On Thursday, August 25, 2022 at 12:05:52 PM UTC-7 jdi...@gmail.com wrote:
> The weird thing about "aryan" history (originally a linguistic term) is > that it is primarily a history of devolution. Classical Sanskrit is already > considerably less grammatically complex than its predecessors. So the > earliest human ancestors presumably spoke a language that was far more > advanced and complex than any currently in active usage. Bizzare. Same > thing with the Blavatskyites and their theories of primordial loss. > Interesting podcast by John McWhorter about this. The short version, there is no general rule that languages simplify over time: http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2017/09/do_languages_get_simpler_over_time.html The most trivial refutation is that if languages always simplified over time, the first humans 100,00 years ago would have been maximally complex, and by now our languages should all be ridiculously simply. Languages like Chinese and English have indeed simplified and one of the reasons is that these imperial languages have added large numbers of adult speakers who had to newly learn the language which tends to lead to simplification. But he also give several counter examples. Dirk. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/0a9360dd-b178-4b0b-8a5e-dde931b36a4an%40googlegroups.com.
