Talk:Proto-World language

message: "Critics say that from a purely statistical point of view, among any two unrelated languages, there would be a more than 40% chance that any given two words would share a related sound and meaning."  This statement is so obviously false that I assume it's misphrased; what was it intended to say? - Mustafaa 07:39, 23 Aug 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree. I gave it a more non-committal wording for the time being (but feel free to make further changes). I also deleted a reference to Mario Pei, since it only stated this linguist thinks it's "an interesting concept" (i.e. he is neither a decided proponent, nor an adversary of the theory -- I mean, *I* think it's interesting, and I don't feel compelled to add my name to the article;) and the link is dead, anyway Dbachmann 10:44, 23 Aug 2004 (UTC)

text: Actually it isn't false - I think he meant to say 'with the phonetic and semantic leeway used in the reconstruction of Proto-World'.32.106.193.203 20:55, 2 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: misphrased?

message: 'You' in Arabic is 'Anta', in Japanese it is 'Anata'
Jondel | Talk
:Even better, anta is a variant of anata in Japanese.  However, as usual, this is but coincidence.  See false cognates and false friends. -- VV 06:22, 22 Apr 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Hebrew/Arabic and Japanese

message: your last edit is acceptable as such , Nixer, it is just still ungrammatical. So we are really forced to either fix your grammar or roll you back. I'll let it stand for a couple of days to see if somebody fixes it, but I don't want to get into the habit of cleaning up after you. dab 20:59, 25 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: ok

message: Nixer, please stop reverting. I explained in the edit summary: historical linguistics is a science; you cannot say some historical linguistics, it's meaningless. You are thinking of some historical linguists. Stop reverting - the article is fine. Izehar 22:41, 25 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Oh, yes. There should be some historical linguists.--Nixer 22:44, 25 November 2005 (UTC)

text: Why revert? I've corrected. Any other bugs?--Nixer 22:51, 25 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Oh no! - Nixer, STOP IT! 

message: Let's ignore the really hideous grammar of this article for a minute. Currently this article is stating first that Proto-World "refers to the hypothetical latest common ancestor of all the world's languages" and that it "would have been spoken roughly 200,000 years ago". Has anyone ever stopped to think, I mean really stopped to think that a hypothetical ancestor of all human tongues can't be guaranteed to be 200,000 years old even if homo sapiens is that old. The two facts don't affect each other at all. So many possibilities here are being fluffed away. It hurts me to see narrow-mindedness. If this article isn't a little POV as I type, I'll eat my underwear.
First off, it's irrefutably possible that Proto-World is 80,000 or 100,000 or 150,000 years old and that all other languages that coexisted with Proto-World at the time had died out after so many millenia that had passed. This is similar to the Mitochondrial Eve hypothesis but made into linguistic theory instead. 
To further complicate, who's to say that pre-humans couldn't speak too? Oh yes, people will say that they couldn't speak because they're vocal chords couldn't work like ours... but you've all forgotten that even gorillas like Koko (gorilla) can learn and have been taught to speak sign language. Why is it everyone can accept a signing gorilla but can't accept the idea of a signing Australopithecus who lived some 2 million years ago? Why is that? Is it because people naively think that sign language is a modern invention or something? It's not. Think outside the box. In fact, burn the box. It's doing you people no good.
So I'm gonna take it upon myself to:
a) elevate the English of this article to less comical standards
b) reword things to incorporate possibilities that Proto-Worlder zealots are too frightened to consider
How's that? Fab. --Glengordon01 11:39, 8 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: look, buddy, it is obvious you simply don't understand the concept, or the (perfectly correct) sentence you consider "hideous". I really cannot be bothered to spell it out for you, but note that we put the definition (including the "dead languages" clause) first, and the date estimate, based on this definition, after. 200,000 is simply the date of human phylogenetic separation. This entails that language is older than 200,000 years, but that's it, it doesn't make an assumption about upper bounds. In the phrase "hypothetical latest common ancestor", far from being "an impediment to clarity", every component is required. The "hypothetical" is a gesture towards the possibility of heterogenesis. Now we can clarify this, but it should ideally be clarified by someone who understands what is being said in the first place. regarding "common", I recommend you read most recent common ancestor for background. dab (ᛏ) 22:58, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

text: Is the bolding your emphasis or was it emphasized by Ruhlen in the original? --Miskwito 22:56, 11 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dating Proto-World, a failure in Logic 

message: Before I give you a few quotes that might ellucidate the views of Ruhlen's, I'd like to ask why Trombetti isn't mentioned in the article (the idea of the Proto-World language is his, I guess).--Pet'usek [petr dot hrubis at gmail dot com] 12:25, 11 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Trombetti?

message: From Merritt Ruhlen's "Epilogue for L’Origine des langues", pp.1-4:
Ruhlen goes on, listing the traits:
Then he continues, saying:
Ruhlen further exaplains:
Then he suggests the origin of language, saying:
And, he also hypothesizes about the dating, saying:
I hope these quotations help to clarify what Ruhlen really thinks about this issue...--Pet'usek [petr dot hrubis at gmail dot com] 12:25, 11 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Is the bolding your emphasis or was it emphasized by Ruhlen in the original? --Miskwito 22:56, 11 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: A few quotations

message: Despite the fanfare, deaf speakers in Nicaragua simply were not "in isolation" from sign, ever. The hearing-capable population at large has been using gesture for a very long time. Some gesture is even culture-specific. We all know this already. One might call it "gestural dialect". 
Simple logic then shows us that NSL is not a valid example of "spontaneous" language generation. It had a stimulus. That stimulus was pre-existing gesture from the hearing-capable majority. --Glengordon01 21:10, 9 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: No, Klingon is a constructed language, which has no native speakers. --Miskwito 11:57, 29 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Nicaraguan Sign Language and Spontaneous Language Generation 

