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.
- 30.XII.2025
- Joseph Foster
- If it is factually true, it is an explanation,…
There is no evidence that it is factually true and considerable other evidence to suggest that it is not. It was apparently a just-so story, a folk explanation for there being different languages. It appears to be taken explanatorily seriously only by people committed to a position of biblical historical [and general] inerrancy.
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.
Nope. It’s your manufactured problem. You seem to think you have a clever “gotcha”.
And as to your “As you are a linguist, none of the terms should need any explanation.”
They probably shouldn’t, but they apparently do. For one, I don’t know exactly what you mean by “notional”. Notional is not generally a currently used technical term in Linguistics. It has been used in reference to grammars or parts of grammars that try to define categories like noun, verb, subject, …. in terms of extra-linguistic categories. So a noun is “the name of a person, place, or thing.” The term notional in this use is in opposition to formal.
Even that apparent dicchotomy turns out to be a little fuzzy. In “notional grammars”, the subject of a sentence was characterized as “the noun or pronoun that represents what the sentence is about.”
That’s sort of notional but also refers to sentence-internal linguistic categories. It’s also of course demonstrably just wrong. In the sentence
It’s cold.
only an idiot would argue that the sentence is about the pronoun It. But cold isn’t a noun or a pronoun here. It’s an adjective. Some tried to claim, without a shred of supporting evidence whatever, that it has an antecedent and the antecedent is, well, the weather, the temperature, …..
That is, they’re grasping at straws clingingly desperately to their “notional” grammatical categories. As you appear to be clinging to your God-gave-Man-Language and the Genesis creation story. We have no need of that hypothesis.
Now to your ape calls ~ human language morpheme ~ phoneme stuff. I am not on top of the latest research on bonobo, chimpanzee, or other non-human primate communication. But I’m not sure that the terms morpheme [also shown in recent linguistic research to be maybe a little fuzzy], and phoneme even apply to their calls.
Human spoken language is non-discreet in the speech stream. The more sensitive the spectrograph, the more one sound appears to shade into the next following or be shaded into by the next preceding. But all languages can be represented with alphabetic writing. Alphabetic writing operates as though the sounds of the speech stream are discrete.
Horse whinnies, whippoorwill calls, and the like cannot be represented very closely with alphabetic writing. Not even with the IPA [International Phonetic Alphabet].
Language is a special kind of symboling. In symboling, humans conventionally use something to represent something else. In language there is at least a dual organiztion: Individual phonemes in general do not really represent some extralinguistic thing or in principle do they have assigned to them a language-internal function. That doesn’t mean that there are not morphemes that have only one phoneme; there of course are, in many languages. But those monophonemic morphemes are usually affixes, or vowel ellipted forms, as in French l’aubergine ‘the eggplant’. But in general, a morpheme consists of a string of one or more phonemes (whether taxonomic or systematic doesn’t matter here) and none of which taken individually has any “meaning” nor contributes an analytically identifiable part of the meaning of the entire morpheme.
So we have {house/Haus} and {mouse/Maus}. Two morphemes in English / German with nearly identical “meanings”, or referent classes. But the initial phonemes, /h/ and /m/ do not in any way contribute any part of the meaning to |haus/Haus| or to |mouse/Maus|. And with German it’s even worse~better, because you have also {aus}. The [aus} of these three German and two English words has as a group nor individually any identifiable “meaning’ contribution to the meanings of {house/Haus, mouse / Maus, aus/. Nor has the [aw] any identifiable contribution to the overall meaning of the English word {out} /awt/, the cognate of German aus.
But because of this dual phonological | morphological level of organization, languages can take a relatively small finite number of sounds and combined them into forms that are symbols and, taken as a string, represent about anything we want them to.
You may actually construe that as even more supporting evidence that “God did it.”. And indeed, it is possible, at least conceivable that He/They may have. But it doesn’t address how. The “God-hypothesis” doesn’t help us understand how. It is a possible, though invulnerable to disproof, answer to the question Wer? or Was? ‘Who? or What? It does not answer Wie? / How?.
