Re: LANGUAGE LAWS

Nik Taylor wrote:

> Tommie Powell wrote:
> > So I don't believe that the first language had any defined (or
> > definite) words
>
> The problem with your argument lies in crude sign languages created by
> deaf people isolated from other deaf people.  Before there was any deaf
> community, deaf people simply created a few crude signs, which their
> family could interpret.  They might have a sign for "food/eat" (note
> that when I said "a few nouns and verbs, I did not mean that they were
> necessarily differentiated, only that there were probably no words that
> functioned as adpositions, etc,), or "water/drink", and things like
> that.  These are *definite* words.  Note that I agree that there
> probably weren't words that were specifically nouns, or specifically
> verbs, I simply meant that the first words probably were noun/verbs,
> with few, if any, modifiers such as adjectives and adverbs, and probably
> no gramatical relations like adpositions.
Thanks for this clarification.  This makes it quite possible that we fully
agree about the nature of "the first words".

What you now call "noun/verbs", I prefer to continue to call "activity
words" (because such a word's multiple object/event aspects could not have
been segregated out until further grammatical developments arose to
facilitate that process).

What makes activity words ideally suited to be the first words is that an
activity word's meaning can be demonstrated -- an activity can be "acted
out" -- so that there's no need to define it in terms of other words and no
need to name (or even to point ambiguously toward) the various objects and
events that are essential elements of the activity.

>From my previous post, it should be obvious that I also agree with you that
there were "few, if any, modifiers such as adjectives and adverbs" in that
primordial stage of language development (since I gave an example of an
activity word evolving into such words).

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.  You mention sign
languages.  I'm somewhat familiar with American Sign Language, and it
certainly uses devices which could be likened to adpositions -- at least for
purposes of locating activities in time and space!  And it does seem to me
that activities cannot sensibly be spoken of, without locating them in time
and space.

-- Tommie