Re: glossogenesis (was: Indo-European question)

At 3:18 pm -0400 18/6/01, Andreas Johansson wrote:
>Raymond Brown wrote:
[snip]
>>
>>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.
...and, I'm told, Neanderthal man had higher brain-to-body ratio.

>But there's a better argument. If we accept evolutionism, humans have
>developed from moncellular organisms that most certainly couldn't speak.
I don't think we need go back to monocellular organism.  We can get much
closer; no primates, other than Homo Sapiens has AFAIK evolved anything
comparable to human speech.  I'm not expert in this field, but I'm told
that chimps have mentalities comparable to five-year old kids; but
five-year old humans talk pretty fluently - no chimp does.

>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
Well, it depends one is defining "man".  I's assumed - wrongly, obviously -
that you were talking about human speech among Homo Sapiens.  If we include
all hominids, then we simply are in the realms of speculation, for as Lars
so rightly IMO wrote:
"If people want to talk about how some earlier homo not-quite-sapiens
spoke, the field is wide open. To my mind it's utterly uninteresting,
though. Just define that you're talking about people who were unable
to use this or that feature, and conclude that they didn't use it."

Certainly I've read this sort of circular argument nonsense with regard to
Homo (Sapiens) Neanderthalis.  We simply don't know nor, in the absence of
time travel, do I see how we can possibly know.
---------------------------------------------------------------

At 10:37 pm -0600 18/6/01, Tom Tadfor Little wrote:
[snip]
>This may be true, I suppose, but it arouses my suspicion. It's difficult to
>imagine where hard evidence would come from,
I agree - see my remark on time travel above.

>         and it reminds me a little too
>much of the "caveman talk" of pulp fiction and B movies, which probably
>owes its origin to Europeans talking creole with native peoples and
>assuming that the grammatical simplicity of the speech was a reflection of
>the "primitive minds" of those they were talking with.
Absolutely - I'm in 100% agreement with Tom on this.

>It seems more
>plausible to me that lexical growth and strategies for expressing
>relationships between words would evolve in tandem, and both have probably
>been with us for as far back as one cares to go. I'm having trouble
>imagining people saying things like "I walk house" for centuries or
>millennia, not knowing whether the speaker is walking to the house or from
>the house and so missing 50% of their appointments.   ;)
Yep - if Australopithecines did develop anything resembling speech, I'm
darn sure they didn't utter monosyllables like "me walk house"; of course
lexical growth & strategies for expressing them must've evolved in tandem.

And the genesis of speech is surely part & parcel of the genesis of
communication.  Even bees doing their "bee dance" in the hive communicate a
little more meaningfully than typical "caveman talk" of the B movies.

[snip]
>In
>fact, if the history of Indo-European languages over the last few millennia
>is any guide, one might judge the inflectional strategy to be more basic
>and the preposition/word order strategies to represent an evolutionary
>development that invites explanation.
Quite so.

Ray.



=========================================
A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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