That we don’t know. We’re working on it. Or trying to.
- Hans-Georg Lundahl
- "There is no evidence that it is factually true and considerable other evidence to suggest that it is not."
Possibilities: Genesis 1 and 2 or something like it is true. Man is eternal in an eternal universe. Or language doesn't exist, because it would not have evolved.
"It was apparently a just-so story, a folk explanation for there being different languages."
You are confusing the subthreads. This is your position on Genesis 11. This one is on the main issue, creation of language as such, Genesis 1 and 2.
"It appears to be taken explanatorily seriously only by people committed to a position of biblical historical [and general] inerrancy."
I certainly am committed to Biblical inerrancy, not least historical. Knowing Tabitha means Dorcas and a woman in Joppe was referred to by both names, or that Joppe and Lydda are close may not be neessary to save my soul, but once I know Acts 9 says so, I am dedicated to this being so.
"Nope. It’s your manufactured problem. You seem to think you have a clever “gotcha”."
My "manufactured problem" is stating facts as they are.
"For one, I don’t know exactly what you mean by “notional”."
"I ate chicken" is notional. "Thank you!" is another speach function, social interaction or whatever. It borrows its expression from the notional statement meaning "I am in the process of thanking you" ....
In "ape" it is perfectly possible to say "thank you" but it wouldn't involve two morphemes, or ellipsis suggesting a third of them. And the morpheme wouldn't be divided into phonemes. It needn't be, since the main type of communication is pragmatic ("let's ...") or emotive (insert any smiley for equivalent) and a "language" consisting only of the equivalent of traffic signs and smileys doesn't need so many expressions that subdividing sentences into different morphemes or morphemes into different phonemes pays.
"In the sentence // It’s cold. // only an idiot would argue that the sentence is about the pronoun It"
Only an idiot would pretend that "it's cold" or "it's raining" is the typical sentence expression, the reason why grammar has the category of subject. If you want examples of the real stuff, I suggest "all dogs are mammals" or "the little boy in the corner is crying."
"But I’m not sure that the terms morpheme [also shown in recent linguistic research to be maybe a little fuzzy], and phoneme even apply to their calls."
That's exactly my point. The problem is how to get from pragmatic emotica to notional language and from non-morpheme / non-phoneme to discrete mind bytes of phonemes making morphemes and morphemes making sentences.
"The more sensitive the spectrograph, the more one sound appears to shade into the next following or be shaded into by the next preceding."
Because the spectrograph isn't a mind. It only catches all of the physical sound, not what makes this a "p" or what makes that an "eye" or both of them together a "pie."
"In language there is at least a dual organization:"
Yes. Thank you for making my point.
"But because of this dual phonological | morphological level of organization, languages can take a relatively small finite number of sounds and combined them into forms that are symbols and, taken as a string, represent about anything we want them to."
Precisely what Australopithecus definitely couldn't. And you take that creature to be our ancestor and no God to have interfered in the transition.
"You may actually construe that as even more supporting evidence that “God did it.”."
Thank you, that is not "even more" it's just a restating of what I already did say was evidence of Genesis 1 and 2 (11 being a different thing entirely, depending on history rather than philosophy).
"the question Wer? or Was? ‘Who? or What? It does not answer Wie? / How?."
Well, God as answer to the who means omnipotence answers the how. Because no natural explanation could.
"That we don’t know. We’re working on it. Or trying to."
Tomasello didn't show that, when I tried to consult him on it.
- 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!
- 30.XII.2025
- Joseph Foster
- I mean a Northwest Semitic Canaanite language we can identify as (early) Hebrew. And I do not know what you mean by “Proto-Sinaitic”. I don’t think that comparative Semitic linguists identify a Sinaitic Branch. I might have missed something. Perhaps your reference is geographic?
********
Mine you quoted: Reconstruction of a theoretically retrodicted Proto-Language is not an “educated guess”
Your comment: “It certainly is. For instance it involves the assumption that the languages share an actual ancestral one.”
