- 1) You are perfectly right human language is too complex for evolving from ape "language".
However, the correct way of putting this is that every "statement" of an ape, is a unitary signal. This limits the number of signals to the avilable number of sounds, strength of voice also taken into account, and gestures.
In human language, a statement is composed of or articulated into one or often MORE parts, known as words or morphemes, each bearing a meaning with a logical relation to the meaning of the statment as a whole, and these in turn are articulated into further smaller units, NOT bearing logical relation to the meaning of the morpheme or word as a whole. These even smaller units are called phonemes, and are in spoken language known either as "language sounds" or "letters" and in written language (with alphabetic writing), known as "letters" (sometimes graphemes are distinguished from phonemes).
Both of these articulation which magnify the number of possible statements even while reducing the number of unitary signals a speaker must master, into infinity, are lacking from ape "language".
- 2) Original complexity and degeneration is however NOT a linguistically documented fact.
I am quoting you:
Hence both Juola and Bane define complexity according to those aspects which can be quantified and analyzed mathematically; but without wishing to belittle these studies the question still needs to be asked, “Can language—and its complexity—be reduced to mathematics in this way?” Furthermore, these studies deal with contemporary languages on the plane of the present: no attempt is made to explicate any sort of historical trend to simplification.
Yet, even with their approach and criteria, it is significant that in Bane’s study, where he selects twenty languages for comparison, the most ancient language of his group, viz. Latin, comes out as the most complex, while Bislama—one of his ‘Creole’ group, appears near the bottom of his list as a very simple language, as indeed it is.
I am sorry, but this is not what Bane said. I looked up your reference, and it said something else:
Bane, M., Quantifying and Measuring Morphological Complexity; in: Chang, C.B. and Haynie, H.J. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 26th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, Somerville, pp. 69–76, 2008.
Did you catch the nuance? He said nothing about complexity of a language as a whole. He said something about complexity in a specified area : morphological complexity.
Now, the thing is, morphological complexity is usually at inverse ratio with syntactic one. It is not simplifying relation of morphemes, but reshuffling it.
English indeed had, morphologically, four cases for nouns, five for adjectives and pronouns in the time of King Alfred, and now has general case for all nouns, s-genitive for nouns denoting persons, genitive or related adjective plus nominative vs oblique case for pronouns, no case forms at all for adjectives.
This is a reduction.
But on the other hand, in the time of King Alfred, English had basically two tenses, past and present. You don't find many futures, you don't find many pluperfects or perfects, these come once in a while, perhaps (though I don't recall getting them explained in Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Primer), but future meaning is mainly represented by present form, pluperfect or perfect by past form.
Now English has sixteen tenses. Past and present remain the simple forms, but you have three more parameters expressed in quasimorphological, phraseological ways:
- continuous vs simple ("where are you going" would have been equivalent of "where goest thou" in KA's time)
- perfect vs non-perfect ("I have [already] eaten" would have been "I ate already", precisely as "I ate" would have been "I ate")
- future vs non-future ("I will go there" would have been "I go there", "I would go there" would have been - older sense - "I went theretoward" or "I willed to go there" - or - younger sense - replaced by present or past subjunctive).
This means that the focus of morphological complexity has changed, and one can consider "analytical forms" (extra words) as "less complex" (needing fewer forms to learn separately) in morphology than "synthetic forms". But the complexity of meaning remains roughly the same.
Also, vaunting morphological complexity as a a superiority is placing Sanskrit higher than Hebrew, since Sanskrit has higher both verbal and nominal complexity in morphology, Hebrew replacing it with stricter rules of syntax.
But the original language was arguably Hebrew, therefore, your point of view is derogatory to the sacredness of Hebrew.
Also, some racialists have pretended that Creoles are a sign of mental inferiority of black men, while the morphological complexity of Creoles arguably comes from them learning Portuguese, English or Dutch by replacing words in their own original West African languages, which, precisely like Chinese (hardly a simple language!) is putting the complexity burden on syntax rather than on morphology.
If you take a sentence in English and a sentence in a Creole, and analyse the morphemes, they will be of similar or same number, probably not as often marking plural if understood, but in the Creole all of them will be separated by spaces, in English some will be joined into words of more than one morphem.
And since Latin is a language you pretend to respect here (rightly so), though not over Hebrew (rightly so, once again), I can tell you my Latin professor Birger Bergh thought exactly the same things. Languages are as complex as the speakers need in vocabulary, and they are as potentially complex in logical relations, the difference being how many complexities have to be expressed, not how many can.
When we say Sumerian is complex that is not a subjective judgment as to whether it is difficult (or easy) for person X to learn, but is so in its structure, its inflections and categories.
An inflectional category is : how much complexity of meaning you are forced to show, not how much you can show.
