Friday, September 30, 2016

... against Parallel between Linguistics and Evolutionism


Have you seen all of this video?

Creation vs. Evolution: Tower of Babel and Languages
don't force us to use google+
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqD2FDjg5MI


Three comments
related to this attempt at debunking Creationism via Linguistics. I only saw it sound off in a library with no head phones available.

4:39
regularisation of verbs means starting to feel past tenses such as "dolve" for "delve" rather than "delved" as "irregular" - that is loosing the sense of the rule behind "dolve". As for "half lives" these vary greatly from language to language. Old Icelandic and Old Swedish were basically the same, except a few phonetic features. Modern Icelandic retains four cases, three different persons in singular, the first and second persons plural are not felt as being archaic, many more "irregular" verbs and so on. + it is a moot point whether the IE language community is one of a shared proto-language (in which case glottochronological "half lives" would have some relevance, if there were such) or of a Sprachbund - the langs most apart are those that have least adapted to each other. SOME items are shared outside, like ablaut with Semitic and verb conjugation at most basic with Ural-Altaic.!

6:15
Darwin's Descent of Man made so many parallels with the then accepted views of language developent, that one could consider his work nearly a plagiarism of Grimm. But unlike mutations, sound changes are voluntary and not atomic changes, even if that was less well understood then. + Innovations in sound changes risk embroiling information, and therefore need to be compensated by even more conscious and voluntary innovations, like new paradigms.!

6:31
is the infamous "tree of life" pretended in this video to mirror the "tree" of indo-european language group. The real parallel, like God adapted life forms to each other, so IE lang neighbourhoods or attempts at making esperantos adapted IE langs to each other.


Did I miss anything important in it?

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