Researchers reconstruct major branches in the tree of language (Santa Fe Institute). Thinking like Darwinists, liguists have been trying to find a common trunk for the language “tree of life” but have not found it.
One of the defining goals of historical linguistics is to map the ancestry of modern languages as far back as it will go — perhaps, some linguists hope, to a single common ancestor that would constitute the trunk of the metaphorical tree. But while many thrilling connections have been suggested based on systemic comparisons of data from most of the world’s languages, much of the work, which goes back as early as the 1800s, has been prone to error. Linguists are still debating over the internal structure of such well-established families as Indo-European, and over the very existence of chronologically deeper and larger families.
These linguists tried to connect the Indo-European language family (which includes European and Indian languages) and the Altaic superfamily “which is thought to connect the linguistic ancestors of such distant languages as Turkish, Mongolian, Korean, and Japanese.” No luck so far.
They tried various methods, including a new approach of words that should have been common to all people groups, like hand, fire, rock, cloud and human. This, they feel, bypasses some of the “contamination” caused by borrowed words.
---They found signals that agreed within superfamilies of languages, but not between them. This is analogous to finding large branches on a tree, but no trunk yet.
Imagining a Trunk
Meanwhile, linguists at the University of Helsinki are trying to construct a theoretical trunk for language. This is explained in a press release on Phys.org, titled “The world’s languages may be so similar because of how humans talk about language.” The Helsinki team hypothesizes that the way people talk about language, called “reported speech,” gives clues to how language develops:
This means that the sentence ‘He said: “I will go”‘ in some languages can become the main way to express meanings such as ‘He was about to go’, ‘He might go’, ‘As for him, he will go’. Each of these interpretations have no clear connection with the meaning of reported speech, but use a sentence structure that derives from reported speech. The meanings associated with these non-speech interpretations of reported speech correspond to common grammatical categories in the languages of the world, which linguists call ‘aspect’, ‘modality’, ‘topic’ and others.
Basically, they think that the human capacity to “turn language on itself” like this provides clues to the evolution of grammar. Their paper about this in Frontiers of Communication sheepishly confesses that “This is, admittedly, a speculative story,” but the authors hope that the approach “represents a plausible linguistic context in which grammar evolved.” (Note: there is no scientific plausibility meter.)
The paper provides no universal common ancestor or explanation for the other important keys to language: semantics (meaning) and abstract thought. Their conclusion is almost puerile in its diffidence.
Trees of the Darwinian Imagination
Back to the Santa Fe Group. How did they conclude? Their bottom line, like the Helsinki group, is not achievement, but hope in futureware. Apparently in linguistics, it’s sufficient to look busy constructing an evolutionary tree even if it is mostly imaginary.
As the researchers test and reconstruct the branches of human language, one of the ultimate goals is to understand the evolutionary paths languages follow over generations,
much like evolutionary biologists do for living organisms.“One great thing about historical reconstruction of languages is that it’s able to bring out a lot of cultural information,” Starostin says. “Reconstructing its internal phylogeny, like we’re doing in these studies, is the initial step to a much larger procedure of trying to reconstruct a large part of the lexical stock of that language, including its cultural lexicon.”
That’s Jargonwocky for “there is no internal phylogeny or rooted tree to see yet. Come back later.”
Darwinism
has infected everything, including linguistics. These people just cannot
think outside the tree. Here again, evolutionists hit a wall. Just like
the Cambrian explosion poses an insurmountable hurdle to biologists,
there is another explosion in linguistics that fights their efforts: the
historical confusion of languages at Babel. Both groups never get the
eagerly-sought “understanding” because they are barking up the wrong
tree—one that does not exist. The real Tree of Life was in Genesis." CEH
