Re: OT: babel and english

On Tue, 21 Aug 2001, Roger Mills wrote:

> Interesting.  Weren't the Choctaw one of the mound-building tribes?
I haven't seen that suggested anywhere, but I do not know a lot about this
topic in particular. The homeland of the Choctaw (before the Trail of
Tears) is an area that has mounds.

  I seem
> to recall that that is believed to derive from Aztec influence; and the
> Aztecs probably got it from the Maya, early astronomers par
> excellence....???  A very distant, distorted idea of what mounds were for in
> the first place???
Could be. The mounds tend to be far away from Aztec lands though, so I
don't know how valid this hypothesis is.

> >The Choctaw story is a myth about the tribe's origin as well as why there
> >are other tribes and languages.
>
> Surely early people were not isolated, and would have been well aware that
> the folks in the next valley or across the bay etc. spoke differently.
Of course. Various groups had vastly different ways of accounting for
these differences as well.

The Maidu (I think) believe their language is the one that was spoken by
people who coyote gave fire to. He was unable to deliver fire to the other
tribes, and so they speak with their teeth chattering from the cold.

Other tribes of California believe that the Creator simply made the world
this way: there was no time in the past where everybody spoke the same
language. Talk about a lack of imagination. (just kidding)

The Mojave myths about language are interesting, because the people had a
say in how they spoke. The Creator presented them with a set of words
three or four times before the people actually accepted them. One set they
were unable to pronounce (though they seem to pronounce them in telling
the myth), and one set had more than ten numbers and was therefore
unusuable (my personal favorite). I don't recall what the third problem
was, if there was one. I wonder if the rejected sets of words are from
neighboring languages. It would be interesting to see.

Marcus Smith

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