Creation Moment 7/15/2025 - Cortical Choreography of Sentence Production

Thank You for making Me so wonderfully complex! 

Psalm 139:14 NLT

"In a recent paper published in Nature Communications Psychology, a research team at NYU, led by Associate Professor Adeen Flinker and Postdoctoral Researcher Adam Morgan, explored how the brain constructs sentences from individual words.

The study revealed that although the brain’s activity patterns for individual words stay consistent across different language tasks, the way those words are arranged and processed depends heavily on sentence structure. In sensorimotor areas, neural activity mirrored the order in which the words were spoken.

However, in prefrontal regions—especially the inferior and middle frontal gyri—the encoding strategy was different. These areas not only represented the words participants intended to say but also registered each word’s grammatical function (such as subject or object) and its place within the sentence’s overall structure.

The researchers also found that during passive constructions like

“Frankenstein was hit by Dracula,” the prefrontal cortex maintained activation for both nouns throughout the entire sentence. 

Even while one word was being spoken, the other remained active in the brain. This ongoing, simultaneous encoding indicates that forming grammatically complex or non-standard sentences requires the brain to retain and manage multiple elements at once, likely engaging additional working memory to do so.

Interestingly, this dynamic aligns with a longstanding observation in linguistics: most of the world’s languages favor placing subjects before objects. The researchers propose that this could be due, in part, to neural efficiency.

Ultimately, this work offers a detailed glimpse into the cortical choreography of sentence production and challenges some of the long-standing assumptions about how speech unfolds in the brain. Rather than a simple linear process, it appears that speaking involves a flexible interplay between stable word representations and syntactically driven dynamics, shaped by the demands of grammatical structure." 

SciTechDaily

Creation Moment 7/14/2025 - "but WHY"?

Go to, let Us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. Genesis 11:7

"Take a look at two articles from New Scientist posted on 23 June 2025. The first asks:
Colin Barras, “Ancient humans only evolved language once, but why?”

This article poses several interesting questions: 1) Why did language evolve? 2) When did it evolve? And 3) Why did it only evolve once?

Notice the one question that is never asked: If life evolved. “If” is off

the table.

"… one of the key things researchers want to know about language is how it evolved, and why it only did so once in our human lineage."

OK, pause. “Only once” should send up a Red Flag or two if we know the evolutionary literature. Flight supposedly “emerged” independently multiple times, as did eyes and even sonar. 

Q: Language, possibly the most adaptively useful trait ever, evolved only once?" CEH

Creation Moment 4/5/2025 - Language Makes Humans Human

And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. Genesis 2:19

"Of all the animal world, only humans have the ability to perceive current circumstance in 

--the context of time and space, 

--make moral judgments about right and wrong, 

--and therefore be culpable for intent, which requires premeditation. 

Man’s ability to reason is one aspect that fundamentally sets this “rational animal” apart to uniquely reflect the imago Dei (image of God). 

Finite human rationality is responsible for these differentiating

characteristics, which will be demonstrated to be necessarily dependent on language. 

Language, then, becomes a necessary but insufficient condition for thought, serving as the fabric or material out of which rational thoughts are constructed. 

*Our worldview, in a global sense, is consequently constructed out of our accumulated knowledge, which is based in language and thereby circumscribes our worldview’s boundaries. Denied language, then, man’s ability to think would be reduced to immediate, animal-like reasoning.

However, our ideas are both described by and constrained by the words we have available to define and describe those ideas. 

Only by way of language are we able to form higher-level cumulative thought.

Language gives man the unique ability to recast the immediate in light of a larger context by framing current circumstance in the context of time, space, relationship, principles, and logic." 

AIG

Phonemes tell us.......

Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth. Genesis 11:9

"Psychologist Quentin Atkinson counted distinct units of sound, called phonemes, in 504 of the world’s nearly 7,000 languages. 

He found that sub-Saharan African languages average the most phonemes, while language groups farther away have fewer phonemes. 

