Talk:Proto-World language
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
[edit] misphrased?
"Critics say that from a purely statistical point of view, among any two unrelated languages, there would be a more than 40% chance that any given two words would share a related sound and meaning." This statement is so obviously false that I assume it's misphrased; what was it intended to say? - Mustafaa 07:39, 23 Aug 2004 (UTC)
- I agree. I gave it a more non-committal wording for the time being (but feel free to make further changes). I also deleted a reference to Mario Pei, since it only stated this linguist thinks it's "an interesting concept" (i.e. he is neither a decided proponent, nor an adversary of the theory -- I mean, *I* think it's interesting, and I don't feel compelled to add my name to the article;) and the link is dead, anyway Dbachmann 10:44, 23 Aug 2004 (UTC)
- Actually it isn't false - I think he meant to say 'with the phonetic and semantic leeway used in the reconstruction of Proto-World'.32.106.193.203 20:55, 2 July 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Hebrew/Arabic and Japanese
'You' in Arabic is 'Anta', in Japanese it is 'Anata' Jondel | Talk
- Even better, anta is a variant of anata in Japanese. However, as usual, this is but coincidence. See false cognates and false friends. -- VV 06:22, 22 Apr 2004 (UTC)
[edit] Starostin
yes Nixer, what is it now? I didn't remove your reference to Starostin, who I agree is a notable linguist (who knew what he was doing and unlike you didn't claim "Borean=Proto-World"). I corrected it and moved it to the proper place in the article. Instead of giving us grief here, how about you do some work on the Sergei Starostin article? dab (ᛏ) 15:24, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
- I am shocked to learn from his article that he died in September by the way. I think I got an email from him a couple of months earlier. Sadly, this isn't just a case of Wikipedia vandalism, but his homepage confirms his death. I'm afraid I'll change the statement in the article to past tense, then. :( dab (ᛏ) 15:47, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
[edit] ok
your last edit is acceptable as such , Nixer, it is just still ungrammatical. So we are really forced to either fix your grammar or roll you back. I'll let it stand for a couple of days to see if somebody fixes it, but I don't want to get into the habit of cleaning up after you. dab 20:59, 25 November 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Oh no! - Nixer, STOP IT!
Nixer, please stop reverting. I explained in the edit summary: historical linguistics is a science; you cannot say some historical linguistics, it's meaningless. You are thinking of some historical linguists. Stop reverting - the article is fine. Izehar 22:41, 25 November 2005 (UTC)
- Oh, yes. There should be some historical linguists.--Nixer 22:44, 25 November 2005 (UTC)
Maybe you should revert yourself - lest you get blocked again. Izehar 22:46, 25 November 2005 (UTC)
- Why revert? I've corrected. Any other bugs?--Nixer 22:51, 25 November 2005 (UTC)
No, don't bother. The article's fine now. Izehar 22:55, 25 November 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Dating Proto-World, a failure in Logic
Let's ignore the really hideous grammar of this article for a minute. Currently this article is stating first that Proto-World "refers to the hypothetical latest common ancestor of all the world's languages" and that it "would have been spoken roughly 200,000 years ago". Has anyone ever stopped to think, I mean really stopped to think that a hypothetical ancestor of all human tongues can't be guaranteed to be 200,000 years old even if homo sapiens is that old. The two facts don't affect each other at all. So many possibilities here are being fluffed away. It hurts me to see narrow-mindedness. If this article isn't a little POV as I type, I'll eat my underwear.
First off, it's irrefutably possible that Proto-World is 80,000 or 100,000 or 150,000 years old and that all other languages that coexisted with Proto-World at the time had died out after so many millenia that had passed. This is similar to the Mitochondrial Eve hypothesis but made into linguistic theory instead.
To further complicate, who's to say that pre-humans couldn't speak too? Oh yes, people will say that they couldn't speak because they're vocal chords couldn't work like ours... but you've all forgotten that even gorillas like Koko (gorilla) can learn and have been taught to speak sign language. Why is it everyone can accept a signing gorilla but can't accept the idea of a signing Australopithecus who lived some 2 million years ago? Why is that? Is it because people naively think that sign language is a modern invention or something? It's not. Think outside the box. In fact, burn the box. It's doing you people no good.