It’s not really. As to the reconstruction itself, it’s a motivated approximation. At that point, we take it that there was a particular shared ancestor language. But as I pointed out, that’s a later stage, and entering that activity, the shared ancestor language is not an assumption. It’s a theoretically postulated explanation of the data.
Actually, a shared ancestor language is almost never an “assumption” in Historical-Comparative Linguistics. It’s more apt to be a “discovery”.
Languages generally differ randomly in the actual strings of sounds they use for “words”, for affixes, and the like. Or in tonal languages, the tones they use as a part of the lexical word’s phonological make up. So when we find a set of two or more languages that either have the same sounds for given words or affixes, or else, more commonly, regular and patterned differences in sounds for the same words or affixes, that is unusual and wants an explanation. Loanwords from one to another is of course a possibility but there are ways to check for that and if we eliminate borrowing as an explanation, then the only thing left is that they each underwent separate sound change development from a common ancestor language.
We do not start with the assumption that two or more given languages share a common ancestor. If anything, we start with the assumption that they do not. In some, actually a fair number, of instances, the languages in question are close enough that we have an initial hunch that they are related. The Romance languages are a case in point, and of course there is a lot of extralinguistic historical information too. But a number of the Algonquian languages of North America were close enough and with differing degrees of mutual intelligibility that it was “hunched”, or “assume” if you like, that they were somehow related. Leonard Bloomfield, and others, worked out how and found the regular sound correspondences that led to the theoretical positing of Proto-Algonquian, or in Bloomfield’s case, Proto-Central Alqonquian. But later on a few other languages were also shown to be Algonquian.
There’s an interesting case, actually several, in the development of the Indoeuropean Family theory. In much of the 19th century, there were competent comparative-historical linguists who doubted that the Celtic languages were Indoeuropean. They were eventually however found to be. When Hittite was deciphered, it was found to be either a daughter language of Proto-IE, or else one (along with Luwan and a few others) in a “sister” of PIE, so for a time an even older common prehistoric ancestor language family Indo-Hittite or Indo-Anatolian was seriously considered.
*****
My comment: “Genesis 11 gives no “bearing” whatever on any known linguistic “facts” or data that I am aware of.”
Your comment: “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.”
Sumerian certainly wasn’t. So far as we know, it’s / was a linguistic isolate. Not know or seriously thought to (have) be(en) related to any other language or language family of its time. I don’t think I follow you there. Maybe the problem is
a. “the” flood, by which I take it you mean Noah’s Great Universal Flood
b. the time depth. I take it you take them as having all been one and the same language at the time of the NGF and having had only a millennium to diverge. I don’t. Nor does any scholar or scientist I take seriously.
But you might of course not recognise the Flood happened, history denier there!i
I not only don’t “recognize” it, I think it didn’t happen. Oh, there could very well have been and probably were in the Mesopotamian as wall as some other areas local significant floods, some of them catastrophic. But so far as I know there is no geological evidence of a Great Universal World Wide flood, as per Noah.
- Hans-Georg Lundahl
- “Perhaps your reference is geographic?”
Alphabetic. The alphabet found on Sinai that looks like Hieroglyphs, as an alphabet is called Proto-Sinaitic, but the language is apparently called Proto-Canaanite as I found on the article Proto-Sinaitic script.
“It’s a theoretically postulated explanation of the data.”
If it weren’t theoretically postulated and if it weren’t an explanation of data, the guess wouldn’t be educated.
To give you a little taste of why it’s still a guess, feat. PIE:
1) Along the three to four laryngeal reconstruction commonly shown in etymologies, one Finn named Jouna Pyysalo has made a mono-laryngeal reconstruction;
2) Trubetskoy has suggested a Sprachbund, and while this is met with objections like no way Sanskrit in India could have areal features with Old Irish in Ireland, well, the common ancestor hypothesis also excludes the original extention being all that large, same problem for both hypotheses;
3) along the common assumption of PIE spreading Westward, one Alberto on the site Ancient DNA era has argued Chorded Ware spread sth like Basque, not IE, and Andronovo when spreading South took over an older culture where cremation was already the custom: Origins and spread of Indo-European languages: an alternative view – Ancient DNA Era
In other words, a thing postulated as explanation can be a guess. No one is presumably disputing that PIE in the Kurgan culture was an explanation.
