1 Jun
2010
1 Jun
'10
5:51 p.m.
From: Ben
Sent: Tuesday, June 01, 2010 5:26 PM
Rich Alderson wrote:
I tend not to count things, I need 1 or a few or I
have way too much of
that.
Please have more care with the placement of new material. *You* said that,
not I.
> Another linguistic truism: There has been no such
thing as a "primitive
> language" since early in the evolution of modern humans.
But modern language must have roots from somewhere in
the deep past.
Yes, but do you understand how long humans have been using language?
At least 50,000 years, and probably more than 200,000. It's even likely
that Australopithecines had language.
I have read that domestication of the horse,around the
black sea
may have been on of the first wide spread use of a language to convey
ideas at the time.
Oh, that's simply nonsense, and I doubt that you read that. (You may have
misunderstood something you read to say that, I'll grant.) The horse was
domesticated roughly 7,500 years ago, or anywhere from 7 to 25 times more
recently than language in humans.
Are you refering to _The Horse, the Wheel, and Language_? The author is
an archaeological anthropologist, and both his linguistics and his use of
Zoroastrian mythology is shaky (to be kind). I can only hope that the
archaeology holds up better than the other two; I'm not qualified to judge
its merits (only one arch. anthro. course in college).
Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Server Engineer
Vulcan, Inc.
505 5th Avenue S, Suite 900
Seattle, WA 98104
mailto:RichA at vulcan.com
mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org
http://www.PDPplanet.org/
http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/