lundi 16 juin 2014

Giving Tower of Babel a Fair Hearing

Back in 1996, December, when I was employed as a school teacher in Sysslebäck and demoted from usual lessons due to discipline problems, before I grew a beard, Talk Origins accepted as Post of the Month one post by Gail Davis.

Godless Linguistics!
Post of the Month: December 1996
Gail Davis
http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/postmonth/dec96.html

It is tongue in cheek. It gives linguistic evolution as a parallel for evolution in the biological sense. Since then two things have happened: the argument has become somewhat of a standard for internet atheist debaters and Talk Origins has not given another linguistic post ever status of post of the month, and I have looked up until 2013. I even found Aron-Ra's formalistic approach on "ape to man evolution" in the process of looking. But not one single other post on linguistic evolution on the post of the month. Nor on site map. Nor on ... yes, there were in fact 3 posts in the index of creationist claims dealing with linguistics.

Index to Creationist Claims
edited by Mark Isaak
Copyright © 2006
[Last update: 5 Nov 2006]
CG: Miscellaneous Anti-Evolution
CG100: Linguistics
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/list.html#CG100

  • CG100: Linguistics
    • CG101. Chinese glyph for "ark" is literally "8 mouths."
    • CG110. The first known languages are highly complex.
    • CG111. Why are languages getting less complex?


    Of these the first is not very related to the subject. I will look at the other two before going back to that old PotM.

  • Claim CG110:

    The first known human languages were already very complex. Languages do not show the evolutionary progression we would expect if humans evolved gradually.

    • Source:

      Skjaerlund, David, n.d. Creationism explains human diversity.
      http://www.forerunner.com/forerunner/X0722_Creationism_explains.html

    • Response:

      • 1. The first known languages were written languages (else they would not be known). Since most cultures in the world have had no written language, and most people have been illiterate even where written language existed, written language is a poor metric to use to measure language in general. Language had been developing for an unknown period of time before written language evolved.

      • 2. The earliest known writing is simpler than written languages today. There are very simple, nonlinguistic precursors (no grammar) to cuneiform writing (Coulmas 1989).


  • Claim CG111:

    If current languages evolved gradually from primitive grunts or noises, earliest languages should be the simplest. But ancient languages such as Latin and Vedic Sanskrit are more complex than modern languages in terms of cases, genders, voices, verb forms, etc.



Responding ...
...to their responses
CG 110 resp. 1. The first known languages were written languages (else they would not be known). Since most cultures in the world have had no written language, and most people have been illiterate even where written language existed, written language is a poor metric to use to measure language in general. Language had been developing for an unknown period of time before written language evolved.

Maybe so. But it is the only "metric" we have got.

It is also only very poor if you assume that unwritten happenings cover much longer time before than written history after writing started. But then you could claim it makes it an uncertain metric.

But it is the only metric we have for complexity of past languages.

We have no tape recordings of Cro Magnon man to test if they spoke Biblical Hebrew or Aramaic, an immediate post-Babel language, a known language group's oldest form, or a rudimentary language. In absense if direct evidence, we can rule out rudimentary language since it has never been observed.

resp 2. The earliest known writing is simpler than written languages today. There are very simple, nonlinguistic precursors (no grammar) to cuneiform writing (Coulmas 1989).

Sure. Pure pictograms are not very informative either of the phonemes involved in possible case endings or of the categories that these represent.

So they give us an imperfect rendering of speech, but that does not in the least prove that the speech itself was imperfect.

CG 111 resp. 1. Languages are not becoming less complex overall. They may be simpler in some ways (such as verb endings) but are more complex in others (such as syntax and vocabulary) (Teegarden 2002).

They are so by intelligent restructuring of grammatical strategies. In other words by intelligent design.

And the over all complexity of expression range stays the same.

Or just perhaps devolves a bit. Is it still possible in English to say "Helms too they choose" or not? "They chose helmets too" is less emphatic. I know the point was under debate.

resp. 2. Evolution is not necessarily a uniform progression from simple to complex. Evolution towards simplicity is consistent with both biological and linguistic evolution.

But the point of the countered creationist claim is that an evolution towards linguistic simplicity cannot - on evolutionist views - have started until one first had a linguistic complexity that had somehow evovled from simplicity. Here are the two claims again, and they are closely related:

CG 110
The first known human languages were already very complex. Languages do not show the evolutionary progression we would expect if humans evolved gradually.
CG 111
If current languages evolved gradually from primitive grunts or noises, earliest languages should be the simplest. But ancient languages such as Latin and Vedic Sanskrit are more complex than modern languages in terms of cases, genders, voices, verb forms, etc.
Summing them up
Birds have no grammar in their songs - at least not grammar in a proper linguistic sense. Only man has such. No transitional state between animal and human grammar has been observed.