These findings, published in Science, are consistent with the principle that “when a very small number of individuals break off from a larger population, there is a gradual loss” of linguistic complexity.

Controversy in the linguistic community is being stirred up by another recent study, this one from Nature. Researchers analyzed the grammatical rules of word order in several language groups and found that the patterns were too random to construct an evolutionary language tree.

The findings of these studies are consistent with a Biblical worldview, so long as evolutionary presuppositions are ignored. 

God gave Adam and Eve language when He made them about 6,000 years ago. 

When people rebelled at the Tower of Babel, God confused their language. 

Their new languages then lost complexity as small people groups spread out. The languages created then were the forerunners of today’s languages." 

AIG

Creation Moment 12/30/2024 - Babies Know

So God created man in His own image.... Genesis 1:27

"Research has revealed that babies begin learning language in the

womb, and by the time they are born, they have already developed a preference for hearing their native language. The child does not yet know how to speak or understand what is being said. But it is familiar enough with the language that it can distinguish its parents’ language from others. A child in the womb can recognize when someone is speaking (for example) Japanese, rather than English or Arabic. This is just another piece of knowledge among many that highlights amazing design and the Biblical truth that the unborn child is a human being, made in God’s image." 

CMI

Creation Moment 10/26/2024 - What do the Mouth of babes teach us?

"A fascinating article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences explores the amazing ability of infants to acquire language skills, identify words, and recognize syntax. 

 

A couple of quotes from the paper are sufficient to arouse awe:

"Imagine that you are faced with the following challenge. You must discover the internal structure of a system that contains tens of

thousands of units, all generated from a small set of materials. These units, in turn, can be assembled into an infinite number of combinations. Although only a subset of those combinations is correct, the subset itself is for all practical purposes infinite. Somehow you must converge on the structure of this system to use it to communicate. And you are a very young child. This system is human language. The units are words, the materials are the small set of sounds from which they are constructed, and the combinations are the sentences into which they can be assembled. Given the complexity of this system, it seems improbable that mere children could discover its underlying structure and use it to communicate. Yet most do so with eagerness and ease, all within the first few years of life."

The researchers ran experiments with infants presented with artificial languages interspersed with subtle elements of surprise to see how they adapted to novel elements. They also investigated a Nicaraguan school for deaf children who were learning sign language. A review of the literature revealed no commonly accepted evolutionary explanation for the remarkable ability of children to acquire language. 

The authors conclude:

"These examples of language learning, processing, and creation represent just a few of the many developments between birth and

linguistic maturity. During this period, children discover the raw materials in the sounds (or gestures) of their language, learn how they are assembled into longer strings, and map these combinations onto meaning. These processes unfold simultaneously, requiring children to integrate their capacities as they learn, to crack the code of communication that surrounds them. Despite layers of complexity, each currently beyond the reach of modern computers, young children readily solve the linguistic puzzles facing them, even surpassing their input when it lacks the expected structure.

No less determined, researchers are assembling a variety of methodologies to uncover the mechanisms underlying language acquisition . . . . As these techniques and others probing the child’s mind are developed and their findings integrated, they will reveal the child’s solution to the puzzle of learning a language."

The gap between humans and animals is more than just biological.  Unlike the animals, we have the ability to communicate meaning, not just signals, and to form relationships based on mutual love and understanding.

Evolutionists strive to package humanness into a materialistic box that is too small for it. 

---King David, in Psalm 8, said, “Out of the mouth of babes and nursing infants You have ordained strength, because of Your enemies, that You may silence the enemy and the avenger.” 

---The enemies today are the materialists who would rob God of His honor as Creator, and who would ascribe His wonders to chance. The strength He has ordained is the powerful evidence of nature. Look no farther than the feeble infant in a mother’s arms, focusing its little eyes and ears on her every gentle word." 

