Orgin of Lanuage

[Salty]

How does this report line up with the Bible

 

[menageriekeeper]

First of all, any time I see the words "sophisticated statistical methods" I get skeptical.

Since the last paragraph tainted the rest, I'm just going to say interesting theory, but theories are made to be disproven.

However, we do know that all languages began with just one. How God divided them at Babel, *we* don't know.

 

[John of Japan]

First of all, this researcher is not a linguist. His Ph. D. is in psychology! And he's done research in evolution. So he is completely unqualified to research languages.

Secondly, he chose phonemes, the wrong element of language to research! A phoneme is simply a sound, a basic sound of a particular language. What he should have researched is morpheme. A morpheme is the shortest sound with actual meaning in a language. So for example, in English "eh" is a phoneme, but has no meaning. But "-ed" is a morpheme, a sound with meaning. His research on phonemes is meaningless in his study of 500 languages. It reveals nothing like what he wants it to reveal.

Thirdly, linguists know that languages exist in familes: Indo-European (English, French, Sanskrit etc.), Afro-Asiatic, Altaic, etc. (Japanese is in a class by itself. There are no other similar languages to form a family.) So for example, there is absolutely no similarity between Chinese and Celtic that would indicate a common origin, the thing evolutionist researcher Quentin Atkinson was trying to prove according to this article.

Finally, since the linguistic data reveals various language families, completely unconnected in their origins, the Babel account in the Bible is very believable. The various languages did not evolve, they were created by God. I fully believe that the source languages that developed into modern language families are what God created when He divided the languages at Babel.

 

[John of Japan]

Just as I said, linguists find this research to be very dubious. Here is a quote from one article:

It is putting it mildly to say that many historical linguists find the evolutionary biologists working on language histories to be bungling interlopers who have no idea how to handle linguistic data. It is also an understatement to say that some of these interlopers feel that their critics are hidebound traditionalists working on a hopelessly unverifiable system of hunches, received wisdom and personal taste. And that's just the mood between the historical linguists and the newcomers. Lots of the newcomers don't like each other either. "Why get excited about it when it is still so preliminary?" says Johanna Nichols, a historical linguist at the University of California, Berkeley. "We are not impressed by a computational or mathematical paper per se. We have to see that it blends well with what is known by historical linguistics and really adds to our knowledge. Then we will be excited."

From: http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080521/full/453446a.html