Finnish can, but need not, express whether a single person referred to is masculine or feminine, the pronoun being for both "hän" : this identic pronoun has nothing to do with gender theory, Finns are much more machist than Swedes, precisely as Russians are more machist than English (thugh Russian makes the difference in pronoun choice).
We can see this, for example, in the Sumerian noun with its ten cases (!)
Well, Finnish only has fifteen, what a reduction ! Assuming they are related, which perhaps they are. (Oh, that would be an increase!)
but also class (personal and non-personal)
Finnish too makes a distinction between "hän" and whatever they use for "it" - precisely as English, unlike French and Hebrew, does not replace "it" with either "he" or "she". Bantu languages lack gender and have a more intricate class system - right now - than either Finnish or Sumerian.
One could indeed go on citing examples of ancient languages as to their complexity, their subtle nuances, their economy of words to express, at times, quite extensive sentences, and in turn the gradual loss of some of these nuances over the passage of time, but the point should nevertheless be clear. What can be stated emphatically is that evolutionary theory is at a loss to explain this phenomenon of original complexity and subsequent degeneration.
Being lyrical about complexity of old languages (partly rightly, partly by misplaced apprehensions as a learner) does not justify claiming languages went downhill since then.
The point of view comes from i a Grimm, who were not even Christians : have you read their text "supposing God had a language"? It is awful!
- 3) Different phonemes coalesce, granted, but they compensate too.
Latin had ten vowels, five long, five short. Plus perhaps also a schwa like vowel, which is variously spelled u or i in short internal syllables, between stem and ending : volumus and regimus need not have had different vowels before the m, it could have been voll-uh-mooss, rayg-uh-mooss, conventional different spelling (the spelling regumus exists). So, ten or eleven.
These are reduced to seven detectable diverse vowels (detectable as bottlenecks for original Latin vowels), in most, not all, Romance languages, when long and short cease to make a difference, and then we have some explosions of new differences. Why is there an i in French pied, Spanish pié? Because Latin "pedem" had a short e. Makes an open e in proto-Romance, and that gives this diphthong, in a stressed syllable. Spanish perhaps has only seven sounds for stressed syllables (a, ie, e, i, ue, o, u), but French really explodes the variations.
Also, when words originally distinct become homophones, one word tends to get replaced or modified. In what was becoming French, solum (soil, floor, ground) and solem (Sun) began to coalesce, and one word was modified, the French for Sun comes not from "solem" but from "soliculum", diminutive for "solem". Language change is not just thughtless evolution downhill, but also intelligent design uphill.
- 4) language families :
Greek and Latin belong to the Indo-European family; so too does Hittite, although the decipherment of the cuneiform script and its classification as Indo-European came as a shock to the system for Near Eastern scholars. Meanwhile, Linear B, since its decipherment by Michael Ventris, has been clearly recognized as an early form of Greek, a discovery which also upset the hitherto fond theories of scholars.
Greek belongs to an identifiable person in table of nations : Iavan. Latin belongs to no one in particular in that list.
Hittite seems to belong to a Canaanite, since the first born of Canaan was Heth. Actually, Hattic (Hattili in Hittite) may have been an earlier language of that stem, while Hittite (Nesili in Hittite) came from neighbouring descendants of Gomer ... except for one detail. It is related to Lydian, and the Lud in Anatolia was the Semitic Lud.
And one scholar has pretended to identify Linear A as related to Indic and Iranian languages, to Vedic Sanskrit and to Avestic Old Persian. But since Crete was the land of Caphthorim, this places another Indo-European subfamily within ... yes : Ham.
So, it is far safer to assume after Babel some 72 unrelated families exploded, and some of them started coalescing, like Assur and Chanaaen adopting languages related to the Hebrew of men like Abraham, or some may have had original affinities with Hebrew planted there by God, like Egyptian of Misraim was very similar in some very rough and general respects to Hebrew, like feminines in -t, like bi- or triliteral roots and so on.
Ethiopians coming from Ham (from his son Kush) at least in part speak a language related to Hebrew, Gheez (and Amharic, which could be considered as "modern Gheez" or modern form of some sister language to Gheez). There was not ever a real linear simple decline for some of these languages, or even simple development, since they were in contact with each other.
Your distinctions among ancient Near East families are, unlike your sharing the IE protolanguage craze, though somewhat discretely here, unobjectionable, as far as I can see.
Making Etruscan descend from Thiraz is interesting : do you think Turkish and Hungarian also comes from him? Because, both genetics and linguistics are tying Etruscans to Hungarian and Asiatic origins, though some violently dispute this.
See Alinei on this one (he dates proto-Indo-European to 10 000 BC or at least BP, which means he gives me a motive as Creationist to dispute original unity of this family).
In regard to structure, the Etruscan noun has inflections for each of five cases; however, there is no gender distinction in common nouns, only with proper names.
