(no subject)
Oct. 10th, 2008 06:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
twincityhackerWe 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..."
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..."
