Bursucanu Anca Engleza - Germana

HARD WORDS
By Phillip E. Ross

Review

In the beginning there was the word, this is how everything started. Phillip E. Rosss text is meant to teach us about the first languages ever spoken in the world. We will never know how old a language is, but some of the specialists argue on genetic evidence that it goes back to 100,000 years ago, probably. Others may say that it goes back to perhaps 12,000 or 15,000 years ago, before the development of agriculture, but as the text says, the monogenesis of language is hard to prove. The most ancient protolanguages that all linguistics accept are believed to have been spoken about 7,000 years ago. The soviet linguists Vladislav M. Illych-Svitych and Aaron B. Dolgopolsky made some researches and concluded to the fact that the branches of human language goes back to 12,000 Neolithic trunk. In 1950, in U.S, Joseph Greenberg of Stanford University compared families of languages and he classified the myriad languages of Americas into three groups each with its own ancient antecedents. His analysis had been criticized by Lyle Campbell, who teaches American languages at University of Louisiana, and he thought that Greenbergs classification should be shouted down. Lyle Campbell wasnt the only one to opposite Greenbergs analysis, there were the traditional comparative linguists who are specialized In the Indo-European Family of languages. Specialists say that, for about 4,000 years ago, proto-Indo-European had fragmented into a dozen of branches (Anatolian and Tocharian left no survivors). In 1786, Sir William Jones observed of Sanskrit, Greek and Latin, and believed that they have some common source which perhaps no longer exists. Even Jacob Grimm, one of the Brothers Grimm, was first to call general attention to systematic sound differences in words having similar meaning from different Indo-European groups. August Schleicher was first who charted language families as branches on a tree. He attempted to reconstruct languages by inferring their words from later forms. Some reconstructed words can show us how Indo-European lived, as I quote The reconstructed words dew-os and Dyeu pter (which means god, the patriarchal god of Indo-European religion) tell us more about the conceptual world of the Indo-Europeans than a roomful of graven idols says Calvert Watkins of Harvard University as an introducti on in his dictionary of Indo-European roots. Archeological evidence shows that farmers who usually move just a short distance away from birthplace could have spread the languages across. In the 19th century, Ferdinand Sassure, a French linguist released a theory. He deduced that the Indo-European languages descend from a system that included a class of

Bursucanu Anca Engleza - Germana

sounds that had not survived in any known tongue. His predictions were confirmed when archeologists discovered tablets from the archives of ancient Hittite kings at Hattussas in the modern Turkey. What caught my attention was the fact that Adolf Hitler himself used strange combination of Darwinism and Indo-European linguistics to support his ideology of an Aryan superrace. The theory of Creole languages, was released by Dereck Bickerton of the University of Hawaii. He studied the common languages created by immigrants to island communities and found that they changed strickingly between the first and the second generation of speakers. This creole language was spoken by brown people, the children of slaves, and indentured laborers, which may be found racist, as Mark R. Hale of Harvard University considers. It is worth to mention that Charles Darwin wrote in his book The Descent of Man that the formation of different languages and of distinct species and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process are curiously parallel, but the linguistics thought that the evolution might transform simple languages into complex ones. Whats interesting its the fact that Greenberg classified American languages, and divided them into Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Dene, but the specialists attacked Greenberg about the third group which he called Amerind. There are 150-odd Native American language families, each apparently as different as Indo-European is from Sino-Tibetan, the specialists tell. Linguists estimate that half of the worlds 6,000 existing languages will di e out in the next century. Greenberg concluded that the ancestors of Native Americans must have immigrated in at least three discrete waves over the land bridge that once connected Siberia to Alaska. Greenbergs hypothesis was supported by Douglas C. Wallace of Emory University, and he said that he feels strongly that the paleo-Indians-Amerinds are one group and the first immigrants who came over the land bridge did not encounter other culture. An important backer of Greenbergs hypothesis is Luigi L. Cavalli-Sforza of Stanford University and he says that the language that you learn depends on where you were born and with whom you were born your family and social milieu. If a group separates, both the gene pool and the language will diverge so the history of genes and of language is essentially the same. All in all, the hypothesis of the monogenesis of language is one that most linguists believe to be plausible. Indeed, the appearance of language may define modern Homo sapiens and explain why our species apparently did not interbreed wit contemporaries like the Neanderthals. As we all know, the technology nowadays is very developed. Cant the specialists use high technology to find more about the first language ever spoken? The time will pass by and the language will be advanced at some point, words are borrowed from other languages, the internet has a really huge impact with the abbreviations. Do you think that it is possible at some point for all the humans to speak only one language? Is there any such thing as a primitive language?