determine by the methods of historical-comparative Linguistics.
Here’s a link to a relatively short pithy article you might find interesting:
Pseudoscientific language comparison - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoscientific_language_comparison
- Hans-Georg Lundahl
- Have you heard of the fallacy known as strawman?
“No, not necessarily. The first known and datable example of written Rumanian was in 1521 and is in Cyrillic writing.”
A perfect answer if I had said “a shared writing system always automatically means a shared language” …
Which I specifically had ruled out. I had even given another example of a language written both in Latin and in Cyrillic, i e Serbian.
Now, not only is this a strawman, but it’s a very late exemple in a society where both Cyrillic and Latin came from the outside. I e, through translanguage communications. How many translanguage communications would there have been in a palaeolithic society, all the way from Spain to Indonesia?
“You might want to find some reviews of her First Signs:….”
I have indeed not read that work. I do note that 32 signs looks like a phoneme inventory.
“It was determine by the methods of historical-comparative Linguistics.”
In other words, reconstruction. That means basically “educated guess” and a guess ceases to be educated when it leaves out records (such as Genesis 11) which would give another bearing on the linguistic facts.
Take Quenya and Sindarin, both go back to 1930’s and updates 1950’s and there never was a time when their ancestral Proto-Eldarin was spoken at Cuivienen before the First Age of the Sun.
Even so, they are related in ways predictable by that method, because Tolkien knew it. Somehow God is supposed to not have known it?
- Joseph Foster
- You wrote “goes in the direction of a shared language”, whatever that is supposed to mean.
Reconstruction of a theoretically retrodicted Proto-Language is not an “educated guess” and it is not the same thing as discovering a language family and determining which languages are members of it. The second isn’t a “guess” either. Many laypeople think of a theory as a “guess” or even a “speculation” but that’s not what a theory is. Language family discovery and member determination is done on the basis primarily of regular systematic sound correspondences. It, or a good deal of it, has to be done before reconstruction of the ancestor common language can be seriously attempted but they are separate tasks.
Hebrew did not emerge as a separate language from the Common Canaanite Semitic group of dialects much before 1100 - 1000 BC. It could not have been the “first” language or eldest Semitic language.
Genesis 11 gives no “bearing” whatever on any known linguistic “facts” or data that I am aware of. Nor I suspect that you are aware of.
And how you get a “phoneme” inventory out of those “32 signs [her term] is beyond me unless you are assuming they represent sound segments of a language, in which case 32 is within the typical alphabet range and a bit shy of what we’d normally expect for a syllabary. They might conceivably be logographs. But there’s precious little evidence that they are even what is sometimes called Proto-Writing.
And
- He actually ended
- with this "And" hanging lose.
- Hans-Georg Lundahl
- Proto-Writing, not being deciphered, cannot be excluded from being “within the typical alphabet range” by being precisely alphabets and that’s why I think 32 symbols is important.
“Hebrew did not emerge as a separate language from the Common Canaanite Semitic group of dialects much before 1100 - 1000 BC. It could not have been the “first” language or eldest Semitic language.”
If you mean “Hebrew as we know it” … Peleg could have remained a speaker of sth closer to Proto-Sinaitic than to Biblical Hebrew.
I’m fairly sure even Proto-Sinaitic was sufficiently distinct from Akkadian or Gheez. Or probably even Aramaic.
"You wrote “goes in the direction of a shared language”, whatever that is supposed to mean."
That of two symptoms available, the one after Göbekli Tepe is more probably related to language diversity and the one before Göbekli Tepe to language unity.
In the direction of can be considered as synonym for “more probable than otherwise it would otherwise be” …
"Reconstruction of a theoretically retrodicted Proto-Language is not an “educated guess” "
It certainly is. For instance it involves the assumption that the languages share an actual ancestral one.
“Genesis 11 gives no “bearing” whatever on any known linguistic “facts” or data that I am aware of.”
Like Old Egyptian and Elamite and Sumerian being entirely different languages in Abraham’s time, 1000 years after the Flood? No one is even offering the guess that these belong to the same language family.
But you might of course not recognise the Flood happened, history denier there!
