Re: glossogenesis (was: Indo-European question)

Raymond Brown wrote:
>
>At 9:23 pm +0000 17/6/01, Lars Henrik Mathiesen wrote:
> >> Date:         Sun, 17 Jun 2001 12:46:54 -0400
> >> From: Andreas Johansson <and_yo@...>
> >>
> >> In most articles etc that I've read on the genesis of human speech th
>author
> >> seems to assume that "Proto-World" was isolating, and did at the
>earliest
> >> stage lack any means for expressing number, case, tense etc - it'd've
> >> consisted only of stems strung together to form rough sentences, along
>the
> >> lines of "I hunt fox"="I hunt/hunted/will hunt fox(es)".
>
>"Me Tarzan - you Jane."
>
>I think not.  Just popular modern mythology.  Moderns like to think that
>they are so wise and all preceeding generations are less so; the further
>back, the more stupid - therefore primitive man couldn't possibly handle
>"grammar".
One problem with that - the arguments for primitive man* being stupid are
quite good. The Australopithecines had smaller brains than us, they had less
complex brains than us, they had a lower brain-to-body ratio than us, and
despite existing for millions of years they only ever developed a dozen or
so different tools.

But there's a better argument. If we accept evolutionism, humans have
developed from moncellular organisms that most certainly couldn't speak.
Somewhere along this line of evolution speech arose. Either is arose in a
single miraculous event, or it somehow developed from simpler forms. The
later seems, to me, more likely.

                                               Andreas

* 'Course, you can define "man" as only including modern Homo sapiens (or
perhaps all H. sapiens if you're confident postulating that the archaic
varieties had the same intellectual capabilities as the modern version), but
that's rather beside the point.
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