Re: Presentation on Language Creation

En réponse à Roger Mills <romilly@...>:

>
> "Everyone knows" Sum. is a descendant of Ukrainian, or maybe it was
> vice-versa-- as was proposed in a website cited for amusement value on
> Cybalist a while back.  Cybalist was also the lucky recipient of posts
> from
> a certain Izzy Cohen (quickly banned) who, with incredible ingenuity,
> was
> able to prove that a great many common words in many languages of the
> world,
> descend from Hebrew.
>
He probably just copied everything from this book of the 17th century from E.
Guichard called "L'Harmonie étymologique des langues... issues de l'hébraïque"
where the author argues that all languages come from Hebbrew (reminiscent of
the story of Babel). He explained the evolution of languages as due to
additions, substractions and transpositions of letters due to the change of
direction of writing (from right to left for Hebbrew, from left to right for
any other language he considered). Not only this man thus forgot all the other
Semitic languages, which "kept" the "original" writing direction, or all those
other languages using different kinds of writing systems and which were already
known at that time. And of course, there's the deadly sin of confusing a
language with its written representation, but there he was just carrying on
with a tradition going back directly from the Greek grammarians
(since "grammata" means "written character" in Greek).

Those speculations are unfortunately as old as the world...

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

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