(no subject)

[twincityhacker]

We were talking about Indo-European, and one of the topics that came up was proto-Indo-European, and thoughts on how language was born. It's a binary question: whether language came into being only once, and the languages that we speak today are the many-great-grand-daughters of it, or whether language came into being from two or more groups, and two moderon day languages could not be related to each other at all.

And then the elephant walks into the room: Random Female says, "Or God could have confounded the original language."

The professor talked his way out of it extraordinarily well. For one thing, all three theories have about the same amount of provability. Without a time machine, at least. And since the Creationist answer is just a combination of the two, other's can understand the substrate of any other of your linguistic ideas ( Namely, it doesn't really matter how the fuck languages evolved before Proto-Indo-European and it's contemporaries came about. )

Since with 99% of linguistics it doesn't matter if the Earth revolves around the Sun or the other way around, things that conflict with Creationism doesn't come up often. I'm pretty sure that quite a few people taking courses with me are Creationists.

It's just weird to hear that the world didn't exist before 6,000 years go in a science class. And that my response is, "Er, okay... moving on to this other subject..."

Comments

[aeshna_uk]

Interestingly, linguistic studies and evolutionary biology both use cladistics as a technique to explore relationships. I still have a cladistics textbook somewhere - best insomnia cure known to man.... ;)

[msp-hacker.livejournal.com]

Make sense. Language is treated like a living thing, so it's history is mapped out like the history of living things.

I did have to look up cladistics. = )

[aeshna_uk]

Yeah, it's a technique for looking at the similarities and differences in characters across a group of subjects and using those characters to reconstruct the evolutionary relationships of the subjects. As languages evolve over time and distance, much like living organisms, their characters (I dunno - grammatical structure, word used for "water" etc.) can be used in just the same way as biological ones - cladistics is mainly used for biology, but it's all just stats in the end and can be used with anything with identifiable characters than can be analysed. :)

I'm not sure I'd want to try explaining all that to the mad Creationists, though. ;)

And that's way too much brainpower for this hour on a Saturday. Must go make tea....

[msp-hacker.livejournal.com]

I generally don't bother trying to explain things that happened before the Sumarians to people who are Creationist. I stick to interpreting passages that would help other causes, because a full-frontal assault on their entire world-view is just going to piss people off.

So I have a stack of talking points. I figure it's a better good to discuss the "wedge issues" politications use to divide the elctorate and that reforming health care would save more lives than banning abortion.