Re: Dune Conlang

"Thomas R. Wier" wrote:

> > But ... populations were much smaller, which tends to slow
> > language innovation, so I wonder, thinking of the Austronesian
> > family which is probably (?) much older than Semitic and PIE,
> > if some isolated remaining dialects of it show some unusually
> > "time-deep" commonalities?
>=20
> Like what?  Certainly, the commonalities may exist, but as for
> their importance to us, they only exist insofar as we can prove
> they exist.  At some point, IMO it simply becomes impossible
> to distinguish the data that are similar because logical relations
> make them likely to appear in any language, those that are similar
> because of the hypothesized inbuilt biological language mechanisms
> that may exist, and those that exist simply because the synchronic
> form of the language inherited them from its ancestor.  All the more
> so, since any or all three of those phenomena could be affecting
> the data at any given period.
All true. But the rate of change may possibly be exceptionally
slow in some cases, fossilizing some of the features. The standard
example is Icelandic, a mere 1000 years old. But, perhaps some
mountain tribe in Taiwan preserved the same set of pronouns as,
uh, Tasmanian (they're extinct, I think), modulo a regular set
of phonetic changes. Two other groups might preserve some
set of words. 10000 years may be simply too far to preserve
*anything*, but one can still hope.

> > Or maybe rock paintings with a
> > similar ordering of motifs suggestive of a linguistic analogy?
> > Kinda far-fetched.
>=20
> Yeah, I'd say so.  How is one to say that right-to-left
> is the correct interpretation is correct, rather than left-to-right
> or some variation of a palaeoboustrophedon?  Or, like
> Dal=ED, whether structure has any meaning at all?
You've heard of the problem of marking a nuclear waste disposal site?
The US gov't actually called in some anthropologists, IIRC.

> It really all depends on the data, but I'd say that without strong
> empirical evidence saying so, who knows?
Right. I'm just speculating.

--=20
As they say in Tepa: hike waipettu.