So I'm gonna take it upon myself to:
a) elevate the English of this article to less comical standards b) reword things to incorporate possibilities that Proto-Worlder zealots are too frightened to consider
How's that? Fab. --Glengordon01 11:39, 8 July 2006 (UTC)
Whoops, I should have read the Criticisms section. I notice a mention of sign language is there! Wow. Hehe. I was too disturbed by the awkward sentence at the beginning which really needed to be reworked. --Glengordon01 11:52, 8 July 2006 (UTC)
sigh, did you also stop to consider the word latest in the very definition you cite? I thought not. Now let's talk about hideous grammar. You changed "hypothetical latest common ancestor" to "latest hypothetical ancestor". wtf? maybe you should stop and think a little bit more before editing. dab (ᛏ) 15:38, 8 July 2006 (UTC)
"Wtf"? Try to speak without pointless confrontational swearwords. This is a forum (supposedly) of an academic nature.
Anyways, I do see what you're saying. Tricky, but I'm pretty sure that most people would find "hypothetical latest common ancestor" an impediment to clarity. The use of a non-initial superlative, combined with an overly long string of adjectives, together with the redundancy of the word "common" in this phrase makes it sound ESL.
I mean really: "common ancestor"? If it's the "ancestor of all human languages", then "common" is already implied is it not? Ever heard of an "uncommon ancestor"? What's the point? So, "wtf" backatcha, buddy. This article was written by 1000 typing monkeys. Perhaps even Koko the gorilla, hehe. Just a joke, just a joke. Calm down, Skippy --Glengordon01 21:49, 8 July 2006 (UTC)
You reverted back to "Proto-World would have been spoken roughly 200,000 years ago" but it remains POV and misleading. "Would have" implies that "200,000 years ago" is a higher probability than others. Of course it's not! It should be worded as "Proto-World is theorized ..." or perhaps even better "Some theorize that Proto-World was spoken roughly 200,000 years ago". You know darn well that this isn't a view espoused by everyone. --Glengordon01 22:06, 8 July 2006 (UTC)
More troubles with this nonsensical text: "The term Proto-World language refers to the hypothetical latest common ancestor of all the world's languages, an ancient language from which all modern languages and language families – and usually including all known dead languages – derive."
It's brainless to say "...and usually including all known dead languages". How on earth could Proto-World (a langauge dating to 200,000 years ago as this article claims!) not include them? Why would Proto-World only include modern living languages?? Hunh? "All known dead languages" means to me "all dead languages known from recorded history", ergo a mere 6000 years of time! Again, more Proto-World monkeys typing redundant nonsense. This text is completely disjointed. --Glengordon01 22:14, 8 July 2006 (UTC)
- look, buddy, it is obvious you simply don't understand the concept, or the (perfectly correct) sentence you consider "hideous". I really cannot be bothered to spell it out for you, but note that we put the definition (including the "dead languages" clause) first, and the date estimate, based on this definition, after. 200,000 is simply the date of human phylogenetic separation. This entails that language is older than 200,000 years, but that's it, it doesn't make an assumption about upper bounds. In the phrase "hypothetical latest common ancestor", far from being "an impediment to clarity", every component is required. The "hypothetical" is a gesture towards the possibility of heterogenesis. Now we can clarify this, but it should ideally be clarified by someone who understands what is being said in the first place. regarding "common", I recommend you read most recent common ancestor for background. dab (ᛏ) 22:58, 8 July 2006 (UTC)
Sigh.
1. "Common ancestor" remains redundant. Just say "ancestor". It means the same thing.
If Bob and Mary's ancestor is John, then John is the ancestor of Bob and Mary. We can say John is the common ancestor of Bob and Mary too, but it's pointless and in the text we're speaking of, it's even distracting. But I can see that you're stuck on parroting terminology you don't understand (like "Most recent common ancestor") rather than just saying it plain for everyday people to understand.
Wikipedia is for everyday people whether you like it or not and this sentence needs to be clearer. Be kind.
2. Since Proto-World can be both older and younger than 200,000 years ago.
That means that human phylogenetic separation has nothing to do with dating Proto-World whatsoever but I notice that you've agreed covertly with me that something is wrong with this text and have reworded the sentence as:
"Assuming monogenesis, Proto-World would have been spoken roughly 200,000 years ago, the time suggested by archaeogenetics for the phylogenetic separation of the ancestors of all humans alive today, mainly by analysis of mitochondrial DNA."
