Re: Presentation on Language Creation

En réponse à Tim May <butsuri@...>:

>  >
>  Now, I've never seen anything specifically claiming that Sumerian was
>  a conlang, but this
> http://www.sumerian.org/prot-sum.htm
>
>  does seem to me to imply that the author thinks both Proto-Sumerian
>  and PIE were created by people who were previously without language.
>  You have to scroll down a bit to get to the strange parts.  I may be
>  misinterpreting this, of course.
>
I remember reading this nonsense a few years ago. It basically follows Plato's
idea of the cavern, as well as 18th century's philosophers' ideas, who were a
bit uneasy with the apparent arbitrariness of language (the fact that there
isn't any meaningful connection between the sound of a word and its meaning)
and thus posited that the original language *had* this meaningful connection
between sound and meaning, and that time destroyed it (most of them believed
that by hubris, men decided to add and/or substract sounds from words to make
them more "beautiful", thus loosing the original sound-meaning connection). The
whole philosophical language movement of that time came from people trying
to "rediscover" this forgotten original tongue.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.