RE: Human speech 350,000 years ago?

> -----Original Message-----
> From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu
> [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu] On Behalf Of
> dickfischer@earthlink.net
> Sent: Friday, July 02, 2004 5:35 PM
> To: asa@calvin.edu

> Hollers for attention and simple, basic nouns of everyday
> objects may have been in usage for as long as you suggest.
> Being capable of speech, however, is not the same as
> communicating in a useable language complete with verbs,
> adjectives, adverbs and the like. So what is "language"?
>
> The Japanese people (Ainu not considered) obviously derived
> from the same race as the mainland Chinese people. Yet they
> speak totally unrelated languages.

Not if you look at the written language of Japan and China. The zi
(word) for country in both Mandarin and Japanese are identical. Take a
look at the passports of those two countries.

 The Chinese language
> which is the base of the Vietnamese language, Cambodian,
> Thai, etc. uses high tones, low tones, rising tones and
> falling tones to change the meaning of what otherwise would
> be identical words.

It is incorrect to say that Chinese is the base of those other
languages. They all had a common ancestor none of which were Chinese.

>
> I remember in Thai that a "suah" was a shirt or a tiger
> depending on tone. (So you have to be careful what you put
> on your back.) Also, Chinese style words rarely are more
> than one syllable.
>
> Japanese is entirely different. Tone and inflection change
> the meaning of sentences and moods as they do in other modern
> languages. And there are many multi-syllabic words.
>
> Although humans had lived in Japan from about 30,000 BC, the
> Japanese did not settle Japan until the third century BC.
> Japan during the Ice Ages, was connected to the Korean
> peninsula by means of a land bridge. The incipient Jomon,
> dated from about 10,500 BC to 8,000 BC, has left us only
> pottery fragments.
>
> Japan as a series of islands has remained isolated from the
> mainland from about 10,000 BC to the present day. The
> original inhabitants held on to stone-age life style long
> after the Asiatic regions to the west had developed urbanization.
>
> 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.

Where exactly did I speak in my post of Japan and China? I would
suggest that you see http://home.entouch.net/dmd/babel.htm

>
> During the Jomon Period (13,000 BC to 300 BC), the
> inhabitants of the Japanese islands were gatherers, hunters
> and fisherman. If they spoke a language in common with those
> living on the Chinese mainland there is certainly nothing
> remaining to indicate that.

Most authorities think the Ainu were the aboriginal inhabitants of
Japan.

"the modern Japanese are most likely the descendants of invaders from
northern China called the Yayoi, who conquered the islands a little over
2,000 years ago. An interesting twist to the story is that many of the
medieval Japanese warrior class, the samurai, show physical features
that suggest that they were descendants of Jomon mercenary armies
recruited by the Yayoi during their military conquest. As the samurai
gained power and status, they eventually intermarried with the Yayoi
ruling classes and passed on some of their typically 'Ainu' facial
traits into the modern upper classes of Japan. Today's Ainu are the
descendants of unabsorbed Joman populations who were pushed into
increasingly marginal areas by the Yayoi-Japanese and their
Jomon-derived samurai." Kathleen D. Gordon, "What Bones Teach Us," in
Ruth Osterweis Selig and Marilyn R. London, editors, Anthropology
Explored, (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998), p. 86

>
> Although you can't take this one example and extrapolate to
> the entire world, it is an indicator at least based upon
> actual language usage and not on fossils.

And you should look at http://home.entouch.net/dmd/babel.htm

And the Sandawe and Hazda are not based on fossils and are based upon
genetics and linguistics. No one said that every single language must
show the very same connections or must be click languages.

>
> I think you could conclude that it would be unlikely that the
> sort of conversations in Genesis attributed to Adam, Eve,
> Cain and Tubal-Cain in the pre-flood period could have been
> verbalized prior to the Neolithic.

Bull roar. There is no reason to have all the facilities of language
350, 000 years ago but no one knew what to do with those facilities.
You know, your view on this is biased because it violates your ideas
about Adam.
Received on Fri Jul 2 23:09:02 2004