CEH

Creation Moment 9/8/2024 - Your Temporal Windows

I will praise Thee; 

for I am fearfully and wonderfully made:

marvellous are Thy works;

Psalm 139:14

"Language processing is one of the most complex and captivating abilities of the human brain, enabling us to communicate, comprehend, and connect with one another.
Language allows us to 

--share our thoughts, 

--express our emotions, 

--and convey information, 

forming the foundation of human relationships and society itself.

Despite its central role in human interaction, the intricacies of how the brain processes language remain a mystery.

The experts identified distinct clusters of neurons that handle language at various "temporal windows," responding to linguistic context over different timeframes, ranging from a single word to about six words.
The discovery of these temporal windows was made using a sophisticated technique that involves recording electrical activity in the brain.

With the in-depth analysis, the experts discovered that neurons seemed to process language in groups, or clusters, based on temporal windows of one word, four words, or six words.

According to study lead author Tamar Regev, it appears that these neural populations integrate information across different timescales along the sentence.
Another significant finding from the study reveals the anatomical locations of these different clusters. 

Those with the shortest temporal window were found predominantly in the posterior temporal lobe, while those with longer windows were spread more evenly throughout the temporal and frontal lobes.
"The longest timescale is sensitive to things like syntax or relationships between words, and maybe the shortest timescale is more sensitive to features of single words or parts of them," said Regev." 

Earth

Creation Moment 9/6/2024 - The Production of Speech

I will praise Thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made:
marvellous are Thy works;
Psalm 139:14

"Humans are capable of generating extraordinarily diverse articulatory movement combinations to produce meaningful speech. 

--This ability to orchestrate specific phonetic sequences, 

--and their syllabification and inflection over subsecond timescales

--allows us to produce thousands of word sounds and is a core component of language.

Neuropixels recordings capable of sampling across the cortical column in humans, we discover neurons in the language-dominant prefrontal cortex that encoded detailed information about the phonetic arrangement and composition of planned words during the production of natural speech. 

These neurons represented the specific order and structure of articulatory events before utterance and reflected the segmentation of phonetic sequences into distinct syllables. 

They also accurately predicted the phonetic, syllabic and

morphological components of upcoming words and showed a temporally ordered dynamic. 

Collectively, we show how these mixtures of cells are broadly organized along the cortical column and how their activity patterns transition from articulation planning to production. 

We also demonstrate how these cells reliably track the detailed composition of consonant and vowel sounds during perception and how they distinguish processes specifically related to speaking from those related to listening. 

Together, these findings reveal a remarkably structured organization and encoding cascade of phonetic representations by prefrontal neurons in humans and demonstrate a cellular process that can support the production of speech." 

Nature

Creation Moment 9/1/2024 - Brain's shortcut for processing our first language

I will praise Thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made:

marvellous are Thy works;

Psalm 139:14

"Imagine someone who can effortlessly switch between chatting with their grandma in Italian and arguing philosophy with a classmate in French. That's a polyglot, someone who can speak multiple languages.

A new MIT study explores how their brains handle this impressive feat. The experts found that while the brain's language network lights up when processing any language, it works less intensely for a polyglot's native tongue. This suggests our first language becomes specially encoded in the brain, allowing for smoother comprehension.

Scientists found that the brain processes our native language much faster and easier than other languages. The key to this is early learning. We soak in all the rules and words like sponges. Because we're exposed to this language so early and all the time, it becomes ingrained in our brain's language areas.

Scientists could actually see this happening in the brain scans. When people listen to their native language, there's a specific pattern of brain activity.

Parts of the brain linked to language, like Broca's area for speaking and Wernicke's area for understanding, light up less. 

Basically, our brain has a special shortcut for processing our first language, making it faster and easier to understand and speak." 

Earth

Creation Moment 8/29/2024 - LANGUAGE Undermines evolution

But now thus saith the LORD that created thee,.... Isaiah 43:1

"Language is a huge hurdle for naturalistic dogma. 

---Languages match symbols with specific meanings 

---and arrange those symbols according to a conventional set of rules (syntax) that includes a grammar. 

