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Originally posted by Nygdan
What happens in english is that the words for many livestock are germanic, but the words for the culinary preparation of them are french, presumably this is because the upper classes who had the food prepared for them spoke french, whereas the peasants retained the names for these common animals.
Originally posted by Nygdan
I am just not seeing why we should think that there were homo sapiens without langauge. I'd think that language even pre-exists homo sapiens.
Originally posted by Toromos
One possibility that I've always been intrigued by, is that language developed as part of rhythmic chants used by work crews in early human communities. People would chant to generate a rhythm for often laborious work, and this chanting kind of co-evolved both music and language. Different chants lead to different meanings, which lead to language. There is a scene in the movie Kundan that's always illustrated this well for me. The young Dalai Lama is looking out from his palace, and sees a work crew on a roof. The workmen using some sort of heavy device to stomp the roof flat. They are all singing a song to keep the rhythm of their work going. With this theory, language is thought to have only really developed with the first, settled, proto-agraian communities, where that sort of work would have been called for.
Originally posted by arc_mar
Hi Guys all your posts made interesting reading,unfortunately "Tamil " the living classical language came up nowhere in the discussion. Hence i thought i would offer my insight in this scholarly discussion.
Tamil's origins are independent of Sanskrit (which is from the Indo-European language family and the ancestor of many Indian languages). The oldest available book on Tamil Grammar is Tolkaappiyam, which is said to be the world's oldest surviving grammar for any language, published c. 6th century BC.
Originally posted by dr_strangecraft
With written evidence at 200 BC, you'd have to posit several millennia with no evidence . . .
We have Greek, Minoan from the ~1000 - 1400 BC
Egyptian Hieroglyphics from ~2000-2500 BC
Texts from Mohenjo Daro even older.
Generally, it seems that really ancient languages give rise to numerous "daughter" languages. Examples would be proto-indoeuropean, or the Mayan writings of Yucatan, which were used throughout the region, for related and later languages.
Notice that I'm not saying Tamil isn't just as old.
I'm only pointing out that there's no evidence of it.
4) Do you think evolution of an independent language is just a matter of few centuries?
Traditional English food is not world-renowned.
Originally posted by Cruizer
Sorry but I am failing to see why 2-3-5 or even 8,000 years ago is the only reasonable time for language. If the speech of Neanderthals was not a language what was it? Sophisticated is in the eye of the beholder. If they obviously could convey abstract thought such as burials and grave goods their communication skills were not lacking and their brains were more than adequate.
If not them then Cro-Magnon's influx at some 40,000 years ago was convincingly punctuated by a language to communicate all the aspects of his more complex lifestyle, tool making and manipulation plus social and cultural interaction that ultimately led to established trading.
These may be dead languages now but leaping to just 8,000 years ago to look for the 1st language is strange to me.
If we continue like this we will eventually end up with viruses since they are the very primitive beings (with RNA) on earth and their language is chemical signals
The first spoken command given to mankind appears in Genesis 1:28. Yahweh warned Adam and Eve not to eat of the forbidden fruit (2:16-17). He again spoke to them in chapter 3, and they understood and answered.
Yahweh communicated with Adam and Eve in Hebrew, which is the language of celestial beings and would logically be the original human language. No other tongue but Hebrew is mentioned in Scripture for the earliest of Biblical communication. It is the language of the oldest manuscripts and is the language specifically mentioned when people were spoken to from on high in the Old and New Testaments.
While it may be a disappointment to some Christian readers to discover that Hebrew itself was probably not the original language, it may at the same time be reassuring to remember that our Lord Himself spoke not Hebrew, but Aramaic. This subject is dealt with fully by the well-known Orientalist, Edouard Naville, in his book, The Archaeology of the Old Testament: Was the Old Testament written in Hebrew? (39) His conclusion is in accordance, save for some minor details, with the views of Delitzsch.
And Moses assembled all the congregation of the children of Israel, and said unto them: 'These are the words which the LORD hath commanded, that ye should do them.
And the congregation did say "what is the first law of God" master
And moses did reply "something something something, Kill" i think
Originally posted by Marduk
Its already been proven that Noah is based on a sumerian story
therefore Aramiac which is derived from Aram, the fifth son of Shem, the firstborn of Noah is not the oldest language
likewise Hebrew didn't exist until around the 12th century when it developed from Phoenecian