And here’s one for the linguists!


If you’ve ever been curious about the intelligent design of language, here’s a new one for you: Edenics.

Here you will discover that ALL human words contain forms of the Edenic roots within them. These proto-Semitic or early Biblical Hebrew words were programmed into our common ancestors, Adam and Eve, before the language dispersion, or babble at the Tower of Babel — which kickstarted multi-national human history.

Oh, joy. They’re after all of our sciences.

Comments

  1. says

    These guys seem to forget that at least 7 languages predate this supposed Tower of Babel, and that any linguistic rule conceived is violated by at least one language.

  2. Stephen says

    Don’t be silly. The only science creationists dispute is evolution. Well, and astronomy. And geology. And archeology. And history. And paleontology. And meteorology. Even chemistry and physics, since they try to argue the basis of radiometric dating.

    And now linguistics. But that’s it. Other than that, creationists are A-OK with science.

  3. Richard Harris says

    Let me get this straight. Are they saying that in 6 000 years, languages as different as Mandarin, Basque, Swahili, & Greek evolved from a common ancestor? Jumpin’ Jeezus, there’s that goddam evolution word! How’d that get allowed?

  4. Grumpy says

    Richard Harris… If I understand Wrathful Dispersion theory correctly, languages didn’t “evolve,” they were created ex nihilo and put into the mouths of the Babel builders as they scattered across the world. It seems in addition to decorating beetles and butterfly wings as a hobby, Jehovah had a knack for code-building.

    “…which kickstarted multi-national human history…”

    …Even after, say, the separate nation of Egypt had built pyramids prior to Noah’s flood, which predated the Tower of Babel.

  5. SJN says

    Now that we know the real source of the word “paradise” (from the Avestan pairidaezan for walled garden) all those Indo-European linguists won’t have to waste so much time trying to find the location of the Urheimat.

  6. Richard Harris says

    Come off it, Grumpy, Wrathful Dispersion Theory is just Babelism. The Disperser is not identified as God, but it’s gotta be the same one that does the Intelligent Designing. I mean, the cock-ups in any language’s grammar (such as irregular verbs) parallels the cock-ups in human physiology, such as the prostate gland’s positioning.

  7. 386sx says

    I thought the Wrathful Dispersion thing was a joke like the Spaghetti Monster and all that. I guess not! Wonderful…

  8. says

    You think you’ve got it bad!? A spider’s esophagus runs through its brain! If its brain were to expand it would starve to death! (Luckily for us…)

    I read it in a book of Isaac Asimov’s essays, so it must be true.

  9. says

    I followed an interesting link the other day and ended up here. The following snippet:

    The Roman Numeral system and its mathematical limitation would not have allowed us to develop such a level of math complexity required for us to create/invent much of what we have today, including computers. Yet at the introduction of the Hindu-Arabic Decimal system, such potential creations/inventions were not even imagined.

    seems to support the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, at least in the special case of mathematical language.

    I also (in a quite unrelated part of the same discussion) found a way here, which made me think of the principles behind Newspeak.

    The way certain phrases are constructed and used (such as “binge drinking” and “illegal immigrants”) takes advantage of the way that, in English, we put the adjective before the noun and we put the given name before the family name. When we hear a family name (such as “Dawkins”) alone, we unconsciously associate a given name (such as “Richard”) with it; and by the same token, people unconsciously insert adjectives in front of bare nouns. The end effect is that we come to see any drinking as binge-drinking, and any immigrant as an illegal immigrant.

  10. Steven Pinker's Awesome Hair says

    From that site:

    “I congratulate you for investigating for yourself if language is an engineered miracle or merely the evolved gesturing of chimps.”

    Here in a single sentence is everything that annoys me about creationists. Aside from the utter misunderstanding of human evolution (chimps -> humans), the notion that being an evolved species (as opposed to a “miraculously engineered” one) somehow diminishes the awesome grandeur of life.

    Once you have even a basic understanding of evolution and the mechanism of natural selection, I don’t see how one can AVOID seeing all life as sacred. I remember when I was in my teens I read something Carl Sagan wrote, saying something along the lines that every living thing is part of an unbroken chain of life that extends back billions of years, all the way back to the very first replicating life form on the planet. I had never really considered it that way before, but the more I thought about it, the more ENORMOUS it seemed.

    In fact, the idea that some sort of god poofed us into existence to live for a short time on earth where things frequently suck major ass (as though it’s some sort of waiting room we have to sit in before we die and get on with the Good Stuff That Lasts Forever) makes life seem far more pointless and trivial. For me at least, the knowledge that this life is most likely the only one I get is what makes me struggle to make the next day better than the last. If I thought I was going to end up in Celestial Disneyland at the end of it all, I don’t think I’d care about much of anything.

  11. says

    Wow.

    You know when folk are believing some weird shit when it’s getting harder and harder to distinguish real from parody.

    And I’m sorry, but Carl Wieland is being a dick stupid if he really can’t see that the initial step — animal grunts and gestures giving way to more complex words — could have happened several times in parallel among disparate, geographically-isolated tribes. If not everybody was ever speaking the same language to begin with (and there’s no reason to assume they would have been), then there was no need for any dispersion effect. I honestly don’t see how anybody that monumentally stupid could so much as manage to breathe, so I’m tempted to say he must be deliberately being full of shit disingenuous.

  12. Sideways says

    Sounds like someone read Snow Crash with a little too much credulity…

    This is close kin to another absurdity of Biblical literalism that occurred to me recently, the problem of technological development. According to the Bible, early humans went from naked, illiterate hunter-gatherers to agricultural city-dwellers in a single generation (Genesis 4:17).

    The biological, geological, astronomical etc. ridiculousness of young earth creationism is well documented, but I’ve never seen anyone point out how anthropologically preposterous it is to claim that four people managed to come up with technologies from fire and the wheel to agriculture and architecture.

  13. ahunt says

    Okay…so what about written language?

    Are the symbols representing “proto-Semitic or early Biblical Hebrew words” also the foundation for say…written Korean?

    Sigh.

  14. WTFWJD says

    Okay, I got it now. God is ultimately responsible for Welsh spellings, and that makes God the Devil Himself.

  15. Arden Chatfield says

    I mean, the cock-ups in any language’s grammar (such as irregular verbs) parallels the cock-ups in human physiology, such as the prostate gland’s positioning.

    Wrong. Irregular verbs are a result of The Fall, just like T-Rexes switching from their coconut diet to meat eating.

  16. ahunt says

    Actually Stanton, I just picked a language out of midair, but I am reminded of a DOOMED attempt by my Aunt Reiko to teach me some rudimentary written japanese many years ago.

    Where in Edenics are questions regarding written language addressed? Or has not this “science” grappled with such questions?

  17. gus steeves says

    Ironically, these nuts are probably right in the sense that there was almost certainly a base language for the first group of modern humans to leave Africa around 70K years ago. Humans were speaking long before that, but I suspect whatever that group spoke would resemble Hebrew no more than it would resemble English or Korean. If in fact Stephen Oppenheimer is right in The Real Eve (see the genetic map) and those folks first crossed via southern Arabia, Palestine would’ve been a comparatively recently discovered region, therefore its languages would’ve been a more recent vintage and not a source tongue.

  18. BaldApe says

    “Oh, joy. They’re after all of our sciences.”

    Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it?

    For instance, my brother told me about a friend of his who “explained” the fact that we can see objects farther away than 6000 light years by saying that maybe the speed of light is different in interstellar space.

    The just don’t understand that it all works together, and if you change one part of it…

    Oh shit! that’s irreducible complexity, isn’t it?

