If you have a linguistic bend, what do you think of Edenics?

Question

http://www.homestead.com/edenics/sampler_1.doc

Answer 1

I didn't read all of it ...

But clearly, the English language is deevolving, not evolving. No honest person can say that there is anything being produced today in the literary arts that matches the beauty and majesty of Shakespeare, or any of the 17th Century poets.

So, the path of language seems to be taking a "fall" ... if you know what I mean.

Best to you ...

Answer 2

I didn't read the whole thing, but I could see where the paper was going after reading just a little bit and skimming some. First of all, I'm a very religious person who believes in the Bible, and I'm also a linguist, so I feel I'm qualified to answer this question.

First of all, people who read the Bible would believe that there were many languages coming out of the Tower of Babel times. Who says that they were all related languages? Surely God has the ability to create languages that are not the same.

Not to mention that describing language change since the Tower of Babel as deevolution totally rubs me the wrong way. Change is not the same as decay. Just because languages are changing doesn't mean they necessarily get worse.

Problem number two is that, if there is a common language ancestor, Hebrew isn't it. First of all, Hebrew is subject to the same forces of language change that all languages are, so it's changed over time. Secondly, modern Hebrew is a new language. Hebrew basically completely died out and people learned it as a second language and then taught it to their kids, hoping to resurrect the langauge as a naturally-occuring language that kids could learn. As you can see in this paper, they had to make up words for stuff that when they were figuring out vocabulary that they didn't know. It worked, but surely some changes occurred during that process. This paper implies that Biblical Hebrew is somehow the revealer of information about the underlying language forms, but it then uses examples from Modern Hebrew to draw its conclusions. Eek.

Third, the idea that the sounds of words are related to their meanings is universally rejected by linguists. We believe words are symbols whose meaning is arbitrary. In other words, "skunk" and "horse" only refer to certain animals because we say they do. There's no reason to believe that certain sounds have meaning and give that meaning to their words. How could you explain that so many languages have so many different words for the same thing otherwise? For example, English says "house" and Slovak says "domo". They're completely different, no sounds in common. I think a better explanation of the sounds that his examples seem to have in common are just that there's a limited number of sounds available in the world's languages, and some languages happen to use the same ones. There's little reason to believe that the sounds have underlying meaning themselves.

In fact, if people have underlying knowledge of the "meanings" of sounds, we should create a name for something based on this knowledge. The fact that the Hebrew word for "crab" is not what this paper says it should be is a problem for this theory, because if it were true that sounds have meanings, the people who invented that word should have sensed that the word they created didn't have that meaning and/or created a word that fit that meaning better. They stuck with the word they have, which means they think it's okay.

It seems so convenient that this idea seems to be based in common phonological changes that exist in all languages. The analyses that related French to Italian, for example, are based in these known phonological changes. However, any sociolinguist knows that these changes do not all happen at the same time in different words. Changes happen across the vocabulary of a language. So the "EGRETS, CRANES, HERONS" deal is very convenient, but it doesn't really make sense that English or its precursor would have experienced phonological change on the same sound in two different directions. And speaking of the precursors of English, English is the result of contact between Anglo-Saxon and Norman French. Does this theory have an explanation for what happens in situation of language contact like that?

It's a hard sell. I'm not buying.

Answer 3

The dude is a dingbat. The Jews migrated with whatever was spoken there from eastern Turkey along the east coast of the Mediterranean to Caanan, where they picked up most of the Caananite tongue and spoke a dialect of it until it became "Hebrew." And that's just for starters. They became specifically Jews when the Covenant was established with them after they had dug into the area. And even before the Covenant, there were many, many kinds of languages, well attested.

There is no convincing biblical literalists, however.