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Author | Topic: Creation of the English Language | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Jon Inactive Member |
The earliest writings I can find are 8,000 years old (Chinese). There are potentially older writings. Huh? Are you sure? According to whom?
As to the 50K date, you might be thinking of the emergence of culture. Some hypotheses put the emergence of culture at roughly the same time H. sapiens came into being--180,000 or so years ago. One part of culture is language. Some, including myself, would say that language probably goes back to even earlier forms of H. sapiens, such as H. sapiens neandertalensis, or (even) H. sapiens erectus. That's at least 1.5 MYA! Of course, like you say, one thing is certain; language goes back at least 2KYA. Jon
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5949 Joined: Member Rating: 5.2 |
The earliest writings I can find are 8,000 years old (Chinese). There are potentially older writings. Huh? Are you sure? According to whom? I remember hearing of an archeological find in the south Nile area. Small tiles with a hole in one corner and pictograms on them. They appear to have been tags attached to containers and could represent a precursor to hieroglyphs.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5949 Joined: Member Rating: 5.2 |
I know my maths and two other languages. But do you speak those other languages? Have learned to express yourself in them and to converse? To think in those languages? The impression I have is that your other two languages are probably biblical Hebrew and Koine Greek and that your knowledge of them only extends to reading or deciphering biblical texts in the original and studying the meanings of key words. That is a very limited experience compared to learning to use and to think in another language. From Message 107:
quote:This appears very true and commonplace. It is most probably related to taking one's own for granted and an indifference, while a new immigrant must make greater input to adapt and is usually far more enthusiastic of making it in the new scenario. Here, the native can well fear the new comer. Why fear? Not everybody is xenophobic. And it is not at all the case that an immigrant must necessarily do better at learning the native's language. While a non-native learns more than a monoglot native by studying a to-him-foreign language, it is also true that the native speaker can learn so much more about his own language by learning another language. Hast du wirklich gar nichts davon verstanden, was Lessing sagte? Didn't you understand anything that Lessing said? That you need to learn a foreign language in order to learn your own. It shouldn't just be everybody else's job to learn English; we need to learn the other languages ourselves. From Message 108:
I mean here, what the alphabet 'V' sounds like, when it is spoken. The latin and arabic, for example, did not possess the V sound, while the Hebrew did. Many such alphabetical sounds are missing in european languages, and thus there is a displacement factor, resulting in different pronounciations of words. We call this accents, but mainly it is resultant from the lack of alphabetical sounds. Uh, no, that is not what causes accents. If you had learned to speak a foreign language, you have known better. There is a wide variety of possible sounds that the human speech apparatus can produce. The study of those sounds and how they are produced is called phonology. However, only certain sounds distinguish meaning within a language; those are called phonemes. Different languages use different phonemes. For example, English has two forms of the "p" sound (one plosive, the other not), but we do not use them to distinguish meaning. However, a South-east Asian language (Cambodian, I think, but it's been decades) does use those two forms of "p" to distinguish meaning. Therefore, those two forms of "p" are phonemic in that other language, but not in English. When a phoneme can be pronounced in two or more different ways, then those forms are called allophones -- eg, the "r" in German can be either velar or apico-dental, which sound different but don't change the meaning. When we learn our native language, we learn to restrict ourselves to the sounds of the phonemes of that language. Furthermore, our brains learn to identify those phonemes and to distinguish between different phonemes (eg, between the voiced and unvoiced apico-dental plosives as demonstrated by the minimal pairs of "bitter" and "bidder" and "latter" and "ladder"). But when we start to learn a new language that has different sounds and uses different phonemes, then multiple problems result in an accent. First, we may not be able to distinguish between phonemes. For example, in Russian palatalization of consonants is phonemic (sounds kind of like placing the semi-vowel "y" between the consonant and the vowel that follows, but that's not what it is). It's difficult for beginning students to hear that. So when the non-native first tries to repeat what he thinks he hears, it's going to come out wrong and he's going to have an "accent". Second, the non-native will tend to misidentify the sound as being like a different sound in his own native language and so use that instead, which will give him an "accent". A common example of this is a Spanish speaker substituting "ch" for "sh", since the "sh" doesn't exist in Spanish. Third, the non-native's language may have the same sound as the target language, but it's different phonologically. Therefore, by using his own language's version of that sound he'll sound a bit different, sound "funny", in the target language and so will have an "accent". In a French phonology class, our text (which was in French published in France) contained extensive notes for each sound describing the problems that speakers of specific other language would have