Re: LANGUAGE LAWS

Tommie Powell wrote:
> I may or may not agree with you that there were "probably no grammatical
> relations like adpositions" during the primordial stage of language
> development.  I'm not sure what you mean by that.
I was thinking of a primitive communication system which was something
like young children's speach, especially at the two-word stage.  Of
course, this is assuming that language evolved slowly, and I'm beginning
to doubt that.  Quite possibly, language appeared suddenly, the very
first generation might have had something like a pidgin, without many
gramatical indications (in the same way that creoles do, by taking
lexical words and using them as adpositions, e.g., in many
English-lexified creoles, belong = of), but the second generation
would've taken that and turned it into a full-blown language (that is,
once humans were capable of language, it appeared full-blown), with
probably explosive growth for several generations, i.e., the first
generation might have had a few hundred words, the second generation
might have increased that by a few more hundred, and so on.  So, the
first language might have had a few hundred root words, with tons of
derived words, or perhaps words were being randomly formed.  Nicaraguan
Sign Language is a great example of what I'm thinking about, a language
which appeared literally out of nothing, and became a full-scale
language in two generations.

Alternately, perhaps the first language was taught to us by God Himself
(a divine Conlang?).  :-)  Who knows?

--
"It's bad manners to talk about ropes in the house of a man whose father
was hanged." - Irish proverb
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