From: lip@s1.gov (Loren I. Petrich)
Newsgroups: sci.skeptic,talk.origins
Subject: Re: Symbolic Interpretation (Re: Young earth creationist logic NOT!)
Date: 4 Sep 92 00:48:46 GMT
Organization: LLNL

In article <1992Sep3.155246.17752@city.cs> lionel@cs.city.ac.uk (Lionel Tun) writes:
>In article <973@tdat.teradata.COM> swf@tdat.teradata.com (Stanley Friesen) writes:
@ |Linguistics depends on humans having evolved from primates?
@ |(apoligies if I picked the weakest link)
@ 
@ No, but it provides evidence for a deeper time scale than 6,000 years.
@ Based on linguistic reconstructions, there were many hundreds (at least)
@ of human languages as recently as 6,000 years ago, when Genesis would
@ require only one at that time.
@ Thus, linguistic data requires that *humans* have been around as such
@ for substantially more than 12,000 years (this is just a lower limit,
@ it places no upper limit).

>This is another illustration of the _assumptions_ that evolutionists
>start from, that of uniformity. What if at some point within the
>last 6,000 years human language suddenly and inexplicably exploded
>from one to hundreds instantaneously?

	Lionel Tun, there's a little green man who follows you around
all the time, but who turns invisible whenever you turn to look (and
otherwise leaves no directly apparent physical traces). I dare you to
prove that there is no such little green man.

	More seriously, invoking miraculous mechanisms like that can
account for _anything whatsoever_. And that's not what science is all
about.

>Do these linguistic reconstructions discount the confusion of 
>languages at the Tower of Babel?

	This hypothesis is essentially falsified, barring explanations
that border on divine fraudulence.

	First off, there is not a trace of a worldwide flood ca. 2000
BCE. There are several forests that lived through this alleged event
as if nothing ever happened. These include the bristlecone pines of
the American Southwest and some oak trees buried in bogs in Northern
Europe, in places like (if I remember correctly) northern Germany and
Ireland. I think it is worth pointing out that mainstream science is
not averse to hypothesized catastrophes, just to making extravagant
and unsupported claims of them. Consider the reaction to the discovery
of the Cretaceous-Tertiary iridium layer, for example. So it is a bit
of a disappointment not to find any serious catastrophes :-).

	Furthermore, even the oldest recorded languages are _very_
different from each other. Even known relatives are significantly
different; the first three recorded Indo-European languages, Hittite
(~1700 BCE), Mycenaean Greek (~1200 BCE), and Sanskrit (~1200 BCE) are
different enough from each other to be mutually intelligible. The
probable time of divergence is 4000-3000 BCE, which fits in well with
when the Kurgans dispersed (there are other reasons for supposing them
to be the original IE speakers, however)

	Other languages with early records are Akkadian, Eblaite (both
Semitic), Ancient Egyptian (all these are Afro-Asiatic), Sumerian,
Hurrian, and Elamite; all except the Afro-Asiatic ones are different
enough from each other as to seemingly preclude recognizable common
ancestry. Some linguists have proposed relationships between many of
the languages I have listed, but these are very distant relationships,
and the ages of proposed macro-families like Nostratic turn out to be
at least 10,000 years. And that's too old for Babel :-)
Xref: sparky sci.skeptic:15889 talk.origins:10831