Languages

[tjdisc]

Oh look, yet another religious person using poisoning the well in their argument.

Enlighten me on what I did - I’m curious

[tjdisc]

Oh look, yet another religious person using poisoning the well in their argument.

Enlighten me on what I did - I’m curious

[Mister Agenda]

Oh look, yet another religious person using poisoning the well in their argument.

Enlighten me on what I did - I’m curious

That part where you implied that people who disagreed with you are intellectually dishonest? That was poisoning the well. And maybe flat-out ad hominem.

This would be anoother example, if I did it:

'Actually it doesn't but it just requires a very basic level of intellectual honesty in assessing the historical record.'

But I try not to use logical fallacies when I'm arguing something, so I would never actually say that in earnest.

[tjdisc]

Enlighten me on what I did - I’m curious

That part where you implied that people who disagreed with you are intellectually dishonest? That was poisoning the well. And maybe flat-out ad hominem.

This would be anoother example, if I did it:

'Actually it doesn't but it just requires a very basic level of intellectual honesty in assessing the historical record.'

But I try not to use logical fallacies when I'm arguing something, so I would never actually say that in earnest.

The historical record speaks for itself forget about me. Some here are at least intellectually honest enough to move the argument away from written to the try hard approach that hey people talked and in that time frame magical things happened naturally to bring about these thousands of distinct languages. But it’s pure speculation with no evidential basis - no one had audio recorders. I give credit because it’s less intellectually dishonest than our and out stating the historical record isn’t exactly what it is.

[The Grand Nudger]

“The evidence could have pointed to a recent origin for languages, it just doesn't.”

Actually it does but it just requires a very basic level of intellectual honesty in assessing the historical record.

The historical record doesn't inform us of whether or not a given candidate could speak, rather, whether or not they could write.  We were writing alot earlier than previously believed.   

To determine whether or not a candidate could speak, or probably did, we look at the spinal cord and mandible.  Both are involved in the production of human languages, which is to say that we know given setups are physically capable of speech because we are, with that setup.  Further, talking leaves marks on your bones from the development of muscles in your lower jaw.

So, say we dig up a skull and it looks like it had a beefy enough spinal cord to facilitate all the things that go into talking (it's more than we think, since we don't really think to do it, lol)..and it had a jaw with all the right connections, and the connecting points show evidence of use consistent with speech...it;s a safe bet you found a talker.  

In fact, if we wanted to reject that, we'd have to come up with a wildly ludicrous explanation that acknowledges -that- it looks like the candidate could and did talk, but some other set of hilarious and unrelated processes managed to effect exactly the same evidence without producing said outcome. We'd be left wondering why they didn't talk..when they could have, and in the case of hss and some cuzzos..when they left all sorts of other evidence that strongly suggests™ they had alot of shit to talk about. Art, musical instruments, ritual sites, distributed and transferred tech......the sun rising in the morning...the weather... IMO, it's just too much. That's probably why the most rapid hypothesis for the development of human language take it back 40kya, right around or after full modernity. If we weren't talking before then, we certainly were after then, and have been since. At 40kya, the hss population was already geographically distributed, so it's unlikely that they spoke the same language - just as time, distance, and social or cultural isolation/segregation continues to give rise to differences in speech today.

[Jackalope]

I'm a native English speaker, I am leaning Spanish by osmosis living abroad. I can read fairly well within the limits of my vocabulary, I only infrequently need to use a translation app to get by. I find conversational Spanish more difficult as the language as it is spoken here is not exactly "by the book". Writing also has its challenges.

[arewethereyet]

I'm a native English speaker, I am leaning Spanish by osmosis living abroad.  I can read fairly well within the limits of my vocabulary, I only infrequently need to use a translation app to get by.  I find conversational Spanish more difficult as the language as it is spoken here is not exactly "by the book".  Writing also has its challenges.

Several of the employees in the company where I work are Spanish speakers.  There are times when I have to try to translate their messages and get the craziest stuff.  They are writing in conversational Spanish so things are often lost on me when I try to figure out what they are trying to say.  Some of the translations I get are pretty funny though.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

That part where you implied that people who disagreed with you are intellectually dishonest? That was poisoning the well. And maybe flat-out ad hominem.

This would be anoother example, if I did it:

'Actually it doesn't but it just requires a very basic level of intellectual honesty in assessing the historical record.'

But I try not to use logical fallacies when I'm arguing something, so I would never actually say that in earnest.

The historical record speaks for itself forget about me.  Some here are at least intellectually honest enough to move the argument away from written to the try hard approach that hey people talked and in that time frame magical things happened naturally to bring about these thousands of distinct languages.  But it’s pure speculation with no evidential basis - no one had audio recorders.  I give credit because it’s less intellectually dishonest than our and out stating the historical record isn’t exactly what it is.

Try it this way: People in London speak English. People in Glasgow speak English. But if you take someone who grew up with RP (in say, Mayfair) and plunked him down on Byres Road, he’d have one helluva hard time making himself understood and understanding what was said to him. London and Glasgow are only 400 miles apart.

It’s pretty widely accepted that accents, dialects, and languages change organically with time, distance and location. There doesn’t seem to be any real need to invoke divine intervention as an explanation.

Boru

[Thumpalumpacus]

I haven’t imposed a historical record that only includes a few thousand years of recorded distinct languages.  That’s all there are in truth and reality.  Sorry if that defeats your beliefs but that’s on you to reconcile

By going with your Tower of Babel assertion, you have in fact imposed a timeline, whether you realize it or not, due to the state of architecture at the time. The proliferation of languages almost certainly predates anything alleged to have occurred only six millennia ago, to take the Biblical timeline.

Now, if you're not a Biblical literalist, my apologies. But you'll then need to explain how the Tower of Babel was constructed on an older timeline, and you're still going to have a very limited timeline because the creation of civilizations is a recent event in human history.

In either event, there's not enough time for the Tower of Babel seeding the world with over 7,000 languages.

[Ahriman]

I'm going to try my hand at learning Al Bhed.