We do not have the grammar of Pal Ul Don with 400 words lacking pronouns and tenses totally.

Or rather, we do have precisely that grammar - but it was constructed by a man knowing unless I am mistaken both German and English, plus perhaps some Swahili, all of which do have pronouns and do have tenses. What we do not have is a real population using* it without* any further complexity* of grammar.

Similarily Pidgins may lack grammatical features normally found in languages, but are not anywhere a real precursor to real languages. Chomsky has pretended that Creoles are developed from Pidgins, but McWhorter has refuted him on Atlantic English based Creoles stating that the discrepance from European model language grammars are not due to Pidginisation (with limited contact with model language) followed by Creolisation (when children are raised in a Pidgin that becomes a mother tongue), but because Castle slaves in English colonial Castles (in Thirteen Colonies or US they would be called Forts) when told to learn English only relexicalised their mother tongue (or several of them with similar grammars) and when told to teach English to slaves destined for Trans-Atlantic destinations (like St Kitts) only transmitted their mother tongues relexicalised with English vocabulary.*

So, even Pidgins have nowhere served as precursors - at least exclusive such - for Creoles. And Creoles are everywhere observed as having normal complexity.

There is no such thing as a transitional language between monkey communication and human speech. If evolution were true, there must have been, but none such is found, ever.


Now, before I go back to December 1996, Post of the Month, I will take a look at other linguistic resources mentioned. The links to feedback posts do make the point that language overall is not getting simpler, but - in Western Society I would myself add - morphology is. And I would add: with exceptions, like the new Conditional Tense-Mood.

I also skimmed over the book by Croft. Or what was available of it on preview on Amazon. Hypercorrection is in it described as a "mechanism" which pretty well sums up his confusion of concept between voluntary and purely accidental causes. So, back to PotM December 1996.

First comes a diatribe against rock music and its relation to crime - not meant to be taken seriously. Then comes the great parallel between "linguistics" and "evolutionism" ... no doubt meant to indicate that Evolution, including both Macroevolution and Abiogenesis, are as solidly scientific as English descending from Anglo-Saxon. Or perhaps just as solidly scientific as Anglo-Saxon descending from Proto-Germanic descending from Proto-Indo-European ... which is not solidly scientific. Anyway, here come its points, which I will first of all answer with a bit more seriousness than they deserve. Then I will give a hint of what happened after that PotM.

Our public schools have turned away from the source of Truth, to teach our children that our sacred English language has descended from other languages.

The sacred languages are three, and English is not one of them.

Holy Writ shows in the history of its translations that English has had a succession of states so separate as to be for practical puposes different languages. When King Alfred translated 50 psalms into Ænglisc the result was very different from King James or (to mention a better version with same numeration as King Alfred's) Douay Rheims.

Even the other two sacred languages than Hebrew, if not Hebrew itself, had clearly known other states than that in which they were on the Titulus. We have "Rex Iudaeorum" and not "Ioudaiosom". We also have "Basileus ton Ioudaion" and not - again - "Io-da-o-so" (presumable Linear B spelling for "Ioudaiosom").

We have a testimony that one people came from another people, directly, so that when we read in Scripture of peoples not enumerated among the seventy (or seventytwo) original descendants of Noah, we must assume they have come out of some of those originally enumerated among the seventy. Meaning also that language would descend from language.

The poor impressionable youngsters are taught AS A FACT that English words have certain "root words", even though this is only a theory.

The IE (Indo-European) root words as such are not a theory, but a fact. Father is the same word as pater in all probability.

What is only a theory is that all the common root words came from the same language and all the languages from it within the IE language family. Common origin is one of three possibilities of language similarities, the other two being adstrate and superstrate, or in less technical jargon and more understandable words, neighbourhood and common model.

What is also only a theory is that such and such was the form of the original root word in the theoretical IE proto-language. The one for "pater" and "father" has been given both as "p@taar" and as "p@têr" and as "pχtehr" (presumed pronunciation of "pH2teH1r") depending on who does the reconstruction.

The FACT is, God Almighty created all languages complete when he confused mankind's original language as punishment for our transgression at the tower of Babel.