Sounds very Fenno-Ugric, except the five cases are comparatively few, closer to Turkish.
Apart from the inevitable loan words from Greek, its vocabulary is sui generis, albeit some words passed into Latin as the latter took over as the language of the Italian Peninsula (figure 3).
Except Alinei has shown this is wrong, many words become clearer and this in ways making short inscriptions intelligible (as opposed to totally garbled) if compared to Hungarian ones. What was the Etruscan version of Gyula again? Tried to check with Alinei, but this computer on Nanterre University Library does not allow me to open this pdf:
www.continuitas.org/texts/alinei_etruscan.pdf
I suspect it was Etruscan ZIL, ZILA, as given in this defense of Alinei (who has been attacked):
http://tmajlath.byethost13.com/etruscan.html?i=1
I applaud on the other hand this information:
Finally in this survey of very ancient languages there are the Indus Valley texts. Widely regarded as indecipherable since their discovery in the early 20th century, Barry Fells attempted a decipherment in the 1970s following methods similar to those of Michael Ventris in his work on the Linear B script. His conclusion was that the script was alphabetic, with six vowels and 24 consonants, while the language, again complex in structure, was clearly Indo-European, in turn a direct ancestor of Sanskrit.
If Barry Fells is correct, this means Caphthorim either were both on Crete and in Indus Valley (one could imagine commercial reasons, like for Chanaaenans to be in both Lebanon and Tunisia) or the Caphthorim on Crete were sharing a language with some other post-Flood tribe in Indus Valley (btw, Indus Valley is according to my recalibration of carbon 14 rather close after Babel), or, Hebrews knew one, but not both places where the Caphthorim went - assuming of course the French linguist who removed his site was right in supposing Linear A to be Aryan, in supposing he had identified Mitra-Varuna and Indra (Mount Ida, on Crete = Mount Indra, with Indra as Hindoo name for whoever Zeus was).
The same could be said for the various other ancient languages of the Fertile Crescent: there is no evidence at all that any of the postulated ‘proto-languages’ ever existed. Bonfante does not venture to talk of a ‘proto-Etruscan’, but contents himself with the simple assertion that “the Etruscans were a pocket of non-Indoeuropean speakers in an area where everyone else spoke an Indoeuropean language”.55 The one possible exception to this scenario is the Indo- European family itself (biblically the Japhetic stream): there may have been an ancestor, a ‘proto-Indoeuropean’, for Luwian, Palaic, and Hittite, but even this is conjectural. In all, they are merely theoretical constructs, born ultimately of evolutionary assumptions.
Indo-Europeans are neither purely Japhethic (see Anatolian Lud, in Shem's posterity in Genesis 10, see Caphthorim and - if Regma came to North India / Pakistan - also Regma for Hamite Indo-Europeans), nor the only Japhetics, since the Turks are very arguably Japhethic.
Also, as language similarities go, Indo-European is by far the loosest language group I know of, perhaps rivalled by Ural-Altaic, and superseded only by the tenuous (not main sream, but required by Evolutionist logic) Nostratic and its rival Na Dene-Caucasian. Proto-Semitic is as unproblematic as Proto-Germanic : neither is documented, but both are probable on the ground of language similarities, if one did not have the problem with Proto-Semitic that one "descendent" of it, Hebrew, came before it.
One could imagine Heber and his sons Peleg and Joctan were speaking Proto-Semitic, and that the tradition from early patriarchs, whether by word of mouth or by cuneiform tablets, changed pronunciation to either Aramaic or Hebrew, whichever of the two was the language of Abraham. Meanwhile, some people took over - as much and best they could - Proto-Semitic from them, because land of Chanaan was a bit narrow to have the language differences given from table of nations : instead of Jebusites and Moabites and Tyrians speaking widely divergent languages, we find historically and archaeologically attested Tyrians and Moabites spoke roughly same language as Biblical Hebrew, while Jebusites had no linguistic problems either communicating with Abraham (supposing as I do Melchisedec was a Jebusite, Masoretic and Jewish people will disagree) or getting conquered by King David.
One could imagine that the real Proto-Semitic was either Biblical Hebrew or very close (Shalaam having neither become Shaloom, nor Salaam), and that the relationship with Proto-Semitic as reconstructed has been bungled : what sound changes to what is, excepting mergers, not totally clear. Supposing that IE family had an original unity, one can say Germanic emerged, on consonant side of phonemes, by Grimm and Verner sound changes, and Phrygian also independently had a Grimm like sound change : OR one can say Verner was the sound change leading to Germanic, while most non-Germanic versions (but not Phrygian!) come from an anti-Grimm sound change. There is no impossibility phonetically, when I discussed this with a linguist heavily prejudiced against Creationism, his main objection was it is not economic.