  19. KC says

    So to illustrate this, they have, ‘eSHKoL’ in ‘Edenics.’ ‘SCHooL’ in english, ‘éCoLe’ in French, and ‘eSCueLa’ in Spanish. I’m very curious where `elitnaurvik` fits into this pattern.

    Assikaa = Adore? Hmm. I guess the HDR thing doesn’t work when you lack Rs. And Ds. That’s unfair.

    Okay, MaSaKH = MaSK = Avangcaq? Oh, yes, I’m seeing the edenic roots now!

  20. Crosius says

    So the same god who very carefully concealed all evidence of his creation behind false carbon dating and careful variation of the speed of light botched the business of confusing mankind’s languages badly enough that we can easily find evidence of his meddling?

    Why did he so carefully conceal one and not the other?

    Oh, I forgot: God’s ways are mysterious.

  21. Lunacrous says

    For instance, my brother told me about a friend of his who “explained” the fact that we can see objects farther away than 6000 light years by saying that maybe the speed of light is different in interstellar space.

    Sounds like someone has been reading Rene’s Last Skeptic of Science, a pamphlet made entirely of brain poison. Ugh.

  22. kcanadensis says

    #8:
    I would like to officially exclude English from the list of “intelligently” designed languages…

  23. noodlesoup says

    SERIOUS QUESTION

    I’m confused as to what exactly the Intelligent Design asserts as a hypothesis. Correct me if I’m wrong – IDiots are Old Earth Creationists who partially accept Progressive Creationism in conjunction with a modified Baraminology (created kinds). Thus, according to the IDiot hypothesis the designer created adam&eve proto-bird-kind which subsequently ‘evolved’ into all the various modern bird species. Likewise adam&eve proto-dog-kind and adam&eve proto-fish-kind, However, human man&women were created recently as a modern non-evolved species. Is this correct? Do the IDiots assert that the designer created a adam&eve proto-dinosaur-kind that is now extinct? Do they assign rough dates to the miraculous appearance of each ‘created kind’ that corresponds with some part of the fossil evidence? For example, do they assert that adam&eve proto-dinosaur-kind was created by the designer roughly 230 million years ago, adam&eve proto-bird-kind roughly 70 million years ago, and adam&eve proto-dog-kind roughly 40 million years ago? I would assume then that any ‘link’ fossils, say between dinosaurs and birds are explained away as odd deformities caused by disease? Is this a correct assessment or have I gotten Intelligent Design completely wrong?

  24. Fernando Magyar says

    http://www.tbm.org/tongues.htm

    “Many people inaccurately define speaking in tongues as “speaking gibberish” or “talking nonsense.” The truth is, speaking in tongues is the most intelligent, perfect language in the universe. It is God’s language.”

    Edenics can’t possibly top that so who gives a rodent’s anal orifice about it.

  25. Sastra, OM says

    “I congratulate you for investigating for yourself if language is an engineered miracle or merely the evolved gesturing of chimps.”

    Steven Pinker’s Awesome Hair #18 wrote:

    Here in a single sentence is everything that annoys me about creationists.

    You forgot to mention the annoying thing in the beginning of the sentence: the congratulations given to those ordinary folk with no background or expertise in a subject for “investigating for themselves.” Just poking around on your own is the very best way to be sufficiently prepared to debunk an entire discipline (or series of disciplines) and outsmart all the “experts.”

    Don’t let other people tell you what to think just because they’ve spent lifetimes working in the area and have put it all through a rigorous vetting process! Arrive at your conclusion independently, by weighing all the sides equally, and then make up your own mind. That’s what God gave it to you for! And why He made it all so easy!

  26. Ex-drone says

    Mark Liberman writes:

    This strikes me as crank etymology with a religious overlay, rather than a serious attempt at rationalizing the linguistic aspects of Genesis.

    Of course it is. All fundies know that the original language of Eden was English. After all, the English KJV is the inspired, authoritative version. Perhaps, Hebrew only seems similar to English because it stems from it. In fact, perhaps, the circular rediscovery of English explains the “blessed” nature of the US and presages the End Times. There you go. Who needs valid research when you can just make gut-feel conjectures.

  27. Sastra, OM says

    noodlesoup #35 asked:

    Is this a correct assessment or have I gotten Intelligent Design completely wrong?

    I think you’ve gotten it wrong by putting in too much detail. As far as I can tell, ID has no model. They don’t ever give any broad overview. They leave that up in the air.

    Mostly, ID ists just pick out details here and there which they say could not have evolved, either because of irreducible complexity or it’s just too, too improbable. The rest of it can be standard science. This way, you can accept almost all of evolution and reserve nothing but the flagella of a bacteria as a special miracle of God. Or you can think it was all specially created — except when it was allowed to run on its own.

    The Young Earth Creationists at least have a model. ID — which is presumably less “radical” — does not. Which, ironically, makes it even less scientific on that level.

  28. Numad says

    “They’re still trying that, huh? I thought that went by the wayside in the 1980’s.”

    I thought it was in the gutter in Voltaire’s day.

  29. says

    Hmmm. A lot of English words come from the Latin, or from languages that descended from Latin, so I propose that the original language of people was Latin. We’re all Romans!

    Seriously, there are a lot of English words that come from Arabic, which is a Semitic language, so maybe they have something there ;)

  30. Rita Bennett says

    A book, The Key, by John Phillip Cohane, has an interesting twist on the origin and dispersion of language. His explanation of the word, “havoc” has stayed in my mind for more than thirty years.

    Is this book familiar to anyone else?

  31. says

    I just recently ran across something similar and probably related. It was a site showing how Chinese characters ‘prove’ that the bible is true.

    Can’t seem to make working links anymore but if you look up
    ‘bible chinese characters proof’ on google you will find a boatload of sites.

  32. Wolf Logan says

    Fortunately, a couple years ago a wonderful book was published that described in loving (and easily understood) detail the evolutionary forces on human language. Linguistic evolution isn’t as widely understood as biologic evolution, so I was very happy to recently discover this book.

    http://theunfoldingoflanguage.com/

  33. Yog-Sothoth says

    R’lyehian was created by God?! Sheesh, who woulda thought? Sigh…now I gotta rewrite the lecture I’m giving at Miskatonic U next week…

  34. JIm Thomerson says

    To go off on a little tangent. I am sure many of you discovered the Burroughs books at a tender age. Some folks did not, and that is why their brains failed to develop properly. Tarzan’s first language was the language of the apes (no known species). This is the basic language and is understood by all animals. Because of his knowledge of ape language, Tarzan is able to very quickly learn any language he encounters. I’ve never counted them up, but Tarzan surely knows more languages than did the late Pope John.

  35. David Marjanović, OM says

    Okay…so what about written language?

    Are the symbols representing “proto-Semitic or early Biblical Hebrew words” also the foundation for say…written Korean?

    In fact, yes. Hangeul comes from an ingenious reinterpretation of Phagspa, which comes from Tibetan, which comes from Brahmi, which comes from Aramaic. The alphabet was invented one single time — probably as the use of a few selected one-consonant hieroglyphs by Egyptian bureaucrats to write Semitic names.

    Writing in general, of course, is a different matter. The Chinese characters, for example, were invented on the spot. (Hiragana and katakana, though, are vastly simplified selections of Chinese characters.)

  36. David Marjanović, OM says

    Okay…so what about written language?

    Are the symbols representing “proto-Semitic or early Biblical Hebrew words” also the foundation for say…written Korean?

    In fact, yes. Hangeul comes from an ingenious reinterpretation of Phagspa, which comes from Tibetan, which comes from Brahmi, which comes from Aramaic. The alphabet was invented one single time — probably as the use of a few selected one-consonant hieroglyphs by Egyptian bureaucrats to write Semitic names.