“So when we find a set of two or more languages that either have the same sounds for given words or affixes, or else, more commonly, regular and patterned differences in sounds for the same words or affixes, that is unusual and wants an explanation”
I am very well aware of the methodology, thank you very much. I also think it very likely Germanic, Balto-Slavic, Italo-Celtic each descends from an ancestral language, Italo-Celtic possibly sharing one with Germanic.
What you do not adress is the quantity. Russian and English don’t share 70% of the etymological word roots, they don’t share 50, they share only c. 25 %. Meanwhile, Persian and Arabic share about 33 %. No one suggests they descend from a common ancestor.
As to excluding loan words, there is no problem in excluding recent loan words. In Swedish, I regularly use French spelling for our loan words from French. But what about words borrowed around the time of suggested earlier divergences? It seems “star” is a pretty pan-IE loan from Ishtar, and yet it follows IE divergences of phonetics in respectively Germanic and Italic and Greek.
However, for Afro-Asiatic, I’m not suggesting a Sprachbund, I don’t think there would have been time for it in the c. 600 years separating Babel from the time when Abraham left the areas of Akkadian and arrived in an area of Old Egyptian. I’m suggesting God, at the miracle of Babel, showed the kind of awareness of what descent from a proto-language would look like that Tolkien did in the 1930’s to 50’s. With obviously infinitely more attention to detail and usefulness as human communication (don’t think one could live a daily life, even as a historic reenactor, on Quenya basis).
“Sumerian certainly wasn’t. So far as we know, it’s / was a linguistic isolate. Not know or seriously thought to (have) be(en) related to any other language or language family of its time.”
You seem to have some trouble following me. My point is, on Merritt Ruhlen’s view, Sumerian and Old Egyptian could have a common ancestor 40 000 years ago. They certainly couldn’t have that in 600 years since Babel or 1000 years since the Flood, when Abraham left areas of Akkadian and Sumerian to areas of Canaanite and Old Egyptian.
“I take it you take them as having all been one and the same language at the time of the NGF and having had only a millennium to diverge. I don’t. Nor does any scholar or scientist I take seriously.”
Indeed. And that’s where I have trouble taking you seriously. Because Theologians that I take seriously do.
“I not only don’t “recognize” it, I think it didn’t happen.”
Would you mind telling me the exact notional difference?
“local significant floods, some of them catastrophic.”
Those wouldn’t fit the Ark, on naval reasons. A wooden vessel (not sure if ship is appropriate) cannot be that large on shallow water. They also wouldn’t fit the timelines of Genesis 5 and 11, among other things on carbon dating reasons.
- Joseph Foster
- Re the Sinaitic early alphabet(s), OK. Wondered if that might be what you had in mind.
You and I use the term guess in not entirely the same way. I’ve already suggested other terms for what at least I have been talking about and won’t repeat myself. Yes, there are sometimes different and at least partially competing explanatory theories That’s how science works.
Great time depth can lead to lexical replacement, often by a given language’s internal changes of meaning, or Bedeutungswandel. English town and German Zaun are true cognates, but no longer the same core or absolute meaning. One is |fence, wall, border| and the other is | group of dwellings and shops|, i.e. the settlement enclosed by the fence or wall. So languages long separated from their common ancestor may not have a huge %age of cognates. We don’t determine language family membership on the basis of percentage of source language vocabulary. Albanian was a case where discovering whether and determining that it is Indoeuropean took quite a while.
Again I agree with your point, though not necessarily with your star ~ Ishtar example. That’s actually etymologically problematic. It might have been a loan from early Semitic; or the lending might have gone the other way — into Semitic from IE. Or a coincidental resemblance.
