The Mother of All Languages. Modern languages may have all descended from a single ancestral tongue

Wall Street Journal ^ | 04/15/2011 | Gautam Naik

[ARepublicanForAllReasons]

Try to teach someone how to make a Clovis point by only pointing and grunting.

Fracture propagation vector analysis doesn't translate well into "Ugh!"... Try it; I have...

I submit the following facts which demonstrate that spoken language is not necessary for learning complex tasks.

1. Helen Keller earned a college diploma without even the advantages of pointing and grunting.
2. Predatory felines and lycans learn to hunt mostly by watching the adults and imitating them. Of course, they have an instinctual predisposition toward hunting, but it must be learned.
3. Someone must have discovered how to make a Clovis point all by himself (or with the help of Divine inspiration) if we are to avoid an infinite regression. Thus it was done without linguistic instruction.

Not all thinking is done with words. Where do musical ideas come from? The ideas come first, then musicologists assign names to the forms.

[Ethan Clive Osgoode]

How does language “evolve” in the sense of evolution? Language isn’t genetic. There’s nothing for natural selection to work on.

[bert]

The implication of that statement is almost as obvious as the finding in question.

If there was a first language among the first persons, all languages and all people result. Adam and Eve aside, first was first.

The finding here is merely evidence of the obvious

[Fire_on_High]

I would have guessed an obscure little institution known as the Roman Catholic Church just might’ve kept the pronunciations alive, maybe...

[TXnMA]

"3. Someone must have discovered how to make a Clovis point all by himself (or with the help of Divine inspiration) if we are to avoid an infinite regression. Thus it was done without linguistic instruction. "

The precise sequence of complex design decisions, and multiple specific, demanding processes involved make it highly unlikely that any individual did it "all by himself". I've sat around the campfire with several of the world's top experts ("masters", actually) -- and watched them fail -- spectacularly and repeatedly.

Every single flake removal (among hundreds) is "a walk along the edge of disaster". No one "gets it right" on the first -- or tenth -- attempt (even with verbal coaching and demonstration of each step).

And, once someone made one and held it in his hand -- how was the knowledge of that complex, ever-changing process sequence transfered to his successor?

You obviously have no concept of the extreme difficulty of the task -- or of what you are blathering.

[ConservativeDude]

The timing is wrong, but doesn’t the article say that all languages came from one, which is consistent with the Tower of Babel?

[wendy1946]

The tale as you read it in the Bible would indicate that antediluvians spoke some language like our present ones. That does not appear to be the case, but you’re talking about a long and very weird story.

[ABN 505]

Someone tell me what language Jessie Jackson speaks, I never could figure out what he is saying.

[WoofDog123]

having studied old english a good bit and other ancient languages more cursorily, I am always amazed that the declension system developed apparently thousands and thousands of years ago. Just the thought of the (illiterate) human brain working out a system for essentially conjugating nouns, adjectives, and adverbs based on role vs. the verb or context of a sentence, with 3 genders, 3 quantity-cases( single dual plural), and having it be learnt from birth, just keeps my head spinning.

[Fiji Hill]

I would have guessed an obscure little institution known as the Roman Catholic Church just might’ve kept the pronunciations alive, maybe..

Actually, there are significant differences in the pronunciation of liturgical Latin, which the Catholic Church uses, and classical Latin, which is usually taught in schools. When President John F. Kennedy said, "civis Romaus sum" (I'm a Roman), he was using classical Latin. When you hear Mozart's "Laudate Dominum" (Praise the Lord), the liturgical pronunciation is used.

Up until the eighteenth century, classes in most European universities were conducted in Latin--and students also had to be fluent in Greek. For oral exams, a student might have to respond using Greek to a question asked by a professor using Latin, or vice versa.