Re: Research troubles.

Brian M. Scott wrote:

> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> 
> >On Sun, 30 Nov 2003 07:24:12 +0100, "m.baro"
> ><[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> 
> >>Yes, but apparently, we're more Khoisan than they are us, so it isn't
> >>all that symmetric.
> 
> >I don't think that's possible! 
> 
> You're right: any differences between us are differences from
> either side.  As I said in another post, I suspect that Min wants
> to say that genetically they're more similar to our common
> ancestors than we are; on this I can't comment.

That is - with respect to the Khoisan - like saying that chimpanzees are
closer to our ancestors than we are. They split off earlier off the
evolutionary tree, but they had the same time to develop; and I don't
for a moment think that our ancestor was a chimp - something that looked
more like a chimp, than like homo sapiens, maybe.

 
> >There's some speculation that their
> >speech is more akin to the speech of our common ancestors, but I'm not
> >sure what the grounds for that are -- why wouldn't their speech have
> >changed as much as that of other groups, and given the sparsity of
> >100,000-year-old literature, how would one establish that it hadn't?
> 
> You're right again.  One wouldn't, and there's every reason to
> suppose that their speech has changed about as much as everyone
> else's.

Well, no. Languages change at different rates. I used to know a girl at
university that spoke a dialect of middle German at home - she would
read, and translate, large swathes of text without much effort, much to
the astonishment of the lecturer and the frustration of her fellow
students. At the same time, modern German was a long way from how she
spoke at home. (and I've heard her on the phone, and _entirely_ believe
the story, which I heard from a third friend)

Heather will be able to enlighten me just how much Welsh has changed
since we have the first records - but English has changed _a lot more_
due to invasions and integrations of new vocabulary. 

Take one small population, a society with ways of living and thinking
that do not change much, no outside pressure to change, no otherspeaking
people that conquer, trade, marry into the tribe - such a population
might well keep an old language. I can even percieve that when the
pressure becomes too much, like the Celts who conversed about philosophy
in Greek, that employing an language with the words and the concepts
will do better than your own, and might exist in parallel.

Catja