NAT/CONLANG: "Lone gene linked to language skills"(wasRe: Is "ma" Proto-World? )

interesting article: <A
HREF="http://www.emailthis.clickability.com/et/emailThis?clickMap=viewThis&etM

ailToID=544408082&pt=Y"> *  FOXP2 "language" Gene</A>

    On a semi-related note... the poet Gary Snyder said languages are
"naturally evolved wild systems..."
    Snyder goes onto say: "So language does not impose order on a
chaotic universe, but reflects its own wildness back."

    Sooo... I hafta say we ConLangers are involved in wild (&, sometimes,
wooly) bio-lingua-engineering ;)

en memo 2003:01:29 04.49.25 gozen (a.m.), Tristan (kesuari@YAHOO.COM.AU)
graffii:

> [ . . . ] If a natlang does it, it must be alright. Let's have a
>sometimes rhyme-and-reasonless evolutionary pattern! [ . . . ]
    ! ij-ij --- raadzj'r dat!  (Aye-Aye, rodger that!)

    Language[s] change[s]: vowels shift, phonologies crash-&-burn, grammars
leak, morpho-syntactics implode, lexico-semantics mutate, lexicons explode,
orthographies reform, typographies blip-&-beep, slang flashes, stylistics
warp... linguistic (R)evolutions mark each-&-every quantum leap...

    In _The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language_ by John McWhorter,
McWhorter writes:
    "... Like animals and plants, languages change, split into subvarieties,
hybridize, revivify, evolve functionless features, and can even be
genetically altered [YiPPie!]. The analogy continues in that languages, like
animals and plants, can go extinct [ :/] ."
    McWhorter goes on with "rather gruesome predictions," writing:
    "... By one reasonable estimate, ninety percent of the world's languages
will be dead by 2100 - that is, about fifty-five hundred full, living
languages will no longer be spoken about 1,125 months from when you are
reading this [2001]. As David Crystal puts it, this means that a language is
dying roughly every two weeks....
    To illustrate the "massive loss" this extinction would create, McWhorter
writes:
    "... The current situation is as if, in Europe, Albanian, Frisian,
Romanian, Basque, Catalan, Occitan, Welsh, Lithuanian, Latvian, and Irish and
Scottish Gaelic were no longer spoken, and meanwhile only English, German,
and Russian were still being passed on to children, with Swedish, Norwegian,
Danish, Icelandic, Dutch, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese,
Serbo-Croatian, Macedonian, Polish, Bulgarian, Finnish, Estonian and
Hungarian only spoken by very old people, viewed as 'quaint' and backward by
young people jetting around in sports cars."
    Elsewhere, McWhorter writes:
    "... In view of modern realities [global economy, technology, mass media,
"Global Pop Culture," Coke-Cola-onization, etc.] ... a great many languages
now technically alive will not be saved...."

    Gwerra Legoset Kaka! Riis'rva, Salva, Riikuu, Skopa-gomii aen Riizijklo!
    (Fight Linguistic Waste! Save, Salvage, Recover, Scavenge and Recycle!)

_Some Languages Are Crushed to Powder but Rise Again as New Ones_
    - title of the chapter on pidgins and creoles in
_The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language_ by John McWhorter, 2001 CE

Hanuman Zhang, _Gomi no sensei_ [Master of junk]

€º°`°º€ø,¸¸,ø€º°`°º€ø,¸¸,ø€º°`°º€ø,¸¸,ø€º°`°º€ø,¸¸,ø€º°`°º€€º°`°º€ø,¸~->

    "To live is to scrounge, taking what you can in order to survive. So,
since living is     scrounging, the result of our efforts is to amass a pile
of rubbish."
                            - Chuang Tzu/Zhuangzi, China, 4th Century BCE

    "The most beautiful order is a heap of sweepings piled up at random."
                            - Heraclitus, Greece, 5th Century BCE

    Ars imitatur Naturam in sua operatione.
    [Latin > "Art is the imitation of Nature in her manner of operation."]

    " jinsei to iu mono wa, kinchou na geijyutsu to ieru deshou "
    [Japanese > "one can probably say that 'life' is a precious artform"]

    "Art should be something that liberates your soul." - Keith Haring

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