Charles Stewart:
> I'm sorry to participate in this Glorantha-irrelevant thread, but
> perhaps an injection of facts will assist a humane death.
... or give it a unwholesome new, zombie life -- whoda thunk it?
> Linguists do believe that new languages come into being unrelated to
> any existing languages, and Nicaraguan sign language (NSL) is the best
> documented example.
I was (admittedly fairly recently) aware of this example, but didn't want to drag it in, since firstly, my beef with JL was about a statement about linguistics -- the actual facts of language monongenesis or otherwise, much less so; and because just to confuse matters, apparently the monos and the polys both cite this example, for their own nefarious purposes, in the larger debate (go figure...).
> My wife (who is the linguist, I am not), says she guesses about
> 2/3s of linguists believe there is a spoken Ur language, but very few
> believe the evidence for this is overwhelming. The main evidence is
> that it is hard to stop children acquiring grammatical rules that they
> are exposed to.
I read the interesting tidbit that the preponderance differed between "Western" and "non-Western" linguists, somewhat interestingly. Pesky Plato/God Learners again, perhaps... But surely the counter-argument to the monogenesists is not that unrelated languages arise spontaneously in speaking populations, but that it may have arisen more than once in _non-speaking_ populations. (To simplify this proposition in such a way as to assume some abitrary liminal moment between 'pre-language' and 'language' -- good luck with that!)
> If you want an as-near-as-definitive-as-you-will-get answer to this
> question, asking the linguist list is the right thing to do. If you
> do, make sure to spend some time researching the question first to
> avoid being seen as an idiot by the world linguistics community.
Or suffering the consequences of too obviously giving the impression that the feeling is mutual. ;-) I'm happy enough with the (strongly) received impression that opinions differ, and the evidence is generally considered weak/non-existent/circumstantial, and would consider it something of a cruel field sport to try to further bait innocent linguists on the topic for our amusement...
Julian Lord:
> The Ur-Language is a myth.
Dealt with that in an earlier post, but to briefly recapitulate, there's no problem with that, of course. In the RW, we're stuck with an insufficiency of evidence, in Glorantha, we can (more or less) happily have an inconsistent superfluity of it, with a myth for a Proto- and for several separately-created distinct languages, all proveably 'correct'.
> Also, the linguistic model assumes several basic morphological facts,
> including inspiration and aspiration (which are the basis of speech,
> but also sign language, body language, etc.
>
> The theory is that new languages cannot be unrelated to
> the human linguistic faculty.
Let's not over-hastily conflate two different things here, though. In the context of Proto-World, linguistic super-phylla, etc, we're interested in 'relatedness' insofar as it corresponds to patterns of linguistic 'descent' (or are to a more or less measureable degree possible indicators of same). Clearly, all human languages are 'related' in a weaker sense, that they needn't be to dolphin, Alpha Centauran, elvish, etc, but that's a very different matter. (Human beings can only articulate a certain range of sounds, say, but that doesn't make the IPA chart an Ur-alphabet in any very profound sense.)
> To get back to Alex' objections, there's always been a problem with
> the idea that linguistics is a bona fide science. Linguistics includes
> a model, but it's based on various untestable tenets.
But I'm not objecting _to_ linguistics, just about your statement _about_ linguistics. OK, in practice, a bit of both, since clearly not all linguistic practice is free of untested(/able) assumptions, including the one cited, but I can't see that these can be construed as universal or fundamental to linguistics per se. Perhaps if you were more explicit about Yelmic vs. Orlanthi vs. Lunar quantification over the set of linguists...
Chris Lemens:
> So, is it your thought that, during the green age, people could use
> these faculties to understand each other directly without the formal
> structure of a language? That is, any old grunt would carry the
> intended meaning? Then, at the end of the green age, different
> peoples becaome less and less mutually comprehensible?
But in the Green Age, people had a shared consciousness (or at least, they had a lack of individual consciousness, which I think amounts to the same thing for these purposes). I think it's unlikely one would _even_ need to grunt to make a meaning clear. Then again, what it is one might be said to be 'communicating' in this state is itself brainboggling to conceptualise, since the list of things we know to be 'impossible' in the GA is rather extensive.
Cheers,
Alex.
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