in producing that sound. And the same holds true for every language that a foreigner would try to learn. Fourth, even among native speakers of the same language there are regional differences with favor one allophone over others. And so, even native speakers have "accents". Some of these accents developed in isolation from other regions and some developed under influence from immigrant populations (oh ja, don'cha know?), but they still all develop within the same language and so have nothing at all to do with "alphabetic differences." Fifth, there are additional elements termed "metalanguage" which are characteristic to different languages. These involve intonation patterns, rise and fall of pitch, and range of pitch. For example (as I recall), Spanish has two pitches, English has four or five, and "Black English" has six (one of which is a falsetto that a man would use when excited or upset). There's a commercial currently on Spanish-language radio in which an Angla comes on speaking perfectly correct Spanish, but her metalanguage is puro anglo and so her "accent" is blatant. Please note that there's nothing at all wrong with her pronounciation, but rather her "accent" is pure metalinguistic in nature. Similarly, the cast of "Your Show of Shows" (eg, Sid Caesar, Carl Reiner, Howard Morris) were highly proficient at mimicking the metalanguage of German and French such that they would sound quite proficient at those languages even though the words they were uttering were either pure nonsense or English words that they would throw in so that the audience would kind of follow their babblings. And they did it all "without an accent". Accents are about phonology and phonemics and metalanguage, not alphabetics. Edited by dwise1, : added metalanguage {When you search for God, y}ou can't go to the people who believe already. They've made up their minds and want to convince you of their own personal heresy. ("The Jehovah Contract", AKA "Der Jehova-Vertrag", by Viktor Koman, 1984) And we who listen to the stars, or walk the dusty grade,Or break the very atoms down to see how they are made, Or study cells, or living things, seek truth with open hand. The profoundest act of worship is to try to understand. Deep in flower and in flesh, in star and soil and seed, The truth has left its living word for anyone to read. So turn and look where best you think the story is unfurled. Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the world. (filk song "Word of God" by Dr. Catherine Faber, No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.echoschildren.org/CDlyrics/WORDGOD.HTML)
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Jon Inactive Member |
The earliest writings I can find are 8,000 years old (Chinese). There are potentially older writings. Huh? Are you sure? According to whom? I remember hearing of an archeological find in the south Nile area. Small tiles with a hole in one corner and pictograms on them. They appear to have been tags attached to containers and could represent a precursor to hieroglyphs. Yeah, but since when was China part of the south Nile area?
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Jon Inactive Member |
Accents are about phonology and phonemics and metalanguage, not alphabetics.
Furthermore, our brains learn to identify those phonemes and to distinguish between different phonemes (eg, between the voiced and unvoiced apico-dental plosives as demonstrated by the minimal pairs of "bitter" and "bidder" and "latter" and "ladder"). Some of us pronounce those minimal pairs the same , like with a ap, an allophone of both /t/ and /d/... so without context we wouldn't know which phoneme to 'translate' it into. And that, folks, was my 'I-just-nished-my-phonetics-exam' show-off post Jon
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5949 Joined: Member Rating: 5.2 |
The earliest writings I can find are 8,000 years old (Chinese). There are potentially older writings. Huh? Are you sure? According to whom? Yeah, but since when was China part of the south Nile area?
His statement regarding possibly older writings could be construed as slightly ambiguous:1. There are older writings somewhere in the world. or 2. There are older writings in China. Since the question is about the oldest human writings, I naturally assumed the first meaning. The second meaning is possible, but very unlikely. However, I'm not sure of how old those writings were of which I spoke, so the Chinese writings could still be the oldest known.
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Rrhain Member Posts: 6351 From: San Diego, CA, USA Joined: |
Wounded King writes:
quote: In Reimann, Hilbert, or Banach space,Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways. Our asymptotes no longer out of phase: We shall encounter, counting, face to face. No, Hilbert space is a complete vector space. This is simple Real Analysis. However, the use of the hotel metaphor and this version of the problem was originated by Hilbert. He extended it even further: Suppose an infinite number of coaches arrive, each with an infinite number of guests (both infinities denumerable). The hotel can still take them all: Empty the odd-numbered rooms as before and put the first coach's guests into rooms 3n (the first goes into 3, the second into 9, the third into 27, etc.) The second coach's guests go into rooms 5n (5, 25, 125, etc.) Continue with prime number bases and voila, all the guests get rooms. Drift...drift...drift.... Edited by Rrhain, : Didn't point out the prime number issue. Rrhain Thank you for your submission to Science. Your paper was reviewed by a jury of seventh graders so that they could look for balance and to allow them to make up their own minds. We are sorry to say that they found your paper "bogus," specifically describing the section on the laboratory work "boring." We regret that we will be unable to publish your work at this time.
