Creation of the English Language

One of our better TV networks here has been showing this documentary series over the last few weeks, "The Adventure of English" which may be of interest to you.The Adventure of English (TV Mini Series 2002— ) - IMDbI haven't seen it myself (busy with studying and exams and things ) so I can't vouch for it's quality, but I've heard it's quite good.

Seems as though there's a companion book for that series available. I may look for that.There was also a great PBS series way back in the 80s (yeah I'm old) with Robert MacNeil called "The Story of English" and there's a companion book -- updated many times -- for that as well.

Most are familiar with the words of Psalm 23 especially in the King James Version. Look it up if you don't remember and then check this out. It's something I found a while ago that's quite funny

Some linguists believe that new communication technologies, with
their drive for instant responses to torrents of messages, are
robbing the English language of its richness and poetry. The
elaborate syntactical brickwork characteristic of writing from
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries will become a linguistic
luxury as most lose the capacity to form long sentences with any
degree of subtlety. (Linguist Sven Birkhurst)

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Here, for example, is science-fiction author Samuel Delany's
version of how the 23rd Psalm will be translated a century from
now:

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I have a supervisor.
I need nothing more.
My sleeping, my eating, my drinking is observed and controlled.
My morality is controlled.
Even if threatened by death, I need not fear.
I need not think.
Controls and aides are all around me.
I am fed.
My enemies starve while they watch me eat.
My head is rubbed like a pet.
My water dish is full to overflowing.
My whole life I will frisk about the palace.

"Probably, after the Flood, the Tower of Babel took place. God put them into different language groups. They spread out. Those that spoke French went one way. Those that spoke German went a different way. Those that spoke Spanish went a different way."
- Hovind

Thanks, Taz. Made my day.Careful, though. Hovind's gems are copyrighted now.

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ArcherAll species are transitional.

The main problem for AiG in that link is their timescale, unsurprisingly. Although Sanskrit and the European languages can be recognized as having common roots, the difference between Sanskrit and Latin, for example, should only be about the same as the difference between French and Spanish, or perhaps slightly greater.Sanskrit and Latin have less than two thousand years to diverge (after Babel). The French/Spanish divergence and the English/German divergence could be seen as 1500 hundred year divergences, about the same. But I bet that Sanskrit and Latin speakers could understand virtually nothing of each other's language, whereas we can make easy sense of a lot of German words, and the French equally of the Spanish.This is because the real divergence of Sanskrit/Latin is probably about 4000 years, meaning around 4000 years B.C.Adam and Eve's days!So they'll have to think up a lie to explain the profound difference between Sankrit and Latin in less than two thousand years.

You think that's funny? One time someone asked him why the sun is burning even though there's no oxygen there and he responded saying he didn't know... here is the exact quote... For people who don't know, what goes on in the sun is called fusion (aka hydrogen burning). It's when 2 hydrogen atoms fuse to create helium and energy. May be Hovind should not so liberally use the "Dr." title when he doesn't even know off the top of his head this very obvious fact?

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Owing to the deficiency of the English language, I have occasionally used the academic jargon generator to produce phrases that even I don't fully understand. The jargons are not meant to offend anyone or to insult anyone's intelligence!

{voice="Flip Wilson's Geraldine"}
The Tazmanian devil made me do it!
{/voice}Ah yes, "Dr" Hovind, the self-proclaimed expert in science and math. "You don't understand any of that, but I understand it because I taught high school math and science for 15 years." He wouldn't clarify that it was in his own private Christian school -- oh those poor poor kids!But wait, there's more! At this site, No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.cuttingedge.org/NEWS/n1260.cfm, a Christian group revealed "EXACT ILLUMINIST TIMETABLE FOR PRODUCING ANTICHRIST HAS BEEN REVEALED TO CUTTING EDGE MINISTRIES!". The Illuminati plot was to create a second sun in the sky by crashing the Galileo probe into Jupiter and the resulting nuclear explosion would ignite Jupiter into a star.When they asked astronomers how feasible this was, the astronomers tried to explain that it couldn't happen because Jupiter is not massive enough to trigger a fusion reaction in its core (it's about 1/10th the necessary mass, as I recall from astronomy class over 30 years ago). But Cutting Edge just could not understand what those astronomers told them, but they could understand the "scientific" answer that Hovind gave them:

quote:

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We were still not sure exactly why Jupiter could not ignite, especially if it were hit with the huge atomic explosion of 1,750 Megatons, as occult sources are saying will occur when the 49.7 pounds of plutonium in the spacecraft Galileo is turned into the planet on December 6. After all, the largest thermonuclear explosion on earth was the Russian test of only 100 megatons in 1961. The answer we received from a Christian scientist, Dr. Kent Hovind, [ Dinosaur Adventure Land ] explained the science to us so we could understand. In the NASA excerpt, quoted above, we learned that "most" of the mass of Jupiter is Hydrogen and Helium, a most explosive mix, if it is mixed with sufficient oxygen in order to burn this mixture. Dr. Hovind says Jupiter does not contain enough oxygen in order to sustain the type of continuous burning that would be needed to produce a star. Now, we understand and now it all makes sense. No matter how large the initial explosion might be, the lack of sufficient quantities of oxygen would snuff out any resulting fire rather quickly.

