Back on 26th January 2004 I wrote this article in talk.origins, free.christians and alt.fan.uncle-davey which kicked off no little furore, and got me labelled by Aaron Clausen, a talk.origins regular, as a "science fiction writer" and "the most dangerous and mischievous kind of Creationist". He called my account "nothing more than a piece of fiction. It's like good SF, it weaves fact and fiction together in such a way as the improbable seems no more surprising than the probable." He also wrote on 2nd February 2004 "To my mind, Davey, you are the most mischievous and dangerous kind of Creationist. ... You even know the holes in the knowledge of the study of language, and you can use the terminology to great effect. People ... seeing your essay, would likely fall for it hook, line and sinker. Because it mixes fact and myth so very well, you give it an air of plausibility." That was in amongst admitting that he didn't know any better answer to the origin of language families, and when I asked him what he would tell his kids on the subject if they asked him whether there was a polygenesis of language families or linguistic monogenesis, (this being the sort of thing they ask at the breakfast table in American skeptics' households) he said he would tell them "we don't know".
It's seems like even no explanation is better for these "knowledge-thirsty" evolutionists than the Bible's one, if and whenever the Bible invokes supernatural intervention by God, as at Babel. And their counter to the perfectly reasonable claim, straight out of atheist Conan Doyle, that if you cannot disprove a theory it must be true, is that that's the 'goddidit' argument. They think that by giving silly, mocking designations to the perfectly logical and consistent lines of thought that Christians have, they have somehow effectively dealt with them. Either that or they make out that the questions which we raise are invalid in some way. In all they do they are like lawyers who, having trouble with the evidence, use odd points of law to attack the procedure.
Obviously, I'm not out to deceive anybody or produce fiction or stir up mischief as Aaron Clausen claimed, but I really think that if someone knows the facts about where we are in the reconstruction of earlier languages, and doesn't have a world view that excludes the chance for God to work directly on the human mind, en masse, they will say that the explanation I gave, based on the Babel account of scripture, is just as valid an account of how we got to today's languages as any other. Only prejudice against the possibility of such action by God is a reason not to acknowledge that I have offered a workable and valid theory.
Anyway, the person who got me started is 'Sloggoth' and he/she is in the mauvey colour known to hexadecimalist literalists as "ba00ba", and I'm in black.
- Start quoted material -
> Well, Uncle Davey, you've confused a lurker pretty well here. If you
> would be so kind as to clarify:
>
> When you speak of linguistic evolution do you mean
> 1) The evolution of the *capacity for language* in humans? Biological
> evolution must indeed be able to explain this.
> or
> 2) What everyone else means, i.e. change in language, such as that
> which produced French and Spanish from Latin? There is no reason why a
> theory which deals with genetic change should address a purely
> cultural phenomenon, beyond explaining how it is biologically possible
> in the first place.
> or even
> 3) If one cannot trace linguistic evolution beyond the known families,
> (which probably arose at some time in the past that could very loosely
> fit the Babel account), then the Babel account is thereby not
> contradicted?
The way I see it is that everyone received their own language at Babel. Even
husbands and wives could not talk and little kids could not communicate with
their parents. This meant that in order to have an established family
language, families needed to isolate themselves, and then they would all
learn the language of the mother of that family, as mothers are and always
have been the main one to teach the little children language. The men
therefore would also have needed to take their wive's grammar and syntax,
but the wife would in return take a lot of the lexicon from her husband, and
in the process already the family language would become at once
grammatically simpler but also lexically richer than the Babel exit
languages each member spoke. We have the expression 'mother tongue' in
almost every language but Welsh, which is like the exception that proves the
rule, exactly from this time, which was only one generation in the history
of man.
This was the mechanism that would have driven people out of Babel into their
own place, so that they could quietly re-establish a common language with
those who meant most to them, their family, without linguistic interference
from all the others who would come babbling over the horizon, preventing
their children from achieving any linguistic competence.
Within forty years, one language per family (already maybe one fifth of the
number actually made at Babel) was similar conflating and merging into
tribal languages. The basic model would then be the family language of the
most dominant family in the tribe. This process took longer than the family
language process, as the new languages were being learned as foreign
languages by all in the tribe but the dominant family. These dominant
families are the ancestors of the aristocratic families that grew up later
in almost every culture.
