h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'm sorry. I'm not familiar with this person, Sherman Alexis. Who is that?

>> He acts like a boy not a man. <<

Yes, now you've got it. He is an adolescent, overwhelmed by circumstance and a paranoid conviction that the world seems to conspire against him. His immature response, resulting in murder, madness and chaos, is the 'tragedy' of the play.

Many young people identify with Hamlet. "To be. Or NOT!"
But hopefully reason and wisdom will prevail and they get to enjoy the pleasures of adulthood (I almost said adultery ). In many ways, as a dramatic presentation, it is a 'rite of passage'.

The obscure knowldedge of herbs and herbal essences displayed by the tragically mad Ophelia is a direct reference to pagan knowledge regarding organic pharmaceuticals that is identified with 'witchcraft' in many cultures.


~jwf~

I think the thing about Hamlet is just that it sounds so good. Hamlet himself is an idiot told by a tale, but he sure can talk. And so can the others. Well, Polonius sure can talk in a different way.

A rite of passage, huh? That's an interesting analysis. Do you suppose Shakespeare's audience appreciated it as such?

I realize we've sort of gotten a little off topic here but it might be useful to consider the larger compositions of language or symbolic manipulation a little anyways. I think I showed earlier in the discussion how a depiction of something could be interpreted in a variety of manners outside the original context, because people are frequently ignorant of that context.

Let's suppose there really is a connection between Ophelia and herbal knowledge associated with witchcraft. Does that suggest something about her name maybe? Anyone familiar with Ophion? Could the names be related? Did Shakespeare appreciate the connection if it existed? Would his audience have appreciated it? Is Elizabethan Drama something other than popular entertainment? Did it provide something like ceremony or ritual for the Elizabethans? Or do those things exist exclusively within a tribal context?

hey, over at the "What is the English specific name for a cow or bull?" thread I think we may be witnessing the development of the English language right before our eyes.

Sherman Alexis is an author and filmaker (Reservation Blues, Smoke Signals). He's a Yakima (I think) and he now lives in Seattle (I think).

Close maybe. Sherman Alexie, not Alexis, lives in Seattle maybe and actually wrote an antiwar piece recently.

http://www.thestranger.com/current/feature2.html

Might be worth looking at.

First I want to say I'm sorry I dragged this thread off topic into the specifics of Hamlet, but it was the down side of that old culture barrier thing that made me want to force some of its joys and wonders upon Analiese.

Anyways... before you all unsubscribe can I just re-iterate my primary point of this discussion. That is, that 'language' as put forward in the original question, has to be defined for a proper discussion. There is a narrow minded view held by most modern westerners that 'dispersal of language' originates in the biblical lands and 'progresses forward'. I disagree entirely and maintain that if anything, 'written language' (in spite of its high points like Hamlet and me and Analiese and a few others) has been our downfall not our salvation.

Most of our western cultures think only of the fairly recent events that are traceable thru 'written' language since the days of Babylon and Egypt. There has no doubt been a linear and 'progressive' path that can be traced backward (with '20-20' hindsight) to those origins, which are seen as the source of our modern 'languages' and cultures. But, this attitude comes as a result of a myopic dependence upon, and unholy subsripion to, the power of 'written' language.

It is all a myth, instilled by all those early religious writings that are supposedly the 'word of god'. These, the holy of holies, form the basis of all the holy books and laws of three major religions. There are the unsupportable basis of western civilisation. They maintain their power and influence over us because they have been supported by the power-brokers, kings and popes and princes who have used 'written language and laws' to maintain power in spite of what people might be 'really SAYing'.

So I say again so that it is clear: written language is not 'the language' and certainly not 'the word' let alone 'the final word'. Writing is, at best, only a transcription of what has already been said, felt or thought. A shadow of what is really happening.

And (secondly) there was actually a time (long before written language) when 'visual symbols' were part of 'the language'. Writing, whether it be upon paper, stone or the internet is idolatrous. The birds have no need to transcribe their songs, and only kings and priests need to rely on writ.