Similarily, the sound changes "from Proto-Semitic to Hebrew" could, excepting the mergers (Verner involves a merger, and is therefore clinched) have gone, all or most of them, other way round.
Ugaritic could fit either scenario : as a real Proto-Semitic very close to the Hebrew then spoken (and Hebrew Bibles, Masoretic, Samaritan or LXX identic fragments in Qumran have been phonetically updated to include sound changes since Moses presumably wrote sth close to Ugaritic), or Ugaritic can be derived from this movement of trying to learn Hebrew and partly failing.
Obviously a Hebraist could imagine objections I don't even dream of, I have not studied Hebrew myself.
This parallels my own earlier, and better founded, observations on Hittite, which seem not to have been totally lost on CMI:
Hittite could well be seen as an ancestral Indo-European language.
Especially if mergers deduced from Hittite spelling are really imprecisions in its spelling. But note, even then, Indo-European languages are very unequally in closeness to Hittite or indeed to any imagined or real language.
- 5) Shinar:
Whether an occurrence in an Egyptian text of šngr or a similar occurrence in an Amarna letter of Sa-an-ha-ar refer to the biblical Shin‘ar, i.e. Lower Babylonia, is disputed, the Hebrew is nevertheless clear, even if extra-biblical references are not. According to Genesis 11:2 the confusion of languages occurred in “the land of Shin‘ar”, also mentioned in Genesis 10:10 and 14:1. That this name refers to Lower Mesopotamia is undoubted: the association with other known cities of that region in Genesis 10:10, and the destination of Shin‘ar for the Jewish exiles in Daniel 1:2, make the identification certain.
No, the word Shinar can equally be considered as all of Mesopotamie, including Assyria and beyond, which means Göbekli Tepe is not excluded. Also, confer the fact that geographic names can get restricted areas. "Australia" in early 19th C. used to refer not just to "Ulimaroa"* and Tasmania, but include Easter Island and New Zealand too - as is now referred to as Oceania. Louisiana of the Louisiana Purchase is a larger area than Louisiana as a State. The place names also are actually not quite as clinching as imagined. Are you aware there is a city called Ur near Göbekli Tepe? Urfa. Also known as Edessa. Has by orientals been credited with being Abraham's hometown, Ur of the Chaldees. Here a man considers it likelier as referring to Erech, Uruk, if I get him right:
TheHoloGrid : The Builders of Gobekli Tepe, the Tower of Babel and the Saturn Myth Part I
https://thehologrid.wordpress.com/2015/02/18/the-builders-of-gobekli-tepe-the-tower-of-babel-and-the-saturn-myth/
I obviously disagree with datings like considering anything in Edessa as 13 500 years old. I do however note that if that statue has six fingers, it could be one of someone who "began to be a giant" (Nimrod comes to mind).
And there is a Harran not far from Urfa.
It is also close enough to ... "Including Neolithic sites such as, Çatalhöyük (7500 BC – 5700 BC) with evidence of bull worship."
Hmm, 7500 BC = 1100 years after 8600 BC or end of Göbekli Tepe ...
Let's do some redating ... on my Interim III recalibration, I am using the Syncellus chronology, not the one from Roman martyrology, but here goes:
- Reu
- 2699 BC
- XVII 2698 BC
- 53.577 pmc 7857 BC
- XVIII 2657 BC
- 55.763 pmc 7486 BC
- Shelah +
- 2633 BC
- Skipping
- some.
- Eber +
- 2459 BC
- XXIII 2453 BC
- 68.105 pmc 5629 BC
With Babel / Göbekli Tepe ending [XV] 2780 BC in this scenario, Çatalhöyük begins rather close to:
2780 BC
2657 BC
=123 years
... to 123 years after Babel. And Çatalhöyük lasts :
"7486 BC" = 2657 BC
"5629 BC" = 2453 BC
= "1857 years" = 204 years.
Well, that aside was a bit non-linguistic, but to return to Shinar, I have found it defined as = Mesopotamia rather than as = Sumer or lower Babylonia. so, yes, Göbekli Tepe could very well be Babel, and therefore the identity is a better hint on coupling Biblical and carbon years than Tas Walker's try at finding a Biblical year for Glacial Maximum by misreading evidence from Job (sorry, Tas, I respect your work in general, but I think your speciality gave you the wrong clue to look for). (On this one).
Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
Our Lady of Sorrows
15.IX.2015
Reference to their article:
CMI : Languages of the post-Diluvian World
by Murray R. Adamthwaite, today
https://creation.com/how-did-languages-develop
Note:
* I am not sure if you will ever find Ulimaroa as name for the larger island in Commonwealth of Australia used in English literature, I found it in a Swedish geography book from when Texas was a free state, and Ashanti kingdoms were not yet French colonies, but engaged in slave hunt and human sacrifice.
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