Sigh, since we're dealing with both genetics and linguistics here in the same sentence, you need to be careful about WHICH monogenesis you're refering to: genetic monogenesis or linguistic monogenesis. While you may assume that it's clear for everyone, I can see many people being lost in the vagueries of your hasty sentence. Don't pretend to be a napoleonic authority over others, if you can't use terminology properly. --Glengordon01 00:29, 9 July 2006 (UTC)
3. And "and usually including all known dead languages" still makes no sense
This is simply because "all known dead languages" have no clear reason to be singled out from living ones. Plus, all known dead languages, even including well-known established proto-languages (if that is what is meant by "dead languages" here, who knows??) all date to a mere 10,000 years at best. So the text is verbose, vague, disjointed and in the end irrational. I really recommend that we cooperate together to reword it into something meaningful. --Glengordon01 01:24, 9 July 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Trombetti?
Before I give you a few quotes that might ellucidate the views of Ruhlen's, I'd like to ask why Trombetti isn't mentioned in the article (the idea of the Proto-World language is his, I guess).--Pet'usek [petr dot hrubis at gmail dot com] 12:25, 11 April 2007 (UTC)
[edit] A few quotations
From Merritt Ruhlen's "Epilogue for L’Origine des langues", pp.1-4:
| “ | ...The earliest archaeological evidence for anatomically-modern humans has been found in Ethiopia and dated to 195,000 BP. Anatomically-modern humans are people who, on skeletal evidence, look the same as all people living today and do not look like Neanderthals, whose morphology was quite distinct. But while the Neanderthals’ physical morphology might have been quite different from that of anatomically-modern humans, their cultures appear to have been almost identical. That they should have looked quite different is hardly surprising since the Neanderthals are descendants of the first Out-of-Africa migration, which took place between one and two million years ago, whereas anatomically-modern humans did not leave Africa until around 50,000 years ago, and the most recent common ancestor of the Neanderthals and modern humans is thought to have lived around 600,000 BP. What is most interesting, however, about the anatomically-modern humans who emerged in East Africa almost 200,000 years ago, is that for the next 150,000 years they continued to behave like Neanderthals and then suddenly, around 50,000 years ago, their behavior changed dramatically in numerous ways, though their physiology did not change at all. These new people are called behaviorally-modern humans and traits that distinguish them from the earlier anatomically-modern humans, as well as Neanderthals, include: |
” |
Ruhlen goes on, listing the traits:
| “ | (1) Artifacts are now made not just from stones, but from bones, shells, ivory and other materials, and there is greater artifactual diversity as well. (2) These artifacts begin to change rapidly in both time and space; before this time tools changed very little over hundreds of thousands of years. |
” |
Then he continues, saying:
| “ | The Neanderthals, who had lived successfully in Europe for several hundred thousand years, disappear from the archaeological record around 30,000 years ago, only five or ten thousand years after the first behaviorally-modern humans arrived in Europe. What could have been responsible for this sudden and profound transition in human evolution? Many people, including Richard Klein (Klein 1999), Luca Cavalli-Sforza (Cavalli-Sforza 2000)), Jared Diamond (Diamond 1992), and Nicholas Wade(Wade 2006) have concluded that it must have been the sudden appearance of fully-modern language. How this first fully-modern language would have differed from earlier languages of the Neanderthals and others is a tantalizing, but inscrutable question because all of these earlier languages went extinct along with the people who spoke them. Still, it seems likely that it was a new form of language that permitted these behaviorally-modern people to leave Africa and replace the earlier people in Eurasia by simply outcompeting them for the resources upon which they had lived for over a million years. | ” |
Ruhlen further exaplains:
| “ | Recent genetic studies indicate that this ancestral human population in East Africa, from which all modern humans descend, was quite small, perhaps as few as a thousand people, which would suggest that they spoke a single language from which all modern languages derive. Words such as tik ‘finger, one’ and pal ‘two,’ which we have seen are found in language families around the globe, would have been part of this original language. This does not mean that there were no other languages at this time, only that all the other languages went extinct. This is no different from the fact that all human Y-chromosomes found on the earth today derive from the Y-chromosome of one man who lived in Africa around 60,000 years ago, at a time when there were other men, and other Y-chromosomes, which have since disappeared without a trace. | ” |
