From: lip@s1.gov (Loren I. Petrich)
Subject: Re: Linguistic Evolution / Tower of Babel
Organization: LLNL
Date: Mon, 7 Sep 1992 08:46:11 GMT

In article <2893@fedfil.UUCP> news@fedfil.UUCP (news) writes:

>As several have noted, there are a number of insoluble problems with
>the standard theories on language.

	Abundantly addressed in previous postings.

>The divide between Semetic and Indo-European peoples is very recent;
>there is no real racial difference.  To try to explain the total lack
>of relationships between Semetic and Indo-European languages within
>the confines of standard theories is futile.  You just don't have the 
>TIME you need.  

	10,000-30,000 years is more than enough time :-)

>     Did you ever wonder about the universal traditon in folklore
>which has animals speaking at some prior time?

	Haven't you ever noticed people talking to their pets?

	My mother used to do that all the time to our pet cat.

	[Age of Cronos stuff deleted...]

	Mythology == History. Sheesh.

>If, as seems overwhelmingly likely, the white and black races are
>very recent branches of the same family, their languages should show
>strong relationships.  As far as anybody has ever shown, African and
>European languages are totally unrelated.

	Good grief! Sub-saharan Africans appear to have done the
earliest branching of the human family tree. The !Kung of Southern
Africa appear to have branched away from the rest of humanity the
first. 

>Tricia borawski, The Dorsai Diplomatic Mission, recently noted that:

	What's the "Dorsai Diplomatic Mission"? I've heard of the
Dorsai as characters in some SF stories, but that's all.

>  12.  If man and languages "evolved", the earliest languages should be
>       the simplest.  On the contrary, as one studies languages that are
>       increasingly ancient, such as Latin (200 B.C.), Greek (800 B.C.),
>       and Vedic Sanskrit (1500 B.C.), they become INCREASINGLY COMPLEX
>       with respect to syntax, cases, genders, moods, voices, tenses,
>       and verb forms.  The evidence indicates that languages do not
>       Evolve, they DEvolve.

	Hittite appears to be more simple in some ways than (say)
Sanskrit.

	Actually, there seems to be a continual interchange in
complexity between various language features. If morphology is simple,
then syntax is complicated (English, Chinese, etc.). If syntax is
simple, morphology is complicated (Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Finnish,
etc.)

>     My apologies to believers in "Nostradus" or whatever you're
>calling it these days;

	It's "Nostratic". Who are you, O Tedster? J. Danforth Quayle?

it is my belief that you're basically
>trying to pound a square peg into a round hole, i.e. REALIZING the
>truth of the logical requirement stated above, you are trying to
>force facts to fit.  Look at the words for the basic numbers one to
>four in Indo-European languages:  unos, dos, tres, quattro...  une
>deux, trois, quatre...  odin, dva, tri, chitere...  one, two three,
>four...  ...  If there were ANY relation betrween any of these
>languages and, say, Hebrew or Assyrian, there would be some such
>similar close similarity;  there is none at all.

	So what if they don't match? The numerals could have been
invented independently as different groups of people acquired the
necessity of doing heavy-duty accounting as their material culture
advanced. There are enough other vocabulary items to suggest a
comparison; see some of the Nostraticists for details.

	For instance, Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, and
Chukchi-Kamchatkan share first-person singular stems in m-/b-, and
second-person singular stems in t-/s-. This is a seldom-borrowed type
of word, as experience with comparative linguistics indicates, so
that's one thing that indicates a broader relationship, even if a
rather distant one.