Re: Is 'comparative linguistics' just a genocidal 'scientific' joke?

On Nov 11, 7:42 am, Thorsten Kampe <thors...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
* Peter T. Daniels (Sat, 10 Nov 2007 13:51:57 -0800)

On Nov 10, 12:56 pm, Thorsten Kampe <thors...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
* Peter T. Daniels (Fri, 09 Nov 2007 14:26:46 -0800)
On Nov 9, 9:41 am, Thorsten Kampe <thors...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I wonder whether there are /linguistic? criterions by which
languages could be categorised as "archaic" or "modern" or
"primitive".

No. "Archaisms" in a language are simply features that have survived
from an earlier stage -- in English the plural "children," for
instance. What would "archaic language" even mean?

It would mean a language that has characteristics that most or all
modern languages don't have any more.

Can you name any such characteristics? (No, you can't.)

If I could I wouldn't be asking (or "wondering").

No one can.

"Modern" is simply a chronological term. A modern language is one
that's currently spoken.

I was asking because many (most?) at least indo-european languages
seem to loose "cases" (for instance). So for people with a background
in these languages (like English) a "highly inflected" language would
indicate that this language has to be "old".

So that makes Finnish and Hungarian -- and Russian -- "old"?

I know that loss of inflection is not a general phenonemon - not even
for indo-european languages.

Okay, let's rephrase my question: if a linguist who never heard of
Sanskrit or contemporary English would compare these languages - is
there any way for him to find out (apart from the vocabulary) that one
language was spoken about 2500 years ago and the other right now?

No.

Or to put it some other way: are all the languages known or
reconstructed (like PIE) modern languages?

No. If they're reconstructed, by definition they no longer exist.

I suspect that what you're asking is whether any language is so
different from other languages that there are things that can't be
said in it.

The answer is No.

If there ever were -- if forms of linguistic communication evolved in
human populations more than once -- then all the ones other than the
one that survived and covers the earth, they all died out. (Perhaps
because of evolutionary disadvantage?)

The ancestral unity of all human languages is shown by the fact that
any human infant will automatically acquire whichever language(s) are
spoken in its environment, no matter what its ethnic (geographical,
"racial") background.

.

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