And you’re right about very early loanwords: if they came into the ancestor proto-/common language before the sound changes, they are likely to have undergone them too. One of the reasons why historical-comparative methodology can only take us back so far. In this respect you’re very likely aware that Ruhlen is, or was, something of an outlier.
I have no position re a possible AfroAsiatic Sprachbund but find your reasoning or grounds for rejecting the possibility odd, even bizarre. I don’t regard a timeline between those legendary or mythological biblical events as having any bearing on the issue. And the “miracle” of Babel is simply not an event at all except as a made-up just-so story. Nothing to hang rejection or acceptance of a linguistic theory on.
Re the difference between not recognize and think did not happen’,
—In my dialects of English recognize implies there is or was actually something there. I can’t “recognize” the Noahnic Universal Flood because I think, for lack of evidence apart from Genesis, that it didn’t happen. There was no recognizeable there there.
“I take it you take them as having all been one and the same language at the time of the NGF and having had only a millennium to diverge. I don’t. Nor does any scholar or scientist I take seriously.”
Your reply: “Indeed. And that’s where I have trouble taking you seriously. Because Theologians that I take seriously do.”
That’s a big and maybe the big difference between you and me. I don’t generally care whether theologians care about my Linguistics because most of them don’t know much, if at all, about it. [Some do know some ancient languages but that’s not Linguistics.] You apparently know more Linguistics than most theologians I’ve encountered or read but you apparently let your Linguistics be guided, directed, or limited by theological considerations and the approval of, selected, theologians.
I don’t. And if I did, we probably wouldn’t necessarily select the same theologians, though we might overlap a bit. You’ve referred a couple of times here or elsewhere to something you call, I believe, “Methodological Atheism”.
I’d call it Methodological / Scientific Agnosticism. Adduction of “God” is simply in most, possibly all, instances in doing scientific or, nowdays even historical /prehistoric, investigation simply invulnerable to disproof. It’s not even a hypothesis because we know of no way to check it and find out that it’s wrong. It’s a convenient adduction for those who deeply desire finality, and especially a personal finality. But science requires some tolerance for infinality.
So I think we’ve exhausted this and you probably have other things to do — I know I have. I think I may owe you another response, at least a consideration, of another reply on a different subthread. I’ll read that most recent comment of yours and reply if I have anything I think worth adding or altering.
- 31.XII.2025
- Hans-Georg Lundahl
- And you’re right about very early loanwords: if they came into the ancestor proto-/common language before the sound changes, they are likely to have undergone them too.
Which is why a very early Sprachbund (probably followed up by more of them) cannot be excluded.
By the way, the possibility of Semantic shift would hardly account for the 75 % non-etyma between English and Russian.
“In this respect you’re very likely aware that Ruhlen is, or was, something of an outlier.”
Indeed, hence my exaggeration that “no one” suggests Sumerian and Akkadian had a common ancestor, meaning no one dealing with Proto-Languages that are longer than 27 or 32 words, as his Proto-World is.
“I don’t regard a timeline between those legendary or mythological biblical events as having any bearing on the issue.”
In other words, you are a history denier.
“—In my dialects of English recognize implies there is or was actually something there.”
Our usage agrees. Since I think there is something to recognise, that’s the word I chose.
“I’d call it Methodological / Scientific Agnosticism. Adduction of “God” is simply in most, possibly all, instances in doing scientific or, nowdays even historical /prehistoric, investigation simply invulnerable to disproof.”
Is it amenable to proof? Is the alternative vulnerable to disproof or even actually disproven?
Or does it depend on paradigm, in such a way that your stance makes any naturalistic alternative invulnerable to disproof?
If the supernatural is excluded, there are lots of historic sources that get smudged, not just Genesis 11.
“It’s not even a hypothesis because we know of no way to check it and find out that it’s wrong.”
Do you know a way of checking and finding out if it’s wrong that the sky (on a clear day) is blue?
And is there a way of checking that the alternative (“mythology is made up just so stories”) is wrong?
Excuse me if I overtax your patience with a subject you find exhausted.
