Re: Presentation on Language Creation

Tim May wrote:
>Christophe Grandsire writes:
>  >
>  > > i can just see someone ( real or fictional ) making a
>  > > whole academic career of trying to prove that some
>  > > isolate, say euskara, is actually the result of a
>  > > conlang/auxlang/lignua ignota of some social, racial
>  > > or religious group which subsequently gained currency
>  > > . . . ? !
>  > >
>  >
>  > I don't know why but Sumerian popped up in my mind when you mentioned
>that...
>  > Is it possible that someone spent his/her career trying to prove that
>Sumerian
>  > was actually an artificial language?
>  >
>  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 can't read the thing to many anything other than that Sumerian was
invented by previously speechless people during the Neolithic. And I do
agree the stuff appears pretty weird.

Tangentially, the author contrasts Sumerian vs "Eurasian". Does the later
term have linguistic meaning beyond the geographical? Sumerian, afterall,
was spoken in Eurasia.

                                          Andreas


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