Is Gradualism Really That Impossible?

An Ambiguous Term, "Language Development" · Is Gradualism Really That Impossible? · Was Jean Aitchison Calling Bird-Song Doubly Articulated?

While I was beginning to be a Christian, at age 9 or a little earlier, I had read the Gospels but not Genesis. Even after reading Genesis, I was hoping some time for a loophole for evolution to be true also. I mean, so much detective work had gone to it, and I was a fairly big sucker for detective stories. One thing that helped me decide for fullfledged creationism rather than evolutionism, if not fullfledged Biblical chronology yet, was the question how total non-speakers of a human language (any language whatsoever) could develop a language. If Tolkien could invent Quenya, he already had experience of knowing other languages (Finnish and Greek had helped to inspire Quenya, Spanish and Welsh had inspired Naffarin, Latin at least gave the rythm for Quenya and Sindarin with its antepaenultima rule, he already knew English and perhaps some French before starting Latin ... all starting when his mother taught him English at the apropriate age). So, let's go through a few hairbrained and detailed ideas.

One or two over the internet have suggested, when someone came up with saying the sound "tiger" when seeing a tiger, this had a survival advantage. Actually, no. Green monkeys have three danger signals, depending on whether the threat is tiger, eagle or snake. The tactic is different. Please note, if you recall, the animals generally have up to 500 signals, unitary, with well defined phonemes constituting the morphemes that constitute the entire signals. And getting to shift the entire tactic of communication, introducing more than one phoneme per morpheme and a notion of classification into the morpheme, is not the kind of thing you do in a hurry. It's like saying a Morse telegraph developed ASCII code of computers by being heavily shaken.

I found a theory (a bit more seriously) that language came by as a way for mothers to communicate with offspring they couldn't carry on the back like monkeys do. Or however it is monkeys do carry them. Well, in that case, the arguable outcome of not being able to carry offspring the normal way for a female would not be to develop a new way of communicating, but rather to lose the offspring and therefore get extinct.

Back when I was a child, about ten, I saw the theory, the first phoneme, morpheme, sentence of the human language was a bilabial f, the sound phoneticians describe by Greek letter φ - what you get when you blow through pursed lips. Why? The same sound is needed to light fires, once you master the fire. So, the one sound came to mean "fire" and "light a fire" and (since you do it with your breath) "breath" and "soul" (the thing that ceases to breath in your body when you die) and obviously "die" and "death" as well ... all this for one sound. Meanwhile, ee came to symbolise "here, by me", ah came to symbolise "there" and oo came to symbolise "yonder" ... I think one consonant and three vowels is a bit thin to actually start sorting out the diverse meanings of the original sound-word φ ...

And in Sarlat, in a library, I saw the theory Homo erectus spoke with ten speach sounds stringed vowel + cosonant and ten other ones stringed consonant + vowel. These twenty "phonemes" were also morphemes, and each had a fairly abstract meaning, with ad + am = earth + harmonious (samples of "living fossils" from this one included Eden, Aden, Adam!) ...

Enough of hairbrained ones, here is a reference, Pascal Picq, and here are my responses to one of his books:

Human Language Revisited · Elves and Adam · Back to Picq · Off the Bat

Here there is not much of an idea, the one salient point being that the language capacity of two year olds would represent the past language capacity of human ancestors at an un-precise past.

And my idea about it being that Pascal and his pals hadn't even started to scratch the problem. Plus, the suggestion makes one wonder - wouldn't a language with capacity for only positive and indicative two word sentences be a source of misunderstanding and a liability for survival rather than anything else?

Now, I'll mention Jean Aitchison with respect. Her book Language change: Progress or decay? (3rd edition (1st edition1981). Cambridge, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2001) was an eye-opener in 1993 about the process I've likened to repainting a house or resewing a pair of pants or shorts - the gradual changes you see between different human languages, all of which are already perfectly human. She has also written, and I have not yet read, The seeds of speech: Language origin and evolution. Cambridge, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1996. (Also, with new extended introduction, in C.U.P. Canto series, 2000.) It is probably the best one, it basically says (as far as I have gathered) that human or pre-human courtship came to include certain songs that came to be associated with meaning outside courtship as well.

And now I'll try to fill in the details, a bit like I tried back when I was a child with "φ as in φanning a φire being the φirst word". Notable difference, to that one the book hadn't given details, and with Aitchison, I haven't had occasion to read them.