Whoever said that something was 'not worth the paper it was written on' wasn't just talking about marriage certificates, tax returns and UN resolutions. He really had this whole 'writing' scam sussed out pretty good, methinks.


~jwf~

As the originator of this thread, let me reiterate that I was certainly not talking about any biblical origin or indo-european language bias. I'm really interested in whether there is any evidence, not direct, of course, but as inferred from archeology, about when humans started speaking, how many places that "start" occurred in, and how that speech changed into what we have now.

>> ..methinks. <<

To which I hasten to add that Shakespeare never 'wrote' his plays. He was stone cold dead before anyone felt the need to write them down.

And this was only because the sweep of religious turmoil and warfare was about to close the theatres and public houses. The works of Shakespeare (which could have lived on in an oral tradition if the Puritans hadn't declared the theatres as pits of sin and driven the actors into the hills) might well have been lost forever. In that regard his works are very much like the old testament, secretly prserved from invaders and blasphemers and puritanical ethnic cleansers.

A more cynical view is that a profit could be realised by printing and selling copies and that those who did preserve them did so only for money. But please bear in mind that (given the times) reading plays, printing plays and distributing plays, could easily have been regarded as evil as watching them, creating them or performing them. Those who preserved the folios of Shakespeare' works are quite like the early rabbis who preserved the 'word of god'.

Our trouble is, as I said above, we put far too much stock in written text and lose sight of the fact that they are merely an 'icon', a souvenir, of something else that really happened.


~jwf~

Ah, greetings Alitnil.

Yes, thank you for restating the question as 'speech' separate from the notions of writ!

In that regard I stand by my contention that birds talk, monkeys talk and all the beasts, including men, talk. Always have. Since day one if not before.


~jwf~

Well, indeed. And yet, I think there is something qualitatively different between my own speech and that of, say, my dogs. However, I will put that aside for the moment.

Deducing from your statement that the first homo sapiens (at least) were "speaking", are there any remnants (like mitochondrial DNA) of that "proto-speech"?

Huh?



~jwf~

Babies can usually articulate hundreds of sounds or phonemes. As they learn their native tongues, this inventory is effectively reduced so that subsequent learning of foreign languages becomes difficult.

There's no reason to suppose this process hasn't been occurring for thousands of years. Consequently, I'm not sure how you would know what constituted a remnant of "proto-speech". How could you identify such a thing?

I'm not sure. There are words common across the Indo-european group. Has anyone discovered a linkage between any of those words and, say, a word in Mongolian?

Well, that's the problem isn't it?

If you hypothesize that all language groups are ultimately related through a single ancestral or mother tongue, that's what you're going to be looking for isn't it? And it's likely you'll find something even if it's just a few phonemes here or there. The question then would be how much of your preconception would be reflected in your identification?

But suppose the African genesis theory isn't correct or only explains a part of the overall human experience? What then?

I mean there's still disputes about whether or not Neanderthals were human as in Homo sapiens so what does that do to the common mitochondrial hypothesis? Suppose we discovered we could have bred with Erectus or Habilis? What then?

Suppose the common ancestor proves to be just a genetic convenience rather than a real person? At what point does a group stop being a variation and start being a distinct species? And how can you really tell from any fossil evidence who somebody could have bred viable offspring with?

Finally, but not really finally because I bet we could ask even more questions if we thought about it long enough, given that language very often becomes independent of blood lineage, does the mitochondrial model even apply to language analysis?

Didn't we talk about this back at the beginning of the thread? I was sure I posted a bunch of webpages about theories of Nostratic and so on. The attempts at making connections back to earlier times than prot-Indo-European (and the languages of that time) are very speculative at the moment. There is a consensus that trying to find connections between languages that separated more than 10 (or 20) thousand years ago is pretty much impossible. Right now that fundamental theoretical wall is made more impassable by the depressing lack of documentation of languages outside the Indo-European group. There is a lack of agreement on which languages form groups in many parts of the world.

Well, sure, and I probably shouldn't mention this but there is a certain bias with these language studies that goes back a ways.