    Writing in general, of course, is a different matter. The Chinese characters, for example, were invented on the spot. (Hiragana and katakana, though, are vastly simplified selections of Chinese characters.)

  37. David Marjanović, OM says

    Because of his knowledge of ape language, Tarzan is able to very quickly learn any language he encounters.

    And just to elevate the mildly amusing to the level of the incredibly hilarious, Tarzan has taught himself English by teaching himself to read! TSIB.

  38. David Marjanović, OM says

    Because of his knowledge of ape language, Tarzan is able to very quickly learn any language he encounters.

    And just to elevate the mildly amusing to the level of the incredibly hilarious, Tarzan has taught himself English by teaching himself to read! TSIB.

  39. says

    Noodlesoup (#35):

    I think Baraminology only considers divergence that has happened since Noah’s flood. It tries to infer what kinds of organisms were on the ark by grouping similar species into ‘baramins’. For example, they ask how many different snake baramins must the ark have carried to account for all the kinds of snakes alive today. I guess Noah and family must have diverged into all the different kinds of people, but not into different species.

    Species that were created or diverged before the flood but that didn’t make it onto the ark are not represented in modern organisms. So I guess dinosaurs were one or more baramins that god didn’t want to save from the flood.

  40. says

    I think Baraminology only considers divergence that has happened since Noah’s flood. It tries to infer what kinds of organisms were on 电炉
    电磁流量计
    填料
    接近开关the ark by grouping similar species into ‘baramins’. For example, they ask how many different snake baramins must the ark have carried to account for all the kinds of snakes alive today. I guess Noah and family must have diverged into all the different kinds of people, but not into different species

  41. craig says

    And yet why do I suspect many of these same people are the ones who get angry because they now have the option to press 2 for Spanish?

  42. Tim says

    #53

    David, are you sure about that? I have been given to understand that hangul was based on the shape of the mouth when making various sounds. Written Tibetan is based on the Sanskrit devanagri which while phonetic does not attempt to graph actual sounds.

    Just FYI, while I am not a linguist I am a functional speaker of Korean and a first year student of Sanskrit. Who may nonetheless be mistaken.

  43. Tulse says

    “First they came for the evolutionary biologists, but I just argued for framing since I wasn’t an evolutionary biologist. Then they came for the astrophysicists…then the geologists…then the linguists…”

  44. Kutsuwamushi says

    #53

    You’re right. All of my respectable references on Korean writing (among them “The World’s Writing Systems” and Sampson’s “Writing Systems”) agree that Hangeul was based on a phonological analysis of the Korean at the time. The theories that it was derived from another script are only mentioned to point out that they’re not widely accepted.

    The nail in the coffin of the other theories was the discovery of the Hunmin Jeongeum Haerye in the 1940s.

  45. Azkyroth says

    I’m confused as to what exactly the Intelligent Design asserts as a hypothesis.

    As far as I can see, the source of your confusion is the assumed premise of this question.

  46. Chemist says

    Following several links from the Edenics page, one finds this little gem:

    © Bibi Baxter, England 2007

    THE MYSTERY OF IMMACULATE CONCEPTION

    A Theory by Bibi Baxter

    Immaculate conception was almost certainly achieved with the use of combined technologies. Every part of the body has a different range of frequencies. It is possible to activate parts of the body, using this method, e.g. the bladder can be made to work, the stomach can be made to produce more or less acid, etc. In Mary’s case, parthenogenesis occurred. The ovaries were made to produce an egg, which was fertilized with another of her eggs. When an egg is fertilized in this way, the child is infertile.

    (more to be added at a later date)

  47. Moses says

    The ovaries were made to produce an egg, which was fertilized with another of her eggs. When an egg is fertilized in this way, the child is infertile.

    (more to be added at a later date)

    Posted by: Chemist | January 1, 2008 8:47 PM

    Jesus was a woman? Because there is a decided lack of Y chromosome there.

  48. raven says

    The ovaries were made to produce an egg, which was fertilized with another of her eggs. When an egg is fertilized in this way, the child is infertile.

    I don’t believe this is true. Parthenogenesis has been seen in reptiles, fish, and turkeys. Anyone who can’t figure out that two eggs fusing will yield a female probably can’t be counted on to know much about parthenogenesis either.

  49. Wolf Logan says

    (pointless nitpicking follows:)

    The “Immaculate Conception” refers to the story of how Mary was conceived, following the doctrine that she was “without Original Sin.” Jesus’ story is referred to as the “Virginal Conception” or the “Virgin Birth”.

    I would suspect that an understanding of parthenogenesis might be a little bit much to expect from someone who can’t even keep their own mythology straight.

  50. RamblinDude says

    “Because of his knowledge of ape language, Tarzan is able to very quickly learn any language he encounters.”

    And just to elevate the mildly amusing to the level of the incredibly hilarious, Tarzan has taught himself English by teaching himself to read! TSIB.

    IIRC, he thought the letters of the alphabet in his school book were little bugs, and he still managed to get it right. (And he had never even heard of a “spelling bee”!)

    After he taught himself to read, when he encountered his first Englishman he could understand English if the message was written on paper but not if spoken!

    Here you will discover that ALL human words can be written down, proving that hieroglyphics came first, before spoken language. Isn’t the Word of God, the Holy Bible, communication in writing? You see, It was only after eating from the tree of knowledge that Adam and eve were able to communicate with spoken words. (I could go on all night, making up stuff is fun)

  51. Jim Thomerson says

    Tarzan’s first spoken human language was French, even though he could read and write English. He learned from a Frenchman who did not feel competent to teach him to speak English.

  52. Interrobang says

    And here I was thinking that the proto-Semitic languages drew on other even earlier languages… At least that’s what the letter chart (organised by script and time) in my Hebrew textbook shows. Speaking as someone with some amount of linguistic chops, the phrase “not even wrong” springs to mind.

    ‘eSHKoL’, huh? Yeah, that sure looks like “beit-sefer” to me. Could it be “ouniversitah” instead? How ’bout (to completely switch languages) “gakko” or “daigaku”? Mhh, similarities abound!

    On the other hand, I’d believe that maybe something akin to S*K*L was a hypothetical Indo-European root word. Which makes me wonder if the person who wrote this isn’t one of those white supremacist sort of people who think that the Bible was about white, European type people, if you know what I mean.

  53. Sophist, FCD says

    Ok, seriously? You’re supporting your crazy theory that all the languages in the world have the same root by comparing Spanish, French and English? Half of English is French, and from the perspective of someone who speaks, say, Mandarin, Spanish and French are practically identical.

    This is ten gallons of stupid in a five gallon asshat.

  54. Kimpatsu says

    この「イデニックス」という概念は絶対にナンセンスです。
    There. Let’s see an Edenicsist(?) translate that.

  55. Venger says

    “The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that
    English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow
    words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways
    to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”
    –James D. Nicoll

    That about covers the value of trying to use English to judge the relatedness of languages.

  56. says

    You’re right. All of my respectable references on Korean writing (among them “The World’s Writing Systems” and Sampson’s “Writing Systems”) 电炉
    电磁流量计
    填料
    接近开关
    除尘器
    袋式除尘器gree that Hangeul was based on a phonological analysis of the Korean at the time. The theories that it was derived from another script are only mentioned to point out that they’re not widely accepted

  57. roystgnr says

    These guys are just making stuff up. Any true scholar of Adamic knows that the only surviving words are “Pay Lay Ale”, which means “Oh God, hear the words of my mouth” or “Being ‘Prophet’ has awesome perks” depending on whom you ask.

