>From: ABlainey@aol.com
>Reply-To: extropians@extropy.org
>To: extropians@extropy.org
>Subject: Origins of English ?.
>Date: Sun, 10 Dec 2000 17:25:06 EST
>
> I recently pondered on the origins of the English language, I was
>thinking about the international space station but somehow went off on a
>tangent.
> I was wondering why English on first sight, has many differences from
>most other languages. Such as the lack of genderised words when descibing
>an
>object or "Black Cat" as opposed to "Cat Black" in most other languages.
>
The two most widely spoken languages in the world - English and Chinese, put
the adjective before the town. I mean before the noun. At least Mandarin
Chinese does. Could this have something to do with the fact that they are
the most widely spoken?
> I have heard that all languages stem from an ancient very basic
>language
>"Ancient Nostratic" ?? . Could it be that Britain was somehow seperate from
>this evolving language and formed its own with a slightly different
>viewpoint
>from the rest ?. The only way I can see an solution to this, is if the
>English language was originally concieved by Neaderthals or another group
>of
>ancient homanids living mainly around the British Isles.
There are languages so bizzarre that they make the differences between
English and Romance languages very trivial. In Africa, there is a language
where clicks of the tongue are used as phonemes. Chinese, and many other
Asian languages, use a tone system. You say "ma" in one tone and it means
"mother", in another tone it means "donkey", in another it serves as ther
verbal equivalent of a question mark. Mandarin has only four tones, I think
Cantonese has seven or eight. There are Native American languages once
spoken in Northern California (they're now dead) where nouns were not used -
you just used object specific verbs (like "rained"). The typical word in
Mohawk has as many phonemes as the typical sentence in English, sentences
like "She saw him picking flowers as she was coming around the mountain
yesterday" is reduced to one root word with dozens of affixes.
Look at some of these languages if you think English is strange.
---------------------------------------------------
Zeb Haradon (zebharadon@hotmail.com)
My personal webpage:
http://www.inconnect.com/~zharadon/ubunix
A movie I'm directing:
http://www.elevatormovie.com
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