The fact is that God almighty did so with seventy or seventy two languages at Babel. Since we have lots of more languages and only 32 large language families, we are left to assume that the 32 language families are not all from only one source after Babel, but unless 40 just vanished, at least some of the 32 must be mergers - or incomplete mergers by adstrate, i e neighbourhood - between diverse Babelic languages. And we are also left to assume lots of splits have occurred.

But the atheist/linguists don't want this mentioned in public settings, because it goes against their FAITH, and forces them to face their own accountability.

What neither Atheists in general nor Gail Davis in particular wants mentioned is that Tower of Babel remains an entirely possible scenario. It does not contradict any clear linguistic fact, such as "pater" and "father" being the same word. Of course, Gail Davis just might have written his piece for that precise motive.

So they have BANNED the teaching of Babelism, because they are afraid that it might expose the weakness of their own linguistic ideas. Is this fair? I don't think so. It goes against all that America stands for.

Gail Davis does what he can to ban the Tower of Babel scenario from getting a fair hearing. By lampooning it. Or rather the kind of people he thinks would advocate it.

Therefore, join me in the campaign to have a balanced and fair treatment in public education. All English teachers should be required to include Babelism as a valid alternate theory to Linguisticism, whenever the origins of the English language is discussed.

When getting as far back as IE root language, stating the possibility it was never one single such, but several post-Babelic ones heavily influencing each other through neighbourhood or perhaps also influenced by some contructed lingua franca (like getting very basic morphological grammar from it, leaving aside their previous different grammars, or taking over many words for family members and some but not all for body parts) would be as fair to mention as mentioning a language spoken by the Kurgan people in a time according to modern theories pre-dating the Flood or maybe even Creation.

Oh, of course we can expect opposition from the entrenched vested interests.

Like those that Gail Davis either represents or by sheer thoughtlessness happens to defend.

They will point to certain similarities (i.e. "mother", "madre", "mater") as evidence of the relatedness of various languages.

That Spanish came from Latin is not against the Faith, nor against any part of the evidence. Whether Germanic and Latin came from an earlier same language by a split or converged by incomplete merging from previously less related languages (taking over the "mater" word from the lingua franca if there was such a one) is less certain.

We do know Germans and Romans descend from different sons or grandsons of Japheth who is the relevant son of Noah for Europe (though not solely so for all the IE speaking lands).

One can have taken over the language of the other or both can have exchanged words and taken over such from Nesili (Hittite - as opposed to Hattili/Hattic, which seems to be a Fenno-Ugrian one as clearly as the case would be for Sumerian, if not for Etruscan).

But this is a complete misinterpretation of the evidence. Clearly it is more economical for God to use similar phonic structures to designate similar meanings.

Here the lampooning is more directed at Biological Evolution. Linguistic evolution is only interesting to Gail Davis as a parallel to Biological one.

Of course, God does use similar structures over different kinds for similar purposes. Whether donkeys and horses were originally same kind or not, whether sheep and goats were originally same kind or not, sheep and horses weren't. But God gave both four legs and similar "toenails" and "fingernails" - to cite what structure in man is supposed to be originally same as hooves and cleft hooves.

He also probably used similar genetic codes for achieving the results.

The counterpart in what God did at Babel would be that God gave all languages more or less the same grammatical categories - even if he sometimes exchanged the means for expressing them.

If He meant certain languages to form families, He would have given them some initial similarities in vocabulary too. With a neat phonetic comfort distance between their versions, so as to suggest a demoted borrowing, once the peoples start to get in touch.

Supposing for instance that Germanic soundshift was never an event, but that Germanic represents a Phrygian state of sounds, with a de-satemisation (tch > k, dj > g) making it an overall Centum language, the "b" in "beru" could have been taken over as "φ" in "φερω" - or the reverse - because this was a difference the languages of Lud (ancestor of Lydians and Phrygians) and Javan (ancestor of at least Ionian Greeks) had in the original common glosses.

Therefore, the existence of such similarities PROVES that the various languages must have had the same author.

Logic. A similarity proves common origin. Common author, common ancestor, common model, common neighbourhood are all valid options.

The sentence is of course meant to lampoon the argument about similarities that even evolution believers do not put down to common ancestry (like caffeine in both Cammelia Sinensis and Coffea Coffea or echolocation in dolphins and bats) being proof of a common designer.

Second, a language is a complex thing. The odds that some first speaker could randomly string together a complex series of sounds, and then multiply this by the odds that someone else would UNDERSTAND him, and the probability could be calculated to be less than 1 in 10500. That's a one with five hundred zeroes. A statistical impossibility. Obviously, the first language must have a designer: God.