Evolution supposedly proceeds bit by bit, but language requires all three bits to come preintegrated: 

symbols, 

meanings, 

and syntax. 

Language encoded within DNA was such clear evidence of a divine designer that it convinced the once hard-boiled atheist Antony Flew to do an about-face." 

ICR

Creation Moment 8/23/2024 - Brains "thesaurus"

I will praise Thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made:

marvellous are Thy works;

Psalm 139:14

"Using a novel technology for obtaining recordings from single neurons, a team of investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham health care system, discovered a microscopic "thesaurus" that reflects how word meanings are represented by neurons in the human brain...opens the door to understanding how humans comprehend language.

"Humans possess an exceptional ability to extract nuanced meaning through language—when we listen to speech, we can comprehend the meanings of up to tens of thousands of words and do so seamlessly across remarkably diverse concepts and themes," said senior author Ziv Williams.

"We also wanted to find how humans are able to process such diverse meanings during natural speech and through which we are able to rapidly comprehend the meanings of words across a wide array of sentences, stories, and narratives," Williams said.

To start addressing these questions, the scientists used a novel technology that allowed them to simultaneously record the activities of up to a hundred neurons from the brain while people listened to sentences (such as, "the child bent down to smell the rose") and short stories (for example, about the life and times of Elvis Presley).

For example, most people can rapidly tell the correct meaning of words such as "sun" and "son" or "see" and "sea" when used in a sentence, even though the words sound exactly the same.

"We found that certain neurons in the brain are able to reliably distinguish between such words, and they continuously anticipate the most likely meaning of the words based on the sentence contexts in which they are heard," said Williams.

Lastly, and perhaps most excitingly, the researchers found that, by recording a relatively small number of brain neurons, they could reliably predict the meanings of words as they were heard in real-time during speech. 

That is, based on the activities of the neurons, the team could determine the general ideas and concepts experienced by an individual as they were being comprehended during speech." ScienceAlert

Creation Moment 8/20/2024 - Brain & Language (Amazing)

I will praise Thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made:

marvellous are Thy works;

Psalm 139:14

"New techniques that can track brain activity down to a single neuron are now revealing exactly where this sound translation takes place within our minds.

"Humans possess an exceptional ability to extract nuanced meaning through language – when we listen to speech, we can comprehend the meanings of up to tens of thousands of words and do so seamlessly across remarkably diverse concepts and themes," says Harvard University neuroscientist Ziv Williams.

The recordings revealed words that share similar meanings like noodles and pizza create similar patterns of activity within participants' brains and that these patterns differ substantially when hearing words that have disparate meanings such as duck and coffee.

"We found that while 

--certain neurons preferentially activated when people heard words such as ran or jumped, which reflect actions, 

--other neurons preferentially activated when hearing words that have emotional connotations, such as happy or sad," explains Williams.

"When looking at all of the neurons together, we could start building a detailed picture of how word meanings are represented in the brain."

What's more, the patterns of neuron activity in response to a word sound depends on what came before and after too.
"Rather than simply responding to words as fixed stored memory representations, these neurons seemed to adaptively represent word meanings in a context-dependent manner during natural speech processing," the team writes in their paper.
--This is what allows us to distinguish between homophones – words that sound the same but have different meanings like 'I' and 'eye'.

Together, these findings reveal a finely detailed cortical organization of semantic representations at the neuron scale in humans and begin to illuminate the cellular-level processing of meaning during language comprehension." 

ScienceAlert

Creation Moment 8/11/2024 - Brain-to-Brain Coupling

For then will I turn to the people a pure language, that they may all call upon the name of the LORD, to serve Him with one consent. Zephaniah 3:9

"When two people interact, their brain activity becomes synchronized, but it was unclear until now to what extent this

"brain-to-brain coupling" is due to linguistic information or other factors, such as body language or tone of voice.