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Talk about the blind leading the blind!A related Hovind claim that I've tracked down is that at the rate that the sun is losing mass because it's "burning its fuel", 5 million tons per second, then 5 billion years ago the sun would have been so massive that it would have sucked the earth in. But if we do the math (gee, wasn't Hovind an "expert" in math?) we find that the sun's mass and gravity would have been only a few thousandths of a percent greater, sucking the earth in by less that 100,000 miles. When I emailed Hovind about this and asking for clarification, he did everything he could to avoid discussing or even supporting his own claim; he even tried, twice, to pick a fight with me over my AOL screenname (same as the one here).Even if the sun were originally pure hydrogen and were allowed to fuse its entire mass into helium, the total mass lost by "burning its fuel" could not possibly exceed 0.7% of the original mass. Apparently, Hovind not only believes that the sun burns by combustion, but he also believes that combustion results in the mass of the fuel disappearing -- what, conservation of matter and basic chemistry is just an evolutionist conspiracy?Oh those poor, poor former students of his!Oh, and obviously, when Galileo did crash into Jupiter on 21 September 2003 there was no nuclear explosion. The craft's nuclear power modules were designed to be safe and could not have exploded. Galileo (spacecraft) - WikipediaEdited by dwise1, : No reason given.Edited by dwise1, : Trying to get that fool voice tag to work right

Before an hour ago, I honestly thought that what goes on in the sun is an obvious fact. But after talking to jar and anglagard, I guess it's not so obvious. So, I don't blame them for believing Hovind's bullshit.

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Owing to the deficiency of the English language, I have occasionally used the academic jargon generator to produce phrases that even I don't fully understand. The jargons are not meant to offend anyone or to insult anyone's intelligence!

This can be read as an insinuation that neither jar nor I know how the sun gets it's energy and that we believe what Hovind says. Is that what you meant?ABE - We said fusion, not combustion, is the source, remember Edited by anglagard, : title

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Read not to contradict and confute, not to believe and take for granted, not to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider - Francis BaconThe more we understand particular things, the more we understand God - Spinoza

I'm at a big disadvantage with this claim, because I've known ever since about third grade that the sun and stars burn through fusion. It is virtually impossible for me to even imagine how anyone could actually think that it's by other means, such as combustion.We first got into this claim on a Yahoo creation/evolution forum -- before it turned into the sole province of a creationist moderator who immediately set about silencing all opposition. In the middle of the ongoing discussion, a 1st or 2nd year college student joined in stating that he had always thought that the sun burned on its surface, though I forget whether he thought it was by combustion. He was very quickly corrected and he accepted the corrections.I just wonder what most people think so that I can understand the appeal that that Hovind claim has for them.

Sorry, I was in a rush.In physics, we usually refer to what goes on in the sun as "hydrogen burning". It's just another way of saying fusion. What I meant was I thought the phrase "hydrogen burning" was obvious to everyone until I talked to you two.The term "hydrogen burning" is probably the sources of confusion. Obviously, you two know what goes on in the sun. But others are not. When they hear us physicists say "hydrogen burning", they automatically assume combustion.Again, sorry for the poor wordings.Edited by Taz, : Changed "everything" to "everyone". I just got back from running.

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Owing to the deficiency of the English language, I have occasionally used the academic jargon generator to produce phrases that even I don't fully understand. The jargons are not meant to offend anyone or to insult anyone's intelligence!

Do you think people stereotype Texans? You all believe the sun burns oil, wear ten gallon hats, and think the Flintstones is a documentary series about the days before the Fall.

It was a strong argument against Darwin and those who wanted a very old earth in the nineteenth century, as you probably know. I mean strong, because there was no possible kind of fuel they could think of that could last for hundreds of millions of years.At that time, it was understandable. The real story would've seemed like magic to them, in a way.

See, people like us are at a disadvantage when it comes to stuff like this. Ordinary people usually can't understand something unless it's related to common everyday stuff. It's easier for them to understand combustion than fusion. This is how people like Hovind can make so much money by preying on the gullible.You'd be amazed to learn how many college students don't know simple facts like this. Although I'd never encountered someone in real life that didn't know it's not combustion at work in the sun (probably because the topic ever comes up anyway), I've dealt with college students that honest to god didn't know the reason stars are so small in the sky is because they're so far away. Back in my TA days for physics, I was very surprised to find some of my students coming up to me to ask if the sun was just an ordinary star how come the stars are so much smaller than the sun?Another example is the way we can determine the distances of the stars. Take parallax and red shifts for example. It's a lot easier for Hovind to claim that there's no way we can know the stars are such and such distance away or if they're moving away. It's a lot harder for us to actually explain to ordinary folks what parallax and red shifts tell us and how/why. Now that you mention it, I seem to remember learning about this in middle school or so. We went through possibilities of what might go on in the sun. Based on the energy output of the sun, there just isn't enough mass for a chemical process to go on this long and giving out this much energy. This fact alone should tell anyone that it's not combustion at work.Oh my goodness, I just looked at the thread title... sorry for bringing everyone way off topic. Edited by Taz, : No reason given.

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Owing to the deficiency of the English language, I have occasionally used the academic jargon generator to produce phrases that even I don't fully understand. The jargons are not meant to offend anyone or to insult anyone's intelligence!

I'm going to add this reply here, too, just because it took me longer than I thought it would to get that other one posted up there. We simply cannot know, but it is unlikely to have been anything with which we are today familiar. This is one of an interesting question, and I, of course, agree. The thing is, however, if a newborn child were placed into an OE setting, he could learn the language with no problems. We know that all humans are descendent from a single man. Interestingly enough, humans all share a common gene that allows for us to acquire language 'naturally'. But, just as the gene is one derived from the original man, so to must be the language a language derived from the original language. This, then, makes even more sense when we realise that all humans can learn any language if born in any part of the world. This is because all languages have the same base (Gen. 11:1), and all humans have the same genetic predisposition to that base (Gen. 9:1).This information, of course, only makes sense if we recognise that all languages have a single common origin, that all humans have a single common origin, and that the split between the language lineages must have happened after the split in the human lineages. In other words, this information all makes sense in light of what the Bible tells us to be the truth.Jon