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jar Member (Idle past 420 days) Posts: 34026 From: Texas!! Joined: |
Check out the Gradeshnitsa tablets which date IIRC to about 5000 BCE.
Aslan is not a Tame Lion
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Adminnemooseus Administrator Posts: 3976 Joined: |
All messages should tie into considerations of the origin of the English language. Please try to make clear what that connection might be.
If the message content does not have that connection, the message is off-topic. Adminnemooseus New Members should start HERE to get an understanding of what makes great posts. Comments on moderation procedures (or wish to respond to admin messages)? - Go to:
General discussion of moderation procedures Thread Reopen Requests Considerations of topic promotions from the "Proposed New Topics" forum Other useful links:
Forum Guidelines, [thread=-19,-112], [thread=-17,-45], [thread=-19,-337], [thread=-14,-1073] Admin writes:
It really helps moderators figure out if a topic is disintegrating because of general misbehavior versus someone in particular if the originally non-misbehaving members kept it that way. When everyone is prickly and argumentative and off-topic and personal then it's just too difficult to tell. We have neither infinite time to untie the Gordian knot, nor the wisdom of Solomon. There used to be a comedian who presented his ideas for a better world, and one of them was to arm everyone on the highway with little rubber dart guns. Every time you see a driver doing something stupid, you fire a little dart at his car. When a state trooper sees someone driving down the highway with a bunch of darts all over his car he pulls him over for being an idiot. Please make it easy to tell you apart from the idiots. Source |
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IamJoseph Member (Idle past 3695 days) Posts: 2822 Joined: |
quote:Doesn’t have to show brain connection [tho these are connected], and we know this action can occur even after death for some hours. Like the involuntary actions of other organs, the involuntary process does not occur because of the knee joint, but that this process is incorporated in the body mechanism. Its like your computer, whereby most of the actions it performs are involuntary and hidden from the user - yet they are incorporated in the pc system. Involuntary does not mean by itself, but not controlled by one’s self; it does not mean there is no control factor - which is thought based, both the knee and your pc. quote: These are mathematical placebos, and not reflected in reality. You cannot prove a math premise using math back-up; this is limited to the academic. The concept of infinity is not grasspable or explainable by maths; we use the term infinite generally to express a vast number, as an expressionism only, but not as an actuality; we use it maths as a term for a large number/quatity which cannot be or need not be, accounted.
quote: This is not the case, and is presented to escape the ”finity’ factor. The universe does have a centre: the original point [BB?], eg. A particle, expanded to the current status quo. This means the original diameter of the BB particle, expanded to become the diameter of the current universe, and we and everything else, is in the centre. The original centroid has expanded. There is no way a finite body cannot have a centre! And we know, an infinity being expanded is a self-contradictory moot point.
quote: They were not infinite to begin with.
quote: Incorrect. Another room is not an addition/expansion of the infinite number of rooms [your nominated infinite entity here]. Your glitch is: that the infinite rooms were ”booked solid’ [meaning, to the capacity of infinite], so where did the additional room come from? - its an impossibility, else you never had infinity to begin with. Do you see what I mean by academic placebos? - here, one can ”write’ the notion of ”infinite + 1’ - but this is limited to the academic premise only. So, what's your preamble - the uni is finite - or finite and infinite together?! {Content off-topic - hidden. Use "peek" if you feel you must see it. Adminnemooseus} Edited by Adminnemooseus, : Comments and off-topic banner.
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Adminnemooseus Administrator Posts: 3976 Joined: |
If you wish to present a case for why it should be reopened, go to the " Thread Reopen Requests" topic, link below.