  58. Azkyroth says

    この「イデニックス」という概念は絶対にナンセンスです。
    There. Let’s see an Edenicsist(?) translate that.

    Or how about this message?

  59. Peter Barber says

    Вся ваша наука принадлежат нам!

    This is weird. I don’t know Russian, and yet I just know what this means… it must be the vestiges of Edenic programming! Praise the Lord!

  60. The green frog says

    “ALL human words contain forms of the Edenic roots within them…”

    My basque friend is still laughing from that…

  61. grinch says

    I suppose languages have only undergone micro evolution since babel. And of course those mutations didn’t add any new information.

  62. arachnophilia says

    maybe the edenics people can explain why “me” in hebrew is “who” in english, and “who” in hebrew is “he” in english, and “he” in hebrew is “she” in english.

  63. ndt says

    My BA in Linguistics is probably sufficient to tear apart this “theory”, but it would be far more entertaining to hear Noam Chomsky do it.

  64. says

    Forgive me, but Edenics is, without a shred of doubt, the dumbest fucking thing I’ve ever heard of.

    Then again, I suppose it was only a matter of time before these god-soaked retards started lying about language. I mean, they literally lie about everything else, so why not?

    I suppose this is just further proof that religion is the short bus to loony-town. What’s next for these assholes? God invented the pencil? Food stamps? Plasma TV’s?

    Seriously, man. Reading this Edenics nonsense just makes me want to throttle the life out of these supposed “scholars.” I can’t imagine anyone with the slightest shred of integrity endorsing this half-cocked collection of lunacy.

  65. David Marjanović, OM says

    David, are you sure about that? I have been given to understand that hangul was based on the shape of the mouth when making various sounds.

    It is based on the interpretation of four Phagspa letters as indicating the shape of the mouth, and building on that.

    Source

    You’re right. All of my respectable references on Korean writing (among them “The World’s Writing Systems” and Sampson’s “Writing Systems”) agree that Hangeul was based on a phonological analysis of the Korean at the time. The theories that it was derived from another script are only mentioned to point out that they’re not widely accepted.

    The nail in the coffin of the other theories was the discovery of the Hunmin Jeongeum Haerye in the 1940s.

    But read that one again. Written in Classical Chinese, it says Hangeul is derived from “the ancient seal script” (古篆字). Obviously, it has no resemblance to the Chinese seal script, so what is that claim doing in the Hunmin Jeongeum? Maybe it’s a pun (and apparently this particular pun is even attested independently). To write foreign words, the Chinese use characters that sound similar, no matter what they mean. To write “Mongol”, they combine 蒙 (“cover”; modern Standard Mandarin měng, where the e stands for the Korean eo sound in the standard and is pronounced o in southern dialects; in the standard, the syllable “mong” does not exist) and 古 (“ancient”; modern Standard Mandarin — in no known version of Chinese can syllables end in “l”). Lo and behold, Phagspa had a seal-script version, which is called 蒙古篆字 (“Mongolian seal script”) in Chinese.

    On the other hand, I’d believe that maybe something akin to S*K*L was a hypothetical Indo-European root word.

    Well, Greek σχολή (I hope I got that right), which means “spare time”, had to come from somewhere… incidentally, that would mean a root more like S*GH*L (with the Hindi-style aspirated g).

    This is weird. I don’t know Russian, and yet I just know what this means…

    “All your science belongs to us” in correct grammar.

  66. David Marjanović, OM says

    David, are you sure about that? I have been given to understand that hangul was based on the shape of the mouth when making various sounds.

    It is based on the interpretation of four Phagspa letters as indicating the shape of the mouth, and building on that.

    Source

    You’re right. All of my respectable references on Korean writing (among them “The World’s Writing Systems” and Sampson’s “Writing Systems”) agree that Hangeul was based on a phonological analysis of the Korean at the time. The theories that it was derived from another script are only mentioned to point out that they’re not widely accepted.

    The nail in the coffin of the other theories was the discovery of the Hunmin Jeongeum Haerye in the 1940s.

    But read that one again. Written in Classical Chinese, it says Hangeul is derived from “the ancient seal script” (古篆字). Obviously, it has no resemblance to the Chinese seal script, so what is that claim doing in the Hunmin Jeongeum? Maybe it’s a pun (and apparently this particular pun is even attested independently). To write foreign words, the Chinese use characters that sound similar, no matter what they mean. To write “Mongol”, they combine 蒙 (“cover”; modern Standard Mandarin měng, where the e stands for the Korean eo sound in the standard and is pronounced o in southern dialects; in the standard, the syllable “mong” does not exist) and 古 (“ancient”; modern Standard Mandarin — in no known version of Chinese can syllables end in “l”). Lo and behold, Phagspa had a seal-script version, which is called 蒙古篆字 (“Mongolian seal script”) in Chinese.

    On the other hand, I’d believe that maybe something akin to S*K*L was a hypothetical Indo-European root word.

    Well, Greek σχολή (I hope I got that right), which means “spare time”, had to come from somewhere… incidentally, that would mean a root more like S*GH*L (with the Hindi-style aspirated g).

    This is weird. I don’t know Russian, and yet I just know what this means…

    “All your science belongs to us” in correct grammar.

  67. Lars Dietz says

    If I remember this correctly, some Swedish guy in the 17th century (forgot his name) wrote a book on “The Languages of Paradise” in which he claimed that God spoke Swedish (of course), Adam spoke Danish and the serpent spoke French.

  68. says

    Rules of Language

    With the exception of those rules that are just plain useless, every linguistic rule is violated by every language in one way or another. I recall once reading at a site on Basque a page where examples of one rule of Basque were listed. Those examples of correct usage were vastly outnumbered by incorrect usage.

    On Jesus and Parthenogenesis

    Jesus was an XX male. It happens, there are XX males and XY females who are born that way. Fetal development doesn’t always proceed the way it’s supposed to.

  69. Graculus says

    Half of English is French

    Just a quibble. Roughly 80% of spoken English is Anglo-Saxon. The 50% is on dictionary word counts, and includes a lot of feudal/legal terms and words that are more recent “Latin” constructions than Norman French.

  70. Stephen Wells says

    Bloody Romans, Germans and Normans, coming over here, creating our language…. (mutter grumble)

  71. DrFrank says

    As we all know, the first word ever uttered was, “Yoink”.

    Was that as fire was stolen from the Gods, by any chance?

  72. says

    I’m just wondering how Adam and Eve said “Google”. (I mean, if god knew everything, and the bible is full of science, they must have known it was coming eventually, right?)

  73. Jim A says

    I am reminded of a scene in My big fat Greek wedding where the family patriarch says that “All words come from Greek.” To which somebody responds “What about Kimono?” and he proceeds to formulate a Greek origin for the it.

  74. Ginger Yellow says

    I’ve long thought linguistic evolution is a great example of how undirected processes can create both new information and complexity. Nobody designed modern English, but it is radically different from and (at least in preserved written form) far richer than Old English. And that’s before we go back to Indo-European and beyond. Unfortunately for me, Rob Pennock had the same idea a long time ago and wrote a book about it. It’s a fantastic takedown of ID from long before Dover.

  75. Kseniya says

    “All your science belongs to us” in correct grammar.

    Yup. Российские ЛОЛкоты (Russian LOLcats) are challenging, because it’s not really possible to literally translate a phrase like “All your sciences are belong to us” into a language that lacks a present tense form of the verb to be. ;-)

    Mysterious indeed are the ways of Бок!

  76. Kseniya says

    What about Kimono?

