Thanks, Jane ... just went over there and scanned a bit ... shouldn't it be Nostradamus, being a nom de plume meaning 'Our Lady' in Latin? I'll come over when there's time
Re H.G. Wells and 'Aryan' - I remember reading years ago that Wells popularized the use of the term 'Aryan' or 'Arian' as a language type after reading a German writer of fifty years previous. The word had no racial connotations to him, and in his 'Outline of History' I believe he uses it as a substitute for 'Indo-European', it includes Sanskrit, the Romance languages, the Germanic (of which English is one), and the Cyrillic (Russian and others). Later a writer of whom I believe Hitler was fond used the word 'Aryan' in a racial sense. Wells in a later edition mentions the use of the swastika in Aryan mythology.
Ok - later for the garden - pulled the book out ... yes, under 'Semitic' he places Arabic, Abyssinian, Assyrian, Hebrew, Phoenician, etc. ... Under 'Hamitic' he places Berber, Coptic, Ethiopian, Egyptian, etc. .... But he also recognizes separate language groups in the 'Turanian/Ural-Altaic' (Lappish, Finnish, Magyar, Turkish etc), 'Chinese' (Burmese, Chinese, Siamese, Tibetan, etc), 'Bantu', 'Dravidian' (of southern India, quite distinct from Sanskrit), 'Malayo-Polynesian', and the 'American-Indian' languages, which even Wells recognizes are so widely varying as to be likely to originate from separate and distinct sources.
So I do not think that even Wells would state that human language had only three sources. Of course with Wells, it depends which edition you read, his early historical writings were centred on the causes of the 'Great War', the 'First World War' to us, and in his own words (in later revisions) they were written 'with a touch of the pamphleteer'. He would have loved the internet, I think -g-
I believe that language originated just as did religion - mankind felt a need for it, and invented it. It was a general need, felt by separate peoples, and so was developed quite separately, in distinct and unconnected forms.
Languages, just like religions, change - they split off from or grow to include other languages. The English that we speak is quite a polyglot concoction, originally a dialect spoken by the very Germanic Saxons, which absorbed much Latin of the Medieval Church and the Norman French of the Duke of Normandy and bits and pieces of a host of languages since. The word describing my favourite drug, 'alcohol', comes from thousand-year-old Spanish, which picked up the word from the Moors, who got it from the Arabs. Likewise 'algebra' and many others.
In Chiapas we have four (or five or nine or seventeen, depends on how you separate them) distinct languages. Some words can have opposite meanings on the other side of a single hill. Yet a thousand years ago all these people spoke Mayan, which some say was a separate unifying language of empire and trade. These dialects were not written down until late in the sixteenth century, and seem to have changed less since then. But they still change - funny thing, but many new words in Chol or Tzetlal seem to come from English or German, as much if not more than from Spanish (that's just my personal impression, having seen very little of it written). There is a parallel in religion in the same area - the evang‚licos (born-again evangelists in the American style) seem to gain great favour among many of the people, imho not least because they represent rebellion against the feudal mind-set of the PRIistas. A distant aunt is at the moment quite enthused about the third of these 'evangelismos' with which she has experimented, I believe this one is based in Pentecostalism. They have very dramatic services/meetings, and I mean to attend at the next opportunity.
"It would be much fun to discuss interesting things if the thread was protected from lurkers who simply came to attack all discussions because they involve a certain belief in God."
Jane, I am one of these lurkers. But I do not come 'to attack .. a certain belief in God', but rather to poke fun at the exclusivity, the excluding, the belief in a 'We are Right, and They are Wrong, therefore We are Good, and They are Evil' sort of mindset. There are born-again Christians and cat¢licos and Jews and Agnostics and Undecideds and Various on this thread who impress me with the extent to which their belief structure has made them a decent and caring and humourous human being, fit for association in civilized company.
And there are others who do not.
... off to plant lettuce, cilantro, cebollitas de Cambrai now ... cheers ... marcos |
