Re: Question about linguistics

Anthony Campbell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>...
> On 2003-11-26, Red Dragon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >> Languages evolve far faster than genes so it is difficult to go back much
> >> beyond 8,000 years and still obtain meaningful results. English and Dutch,
> >> for example, were mutually intelligible until 1000 years ago.
>  Nevertheless,
> >> the data, however tenuous, suggest all languages in the world evolved from
>  a
> >> common ancestor, which supports the genetic evidence.
> >
> > Since all languages in the world evolved from a common ancestor,  I would
> > expect it to be the African language of the people in the Rift Valley where
> > it is said to be the Origin of Mankind.
> >
> > I find that  "Papa" and "Mama"  is the term for Father and Mother for  all
> > the Languages I know.  It is true for English ,  Mandarin, Hokkien and
> > Cantonese.
> > In Indonesian it is " "Bapa" for Father and  "Ema" for mother
> > In  Tamil India it is " Apa" for Father and " Ama" for mother.
> >
> > Therefore  this is the evidence of  the evolution of Language from  the
> > Common
> > Ancestor.
> >
> 
> It seems extremely unlikely that any modern language retains traces of
> the original human "language", assuming that it makes sense speak of
> such a thing. I don't know how universal "Papa" and "Mama" really are,
> but if they are widespread it could be simply a reflection of infant
> babbling being picked up and reinforced by the parents.
> 

The near universality of 'mama' and 'papa' probably has something to
do with them being easy to pronounce. Repeated consonant vowel
sequences like these are among the first proper speech sounds that
infants make. They start to produce streams of consonant vowel pairs
like 'mamamama...' and 'papapapa...' from about six months old. Prior
to this their vocalisations basically consist of things like
raspberries and sustained vowels. Their first referential words are
spoken at about 12 months.

By the way, I seem to remember from linguistics classes that in some
languages the 'papa' variant means 'mother' and 'mama' means 'father'.


> An article in today's *Times* reports two Australian researchers who
> claim that all the Indo-European languages derive from a Hittite
> language spoken 8000 years ago in what is now Anatolia. This would be
> remarkable if true. 

Why would this be so remarkable?


> 
> On the other hand, a few mavericks (Julian Jaynes, Nicholas Humphrey)
> suggest that language may be much more recent than we suppose, and that
> even the people who produced the Neolithic cave paintings need not
> necessarily have possessed language in the modern sense.
> 
> 
> > The experience I find when bringing up a child  is that,  the first
> > vocabulary  a child will learn will be Father and Mother and only then come
> > body parts like  eyes, mouth,  hand  and leg etc.  So these vocabulary  are
> > deeply embeded into the memory of the infant and will not suffer any
> > distortion for the rest of her life.  Subsequently it will be passed on to
> > her offspring.
> >
> > But what puzzle me is  that in the transmission from generation to
> > generation,  the structure of the sentence can be changed.  For example in
> > English  " The  hungry man eat his food"
> > In Japanese it is "  hungry that  man his food eat"
> > In Indonesian it is " man hungry that eat food his "
> > In Mandarin  it is "  hungry that man  eat  his that food"
> >
> > So the arrangement of  Subject,  adjective,  verb and Object  got altered
> > and  rearranged.
> 
> This is the kind of thing that Noam Chomsky has been going on about for
> years. For a popular exposition, see Stephen Pinker, *The Language
> Instinct*. Not all languages, even Indo-European ones, are based on word
> order. For example, classical Greek and Latin relied on case, not word
> order, to make the meaning plain.
> 

To be completely accurate, languages with rich case systems (a modern
example is Russian) have *more flexible* word orders, but it is not
true to say that anything goes in these languages. It is also not true
that case marking correlates perfectly with semantic roles or even
with relations like subject/object.

Evidence:
"She hit HIM" vs "HE was hit" 
(he/him have different case markings but the same semantic role - the
individual who was hit rather than the individual doing the hitting)

"She forced HIM to eat cake" vs. "HE ate cake"
(he/him have different case markings but in both sentences appear as
the subject of 'eat')


> AC


H.
 
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