Human anatomy involves the capacity for infants to babble indefinitely and for both themselves and the surrounding adults to hear the babbling. On what I take Jean Aitchison's theory to be, this babbling came to be reused in courtship. And let's imagine some male not-yet-quite-human wooer got into saying "pat-pat-pat" while strewing nuts before the object of his desires, while in another not-yet-quite human tribe the sound at that moment would have been "pal-pal-pal" and the offering would have been apples. And the two tribes unite and some time later they note they are using "pal-pal-pal" for "give me an apple" and "pat-pat-pat" for "give me a nut" ... no, I don't think this is much better than the φ-theory already alluded to. I was going to write off that ape courtships don't have the sufficient complexity for this, but this appears to be not true, some chimps do have complex courtship.

But even so, it would take very much for distinguishing foods from combinations of courtship rituals to actually coming anywhere near a human language. It would among other things also involve inventing sentence structure and negatives and conditionals and pasts and futures as much as the other theories. And having a language lacking these would, as said, be hazardous.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Saturnine
29.XI.2021

PS: I think my impression of Jean Aitchison's work on language origin came from another preview than these two:

The seeds of speech: Language origin and evolution. Aitchison Jean. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp 281.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2008
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/applied-psycholinguistics/article/abs/seeds-of-speech-language-origin-and-evolution-aitchison-jean-cambridgecambridge-university-press-1996-pp-281/3D19734EA6CA3C0C6938D39BF6D26F54

The Seeds of Speech Language Origin and Evolution
Jean Aitchison
Excerpt
https://beckassets.blob.core.windows.net/product/readingsample/443426/9780521785716_excerpt_001.pdf

However, the comparison to bird song and the statement about birds using song for nesting reminds me of the thing I half recalled./HGL

A Disaster 70 Years Ago

Pius XII in an allocution (speech) to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, stated that the world was 5 billion years old, according to dating methods that are very exact. This happened the day of St. Cecilia, 22.XI.1951.

One could imagine he had already sinned against the faith the previous year, with Humani Generis, leaving formally undecided, and in practise often in the field decided the wrong way, what should be decided the right way. If so, he could have been for one year "papa materialiter, non formaliter" and as such able to apostatise. This speech before the Academy could then have been his apostasy.

Some lenifying circumstances though - he could have been assuming simply the day age theory or gap theory held and that Adam's creation was even with a 5 billion year delay c. 6 or 7000 years ago. You see, if he was hearing of the U-Pb dating of the meteorites, now assumed to be just 4.5 billion years old, he might have seen no implication about the age of mankind, since carbon dating was not yet invented./HGL

Small Tidbits on Ark, Especially Mathematical

Baraminological Note · For Sea-Farers .... · Rolling Period of Ark? · Ark : empty weight and freighted weight, number of couples on the Ark. · Small Tidbits on Ark, Especially Mathematical

I

Someone - I think former JW The Truth Hurts - made the argument that all peoples who have a Flood story also have access to big water.

I have already argued, for the peoples in the Altai region, this is not true.

But here is more - nearly all countries in the world are with sea access. On wiki, List of sovereign states states:

The 206 listed states can be divided into three categories based on membership within the United Nations System: 193 member states,[1] 2 observer states, and 11 other states.

And the article Landlocked country states:

In 1990, there were only 30 landlocked countries in the world. The breakup of Yugoslavia, the dissolutions of the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, and the independence referendums of Eritrea and South Sudan have created 15 new landlocked countries and 4 partially recognized landlocked states while the former landlocked country of Czechoslovakia ceased to exist on 1 January 1993.

In other words, human populations overall have a tendency to have access to big waters.

II

Dimensions of wood on the ark were calculated in my article Ark : empty weight and freighted weight, number of couples on the Ark as if the "walls" of the container had no overlapping parts. This is not true. You have prisms:

4 * hind wall X horizontals
4 * front wall X horizontals
4 * right wall X horizontals
4 * left wall X horizontals
4 * long X short verticals only

And you have 16 cubes where these prisms intersect.

The proper maths to deal with a correction would be to first subtract the prisms and then add back the cubes. Why so?

Imagine you had only three walls. Three prisms belong to two walls each. These are therefore already accounted for twice, so you subtract them once, the one correct count being left. The cube where all three walls meet also belongs to the three prisms. It is added three times over, once in each wall, and subtracted three times over, once in each prism. It must therefore be added once to have the one correct count of its existence.

III

Executing previous corrections ... in order to get the right total volume (which is not our main concern), one would for each deduct the first three values and add the fourth one, but as deduction from volume of wood ultimately means addition of freight capacity, we well add the three and subtract the fourth (in order to get the volume one would then deduct the result from the volume).

For readability, I will approximate after three decimals and for the final result, we'll consider that the m³ of water = mt (metric ton).