Researchers report August 2 in the journal Neuron that brain-to-brain coupling during conversation can be modeled by considering the words used during that conversation, and the context in which they are used.
"We can see 

---linguistic content emerge word-by-word in the speaker's brain before they actually articulate what they're trying to say, 

---and the same linguistic content rapidly reemerges in the listener's brain after they hear it," says first author and neuroscientist Zaid Zada.....the researchers were able to observe brain activity associated with the context-specific meaning of words in the brains of both speaker and listener.

They showed that word-specific brain activity peaked in the speaker's brain around 250 ms before they spoke each word, and corresponding spikes in brain activity associated with the same words appeared in the listener's brain approximately 250 ms after they heard them. "This shows just how important context is, because it best explains the brain data," says Zada. "Large language models take all these different elements of linguistics like syntax and semantics and represent them in a single high-dimensional vector. We show that this type of unified model is able to outperform other hand-engineered models from linguistics." 

MedicalXpress

Creation Moment 7/22/2022 - Universal Language Network

And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.

Genesis 11:1

 

"In a large-scale functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)

study, neuroscientists from MIT and Harvard University evaluated the claim of language universality with respect to core features of its neural architecture.

 The world’s languages exhibit striking diversity, with differences spanning the sound inventories, the complexity of derivational and functional morphology, the ways in which the conceptual space is carved up into lexical categories and the rules for how words can combine into phrases and sentences. 

 

To foster inclusivity in language research, Dr. Saima Malik-Moraleda and her colleagues from MIT and Harvard University examined whether there are shared brain responses across 45 languages in 12 language families: Afro-Asiatic, Austro-Asiatic, Austronesian, Dravidian, Indo-European, Japonic, Koreanic, Atlantic-Congo, Sino-Tibetan, Turkic, Uralic and an isolate, Basque, which is effectively a one-language family. 

 

All native languages activated large areas of the left frontal, temporal and parietal cortex in the brain.

The responses of this language-related network were stronger and more correlated in the left hemisphere of the brain than the right hemisphere as subjects listened to different stories in their native languages.

The network was more responsive during listening to native languages than when performing a spatial working memory or an arithmetic task, suggesting that this common network was selective for language processing.

“This finding is a first step in deeper examinations of the neural processing of different languages, which will require larger groups of native speakers for each language,” the authors said."

SciNews

Creation Moment 4/14/2022 - Chatty Mushrooms?

And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good. Genesis 1:12

"By far the most delectable news item to come across the transom

Thursday was the revelation that mushrooms are magical indeed: the British journal Royal Society Open Science has published, according to the New York Post, a startling new study that claims that mushrooms can talk to each other — and even have a bountiful vocabulary.....researchers “found that the ‘fungal language’ exceeds the European languages in morphological complexity.”

Human communication can be recorded as a trading of electrical impulses, you see, and for some of us that’s a considerable improvement. In a similar way, Adamatzky “found that the electrical spikes often occurred in clusters, mirroring human vocabularies and employing up to 50 words.” He explained in his study, “We demonstrate that distributions of fungal word lengths match that of human languages.” Split gills are the most articulate of the chatty fungi: the study found that “split gills — a species that resides in rotting wood — generated the most complex ‘sentences’ of the four fungi.”

The examiners of mushroom conversation suggest that they “‘chat’ in order to make their presence known to other members of their cluster — much like wolves howling to alert the pack.” They could also be “trying to tip off fellow fungi, both to potential threats — such as the weather — as well as sources of sustenance.” PJM

Sumerian Language Isolate tells us......

Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth. Genesis 11:9

 

--Sounds like there were 2 major Linguistic groups who stayed around Babel----the Sumerian and Semetic Akkadian groups.

--Sumerian would be a LANGUAGE ISOLATE because it didn't disperse and morph through dialects as fast a Akkadian. 

Likely there were more Akkadian speakers and spread out and multiplied faster and farther with the result of it's dialects morphing into Semetic sub-branches.