So far linguistics has not answered that one. I have seen a few attempts. One pretty funny such, which I saw in a science book of anthropology in Austria (probably written by someone close to Nazism**, same book says "Aryans" became a beautiful people by selection for beauty) indicated that the first word and phoneme was "φ" as in bilabial f. It meant fire. This is because the phoneme bilabial f is phonetically identic to the sound you make when blowing embers into flames. Man invented fire and then invented language to talk about fire. The sound "φ" was immediately understood as referring to fire. But getting from there to a language ...

Seriously, no evolutionist scenario beats God giving a ready made language to Adam and inviting him to fill in terminological gaps, in this case the names of the kinds of animal.

This is of course an entirely different question than that of why languages do change. And sometimes crossing boundaries into becoming new languages (I have argued elsewhere that this does at least sometimes, as for French adn English, as compared to Latin and West-Saxon, involve crossing boundaries and inventing things like new correspondences between sounds and letters).

Third, there is NO evidence that transitional languages ever existed. What use is half a language? A noun without verbs conveys no meaning!

Indeed, the very point that language does not evolve from brute systems of communication.

Sure, there is middle and old- English. But these are ENGLISH! A complete nontransitional language.

None of these is transitional between bird song and human language, that is for sure.

Obviously Early Middle English (or Old English) is transitional between Old English (or Anglo-Saxon) and Late Middle English (or Middle English).

Chomsky has argued that the (Late) Middle English of Chaucer and Modern English are very much the same language with only minor adjustments.

The point is, there was a transition. The West Saxon model of writing the native speech was lost. The Chaucerian one (which involved adaptations to French spelling, as when "hyll" was respelled "hull" before being respelled "hill" after delabialisation - sorry Chaucer if you already spelled "hill" but whatever you did pronounce with the labial front high vowel you did spell "u", as in French***) was not yet invented and universally accepted. And Orrmulum was written.

We do not deny that micro-linguistics can happen, but this process can create only DIALECTS. There is NO EVIDENCE that a series of random micro-linguistic events can create a WHOLE NEW LANGUAGE.

This is obviously a lmampooning of variation within kinds.

A linguist would not call English a whole new language. He would call it a Germanic dialect. It is as obviously a dialect of same root as Dutch, Frisonic and High German as Aeolic is of same root as Attic.

But the fault of the comparison is that all human languages are in a sense dialects of one language.

All human languages have the same basic grammatic functions. All have same basic semantic distinctions. No two are "similar and dissimilar" like elephant and whale. All pairs have such compatibility of functions as between Great Dane and Chihuahua. Does not make them immediately comrpehensible to each other. It is more comparable to a kind forming band species than to a kind forming just variants all directly interbreeedable.

I'll believe in Macro-linguistics when I see a video tape of a child growing up in an Eskimo village suddenly become fluent in Armenian!

Eskimo - or rather Inuit or Greenlandic - does have the same basic grammar as Armenian.

You only need lots of translations between not just words but also the structures expressing the functions before a man with Inuit mother tongue can be fluent in Armenian.

That is not comparable to the biological presumed example that all land animals have some kind of expression of original five phalangs, because you find them both in frogs and in man. But not in horses or goats, nor in sheep and donkeys.

Obviously Gail Davis is not at all interested in linguistics for its own sake, just as a parallel to Biologic Evolution.

It takes A LOT MORE FAITH to believe in atheistic linguisticism than the truth of Babelism.

Babel was the original diversity of languages.

It could also have originated non-mirculously. We have no record of that, but we have a record of the Tower of Babel.

It is rather God giving Adam a complete language where the Christian scenario is immediately much more comprehensible than the atheist one. But there the atheist one is not linguistics as the word is commonly understood.

Not even reconstructing a common parent language for all 32 large language families would come close to giving us rudimentary languages.

If the so constructed model of a proto-human-language completely lacked the conditional function, neither conjunctions like "if" and "then" nor doubling of the word order for question clauses, that would not mean the proto-human-language the model is meant to construct lacked it any more than the lack of a word for "head" or a word for "hand" in actual proto-IE means that if that language existed it lacked a word for "head" and lacked a word for "hand". It would only mean that the model is incomplete in reconstructing.

So join me in the crusade: Babelism must be included in the public school English curriculum.

There are only two theories which explain the origin of our language: Babelism and Linguisticism. Shouldn't they BOTH be given a fair hearing?

