Re: language origin, language evolution, evolutionary mutation

From: Yago Campos (s.campos.l_at_esade.edu)
Date: 09/16/04 

Date: 16 Sep 2004 10:54:29 -0700

ronish20@bezeqint.net (Yair Shimron) wrote in message news:<5a550450.0409141026.5c205b0f@posting.google.com>...
> 36. When hominids and humans had already meaningful signaling voices,
> namely primitive words, the only true syntax that served was repeating
> their utterances, very much like apes, yet with the added meaning and
> signing attachment. And that appendix which was not the main cause for
> the expressive voicing, helped to more and more utterances to be
> appended with dedicated meanings. Where did they take the new
> dedicated utterances? Not from the air, not from anything that did not
> exist. People don't laugh or weep voicing random voices. There are
> selected patterns of voices that are acceptable, patterns that people
> hear and use. All utterances and words are created in accordance with
> well-known existing utterances. New words are always, that's a law,
> made of existing words. This means that new words though somewhat
> different from the other, are always similar to other words. The
> ancient, wishing to attribute meaning to a thing could do so only by
> modifying one or some of their already in use utterances. At times
> when all grammatical laws were not at sight, the main procedure of
> renewing words was "phonetic declension". For example, if there was a
> word ?qa' to say ?water', it could be changed to ?qha' to represent
> ?river'. My example lacks sharpness because my computer is not
> equipped to show laryngeal-pharyngeal consonants. Another example is
> duplication: in Hebrew there are many words that change meaning as one
> consonant is duplicated: ?naphakh'=blow, ?nappakh'= a man who blows
> fire, a smith. This hypothesis explains quite much of problems that
> are not really explained by the comparative sound change theory.

huh? How's that supposed to work? I mean, if all new words are coined
from pre-existing old words, where did those "old words" come from?
Older words? It's ok to coin the word "river" from the word "water",
but how would you coin the word "mountain" if you only have "water"
and, say, "father" ?

Of course languages use existing words to coin new word related to
them, but that happened quite recently and when languages were totally
developed, with a working grammatical declension system. Phonetic
declension preceding any logical, grammatical law sounds strange.
Using hebrew, a full-fledged language as a model for hominid language
doesn't look very logical to me either.

Anyway your post is quite insightful in most of its points. Doesn't
look quite "factual" to me, but speculation can sometimes be very
interesting, and become the lead to real discoverings.

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