--Another observation is that since Sumer is considered the first organized civilization with first written language (likely because those who stayed behind at Babel had the cultural structure to build upon immediately) it would sense it was used later as a nostalgic language of a "old period".

"The Sumerian language was spoken in southern Mesopotamia and

was the first language to be written in the cuneiform script. 

It is an isolate language meaning we know of no other languages that relate to it ancestrally.

The language was spoken in a region where Semitic languages were also spoken, particularly Akkadian, and it eventually fell out of use in favor of those languages.

 

Little is known about when Sumerian-speaking people arrived in southern Mesopotamia, assuming they did not originate there. Either way, from a very early period a multilingual environment existed in southern Mesopotamia, which included languages like Sumerian, an early form of Akkadian, other Semitic languages, and Hurrian. 

Some scholars have posited the possibility of an otherwise unknown substrate, or influencing language of the area, due to the presence of words of unknown origin in Sumerian writings. 

 

Even though these texts are difficult to read, we can ascertain literary themes like 

--the formation of the world, 

--divine temple building, 

--and other divine activities, sometimes of an adult nature. 

 

In these texts, we also encounter a large number of names of scribes

and functions which are Akkadian in origin, suggesting that the two languages were very intermixed, as stated above. This was the time of the Sumerian's greatest worldly influence, as evidenced by texts outside the Mesopotamian realm from Mari, Ebla, Tell Beydar, and Tell Brak which utilized the cuneiform script for Sumerian as well as their local Semitic languages.

 

The writing system of Sumerian has the principles of polyphony and homophony. 

Polyphony means that some signs have multiple syllabic values, for instance the DU sign could be read either 'du', 'ra₂', 'ša₄', etc., each having different but often related meanings. 

Homophony means that there are multiple signs having the same syllabic value. You may have noticed the use of subscripts (₂) in the sign values. This is because syllables like 'ra' had multiple sign renderings like RA , the aforementioned DU, and others. Incredibly, some syllables had more than 10 different signs representing them. This principle of homophony and the fact that one syllable in Sumerian often comprises the entire word have led some scholars to believe that Sumerian contained a tonal system.

 

Eme-sal is commonly referred to as a dialect of Sumerian as opposed to eme-gir₁₅ or the “main dialect” of Sumerian. The writing of eme-sal is limited to ritual texts, particularly the lamentation texts for gala-priests, and the words spoken by certain goddesses, although in other places these goddesses speak eme-gir₁₅. 

Because the sign SAL can have a reading as munus meaning “woman”, scholars have posited that eme-sal is a genderlect or special dialect for speech by women. However, the sign SAL also has the reading sal which means “thin” or “soft” and could simply refer to a special variant for the goddesses or ritual-performing priests as stated before. Another suggestion put forth is that the gala-priests were eunuchs, but there is no evidence for castration in ancient southern Mesopotamian culture.

 

Sumerian language enjoyed a resurrection during the Old Babylonian period as a literary and liturgical language. The scribes in this period considered the language as essential for maintaining the traditions of a very old period, and wanted to recapture an archaic time of magic and legend. After this period ending c. 1595 BC, the scribal usage of Sumerian decreased significantly. The repertoire of texts was reduced, particularly the royal/divine hymns of the Ur III period, and even the ones that continued were written only in bilingual renditions with Akkadian and other languages. 

However, Sumerian was still being studied in scribal schools and even chanted in liturgy through the Persian and Hellenistic periods. There even exist student exercise tablets with cuneiform on one side and Greek on the other. 

The last known cuneiform tablet was an astronomical work dating to 75 AD from Babylon, but it is possible that the script finally fell out of use later than this." WHE

Creation Moment 9/18/2021 - No Linguistic Trunk

Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth... Genesis 11:9

"Evolutionary linguists would like to find universal common ancestry in languages, but they can’t get there. Why?