Then he suggests the origin of language, saying:
| “ | If this scenario is correct — and it seems well-founded on archaeological and genetic evidence — then the question of the origin of those languages which now exist is resolved. The origin of these languages goes back to a single language spoken in East Africa 50,000 years ago. What then is the time and place of the origin of Language? The place must have also been Africa for the simple reason that, as Darwin saw, our closest relatives, gorillas and chimpanzees, have always lived exclusively in Africa and anatomically-modern humans only left Africa 50,000 years ago. Therefore the evolution of Language must have taken place in Africa. | ” |
And, he also hypothesizes about the dating, saying:
| “ | But what about the date of the origin of Language? There are here two problems. First, since all intermediate varieties of Language between rudimentary chimpanzee communication and fully-modern languages spoken by all humans today have been irretrievably lost, along with the people who spoke them, all we can say is that the origin of Language must have occurred some time in the last five million years, after the separation of the chimpanzee and human lineages. Second, even if we knew exactly the nature of the languages of the australopithicines, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Neanderthals, and other intermediate species, the origin of Language would be merely a matter of definition. On what grounds could one say that some particular stage of language evolution is the origin of Language? It would all depend on how one defined Language and it would thus be an arbitrary decision... | ” |
I hope these quotations help to clarify what Ruhlen really thinks about this issue...--Pet'usek [petr dot hrubis at gmail dot com] 12:25, 11 April 2007 (UTC)
- Is the bolding your emphasis or was it emphasized by Ruhlen in the original? --Miskwito 22:56, 11 April 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Nicaraguan Sign Language and Spontaneous Language Generation
Despite the fanfare, deaf speakers in Nicaragua simply were not "in isolation" from sign, ever. The hearing-capable population at large has been using gesture for a very long time. Some gesture is even culture-specific. We all know this already. One might call it "gestural dialect".
Simple logic then shows us that NSL is not a valid example of "spontaneous" language generation. It had a stimulus. That stimulus was pre-existing gesture from the hearing-capable majority. --Glengordon01 21:10, 9 July 2006 (UTC)
Would Klingon count as a spontaneously generated language? Tomgreeny 11:51, 29 April 2007 (UTC)
- No, Klingon is a constructed language, which has no native speakers. --Miskwito 11:57, 29 April 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Proto-World and the Evolution of Sign
The general public fundamentally does not seem to realize what "language" means, which is half the reason why this article is a little simplistic to me so far.
Language is simply a form of communication (any communication: gesture, sign, visual expressions, writing, spoken word, music, morse code, chemical signals, etc).
Multiple forms of communication can be, and often are, executed at the same time. For example, one will typically speak to another while gesturing as well. A deaf person will simultaneously sign and offer facial expressions to give nuance to the statement. A mute person may even use voice as a secondary element to add to the meaning of his signing.
Knowing this, we can then easily see that it's perfectly natural for there to be a "primary focus" of communication as well as secondary foci. So if I speak, I may gesture from time to time – thus, my spoken language would be the primary focus of communication and my gesture would be a secondary focus.
Now, if the primary focus of communication within a population can shift over time, what this means for Proto-World is interesting. If we consider a theoretical population of hearing-capable early humans using sign as the primary focus of communication with only accompanied speech as secondary focus from time to time, it can conceivably evolve into a population using speech as primary focus and gesture as secondary. Apparently this doesn't dawn on a lot of people, but this is a succinct possibility that doesn't involve require some idiotic "language organ"[1] theory.
In this "primary-secondary" scenario then, Proto-World can actually be the descendent of a sign language rather than some absurd "spontaneously generated spoken tongue", thereby potentially dating the origin of human language itself to the time of bipedalism when our hands were free to sign in the first place. So we're talking Australopithecus, not just early man.