Adminnemooseus New Members should start HERE to get an understanding of what makes great posts. Comments on moderation procedures (or wish to respond to admin messages)? - Go to:
General discussion of moderation procedures Thread Reopen Requests Considerations of topic promotions from the "Proposed New Topics" forum Other useful links:
Forum Guidelines, [thread=-19,-112], [thread=-17,-45], [thread=-19,-337], [thread=-14,-1073] Admin writes:
It really helps moderators figure out if a topic is disintegrating because of general misbehavior versus someone in particular if the originally non-misbehaving members kept it that way. When everyone is prickly and argumentative and off-topic and personal then it's just too difficult to tell. We have neither infinite time to untie the Gordian knot, nor the wisdom of Solomon. There used to be a comedian who presented his ideas for a better world, and one of them was to arm everyone on the highway with little rubber dart guns. Every time you see a driver doing something stupid, you fire a little dart at his car. When a state trooper sees someone driving down the highway with a bunch of darts all over his car he pulls him over for being an idiot. Please make it easy to tell you apart from the idiots. Source |
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Adminnemooseus Administrator Posts: 3976 Joined: |
Topic reopened per Jon's request. Let's get it back on topic, shall we?
Adminnemooseus
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IamJoseph Member (Idle past 3695 days) Posts: 2822 Joined: |
quote: The above is plausable, even though dating predictions range from 100 CE to 2000 BCE, because we have surrounding evidence of India being an older civilisation, and had interaction with ancient Egypt over 3000 years ago. [as an aside, Hindhi is almost the same as the hebrew, both in alphabet design and ancient word meanings]. The issue of Thracian does not satisfy the criteria:
quote: Neither sanskrit or chinese is older than the Hebrew: point us to proof matching the hebrew and its hard copy? {Content off-topic - hidden. Use "peek" if you feel you must see it. Adminnemooseus} Edited by Adminnemooseus, : Comments and off-topic banner.
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IamJoseph Member (Idle past 3695 days) Posts: 2822 Joined: |
It is not essential one must speak another language fluently as the native one, and one can read and write it, know expressionism and songs of it, and its history. What I meant with immigrants, is they obviously have an existential reason to adapt to the new country, and have to apply themselves more. Most new immigrants end up wealthier and produce greater benefits to the new country, and to science [Einstein] than the natives.
We can trace english's emergence, because this is observable from a certain period, and did not exist before then. In contrast, an ancient, primal language is not traceable: we can point to its oldest existence, but not how it got there. This is made more enigmatic that languages are not evidenced more than 6000 years: the reason of no writings is not relevent here, while the evidences of older civilizations by a small period can be allocated to carbon dating being unreliable for small margins. The operable factor here is, we have no writings in a copious supply, over grads of transitory periods, older than 6000; not in hard copy. We have no history per se pre-6000!
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Jon Inactive Member |
I am going to throw out some information that I would like IAJ to address. From The Oxford History of the English Language re the globalisation of English:
quote: quote: quote: Such status, however, was not always given English, as Richard W. Bailey (same book) points out about the English of the 14th Century4:
quote: From this I think IAJ needs to address the following points:
Until IAJ can do these things his ideas will not be anything more than existing in fanciful dream worlds, and he will have failed to have demonstrated why 'his insistence that English is somehow fundamentally different' adequately provides the information asked for in the OP: "Who, when, where, how and in what form was it created?" In other words, he will need to either directly answer these questions”provide a straight-up creation model”, or explain how the 'pliability' of English demonstrates a creation scenario instead of being a result of the facts listed within this thread. Jon__________ "English Among the Languages" Richard W. Bailey in The Oxford History of the English Language Ed Lynda Mugglestone (Oxford:2006) 340. "English World-Wide in the Twentieth Century" Tom McArthur in The Oxford History of the English Language Ed Lynda Mugglestone (Oxford:2006) 379. McArthur 369-70. 4 Bailey 337. _____ * The bracketed information in this quote appears in the original text in which it is also in brackets. ** I've decided to use the term 'pliable', in the same way as IAJ, to mean 'the characteristics of English, both in linguistic and cultural anthropological terms'. Edited by AgamemJon, : -/= _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ____ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ En el mundo hay multitud de idiomas, y cada uno tiene su propio significado. - I Corintios 14:10_ _ _ _ _ _ _ ____ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ A devout people with its back to the wall can be pushed deeper and deeper into hardening religious nativism, in the end even preferring national suicide to religious compromise. - Colin Wells Sailing from Byzantium_ _ _ _ _ _ _ ____ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ [Philosophy] stands behind everything. It is the loom behind the fabric, the place you arrive when you trace the threads back to their source. It is where you question everything you think you know and seek every truth to be had. - Archer Opterix [msg=-11,-316,210]
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