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

The World's First Language

Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth. Genesis 11:9

"The early chapters of Genesis make several important points about the world’s first language that can be summarized here: 

1) Adam named every living creature that God brought to him

(Genesis 2:19), 

Q:  but on what basis? 

Q:  Did he just invent a combination of sounds or did he try to describe the creature before him, in which case in what language? 

 

2) The Table of the Nations (Genesis 10:1–32) divides the peoples of the world into three groups—the descendants of Noah’s sons Japheth, Ham, and Shem. A total of 70 nations are listed. There is no simple link between descent from a particular son of Noah and language, but generally speaking Japheth fathers the Indo-European-speaking peoples, Ham, the Hamitic-speaking peoples and Shem, the Semitic-speaking peoples.

 

3) The story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11:1–9 gives an

explanation for linguistic diversity and makes three basic points: 

a) Originally there was just one universal language (11:1).

b) When the Lord confused the language of the people, new languages were generated. .... the people were unable to understand each other and so scattered over the face of the whole earth. 

c) The location of this incident is placed in Shinar which may be the land inhabited by the Sumerians, i.e. southern Iraq (11:1). The city, of which the tower was a part, was Babel (‘confused’), the Hebrew word for Babylon (11:9). 

*It is noteworthy that 

---although languages within a language family have many common features, 

---surprisingly few of these features are shared with languages from another language family, 

---suggesting that the proto-languages and progenitors of modern isolates arose at the original confusion of languages that the Book of Genesis records as happening at the Tower of Babel." 

CMI/Paul J.N. Lawrence

Language Diversification Process

It's pretty simple---God made a few language families at Babel then dispersed them worldwide. Based on a few factors it wouldn't be long for Languages within the Language families to begin the diversification process within each family.

1-  And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation;

Acts 17:26

2-  Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth. 

Genesis 11:9

"Among the five factors, geographical isolation exerted the

strongest effect on overall lexical differentiation, significantly increasing its pace (estimate = 1.09; 90% HPDI: [0.92, 1.24]). 

This is because although it moderately increased the ability at which languages acquired new lexical items (estimate = 0.29, 90% HPDI: [0.06, 0.51]) it also severely increased the rate of word loss (estimate = 0.86, 90% HPDI: [0.70, 1.04]).

 

 In the models, the languages of cultural groups with larger populations gained words at a faster rate (estimate = 0.52, 90% HPDI: [0.34, 0.68]). Although we also found evidence that these languages also lost words at a slightly faster pace (estimate = 0.14, 90% HPDI: [0.08, 0.20]), the overall positive effect of speaker population size on lexical turnover was not significant (0.06, 90% HPDI: [-0.10, 0.23]).

 

Conflict between communities of the same culture reduced words gains (estimate = -0.30; 90% HPDI: [-0.50, -0.11]) but increased the pace at which languages lost words (estimate = 0.37; 90% HPDI: [0.16, 0.58].

Although population size did not have an effect on the overall rate of linguistic differentiation, larger population sizes increased the rate at which languages acquired new vocabulary items. ... may also be due to large populations having less stringent norm enforcement allowing them to change fast.

 

We identified patterns of word gain and loss by recording instances where a cognate form within a given semantic category was present in one language of a sister pair but not in the other. 

---If a word form found in one sister language has a cognate in other languages in the language family, it is likely to have been inherited from the common ancestor. This implies that the absence of that cognate form in the other sister language must be due to its loss after divergence from their exclusive common ancestor. 

---On the other hand, if one of the sister languages has a unique word form with no recognized cognates in any other language in the family, it presumably represents a gain of a new word since the split from its sister language. 

 

The difference in the number of word gains and losses between
languages in each pair was modeled as a Poisson distribution, where the expected number of differences in words gained or lost is a log-linear function of the main effects β. We adopted regularizing priors that are more conservative than the implied flat priors of non-Bayesian procedures, which prevents the model from overfitting data]."

Cecilia Padilla-Iglesias, /Erik Gjesfjeld, /Lucio Vinicius-PLOSone