The tribal languages would have taken over from the family languages so that
about four hundred years after Babel the single family language was as
redundant and extinct as the single person language had been forty years
after the Babel event.
But each would have been a selection of grammars, phonologies and lexical
materials that came out of the Babel event.
Some of these tribal languages exist until today. Basque is a good example.
Other tribes conflated again into the supertribe, and the supertribe is
where we find the original languages at the heads of the family trees that
we can easily recognise. The Aryan supertribe spoke a language whose name we
don't know, but call it Proto Indo European. They could have called it
Yaspriyakis, or something like that, for all we know. It was a supertribe,
and as with all supertribes, it fell apart, with people who spoke it leaving
and mingling with the languages of the substrate where they went, which were
generally tribal, not supertribal peoples, and could not compete with them.
So we have a tendency for common grammatical elements to be seen, but a lot
of different lexical stock from the borrowings. Even the supertribe itself
had not been stable long when the emigrations started; some thought the word
for 'a hundred' should be 'kentum' and others thought it should be 'sati'.
About all they could really agree on was the words for beech trees, snow,
and about twenty other matters.
So the supertribal language was the turning point. From Babel to the
supertribal period, maybe a million languages got down to maybe thirty
thousand. After that time the supertribal languages started to have multiple
descendents, and even some descendents had multiple descendents themselves,
so that they replaced the exit languages being spoken by peoples like the
pre-Celtic cultures of Ireland, and then many of those languages, like Irish
Celtic, themselves became forced into a minor role or often made extinct
altogether, like Cornish, by more vigorous languages of their distant
cousins, such as English.
> Incidently, even broader groups than Nostratic have been proposed,
> including attempts to reconstruct words of Proto-World. Unfortunately
> the only one I recall at the moment is rather indelicate.
There's every chance that we can guess at a word that was in the vocabulary
of somebody who walked out of Babel, maybe in a sound-shifted or abbreviated
form. After all, all the material in every tribal or supertribal language
came from someone or other's Babel exit language. It's not common for
languages to invent words, so even 'shit' has good cognates in Greek. If we
say that 'skata' is closer, because we can tell it didn't go through the
Germanic sound shifts which we know all about thanks to Grimm, then we can
assert with a good probability of truth that some rather powerful man or his
wife, with a penchant for talking about his or her bodily functions,
received the ancestor word for 'skata/shit' in his or her personal language
at Babel.
Anyway, this account, which has no shortage of fantasy in it as I am more
than aware, is consistent nevertheless with both on the one hand the
observable fact that we cannot get back any further than PIE or PFU, and
find further common ancestors, obviates the absurd and counterintuitive
notion that language systems fairly equal in complexity could have evolved
in the human race at different times and places, but without the organs of
speech of the races then changing so that an infant could not acquire a
perfect accent in a non related system, and where we do not see easier
grammars compounding into harder grammars, but rather the reverse, and one
the other hand it is consistent with what scripture says about language
origins.
And so, in conclusion, evolutionary science is at odds with what is known of
philology, and the Bible is not.
> Cheers all
Cheers to you too.
I might put this post on my website, www.usenetposts.com so can any other
participants state if they object having their parts quoted there. Remember
it is all on public record on google anyway.
Best,
Uncle Davey
- End quoted material -
You can read the rest of the discussion, in which it becomes apparent that the evolutionists have nothing to offer but rhetoric, and try to divert the uncomfortable topic onto archaeology, by following this link.
I remind evolutionists reading this article of their right of immediate and public reply on the bulletin board of this site, which as I said earlier is not edited or moderated except for obscenity or blasphemy.
I hope Christians are encouraged by all this not to believe that science has all the answers, it doesn't. But as we see evolutionists, especially those who are only using the evolutionary fallacy as their charter for atheism or apostasy, will fill in the gaps between real science and their world view and then try to convince us that this philosophical putty of theirs is good science too.
(DJJ, added 29/4/04, original debate from Jan-Feb 2004)
www.usenetposts.com - Christianity with teeth! 