Short cubit, thin walls

8 * hind/front walls X horizontals
8 * 22.86 m * 0.2286 m * 0.2286 m = 9.557 m³
8 * right/left walls X horizontals
8 * 137.16 m * 0.2286 m * 0.2286 m = 57.342 m³
4 * long X short (verticals only)
4 * 13.716 m * 0.2286 m * 0.2286 m = 2.867 m³
16 * 0.2286 m * 0.2286 m * 0.2286 m = 0.191 m³
9.557 m³ + 57.342 m³ + 2.867 m³ - 0.191 m³ = 69.574 m³ / mt

Short cubit, thick walls

8 * hind/front walls X horizontals
8 * 22.86 m * 0.4572 m * 0.4572 m = 38.228 m³
8 * right/left walls X horizontals
8 * 137.16 m * 0.4572 m * 0.4572 m = 229.366 m³
4 * long X short (verticals only)
4 * 13.716 m * 0.4572 m * 0.4572 m = 11.468 m³
16 * 0.4572 m * 0.4572 m * 0.4572 m = 1.529 m³
38.228 m³ + 229.366 m³ + 11.468 m³ - 1.529 m³ = 278.298 m³ / mt

Long cubit, thin walls

8 * hind/front walls X horizontals
8 * 30.48 m * 0.3048 m * 0.3048 m = 22.653 m³
8 * right/left walls X horizontals
8 * 182.88 m * 0.3048 m * 0.3048 m = 135.921 m³
4 * long X short (verticals only)
4 * 18.288 m * 0.3048 m * 0.3048 m = 6.796 m³
16 * 0.3048 m * 0.3048 m * 0.3048 m = 0.453 m³
22.653 m³ + 135.921 m³ + 6.796 m³ - 0.453 m³ = 164.917 m³ / mt

Long cubit, thick walls

8 * hind/front walls X horizontals
8 * 30.48 m * 0.6096 m * 0.6096 m = 90.614 m³
8 * right/left walls X horizontals
8 * 182.88 m * 0.6096 m * 0.6096 m = 543.683 m³
4 * long X short (verticals only)
4 * 18.288 m * 0.6096 m * 0.6096 m = 27.184 m³
16 * 0.6096 m * 0.6096 m * 0.6096 m = 3.625 m³
90.614 m³ + 543.683 m³ + 27.184 m³ - 3.625 m³ = 659.669 m³ / mt

IV

And now let's apply this to the freight capacity ... and let's stay with 14 cubits high water line, meaning we need not just to multiply above corrections with density, but also with 7/15:

Smallest weight available, biggest weight in walls, for small cubit:

20,069.565 - 6,812.184 = 13,257.381 mt
278.298 * 0.88 * 7/15 = 114.288 mt
13,257.381 + 114.288 = 13,371.669 mt

Biggest weight available, smallest weight in walls, for small cubit:

20,069.565 - 1,362.437 = 18,707.128 mt
69.574 * 0.352 * 7/15 = 11.429 mt
18,707.128 + 11.429 = 18,718.557 mt

Smallest weight available, biggest weight in walls, for big cubit:

47,572.302 - 16,147.399 = 31,424.904 mt
659.669 * 0.88 * 7/15 = 270.904 mt
31,424.904 + 270.904 = 31,695.808 mt

Biggest weight available, smallest weight in walls, for big cubit:

47,572.302 - 3,229.48 = 44,342.823 mt
164.917 * 0.352 * 7/15 = 27.09 mt
44,342.823 + 27.09 = 44,369.913 mt.

V

Revisiting two paragraphs:

On the other* post, I had estimated the number of couples to 2032, meaning 4064 individuals, on the average size of a sheep. Now, a sheep eats 7 kg green fodder per day, 365 days. 10,383.52 metric tons for food. How much would 4064 sheep weigh? Tame sheep weigh 45 to 160 kg for the bucks, 45 to 100 kg for the ewes. Let's add the numbers together and divide by four : (45+45+160+100)/4 = 87.5 kg. Let's multiply this by 4064. 355.6 metric tons. Living passengers with crew therefore 355.6 + 10,383.52 = 10,739.12.

So, even the smallest weight available for the animals and food and tools and the walls of the small chambers and so on has 500 tons for tools and temporary water supplies on top of needed animals and food weight. And the 2032 couples I got by reducing an evolutionist's estimate for number of species (taking mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians separately) by only 16, the number of species I thought there were of hedgehogs, but that's actually 17.

13,371.669 - 10,739.12 = 2632.549 mt
18,718.557 - 10,739.12 = 7979.437 mt

All that for tools and water?

