Re: LANGUAGE LAWS

Nik Taylor wrote:

> Tommie Powell wrote:
> > A trade language abandons that approach, and lets its speakers express all
> > sorts of ideas very sloppily.  And the modern languages -- which IMO are
> > descended from trade languages -- have reduced that grammatical sloppiness
> > by adding layer upon layer of complexities (genders, cases, declensions,
> > etc.) that the Stone Age languages lacked.
>
> That's jumping to conclusions, don't you think?  I mean, there's so few
> "stone age" languages to study, and those that exist are mostly in
> certain areas, where areal features rule, thus what we're thinking are
> features of "stone age languages" may very well simply be features of
> those areas.  And most stone age languages *do* have genders, case,
> etc.  Besides, languages are so changeable that any language can, given
> enough time, become so radically different that its relationship is
> imperceptible, it can go from any combination of features to any other
> possible combination of features over enough time.
>
I agree that there are too few known Stone Age languages to generalize about them
without jumping to conclusions.  So we either have to ignore them altogether or
else decide which conclusions about them are worth jumping to.  And I don't think
we should ignore them, when the only natural languages that resemble computer
programming languages are languages of Stone Age people.

I agree that not all Stone Age people speak such languages.  In fact, it is quite
possible that, if we "Whites" had arrived in this region a few hundred years later
than we did, we may not have found any Stone Age languages here because, by then,
the Puget Sound Indians and neighboring tribes may have abandoned their tribal
languages and be speaking a language descended from the Chinook Jargon.

>
> > So
> > the Chinook Jargon's grammar cannot be due to European influence.  Yet its
> > grammar is very much like that of all other "pidgins" -- and very unlike the
> > grammar of the language of any tribe that shared that trade language!
>
> Also, you're mixing another theory in with that.  You state that this
> trade language shares many features with other pidgins around the
> world.  Of course, if the universal grammar theory is correct, that's
> *exactly* what you would expect.  If it has features in common with the
> European languages, perhaps that's merely suggestive of a pidginization
> of proto-Indo-European, rather than a common feature of "modern"
> languages (unless by "modern" you mean "European").
By "modern" languages, I mean the ones to which the "universal grammar theory"
applies.

And, yes, I do believe that Proto-Indo-European was a pidgin.

I think we know how any pidgin (trade language) gets created: The traders form its
vocabulary by borrowing some words from each other, and they form its grammar by
agreeing on a few sloppy rules that loosely guide how to string those words
together.  That way, they can learn the language in just a week or two.  Long
before the Whites got here, the Chinook Jargon's grammar was as complete as it
ever got and its vocabulary consisted of about 450 words.  The White traders only
added about 150 words to it.

-- Tommie