AC <mightymartianca@yahoo.ca> wrote in message news:<slrnc3lnui.36g.mightymartianca@alder.alberni.net>...
> On Tue, 24 Feb 2004 04:20:50 +0000 (UTC),
> Uncle Davey <noway@jose.com> wrote:
> >
> > news:slrnc3chfp.1c4.mightymartianca@namibia.tandem...
> >> On Fri, 20 Feb 2004 16:04:27 +0000 (UTC),
> >> Uncle Davey <noway@jose.com> wrote:
> >> >
> >> > news:1g9g6ej.vp33qh1x9ymufN%see.sig@for.addy...
> >> >> Uncle Davey <noway@jose.com> wrote:
> >> >>
> >> >> > news:1g9fnp3.dp73mj12lpsucN%see.sig@for.addy...
> >> >> > > Uncle Davey <noway@jose.com> wrote:
> >> >> > >
> >> >> > > > In my opinion, a Biblical kind is
> >> >> > >
> >> >> > > What do you mean "in your opinion"? Shouldn't this sentence start
> "It
> is
> >> >> > > one of the basic results of creation science that a biblical kind
> is
> >> >> > > .." ?
> >> >> > >
> >> >> > > I mean, this question has come up before, why don't you guys have a
> nice
> >> >> > > consensus answer by now?
> >> >> > >
> >> >> > > V.
> >> >> >
> >> >> > Vic, for all I know there is one, and I just don't know about it.
> >> >> >
> >> >> > I'm a freethinker, anyway, so consensus answers don't interest me
> much.
> >> >> >
> >> >> > Uncle Davey
> >> >>
> >> >> You're not concerned with science, in other words.
> >> >>
> >> >> V.
> >> >
> >> > Not overly, no.
> >> >
> >> > I'm more concerned with faith.
> >>
> >> And yet you feel compelled to make up stories about the Tower of Babel.
> >> That sounds more like somebody trying to create at least a
> pseudo-scientific
> >> position to back up their faith.
> >>
> >
> > I'm just showing you that neither your evidence explains anything nor mine
> > does, and at the end of the day it's down to what you CHOOSE to believe.
>
> No Davey, the evidence I see does explain things. The evidence points to an
> Earth around 4.5 billion years and a universe around 13.5 billion. There is
> no evidence for a global flood, and evidence that modern humans have been
> around for about 100k years.
>
> You have no evidence at all. None. The most you can claim against my
> evidence is the weak claim that somehow I'm "extrapolating". Well, Davey,
> one has to have something to extrapolate from. You have nothing save the
> silly ramblings of an ancient mythology which even most of your fellow
> Christians don't accept as literal.
>
> When you can explain the evidence that exists, rather than trying to
> handwave it away, I'll pick up and listen.
Well one piece of evidence that exists is that we can easily tell that
Danish and Swedish and Icelandic and Faroese and the Norwegian
languages all originate from a common ancestor, and we also can see
literally a load of material written in the very common ancestor, Old
Norse. But if we gave the modern languages to a good linguist who
didn't happen to have any knowledge of Old Norse, and locked him in a
room without access to anything in Old Norse and asked him to
reconstruct it, then three years later we would have a student with
his hand out for a PhD and something probably strikingly similar to
Old Norse. There would be a small number of unforeseeables, so he
would probably not get it quite right, but these would be on a minor
scale.
We could do the same with Latin, with slightly less levels of
accuracy, as no modern language reflects the full complexity of Latin
grammar the way icelandic is a close mirror of Old Norse. At least we
could predict a lot of the verbal roots.
In both these cases, knowing the distractor languages helps. We know
Romanian 'citesc' 'I read' isn't a Latin successor because we know
that it is a slavic root.
At the next level, we can take what is known of Old Norse and Gothic
and Anglo Saxon and Old High German and put them together to get Proto
Germanic, we can take Etruscan and Latin and get Italic. Add Old
Celtic for Italo-Celtic. We can get to Proto-Slavonic by performing a
similar analysis on Slavic languages, stripping out the distractor
words from Turkic, Germanic, Latin, etc. We can take all these, and
add in Ancient Greek, Sanskrit and Lithuanian and get back with a fair
degree of accuracy still to proto-indo-european.