I think there might actually have been more animals than just 2032 couples. Especially since 7 kg food per day is not exactly typical in proportion to the body weight, the ruminants need more food.

And this would mean, hedgehogs are more diversified as a baramin than the medium.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Josaphat
12.XI.2021

Vitepsci, in Polonia, passio sancti Josaphat, e sancti Basilii Ordine, Episcopi Polocensis et Martyris; qui a schismaticis, in odium catholicae unitatis et veritatis, crudeliter interfectus est, et a Pio Papa Nono inter sanctos Martyres adscriptus. Ejus tamen festivitas recolitur decimo octavo Kalendas Decembris.

An Ambiguous Term, "Language Development"

An Ambiguous Term, "Language Development" · Is Gradualism Really That Impossible? · Was Jean Aitchison Calling Bird-Song Doubly Articulated?

Imagine you have a cake, Swedish style birthday cake, two layers of sponge cake, since cut up in the middle, and strawberry jam between the two, strawberry jam and whipped cream on top, and a few whole strawberries on top of that as decoration. Plus candles.

Ooops, it wasn't a Swedish birthday, it was a US American wedding. Take off candles and strawberries. Scrape off all cream and jam. Now add rhum, add some buttercream with chocolate and hazelnut flavour, make another storey or two, add glazing, add a doll of a wedding couple on top. Done.

But the sponge cake is still sponge cake. You didn't turn it into pancake or puff pastry.

Or imagine you have a house that is being constantly repainted, from one year to ten years later, the painting may have changed from a mix of blue, green and purple colour fields to a mix involving mainly red, yellow and orange.

And a pair of trousers can be remade (as I'm known to do) adding more and more stuff to replace the holes and widening the knees that way and taking stuff from lower legs to make insertions of Renaissance type or mendings at the butt.

That doesn't start turning the trousers into a house or the house into trousers.

If I bring up that language can't have developed from ape like communications (shrieks, grunts etc) I have reason to fear someone will bring up the absolute facepalm in this situation : stating that linguists deal in language development.

Now, there are other studies in linguistics (as linguistics proper) than historic linguistics, but historic linguistics does indeed deal with one thing that is often nicknamed "language development" - like the "development" from Latin to French. But this has no bearing on developing human language from non-human communications any more than changing the glazing could make your sponge cake into a puff pastry.

Between Latin and French, language of Plautus and language of Molière, we can suppose there were c. 20 or 30 intermediaries. But each one would be perfectly viable, just as the house remains habitable while you repaint it. It is a bit hard to know for each intermediary - like the one between 450 and 550 and by peasants in Gaul - which changes were already made and which weren't. But it's not hard to imagine how the language remained viable through the changes. I'll give you one, from Latin six case system to Old French two case system, in the masculine type declinsion, i. e. II declinsion:

bonus		bonos		bonos		(later bons)
boni		boni/bone		-
bono		bono		bono		(later bon)
bonum		bono		bono
bone		bone		-
bono		bono		bono

You start out with nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative and ablative-instrumental. You get nominative still there, replacing also vocative, and you get accusative taking the place of dative, ablative and even genitive.

In some declinsions, distinguishing between nominative and accusative becomes hard, like first declinsion, nominative bona, accusative bonam ... bonam becomes bona, and later bona becomes bone / bonne. Now, Latin not only had nominative and accusative to distinguish the doer and the done-to, they also had (optionally) word order. In some cases, like neuters or plurals of third declinsion, the option became obligatory, and the development of "bonne" just added to the situations where this was so.

All other types of change similarily left the language useful as human communication along the way too. It's like changing the glazing.

But there is a fact which is true of all human language, and of no bestial communication, including that of apes. A message is subdivided into morphemes. In Greenlandic, there might be one lexical morpheme and a lot of endings on that, in Chinese all morphemes have nearly the status of lexical items - or separate words (not quite true, some words need certain positions to be used as grammatical morphemes, where real lexical ones would be used in other positions) and in French or Latin or English or German you have a situation in between. But the message is subdivided into morphemes. And a morpheme is subdivided into phonemes, that, unlike morphemes, don't mean anything on their own. Changing from message = morpheme = phoneme to this is like trying to turn sponge cake into puff pastry or trousers into a house. It simply won't work. There are no intermediate situations imaginable that this would work with.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Sts Zachary and Elisabeth
father and mother of the
precursor
5.XI.2021

Sancti Zachariae, Sacerdotis et Prophetae, qui pater exstitit beati Joannis Baptistae, Praecursoris Domini. Item sanctae Elisabeth, ejusdem sanctissimi Praecursoris matris.