Did you even dream there would come a Creationist with a serious answer to all you said?

Here I am.

What happened after the piece was written?

Obviously, Talk Origins did not do very well in answering linguistic questions. No post on linguistics ever again made it to post of the month.

But there is another and sadder side. The stance taken by Gail Davis, that linguistics is a valid refutation of Creationism, has been taken up again and again. I have been confronted to it twice. Once back before I left Malmö (i e between 2001 and 2004) on Netscape Boards by one dhux. Once much more recently by one Cushla Geary. I will link to both confrontations below. And they are as vociferous as they are nullities in linguistic knowledge.*

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre University Library
Sts Aureus and Justina
of Mayence, killed by Huns
16 / VI / 2014

* The spell check is amusing: "using" gives "usine", "without" gives "Erfurt", "complexity" gives - somewhat more appropriately - "complexité" as well as "vocabulary" giving "vocabulaire". And "grammar" gives "grammage", whatever that is. Not "grammaire" even. And "knockdown" suggested for "knowledge" is not bad either.

** Note that both Nazism and Austrofascism have ties to Austria. And look to Mussolini more or less as a model. This does not make the two the same. Of the two it is Nazism which is more likely to produce para-Evolutionist stuff.

*** It also involved respelling "c" as "ch" in words or word endings like "-ceastre" / "-chester". And "g" as "y" in "geard" / "yard". And so on, after French model. And as "y" was the consonant or the "ig"/"ige" endings, "y" was replaced by "u" for labial front high vowel, so also "ou" / "ow" replaced "u" for labial back high vowel. Meaning French was the model, West Saxon was ignored.

EARLIER CONFRONTATIONS

Assorted retorts : ...on Tower of Babel or language evolution
http://assortedretorts.blogspot.com/2008/11/tower-of-babel-or-language-evolution.html

HGL's F.B. writings : Attacked on "Evolution of Languages Disproves Tower of Babel" Subject Again
http://hglsfbwritings.blogspot.com/2014/05/attacked-on-evolution-of-languages.html

I forgot I had already had a confrontation last year on it, but that came back as I saw the short debate with Cushla Geary and her supporters featuring as post n° 8 in one of my series of monographic collections of posts.

On PHRYGIAN

Here are some texts of it, I took a look:
http://titus.uni-frankfurt.de/texte/etcs/phrygian/phryg.htm

To me "semon knoumanei" does not look like related to Germanic. I am glad the paragraph in the text above starts "Supposing for instance ...".

Supposing for instance that Germanic soundshift was never an event, but that Germanic represents a Phrygian state of sounds, with a de-satemisation (tch > k, dj > g) making it an overall Centum language, the "b" in "beru" could have been taken over as "φ" in "φερω" - or the reverse - because this was a difference the languages of Lud (ancestor of Lydians and Phrygians) and Javan (ancestor of at least Ionian Greeks) had in the original common glosses.


The scenario is as such plausible, as one of the ways in which a group of basically unrelated langages can have gotten related to each other, and so is the application perhaps of Lydian being one of them, but the application to a short connexion between Phrygian and Germanic is very much less so.

Inscription: 3 (Neo-Phrygian corpus on site)


(Br. 1,1, p.12)
Line: 1 ios ni semon knoumanei kakon a[d]daket
 ΙΟΣ ΝΙ ΣΕΜΟΝ ΚΝΟΥΜΑΝΕΙ ΚΑΚΟΝ Α[Δ]ΔΑΚΕΤ
Line: 2 [deOs ke zemelOs k]/e
 [ΔΕΩΣ ΚΕ ΖΕΜΕΛΩΣ Κ]/Ε
Line: 3 tie tit tetikmenos eitou
 ΤΙΕ ΤΙΤ ΤΕΤΙΚΜΕΝΟΣ ΕΙΤΟΥ


Between Latin and Germanic the number of shared words by far exceeds the total number of words in the Old Phrygian, Mysian and Neo-Phrygian corpus. And it is obviously possible that KAKON has exactly the same meaning as the neighbouring Greek word. For addaket I would guess a connexion to deiknymi and a meaning like "indicate, mean", but I am far from sure. And obviously word forms like tetikmenos or - if it be a genitive - genitives like eitou sound more Greek than anything else. Plus a clearer close connexion to deiknymi for tetikmenos (but it includes the T vs D connexion which is also typical for Germanic - as does the following word). TIT could be identic to the Germanic word THAT which is the same as -TUD in ISTUD.
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