    LOL, I’d forgotten about that scene.

    A moment’s thought suggests the absurdity of that claim anyway: How could indigenous languages of the Americas, the Far East, Africa, or Oceania possibly be rooted in Greek? Somehow, I don’t think Greece was the only geographic or cultural transfer point between prehistoric Africa and the rest of the world.

    I suppose there could be a root language, though, but I’m not sure it has a name. The last chapter of my Russian grammar reference covers interjections, and the last page has a brief section on “Sounds as Interjections”.

    Finally, there are certain words or sounds – some of them easier to pronounce than to spell – which may be classified as interjections… These “words” are undoubtedly many milleniums old and probably the oldest in the language – going back to the days of primitive man.

    Some examples (translated from Russian to English by me, LOL) are:

    hmm? (what?)
    mm-hmm (yes)
    mm-mm, uh-uh (no)
    shhh (be quiet)

    I would guess that these are indeed vestiges of some ancient ape or proto-language, common to all human language.

  77. Kimpatsu says

    すべての科学は俺らの物だ。
    Nope. Not funny.
    But then again, neither is “Edenics”.
    And, BTW, whoever coined that fucktard word shoud be hanged by ancient Greek scholars, with Noam Chomsky as padre…
    Just when I think creationism has reached its limits, some halfwit comes along and extends the boundaries…

  78. Carlie says

    It happens, there are XX males

    I almost started to say I didn’t think this was possible, then realized that if the SRY genes were switched onto an X chromosome via crossing over or translocation it could happen. I went to look it up, but thankfully stopped myself before hitting the search button, noticing that I had typed “xx male” into Google search and realizing what results that would bring up, here, at work…
    Being a bit more cautious of a searcher, I see that is indeed what happens. Learn something new every day.

  79. Steve P. says

    I’ve got a friend who happens to be *this* close to getting her Ph.D. in linguistics. She’s religious but acknowledges the truth of evolution; however, she thinks scientists mocking creationists is purpose-defeating.

    I showed her this Edenics thing several months ago, and her reaction was to mock and ridicule. I think she understands a little better, now.

  80. windy says

    I suppose there could be a root language, though, but I’m not sure it has a name.

    It does: “Finnish”. My apologies for the author of this article for quoting such large but delightful chunks of it:

    The most bizarre manifestation of Fennomania in world history was offered by Sigurd Wettenhovi-Aspa (Wetterhoff-Asp; 1870-1946), a controversial artist and an eccentric autodidact, to whom truth was something more than scholarship. There is no space for a detailed description of the evolution of Aspa’s thinking which was crystallized in his theory of the Fenno-Egyptian origin of Western civilization [51]. The inspiration came from his friend, the famous Swedish author August Strindberg (1849-1912), whom Aspa had met in Paris while the former was suffering from his inferno crisis in 1894-96. As a consequence of his alchemic and occult experiences Strindberg published in 1910 a book entitled “Biblical proper names [52]”, in which he tried to prove that Hebrew was the original language of the world. In 1911 Strindberg published another equally strange book entitled “The roots of the world languages [53]”, in which he claimed that there is an equivalent in Hebrew for every word in all world languages with the notable exception of African languages. Having read Strindberg’s two books, Aspa decided that his mission was to convince the Swede – and the entire world – of the pre-eminence of the Finnish language.

    According to Aspa, the original home of Finns was Java and the Malays were our ancestors. This reasoning was based on the similarity between the ethnonym Malay and the Finnish word maalaji [soil type], as well as other equally sensible linguistic analogies, and the recent discovery of the Java man. From Java, our ancestors went to Egypt through India and the Near East. The pyramids are actually reproductions of the volcanoes of Java. The word Egypt itself comes from the original Finnish denomination Äijäkupittaa which could be understood to mean a fountainhead. According to Aspa, this explanation was reasonable because ancient Egypt was the fountainhead of the Greek civilization [sic]. From Egypt, the proto-Finns dispersed around the old world, though the main branch settled in the Baltic. Indisputable proofs of the ancient Finnish Völkerwanderungen are the many Western European toponyms which are based on the Finnish language [54]. Paris, for example, was originally a Finnish settlement on the Seine and its ancient name Lutetia comes from the Finnish Luteensija [Place of bedbugs]. Similarly, the great Napoleon had a Finnish ancestry, as the name Bonaparte [Buonaparte] comes from the Finnish Punaparta [Red beard]. Actually, all modern European languages are nothing but corrupted forms of Finnish. Some Finnish groups migrated from the Nile valley to black Africa and brought with them elements of Fenno-Egyptian culture. As in the case of Europe, the proof of ancient Finnish presence in black Africa is the existence of many Finnish loan words in various modern African languages.

    Everyone got that? You are all Finns, not Hebrews.

    …One example of the baroque historiography was Olof Rudbeck the Elder (1630-1702) who fabricated a magnificent past for the Swedish Empire [61]. According to Rudbeck, Sweden was the Atlantis of Plato and the Paradise of the Bible, and Swedish the mother of all languages. To support his argument, Rudbeck compared Greek and Latin names with Swedish ones with amazing results. He also claimed that both Greece and Rome had received their first seeds of civilization from Finland. The River Kokemäki in Western Finland, for example – called Kumo in Swedish – was the Cumae of the Aeneid (VI: 1-10). There is even a curious connection to ancient Egypt. According to Rudbeck, the River Ii in Northern Finland was named after the goddess Isis. Following this logic, the Gauls derived their name from the River Kalajoki in Northwestern Finland. Rudbeck’s work prompted the Finnish scholar Daniel Juslenius (1676-1752) to fabricate an equally magnificent history for Finland with great kings and ancient cities [62]. Juslenius made Finland the fountainhead of all civilization and using Rudbeck’s method he was able to make equally amazing discoveries on the European map. Venice, for example, was an ancient Finnish colony, for the Italian name Venezia comes from the Finnish word Venesija [Anchorage]. Aspa knew well both Rudbeck’s and Juslenius’s works.

    It is often assumed that Aspa was serious, but seeing that he wrote that the German feminine article “die” comes from the Finnish word for “titty”, I’m not so sure. (What’s the Hebrew word for titties?)

  81. says

    So Jesus suffered from de la Chapelle’s syndrome, then? See ….. it all fits! The person who discovered the condition in which an individual has XX chromosomes but male outward appearance, was named after the Holy Church ….. whose founder suffered from that very condition! That can’t possibly be a coincidence! It MUST all be true!

  82. says

    I think there is another way to look at this little dust-up.

    If you take the cranks at their word, they want to argue that we should take seriously a story that says, “all loving, knowing, powerful god hates tall buildings, and will take miraculous and direct action if Humans dare to try to build one.” Never mind the fact that he will allow airplanes, space-ships and deep-space probes, which reach “heights” never dreamed off in the puniest brains of the story tellers of the bible. Apparently, god has a edifice complex.

    Sorry, bible-thumpers, if you want to worship such a fool as the biblical god, leave me out.

  83. David vun Kannon says

    FWIW, I happen to know Isaac Mozeson personally. He is not a white supremacist Xian thumping a KJV. He is a Modern Orthodox Jew with a “d’vorah in his kippah” on this subject, which is at odds with the general Torah u’Ma’adah outlook (separate magisteria) of Rav Soloveitchik. I’m not trying to defend the silliness of his monomania, just keep the ad hominem flaming down.

