Re: Age of langs (was Tempus)

>From: David Peterson <DigitalScream@...>
>Reply-To: Constructed Languages List <CONLANG@...>
>To: CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU
>Subject: Re: Age of langs (was Tempus)
>Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2001 04:20:28 EST
>
>      Then how come you can distinguish Old English from Old German?
We-ell take a 9th century OE text and a 9th century OHG text and I think
you'll see! :-)

Of course, if you go far back enough you can't distinguish them cause they
evolved from the same ancestor. Go even farther back and you can't
distinguish it from the earlier forms of Hindu either, since you've got back
to PIE. Even farther and you can't distinguish it form
Proto-Proto-Proto-Proto Arabic either if certain versions of Nostratic is to
be believed. But this is obvious, I should think.

An important point here is that langs are fluid. A large modern lang like
English is fairly well-defined, but at the edges you'll find strange
pidgins, odd creolized forms, abtruse dialects, extreme slang and
nigh-incomprehensible mixes where you find yourself unable to decide just
what's "English" and what's not. It's even worse with German where the
northwestern dialects morph into Dutch without any lingustic border. So
language-names are, by necessity, pragmatic, somewhat arbitrary terms that
we use before they're helpful. In PRINCIPLE there may be only one lang
(everything's only different dialects of Proto-World) or billions of langs
(at the very least one per human), but that's not very helpful so we'll
stick to the traditional, useful designations.

                                                         Andreas

_________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.