For example, the categories Indo-European, Semitic and Hamitic sort of derive from the Bible don't they? Wasn't that sort of convenient?

And just exactly what was Proto-indo-european anyways? It's an entirely hypothetical language right? Which is sort of inconvenient because there's no way of testing whether it ever existed. So how do we even know the methods used to classify languages that when extrapolated backwards in time yield Proto-indo-european or something similar are even valid?

It's kind of like the race thing with Caucasians, and Mongolians and Negroians or whatever, a system devised in the 19th century by Germans to bolster their theories about Aryans and white supremacy.

So if Lakota grammar resembles English grammar more closely than Newe grammar what does that indicate? That English is more closely related to Lakota than to Newe? I don't think so. But how could you tell?

There are many ways of organizing language elements to yield meaning but it doesn't necessarily follow that they all derived from one or even a few more basic or root languages. Maybe there's always been a lot of different languages and some might be related but most probably aren't.

This is sort of similar to what you get into in biology where you've got this very rational, orderly system of classification that's very convenient for classifying creatures that are alive now, but as soon as you try to apply it to the fossil record you get into a little trouble because the classifications don't necessarily follow the lineages.

This is because when Linnaeus or whatever his name was devised the system, everybody believed in the Bible story of creation. So when Darwin came along with the theory of evolution, we ended up with a bunch of missing links, that might not even be missing if the system were a little more adapted to evolutionary thinking instead of creationist thinking. It's too convenient to let it go now, but there's some serious problems with some applications.

So what about linguistics? As I mentioned above, some of the more prominent classifications seem to follow the Bible too, so is it any wonder that the system might not be all that great when extended to other language groups, some that were totally unknown to the people who wrote the Bible?

>> ..a remnant of "proto-speech". How could you identify such a thing? <<

Huh?

But seriously, yes, 'Huh'!
And ouch and oops and whoa.
Hey, wha', yo, no.
Hah, na, nah, yah.

The notion that our ancestors used only monosyllabic grunts is also Creationist in nature. Even a pig has some wide vocal variation and we, the people, are much more complex than an entire choir of monkeys, birds and elephant trumpets and lion grumbles. We howl, we whisper, we cry, we laugh, we bully, we tease. The sounds we make are our reaction to the world around us. And except perhaps when performing essential functions, like procreation and murder, a monsyllabic grunt would not truly express our hearts and minds.

It was a music to my ears and music of the spheres, when first I heard the animals speaking to each other. How long, oh how long has man fallen from this understanding?

... oh right yeah, since about back around the time some Babylonian pulp fiction writer came up with 'Genesis'. For on that fateful first day of his of creation we slipped into an idolatrous enslavement to the written 'word' rather than the truth of the spoken.

There is so much more to the history of the world than the history of 'western civilisation'. We are but one freak wave on the continuing tide of humanity, the cruel cannibal hairless ape.

But the song of the earth, however sad, is still easily sung.

~jwf~

"Just exactly what was Proto-indo-european anyways?"

"It's an entirely hypothetical language right?"

wrong. it's the current best guess as to what the parent language looked like for that language group.

"So how do we even know the methods used to classify languages that when extrapolated backwards in time yield Proto-indo-european or something similar are even valid?"

because of the greek/hebrew/european bias. because we have writings dating back a few thousand years, and some of those writings cover the same works in different ages of the same (or similar) language(s) we can map the evolution of those languages over time.

this map then shows us that there is a definate preference in the ways that language likes to change. so you take three or four languages and look at the common roots and prefixes and postfixes. where there is a definate similarity between languages, you can postulate a common earlier form. using this idea, you then check for similar roots and prefixes and postfixes, and look to see if they have changed the same way. because you have the earlier forms written down, you can verify that the reconstructed languages are the same, and use the reconstructed language as a base for comparing even older languages.

where you get two possibilities for a change, and it is largely undecidable as to which way it happened you usually use the varient that matches the way that language likes to change. because you then check it against even earlier languages, and they also would have the same preferences, you can look at the plausability of getting the set of linguistic changes that are actually observed.

it all works out fairly well.