Creation of the English Language

Huh? Are you sure? According to whom? 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

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.

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: 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: 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

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{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)

Yeah, but since when was China part of the south Nile area?

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

Never said it was.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.

Wounded King writes:

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That sounds familiar, is it something to do with Hilbert space?

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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.

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Rrhain

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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.

Check out the Gradeshnitsa tablets which date IIRC to about 5000 BCE.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

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

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{Content off-topic - hidden. Use "peek" if you feel you must see it. Adminnemooseus}Edited by Adminnemooseus, : Comments and off-topic banner.

If you wish to present a case for why it should be reopened, go to the " Thread Reopen Requests" topic, link below.Adminnemooseus

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Topic reopened per Jon's request. Let's get it back on topic, shall we?Adminnemooseus

{Content off-topic - hidden. Use "peek" if you feel you must see it. Adminnemooseus}Edited by Adminnemooseus, : Comments and off-topic banner.

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!

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:

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One of the great 'facts' about English in the early modern period is that the language was used in exploration and conquest,...

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It is, as the previous chapter has already indicated, entirely the case that the activities of the UK in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries spread English world-wide in commercial and imperial terms, and that those of the USA in the twentieth consolidated its global role culturally, technologically, and militarily.

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1. Two World Wars (1914-18, 1939-45) in which the key victorious nations were English-speaking. Especially in World War II [AmE and BrE] the Second World War [BrE], the use of English for military, political, economic, and other purposes expanded greatly in the various war zones. In Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Pacic millions of people came into regular contact with English who would not otherwise have had much (or anything) to do with it. And where English arrived it tended to stay on after the hostilities ended, for a variety of reasons that included reconstruction, trade, and education.
2. A political and economic Cold War (1945-89) between a capitalist West and a communist East. In this long and often tense struggle for territorial and ideological inuence, the USA was the foremost Western contestant. However, after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, the USA became the world's sole 'super power', the perceived prestige of which impelled many people in ex-Soviet satellites, such as Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland, to switch from Russian to English as their language of wider communication, having already regarded it for years as a”if not indeed the”language of freedom. Inevitably, Russians also began to nd it useful to know some English, especially in trying to catch up on a West that was now both technologically and economically far ahead of them.
3. Globalization, the name of a process, set in train after the Soviet collapse, of world-wide social, cultural, and commercial expansion (and exploitation), in which the USA was the center [AmE] or centre [BrE] of socio-economic, political, cultural, and linguistic interest. In the closing quarter of the century, English was not only a key socio-cultural language but also the communicative linchpin of both international capitalism and the world's media. By this point, the American variety had also become the main inuence not only on other languages but on other Englishes (included the British variety). In its standard spoken form, AmE was now also the primary model for teaching English as a second or foreign language. For many years, key publishers in the UK's 'English language industry' had resisted this tide but when it became clear that the tide was becoming ever stronger, they began to publish courses in US usage from ofces in New York, alongside their continuing operations at home and elsewhere. In this, they proted from both Englishes (and, if BrE ever did ecline beyond a certain unwished-for point, they would be well placed to transfer more resources to selling the US variety).*

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Such status, however, was not always given English, as Richard W. Bailey (same book) points out about the English of the 14th Century⁴:

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English is the 'slangy' language; Latin is the vehicle for serious business. Two other English insertions in this sermon quote a tapster and a glutton. In both cases, English is the language of silliness and sin.

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From this I think IAJ needs to address the following points:

1. Demonstrate that English is naturally 'pliable'** despite the fact that it has not always been held up as the language of prestige.
2. Explain why the information in the rst three quotes could not have been sufcient in spreading English.
3. Provide an alternate hypothesis by which English became the global language that takes into account all the actual evidence”e.g., real kings”that is known on the history and development of English.

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
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"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.
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* 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, : -/=

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In considering the Origin of Species, it is quite conceivable that a naturalist... might come to the conclusion that each species had not been independently created, but had descended, like varieties, from other species. - Charles Darwin On the Origin of Species
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En el mundo hay multitud de idiomas, y cada uno tiene su propio significado. - I Corintios 14:10
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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
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[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]