Re: Is language a mess? (was: English is a mess.)
- From: "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 19 Apr 2007 04:09:05 -0700
On Apr 18, 8:55 am, Joachim Pense <s...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Peter T. Daniels wrote:
(1) In biology, it's the "tree of life", and covers all of
life. To be parallel, it would be the "tree of language" and
cover all of human language.
There is insufficient information about the vast majority of the
world's languages to trace their connections back to their ultimate
single origin. Even with the best attested languages, we can achieve a
time-depth of maybe 1500 years (this is based on the unique example of
the Romance languages; reconstructed Proto-Romance looks satisfyingly
similar to what little is attested of the Vulgar Latin of the first
centuries AD). We know as much as we do about Indo-European only
because written records exist that go back as much as 3500 years for a
few languages -- Hittite, Mycenaean, probably Vedic and Avestan.
You write "probably" Vedic and Avestan. Are you referring to the fact that
for these two languages the actual written records go back only less 1500
years or less, and the remaining 2000 years before that the texts were
preserved through memorization? How is the reliability of the sources
evaluated BTW?
I have no personal knowledge of Vedic or Avestan, but I assume that
any comprehensive grammars of the two languages or editions of the
relevant texts will lay out the reasons why specialists believe that
certain texts faithfully reflect stages of the language as it was used
many centuries before the texts were first recorded.
I do know something about Biblical Hebrew, and there are very good
reasons for believing that certain passages -- the Song of Deborah in
Judges 5, Miriam's Song by the Sea in Exodus 15, Jacob's Blessings at
the end of Genesis -- represent a far earlier stage of the language
than most of the text.
I do not see a direct way to estimate how much was lost due
to the non-written period; and for that matter, the writing systems of
Hittite and Mycenean were very inadequate to the languages, leaving great
parts unrecorded, which have to be reconstructed. Is the certainty on these
languages a result of looking at the great picture and observing that it
all fits together like a jigsaw?
We're not talking about Hittite and Mycenaean. We're talking about
Vedic and Avestan, which have extremely detailed phonetic scripts.
.
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