This suggests the potential for language was already there, but never expressed until after spreading across the globe.
This is a little problematic: in all known instances where the 'potential for language' is present, language develops.
If there was not a single 'proto-World' language, then we must assume that the potential for language developed
after ancient humans had become too dispersed to share a language.
To think, then, that any trace of connection would remain between two languages seperated by tens of thousands of years, mostly spoken by small, close-knit societies with minimal contact with outsiders and no written language, is absurd.
And we may not even know what languages so old would have looked like. Did they utilize similar syllable structuring? The common three-part consonant distinctions? And this is even more true when we start going back so far that we are no longer agreeably dealing with
homo sapiens, but instead different human varieties with different brains and different vocal structures. If such critters beget modern humans and their full capacity and potential for language, then the obvious question is: did
they possess linguistic abilities? And if so, what was the nature of
their 'languages'?
The question of language origins requires us to consider matters of human evolution, and once we do this the Biblical account is clearly sunk. (As if it weren't clearly enough sunk before hand.)
Jon
Love your enemies!
™ Version 4.2
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