And while this is going on, we can do the same for Finno Ugric
languages. We note that 'ver' means blood in Estonian and Finnish, lo
and behold it does in Hungarian also, so we've got a word in the
common ancestor language. And all of this makes up a huge body of
evidence. Philological evidence. There are massive journals full of
the stuff.
And then we hit a complete blank wall going back any further than the
family level. Everybody who believes in evolution kind of feels
instictively there should be a monogenesis of human language, not
separate polygenesis for every language family we find, but when it
comes to finding even a raw skeleton for the common ancestor between
the Finno Ugric and the PIE, nobody can even envisage it. No-one can
even dream up the skeleton for it like they can for a dinosaur in a
museum who has only a few teeth and toes in the fossil record. They
cannot even put together a few hundred words in a putative common
ancestor, even though there must have been one, they feel, and even
have made up a name for it; Nostratic, showing what a 'casa nostra'
the evolutionary thinking on this area can be.
The abundance of evidence that leads us, whether literature exists or
not, to be able to reconstruct families with ease, and the single
massive piece of evidence that we cannot get further back than that,
all this is evidence that you don't wanna deal with, Aaron.
You would tell your kids that we have no idea how this curious state
of affairs came about. You would say, 'we may never know, all we do
know is, it can't possibly be a babel event'
But I gave you a scenario whereby the language families are each
evolutions out from a core point (which I gave the name 'supertribal
language' to) and that each such core point was essentially one of the
languages given to one individual - one of hundreds of thousands at
that time who left Babel, which over time has adopted vocabulary
richness and grammatical simplification first from contact with other
family members as the individual language became the family language,
making extinct the individual languages of the other family members,
then from contact with other family languages as it made them extinct
in becomeing the tribal language, and then the same process with other
tribes as the supertribe was made in the period around 2000-3000 BC.
And what do you say to this scenario which perfectly describes the
philological evidence we see? "Faerie stories" you say. Darwin made a
story to account for what he observed in nature, but you didn't call
it a faerie story. He made observations of the evidence and thought of
a mechanism that would fit it. That's exactly what I've done. So
what's the difference? Why is Uncle Davey's essay on the origins of
tribal and supertribal languages a 'faerie story' and the "origin of
Species' perfect science? Why because my version concurs with
something in the Bible, of course! If that were not the case, you
probably would say, 'hey - he's on to something'. But no. The
prejudice is there with you that the Bible is all myth, and so you
say:
"To my mind, Davey, you are the most mischievous and dangerous kind of
Creationist. ... You even know the holes in the knowledge of the
study of
language, and you can use the terminology to great effect. People ...
seeing your essay, would likely fall for it hook, line and sinker.
Because it
mixes fact and myth so very well, you give it an air of plausibility."
Aaron Clausen (02/02/2004)
The 'myth' you mention is of course the Word of God, at Genesis 9. I
haven't included anything else in my hypothesis from any other body of
revelation. I think there are Assyrian and other Mesopotamian legends
about the origins of language which corroborate scripture, and the
mere fact that they might exist is to you a weakness in my argument
and to me a strength.
I have produced a hypothesis that cannot be objected to on grounds of
evidence because it breaks the deadlock that exists in linguistics and
explains the philological evidence on hand better than any secular
theory not referring to a scriptural supernatural event.
Your objection is that my hypothesis hinges on an act of special
creation by God at the Babel event - the mixing up of people's
language, the provision to every man, woman and child alive their own
fingerprint language. But only this explains why we cannot work back
to common ancestors prior to the supertribal languages which split
into the various modern languages. Other than my mechanism, there's no
mechanism available that I know of that explains better how the
evidence, yes EVIDENCE, Aaron, actually looks.
Thank you for your kind attention.
Uncle Davey
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