message: The general public fundamentally does not seem to realize what "language" means, which is half the reason why this article is a little simplistic to me so far. 
Language is simply a form of communication (any communication: gesture, sign, visual expressions, writing, spoken word, music, morse code, chemical signals, etc). 
Multiple forms of communication can be, and often are, executed at the same time. For example, one will typically speak to another while gesturing as well. A deaf person will simultaneously sign and offer facial expressions to give nuance to the statement. A mute person may even use voice as a secondary element to add to the meaning of his signing.
Knowing this, we can then easily see that it's perfectly natural for there to be a "primary focus" of communication as well as secondary foci. So if I speak, I may gesture from time to time – thus, my spoken language would be the primary focus of communication and my gesture would be a secondary focus.
Now, if the primary focus of communication within a population can shift over time, what this means for Proto-World is interesting. If we consider a theoretical population of hearing-capable early humans using sign as the primary focus of communication with only accompanied speech as secondary focus from time to time, it can conceivably evolve into a population using speech as primary focus and gesture as secondary. Apparently this doesn't dawn on a lot of people, but this is a succinct possibility that doesn't involve require some idiotic "language organ" theory.
 
In this "primary-secondary" scenario then, Proto-World can actually be the descendent of a sign language rather than some absurd "spontaneously generated spoken tongue", thereby potentially dating the origin of human language itself to the time of bipedalism when our hands were free to sign in the first place. So we're talking Australopithecus, not just early man. 
No need for "language organs", "ugh-ugh caveman" theories or Bible belt creationism.
--Glengordon01 21:28, 9 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: All of this and the preceding 2 talk sections sound more appropriate for Origin of language instead of Proto-World which refers to the specific reconstruction efforts of Ruhlen, etc. --JWB 21:50, 12 July 2006 (UTC)

text: JWB, you're confused. The very first sentence of this article reads plainly as "The term Proto-World language refers to the hypothetical, most recent common ancestor of all the world's languages [...]". It says nothing about Ruhlen or any particular person specifically in the intro. So, clearly then, this article is about general language origins, not about Ruhlen's career. Ruhlen didn't invent Proto-World; the concept of a proto-language of mankind has been a tale floating around for thousands of years (eg: Tower of Babel). --Glengordon01 02:58, 13 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, the idea of monogenesis of languages (or of people for that matter) goes back to Genesis and beyond, but the term "Proto-World" is a recent coinage referring to a specific hypothesis and attempts at reconstruction by Ruhlen, Sheveroshkin, etc. The introduction to this article should make that clear. Origin of language is obviously appropriate for general language origins, a nearly identical phrase. --JWB 08:40, 13 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Proto-World and the Evolution of Sign 

message: This article fails Wikipedia's NPOV policy as it's mostly related to an evolutionary point of view. Proto-World language is a widely accepted creationist idea, not an evolutionist one. Please refer to creationism and the adamic language for getting this article NPOVed --Arturo #7 20:24, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: We just went over this in the above section. Proto-World is the proposal by linguists like Ruhlen, and the term was coined by them. Creationist ideas of monogenesis use other terms like Adamic language, Babel, etc. If you want a term covering both classes of ideas, it's monogenesis. --JWB 22:27, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Proto-World language  

message: "One word that is supposed to be still existent among many languages quite similarly is the root of the word "water". Firstly, in Indo-European languages: Sanskrit "vaara", Russian "voda", German "Wasser", English "water" etc. In Finno-Ugric languages: Finnish "vesi", Estonian "vesi" (and "vedel" =wet), Hungarian "vizi"."
This is not a very convincing list, as it includes languages from just two recognized language families, IE and Uralic, which some believe to be related to each other anyway. Can anybody offer examples of "water" cognates from other language families, such as Afro-Asiatic, Sino-Tibetan, Austronesian, Niger-Congo, Na-Dene, Dravidian..... ? If not, it's probably bogus. --user:Cevlakohn 18 October 2006
:In fact, uralic and Indo-European families are closely related. It does not support the proto-world theory.--Nixer 18:26, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: You say that with quite a bit of assumed authority, considering that the Indo-Uralic connection is one that's disputed among experts-- either way, certainly not a "close" relation. Really, Nixer, do you have any idea what you're talking about? --User:Cevlakohn 19 October 2006
The word for "water" that's so often brought up in these contexts is the one NOT cognate to English "water", something like *akwa. So either way, I think that list of possible "cognates" (from two language families!) is completely out of place here. I removed it. --Miskwito 01:45, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Alleged "water" cognates 

message: This article is not well-structured and needs to be edited in this respect. The main problem is that it is not clearly stated in the beginning of the article that Proto-World is fringe science rejetced by an nearly all of comparative linguists. This should be stated already in the introduction, which now instead misleadingly states that the concept of Proto-World could be concidered somehow analogous to Proto-Indo-European - as if these two had the same order of validity. --AAikio 16:29, 4 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Major edit needed 

message: Is the fingerpaint-looking image of a tree really necessary? Maybe something more contextually relevant would be better.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.126.109.17 (talk) 12:20, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: no, it isn't. i just made the image as an impression what a language tree might look like if this hypothesis was true. now even i can't find in it, some of the language families currently in use... too large a subject... I have a "better" version (for personal use), but I strongly suspect it's any better by encyclopedic standards... 19:42, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Tree Image