  84. Sven says

    “Sounds like someone read Snow Crash with a little too much credulity…”

    I was about to say the exact same thing ;)

  85. One Chris among many says

    “This reasoning was based on the similarity between the ethnonym Malay and the Finnish word maalaji [soil type], as well as other equally sensible linguistic analogies…”

    This is a classic example of the flawed thinking behind a lot of amateur attempts to “explain” the origins of languages. You can’t get very far by comparing MODERN forms of words, because words change in ways that have much more to do with sound rules than with where their “roots” came from. If you want to find out whether languages are related, you need to look (at the very least) at the histories of the words you are comparing, to see what they looked like hundreds or thousands of years ago (information that’s not always available, of course). You also need to understand the patterns of sound change in the language you are looking at.

    As I understand it (being only an armchair linguist), there continues to be quite a lot of controversy over whether language had single or multiple origins. Certainly the books I’ve seen that attempt to “prove” that there was a single original language are all badly flawed. Languages like Basque, Finnish, Navajo, and Albanian belong to deep-rooted families so profoundly different from each other in grammar, vocabulary and everything else that it’s difficult to see how they could ever have been connected — though linguists do try to find connections, some of them quite intriguing. At the present state of knowledge about truly ancient languages, though, many of these questions are simply not answerable.

    (The most intriguing language-connection hypothesis I’ve heard suggests, if I remember correctly, that there are remote connections between the Finnish language-family, Japanese, and Navajo. Fascinating if true, but I believe it’s not a widely accepted theory.)

  86. Moses says

    http://www.tbm.org/tongues.htm

    “Many people inaccurately define speaking in tongues as “speaking gibberish” or “talking nonsense.” The truth is, speaking in tongues is the most intelligent, perfect language in the universe. It is God’s language.”

    Edenics can’t possibly top that so who gives a rodent’s anal orifice about it.

    Posted by: Fernando Magyar | January 1, 2008 5:14 PM

    The funny thing are all the religious rationalizations that surround this hysterical phenomena. Simplified:

    In many faiths, “Speaking in Tongues” just doesn’t happen. This relates to their particular Church’s doctrine which, highly simplified, breaks down to that speaking in tongues is no longer required to spread the Gospel, therefore we no longer speak in tongues (sometimes even going so far to say that anyone who does is possessed by the devil). These faiths may, or may not, completely discount the phenomenon, but it’s definitely greeted with skepticism, if not hostility. In people of these faiths, you just do not see people speaking in tongues and the services are, relatively speaking, sedate.

    Charismatics OTOH, believe that if you’re not speaking in tongues at some time in your life you have not received the Holy Spirit. They say that it’s the Language of God (though having heard it many times it tends to sound like pseudo-Slavic or pseudo-African, depending on the origins of the speaker). In these services… Well, let’s just say they’re emotional orgies. Extremely powerful, even if you’re just a witness and not a participant. Having read some studies done on this, I think the best evidence is that “tongues” is nothing more than emotional ramblings unleashed by suppressing some of the regulatory portions of the brain during a heightened emotional state.

    I’d also point out that modern tongues is not like the “Speaking of Tongues” that you find in the bible, when those apostles spoke in foreign, but actual, languages to spread the “good news.” And I think that’s important. Biblical tongues was not the same as the modern hysterical and incomprehensible babbling we see today.

    Rather, it was a “miracle” that the apostles suddenly got the knowledge of foreign languages to spread the Gospel. Not a bunch of gibberish that sounds like a pseudo-Slavic or pseudo-African language. (I suspect there are pseudo-Asian “tongues” as well. I’ve just never heard them personally.)

    In short, it’s transitory hysterics, for lack of a better description.

  87. Tim says

    Re #87:

    Interesting, David. According to this line of thought, what/where/when was the point of contact between the Koreans and the Tibetans?

  88. CJO says

    As far as the putative common ancestor of all languages, I agree that no compelling demonstration for the concept exists, but given that language appears to be a biological adaptation common to, and only to, all H. sapiens, proposing that all languages do not share a common ancestor raises some sticky questions on its own.

    i.e. did the original wetware come with any kind of syntax? If yes, then why can’t that be understood as the common ancestor to all syntax? If no, then you have to propose something else other than grammatical oral communication as the result of the discrete structures in the left hemisphere of the cortex, or a spatio-temporally distributed evolution of the “language organ(s).”

    Some have suggested that they evolved for “talking to ourselves” originally, sort of as a crutch for serial problem-solving. In this case, I guess you could propose that each individual could have had one’s own “ideo-syntax,” and it wasn’t until the wetware got co-opted (exapted) as an interpersonal communication system that “language” per se came about, and that transition could easily have been quite distributed spatio-temporally, allowing for more than one common ancestor according to language group.

    Interesting questions, which, it goes without saying, “Edenists” can do nothing but babble about.

  89. Kagehi says

    Two words, “Australian Aboriginal”. You know, the people that commented, supposedly, when first contacted by people from other places that, “You all howl and screech like monkeys.” lol Having know written language, its bound to be somewhat hard for the Edenics fools to “fit” that language into their silly nonsense, which is probably why they ignore it.

    That said, their argument is doubly stupid in that I once read that “most” of the differences in DNA between cats and humans seemed (at least in the case of the genes being looked at, at the time) to be pattern reversals. So, what, God got confused in a few cases and scrambled human DNA, producing cats, while he was trying to scramble language? Seems reasonable, by these people’s standards. lol It would also explain why cats all think they “own” their owners.

    If there was a proto-language, its probably tied to facial expressions and body motions, not vocalizations. There is common expressions we can recognize, even in other species, that implies emotional context and meaning, and we only usually get it wrong in cases like showing our teeth while smiling. Same with gestures, some seem to be reasonably common, some not. And, I am fairly sure that the *known* cases of deaf children developing their own sign language systems, without outside intervention (some place in South America, where they could get by with trying that, or possibly just didn’t bother to teach them) would show commonality in “some” motions, but not in most others. Same might happen with vocalizations, if you could ever have a group of kids sufficiently cut off from “normal” language to need to form their own.

    Yeah, these Edenics people are just nuts.

  90. SteveM says

    I am not a linguist, so my recommendation probably means little, but I recently listened to John McWhortle’s “The Story of Human Language” series of lectures and found it to be completely fascinating. To my layman’s ear, he seemed to present a very well studied overview of the history of language; how it evolved over time, the different conventions of various families of language, etc. Several of the lectures discuss the concept of a “mother tongue” with considerable skepticism.
    For what it’s worth, I really enjoyed it and think I learned a lot about language that I had never been much interested in before.

  91. Kagehi says

    but given that language appears to be a biological adaptation common to, and only to, all H. sapiens

    Human language is “sort of” unique to humans. Language in general though isn’t. While its only been recently that anyone has taken seriously the idea that other animals have languages, and we developed some means to record, compare and test it, the recent data implies that many birds have languages, specific to what, and even to some extent when, how far, and other key elements needed to communicate concepts, though its primitive, due to the lack of need for truly complex concepts, in most of them. Some, like parrots, especially African Greys, even complex concepts like number theory, symbolic logic, and the capacity to use existing sounds/words to form new concepts are possible. The only real argument that can be made at this point is not that language is unique to humans, but that what ever language is used by animals deviates so greatly from what we use that we are doing the equivalent of looking at odd markings on a page, and occasionally learning a word or two, when ever those words correspond to a clear picture, but we don’t get the grammer, the rules or *most* of the meanings. Not unless we teach the parrot to speak English, instead. lol

  92. HP says

    I seem to recall reading some interesting speculation that speech appeared long after anatomically modern humans show up. This is based, IIRC, on the sudden explosion in human material culture circa 50,000 years ago as indicative of the first appearance of complex language.

    If that’s true, then populations of anatomically modern humans had dispersed across much of Africa (and beyond?) prior to developing complex languages. In which case there’s no reason to assume a single proto-language.

