At 04:25 PM 01/14/2003 +0000, Ken Brown wrote:
> > All contemporary natural languages, like all biological species, are
> > the same age.
> This statement is so silly it leaves me speechless... []
> Nonsense. Icelandic is little changed from the Old Norse of 1000 A.D.
> Icelanders can easily read the sagas without help; modern Danes and
> Norwegians cannot. English, by contrast, is substantially different
> from just the Middle English of Chaucer, let alone the Old English of
> Beowulf.
Er, that's exactly what I said - they are the same age, but some change
more slowly than others...
and I did warn that I was being unreasonably pedantic.
If you're going to be pedantic, it would be nice if you start by
defining the objects you're measuring the age of,
because otherwise I have to strongly agree with Tim's statement -
I don't see how you could claim either that all natural languages
date from the year XXXXX BC when Mitochondrial Mama Eve learned to talk,
or that all biological species have been extent since our
first cellular ancestors crawled their way up out of the primordial soup
to declare themselves to be the prime-time slime.
The one set of definitions I'm familiar with that would lead
to statements like yours is creationism, in the 4004BC Big Bang sense,
with a subdefinition that "anything created the same week is
the same age", since of course the plants, animals, and humans
were created on different days. In modern scientific creationism*,
the same events occurred stretch out over a longer and earlier time,
with plants and animals and humans showing up in different periods,
so they're much different ages. But neither one of those definitions
makes all _languages_ the same age; at minimum there are the languages
descended from what Noah's family spoke and the different languages
that appeared after the Tower of Babel (unless you want to argue that
those are supernatural languages?) but I don't see Biblical evidence
asserting that other languages didn't appear as people needed them.
Hawai'ian pidgen simply didn't exist until Europeans moved into
Polynesian territory and started trading with them,
and unlike the evolution of English since Shakespeare and/or Chaucer,
the languages that emerged from the collision of English Anglo-Saxon
and Norman after the Conquest (plus the collisions of Anglo and Saxon
and Latin and Celtic and Pictish-if-it's-different that happened before)
are sufficiently different from what either side spoke beforehand that I
can't see any pedagogue worth his salarium asserting that they're still
instantiations of the same Original Linguistic Object. You might as well
argue that Esperanto** is just a rapidly evolved Indo-European.
Were you trying to make some different point your pedagogue taught you,
about the age of all these things being Brand New Every Day?
Or is there something fundamental that I'm just missing that you had in mind?
----
* Stop giggling, the difference is important to my point here...
** You probably _can't_ argue that about Logban; hacking the grammar
to make it yacc-parseable is pretty radical surgery.
