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From: longrich@princeton.edu (Nick Longrich)
Subject: Re: What's Grammar, Anyway?
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References: <1995Feb23.142706.3877@oracorp.com> <D4Ir9L.32G@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca>
Date: Mon, 27 Feb 1995 01:30:50 GMT
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In article <D4Ir9L.32G@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca>, pindor@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca
(Andrzej Pindor) wrote:

> In article <1995Feb23.142706.3877@oracorp.com>,
> Daryl McCullough <daryl@oracorp.com> wrote:
> 
> Mostly I agree with what you write, but the statement below has put me
> into "devil's advocate" mode:
> :
> >Well, here we disagree slightly. I think that there is a feedback
> >effect, rather than strict cause-and-effect. Having a complex content
> >makes a grammar of a certain complexity necessary, but *also* having a
> >grammar allows the expansion of the content. As far as I know, most of
> >the basic grammatical features of modern language were pretty much in
> >place thousands of years ago, although what people have to talk about
> 
> Are you sure of this? How do you (we) know this? I am not sure how old are
> earliest Greek writings, 2500 y? Are any Hebrew writings older than these?
> As far as I know knowledge of even older languages is comes only from
> hieroglyphic inscriptions, like Egyptian or Babylonian. It seems to me that
> it is very hard to say much about grammar in case of hieroglyphic writings.
> I rather suspect that in the process of translation they are being 
> interpretted using present day grammar. 
> Perhaps I am wrong, I'll appreciate if someone sheds more light on this.

   Pretty much all humans use language and are capable of reading any
language. Native Americans hit North America over ten thousand years ago,
and the Aborigines made it to Australia maybe fifty thousand years ago.
The fact that you can teach any of these people any other language argues
that, while grammar and language have been developing, our inherent
hard-wiring has not changed over the tens of thousands of years since
these people diverged. Our languages evolve, adapt, and change, but out
ability to create and use them probably goes back to the origin of our
species. Our language capacities probably are very ancient and goes back
to the origin of modern Homo sapiens- something like 100,000 years.