  93. windy says

    Languages like Basque, Finnish, Navajo, and Albanian belong to deep-rooted families so profoundly different from each other in grammar, vocabulary and everything else that it’s difficult to see how they could ever have been connected

    I wouldn’t call Basque, Finnish and Albanian (isn’t the latter Indo-European, btw?) profoundly different – when compared to many non-Eurasian languages the structure seems quite “familiar”, even if the vocabularies are completely different. Easy to imagine that they are connected, but difficult to imagine how, like you said. Like some phyla :)

    (The most intriguing language-connection hypothesis I’ve heard suggests, if I remember correctly, that there are remote connections between the Finnish language-family, Japanese, and Navajo. Fascinating if true, but I believe it’s not a widely accepted theory.)

    I haven’t heard that one put forward seriously, although the Finnish-Japanese connection is a favourite subject of jokes. Do you remember the name of the proposed language family? The only similar hypothesis I found was the Dené-Caucasian, involving Navajo, Chinese and Basque among others.

  94. says

    How ’bout Science? How come these guys can’t really speak Science but can only fake it like improv actors imitating Chinese with gibberish?

    Obviously when God destroyed the tower and scattered everyone else to the four corners, these guys stuck around and took their intellectual cues from the leftover bricks.

  95. Mooser says

    which kickstarted multi-national human history.

    What is this “kickstarter” you speak of?

  96. Sastra, OM says

    Long ago I read something which said that most languages used an “m” sound in the word that signified “mother.” The explanation was that “m” is one of the first noises a baby can make and control, and the mother and baby could then imitate and use it earlier than more complex sounds. Thus, it would be likely that an mmm-mother vocabulary connection would have been independently created in many languages, as it would be one of the first and most important things babies would say.

    Not sure where I read it, or what the linguists say on that one, but it sounds plausible (which should probably make it suspect).

  97. Erp says

    Be interesting to know how they fit the Sign Languages into their theory. Sign languages such as American Sign Language (ASL), British Sign Language (BSL), French Sign Language (LSF) are fully fledged languages and not connected to oral languages. Nicaraguan Sign Language is of great interest since it has only arisen since the late 70s when for the first time in Nicaragua large numbers of deaf children were brought together and has no apparent ancestors.

  98. CJO says

    Some, like parrots, especially African Greys, even complex concepts like number theory, symbolic logic, and the capacity to use existing sounds/words to form new concepts are possible.

    But they don’t, as far as is known, use these admittedly amazing abilities for intraspecific communication, which function is surely essential to what we mean when we say “language.” And, most importantly, they don’t use grammar, which is what makes human languages the open-ended tools they are, capable of representing thoughts with words.

    The only real argument that can be made at this point is not that language is unique to humans

    You must realize that these are fighting words among linguists and ethologists. There are very real arguments for just that.

  99. Kseniya says

    Sure, Sastra, I totally buy that, and have thought the same thing many times. It seems to me that the easiest sound to make (one involving both consonants and vowels) is “mama” … followed closely by “papa”, “baba”, “nana”, “dada” and “tata”… Right there, we have approximations of words used to refer to mothers, fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers, aunts and uncles in at least a few languages. I’d love to elaborate on this point, but I’m woefully ignorant on the subject. :-)

  100. says

    F-ck the FCC for censoring God’s language! Time to walk those picket lines, fundis, cuz they’re out to get you.

  101. David Marjanović, OM says

    Interesting, David. According to this line of thought, what/where/when was the point of contact between the Koreans and the Tibetans?

    Kubilai Khan, ruler over China and much else and founder of the Yuán Dynasty, wanted to have one script for all languages in his empire. So he ordered a Tibetan monk to make one up. That script is based on the Tibetan one, was widely used by the dynasty (mostly for Mongolian and Chinese) for imperial purposes, and then completely stopped being used when the dynasty was gone and the Confucian scholars got back into positions of power. It was, however, still used in the organization of Chinese rhyme dictionaries, so 60 years later there were still people in the heavily Chinese-influenced Korea who knew it.

    Did you miss my entire paragraph about gǔ and Měnggǔ? It’s the one with the Chinese characters in it.

    Two words, “Australian Aboriginal”. You know, the people that commented, supposedly, when first contacted by people from other places that, “You all howl and screech like monkeys.”

    There ain’t no monkeys in Australia. (And I really hope you knew that.)

    that language

    More like 250. I’m not even sure whether everyone now agrees that it’s a single language family.

    This is based, IIRC, on the sudden explosion in human material culture circa 50,000 years ago as indicative of the first appearance of complex language.

    Yes. I wonder if it’s falsifiable.

    —————–

    Yes, Albanian is Indo-European (though a separate branch within it). Yes, Nicaraguan Sign Language proves that languages can arise out of nothing, though it’s difficult to imagine that any reasonable amount of hearing children ever was in such a situation. Yes, most languages have /m/ in “mom” and /p/, /b/, /t/ or /d/ in “dad”, despite a few fascinating exceptions (Georgian dede “mom”, mama “dad”), which is considered to say something about which sounds are easy rather than telling us anything about the last common ancestor of all surviving languages. And I’ll have to go over the Dené-Caucasian article once more, it’s somewhat outdated and somewhat unbalanced, but I won’t find the time for that soon.

  102. David Marjanović, OM says

    Interesting, David. According to this line of thought, what/where/when was the point of contact between the Koreans and the Tibetans?

    Kubilai Khan, ruler over China and much else and founder of the Yuán Dynasty, wanted to have one script for all languages in his empire. So he ordered a Tibetan monk to make one up. That script is based on the Tibetan one, was widely used by the dynasty (mostly for Mongolian and Chinese) for imperial purposes, and then completely stopped being used when the dynasty was gone and the Confucian scholars got back into positions of power. It was, however, still used in the organization of Chinese rhyme dictionaries, so 60 years later there were still people in the heavily Chinese-influenced Korea who knew it.

    Did you miss my entire paragraph about gǔ and Měnggǔ? It’s the one with the Chinese characters in it.

    Two words, “Australian Aboriginal”. You know, the people that commented, supposedly, when first contacted by people from other places that, “You all howl and screech like monkeys.”

    There ain’t no monkeys in Australia. (And I really hope you knew that.)

    that language

    More like 250. I’m not even sure whether everyone now agrees that it’s a single language family.

    This is based, IIRC, on the sudden explosion in human material culture circa 50,000 years ago as indicative of the first appearance of complex language.

    Yes. I wonder if it’s falsifiable.

    —————–

    Yes, Albanian is Indo-European (though a separate branch within it). Yes, Nicaraguan Sign Language proves that languages can arise out of nothing, though it’s difficult to imagine that any reasonable amount of hearing children ever was in such a situation. Yes, most languages have /m/ in “mom” and /p/, /b/, /t/ or /d/ in “dad”, despite a few fascinating exceptions (Georgian dede “mom”, mama “dad”), which is considered to say something about which sounds are easy rather than telling us anything about the last common ancestor of all surviving languages. And I’ll have to go over the Dené-Caucasian article once more, it’s somewhat outdated and somewhat unbalanced, but I won’t find the time for that soon.

  103. Tim says

    Re. 128

    David – Yeah, I figured the Mongols would have had something to do with it. Actually, I hadn’t read post #52 of yours carefully enough. While you did write that phagspa was based on Tibetan, in my carelessness I took you to mean that phagspa = Tibetan and that, therefore, hangul was based on Tibetan (i.e. on bod-yig. Which is not the case. My bad.

