Re: Human speech 350,000 years ago?

Dick Fischer wrote:

A little quibbling here since I live in Japan and
married someone of Chinese heritage.

The Altaic language family (which includes Mongolian,
Korean, Japanese, and because the Mongols invaded
the West, Turkish) is vastly different from
Chinese. Probably only some African languages
are more head twistingly distant.

China had a major economic influence on Korea (located
on the mainland) and Japan and you can tell because
some of the words in those languages are obvious loan
words from Chinese (either Mandarin or Cantonese of
the time period they were borrowed). The Mongolians
invaded and controlled China in two major dynasties,
so I suspect that Mongolian also has many loan words
from Chinese. At any rate, Japanese did not transform
into anything remotely like Chinese except for adopting
loan words (in the same way perhaps as English borrowed
from Latin and Greek). As far as I can tell from what I
know of Korean and have recognized of Koreans in my
Japanese classes, Korean is about as distant from
Japanese as Dutch is from English.

I don't think the Ainu are closely related to Chinese.
The main distinction about them is they have facial
hair, so they can grow beards like Caucasians.

Another thing to remember about the one-sylableness
of Chinese is that they developed their ideograms very
early, and their language was locked in thereafter.
Japanese, to accommodate the language, came up with a scramble
that is hideously complex, and even Japanese sometimes don't
know how to read the words correctly.

> I think it is reasonable to conclude that if there had been freedom of
> movement between what is now Japan and what is now mainland China or Korea until
> roughly 3000 BC, and there had been an established rudimentary, common
> language among those people, that enough language elements would have been
> preserved to at least see a connection. Yet there is none.
>

It's really hard to know. Evidently, the Neanderthal (as a
group) were gradually marginalized. But I have come to realize
that God often has to remind us to be humble. Knowing
that we have Neanderthal blood is a good way to teach
us to chose our words more carefully.

by Grace alone we proceed,
Wayne
Received on Fri Jul 2 21:08:13 2004