No need for "language organs", "ugh-ugh caveman" theories or Bible belt creationism. --Glengordon01 21:28, 9 July 2006 (UTC)
Correction: Man, I didn't really say that, did I? What a twat I am. "A mute person may even use voice ..." should be "A dysphasic person may even use voice ...". Naturally mutes can't speak! Dysphasic individuals can both produce and perceive sound but have difficulty speaking intelligibly hence their use of sign language... kinda like me sometimes. ;) Apologies for the goofy sentence. --Glengordon01 19:14, 12 July 2006 (UTC)
- All of this and the preceding 2 talk sections sound more appropriate for Origin of language instead of Proto-World which refers to the specific reconstruction efforts of Ruhlen, etc. --JWB 21:50, 12 July 2006 (UTC)
--
- JWB, you're confused. The very first sentence of this article reads plainly as "The term Proto-World language refers to the hypothetical, most recent common ancestor of all the world's languages [...]". It says nothing about Ruhlen or any particular person specifically in the intro. So, clearly then, this article is about general language origins, not about Ruhlen's career. Ruhlen didn't invent Proto-World; the concept of a proto-language of mankind has been a tale floating around for thousands of years (eg: Tower of Babel). --Glengordon01 02:58, 13 July 2006 (UTC)
-
- Yes, the idea of monogenesis of languages (or of people for that matter) goes back to Genesis and beyond, but the term "Proto-World" is a recent coinage referring to a specific hypothesis and attempts at reconstruction by Ruhlen, Sheveroshkin, etc. The introduction to this article should make that clear. Origin of language is obviously appropriate for general language origins, a nearly identical phrase. --JWB 08:40, 13 July 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Proto-World language
This article fails Wikipedia's NPOV policy as it's mostly related to an evolutionary point of view. Proto-World language is a widely accepted creationist idea, not an evolutionist one. Please refer to creationism and the adamic language for getting this article NPOVed --Arturo #7 20:24, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
- We just went over this in the above section. Proto-World is the proposal by linguists like Ruhlen, and the term was coined by them. Creationist ideas of monogenesis use other terms like Adamic language, Babel, etc. If you want a term covering both classes of ideas, it's monogenesis. --JWB 22:27, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Alleged "water" cognates
"One word that is supposed to be still existent among many languages quite similarly is the root of the word "water". Firstly, in Indo-European languages: Sanskrit "vaara", Russian "voda", German "Wasser", English "water" etc. In Finno-Ugric languages: Finnish "vesi", Estonian "vesi" (and "vedel" =wet), Hungarian "vizi"."
This is not a very convincing list, as it includes languages from just two recognized language families, IE and Uralic, which some believe to be related to each other anyway. Can anybody offer examples of "water" cognates from other language families, such as Afro-Asiatic, Sino-Tibetan, Austronesian, Niger-Congo, Na-Dene, Dravidian..... ? If not, it's probably bogus. --user:Cevlakohn 18 October 2006
- In fact, uralic and Indo-European families are closely related. It does not support the proto-world theory.--Nixer 18:26, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
-
- You say that with quite a bit of assumed authority, considering that the Indo-Uralic connection is one that's disputed among experts-- either way, certainly not a "close" relation. Really, Nixer, do you have any idea what you're talking about? --User:Cevlakohn 19 October 2006
The word for "water" that's so often brought up in these contexts is the one NOT cognate to English "water", something like *akwa. So either way, I think that list of possible "cognates" (from two language families!) is completely out of place here. I removed it. --Miskwito 01:45, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Major edit needed
This article is not well-structured and needs to be edited in this respect. The main problem is that it is not clearly stated in the beginning of the article that Proto-World is fringe science rejetced by an nearly all of comparative linguists. This should be stated already in the introduction, which now instead misleadingly states that the concept of Proto-World could be concidered somehow analogous to Proto-Indo-European - as if these two had the same order of validity. --AAikio 16:29, 4 November 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Linguists and "proto-world"
As I understand it, the consensus among professional linguists is that "proto-world" is a fringe hypothesis. Most of the article is unsourced, so I'm skeptical of its veracity. Because I think the unsourced information in this article is questionable, I propose deleting it unless it can be replaced with sourced info and a well balanced criticisms section. Aelffin (talk) 17:07, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
- It's ok to have articles about topics that are controversial. We just have to make sure that the best available information is correctly represented and properly weighted. So I'm agreeing with your comment about needing well-balanced criticism, but I don't think we should delete the entire article. It just needs a some needs major work and expert attention (which sadly I can't provide). --Mmm (talk) 18:26, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
[edit] Tree Image
Is the fingerpaint-looking image of a tree really necessary? Maybe something more contextually relevant would be better. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.126.109.17 (talk) 12:20, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