    Thanks

  104. hoary puccoon says

    The Edenics people really used French, Spanish, and English as their examples of languages coming from a pre-Babel root??

    Spanish and French are derived from Latin, which arrived in Spain and France with the Roman empire. In France, the Roman invasion was led by Julius Caesar, just a few decades BC. English got most of its French-derived words after 1066 AD, when it was invaded by William of Normandy. But I suppose, when you’re dealing with people who have never heard of Julius Caesar or William the Conquerer, Edenics is a very persuasive argument. (shudder.)

  105. Bride of Shrek says

    Kagehi @#112

    Interesting, never heard that comment before about our indigenous people. I suppose it could be true but, as we have no monkeys here, I would think the quote may have been altered somewhat in the translation or through time. Just a small nitpick however, our Indigenous people are known as Australian Aborigines. The term Aboriginal is more correctly used as an adjective eg an Aboriginal person or Aboriginal culture. However half of Australia cocks it up regularly so its pretty common mistake to make.

    Small aside story is that when the first white settlers came here they asked an Aboriginal guide what the name of the strange hopping animal was that they could see. The Aborigine replied “kangaroo” and so it was such named. Urban legend has it that “kangaroo” means “I haven’t got a fucking clue what you’re saying” in the local tribal dialect.

  106. Kagehi says

    Hmm. Right. I think the actual quote was something like, “Why do you talk like animals?”, or something to that effect, not monkeys. I can’t remember the actual wording.

    But they don’t, as far as is known, use these admittedly amazing abilities for intraspecific communication, which function is surely essential to what we mean when we say “language.” And, most importantly, they don’t use grammar, which is what makes human languages the open-ended tools they are, capable of representing thoughts with words.

    Umm.. First, as far as known is just the problem. Its only recently that anyone, never mind linguists, have admitted that grey parrots even **have** such versatility. Its also damn hard to study how they use it in the wild, given that they nest on the sides of cliffs, and spend 90% of their time in the canopy of the rain forests they live in, when not nesting on the cliff. We simply don’t know how, if, or to what degree they use their skills, but its considered improbable that they can possess the capacity to differentiate times, objects, or invent new language, **and** successfully do so using human syntax, even if its very short sentences, if they don’t use them in their native environments. They do use grammar, just not *complex* grammar, or at least can use it, while other animals, and even song birds, can’t (well, of ones that a) we can teach to talk like us, or b) we have some idea of the sounds they use and for what purposes.) You might want to read up a bit on the subject, perhaps over at http://scienceblogs.com/retrospectacle/ where there are several articles on just how good they are at it, and how many of the assumptions of solely *human* abilities they have shredded. I don’t doubt that, now that such research is getting acceptance *and* credibility, they will undermine more assumptions. This:

    You must realize that these are fighting words among linguists and ethologists.

    kind of says it all. There is *massive* resistance to the idea that a mere bird is going to undermine long standing assumptions about what makes human language special, and lots of people are really damned unhappy that the more they laugh at it, the more evidence shows up to muddy what was once a nice, simple, clear and clean line between human and animal communication systems. Its literally the whole, “Well, we think birds are monogamous, so we don’t **need** to study their DNA or make careful examinations to prove it.” …a few decades later… “What?!? They aren’t? You must be mistaken!!!”

    There is a very clear assumption, based on *nothing* that because we can’t hear, or didn’t notice birds, or other animals, using what **we** consider valid grammar, they don’t. But its not based on any sort of scientific examination of the assumption. Where is has been examined, the lines get blurry, the boundaries indistinct and the question seem to become, “How much can *this* species do?”, not, “Does it talk or not, at all?”

  107. mikmik says

    Posted by: Steven Pinker’s Awesome Hair .. I don’t see how one can AVOID seeing all life as sacred…

    I see all life this way. It is not only we are of complimentary process. It is much deeper than that. All the basic building blocks, atoms and the molecules from them, came before earth.

    Every thing is an expression of how our universe works and what it is made of.

    Like our thoughts. Like the way non-aware life exists and thrives. This is our universe. There is something fundamentally unaware in those that do not appreciate the mirror of what we are, in everything.

  108. says

    Well, the guy is very friendly… I asked him about Fenno-Ugric languages and he sent me some examples (from his book, I guess), which mostly remind me how every number can be turned to 23 with enough operations… I am not even reading French or German examples, it’s too freaking easy to compare IE languages, for Fenno-Ugric it’s another topic

    Anyway, he offers me something called “Edenics CD III” for $20 (incl. S+H), which I really doubt is the real offer – you cannot send holy breath from US to here for that sum, nor will the CD have any profit margin for him…

  109. Ginger Yellow says

    ” It seems to me that the easiest sound to make (one involving both consonants and vowels) is “mama” … followed closely by “papa”, “baba”, “nana”, “dada” and “tata”… Right there, we have approximations of words used to refer to mothers, fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers, aunts and uncles in at least a few languages. I’d love to elaborate on this point, but I’m woefully ignorant on the subject. :-)”

    There’s research on this. I don’t have links to hand, but I remember from my linguistics course that various studies have shown that ‘m’, ‘b/p’ and ‘g’ are consistently the earliest consonants produced by infants. I think the studies conflict on the order in which they are first vocalised.

  110. David Marjanović, OM says

    I guess these clowns haven’t heard of Nikolai Marr.

    Hah! Linguistics’ equivalent to Lysenko is nothing against the Sun Language Theory! ALL YOUR BASE AĞ BELONG TO US.

    Urban legend has it that “kangaroo” means “I haven’t got a fucking clue what you’re saying” in the local tribal dialect.

    No, ganguru was actually the name of some wallaby species or something in the local language.

  111. David Marjanović, OM says

    I guess these clowns haven’t heard of Nikolai Marr.

    Hah! Linguistics’ equivalent to Lysenko is nothing against the Sun Language Theory! ALL YOUR BASE AĞ BELONG TO US.

    Urban legend has it that “kangaroo” means “I haven’t got a fucking clue what you’re saying” in the local tribal dialect.

    No, ganguru was actually the name of some wallaby species or something in the local language.

  112. windy says

    Yes, most languages have /m/ in “mom” and /p/, /b/, /t/ or /d/ in “dad”, despite a few fascinating exceptions (Georgian dede “mom”, mama “dad”)

    If someone is not tired of me talking about Finnish yet: we have äiti for mother and isä for father, those are quite different. But the mom word is actually a Germanic loan – the original was emo, emä (still used for animals) which does follow the “m” rule.

  113. CJO says

    Kagehi:
    kind of says it all

    Kind of says it all. It’s literally “there are learned people who disagree with my ideas, which just shows how right I am!”

    There are assumptions and cherished notions on both sides of the ‘do animals use grammar?’ divide, and I for one am sick of the knee-jerk ‘those who hold to the uniquness of human grammatical language among animals camp are blinkered conservatives’ line. For a great deal of verbiage, the only positive argument for your claims I see is
    its considered improbable that they can possess the capacity to differentiate times, objects, or invent new language, **and** successfully do so using human syntax, even if its very short sentences, if they don’t use them in their native environments.
    Not real convincing. However, thanks for the link, and blinkered conservative or no, I am astonished and intrigued by what I know of the birds’ abilities just as you are, and despite your scorn, I can actually deal with the fact that human language lies on a continuum of animal communicative behavior.

  114. Cpl. Cam says

    Ha! This is awesome first they tried to fuck with biologists like Dawkins and yourself, now they want to fuck with Chomsky. I’m guessing they’ll have just as much success in this field as they have had in biology… none.

  115. Tristan says

    Edenics proponents obviously haven’t studied Navajo. Or any of the other 6000 languages.