Re: found filk, for linguists and others: http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells

Re:

And an equally puzzling question:
just how does any student reconcile the "Phoenicians-invented-speech"
nonsense, taught as fact,
with the material in a course in anthropology/archeology/ancient
history
which the same student at the same school might also have to take and
pass?

Rafe wonders:

Do any of them also wonder why they haven't been taught about the first European
explorers bringing speech to the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas? (And of
lots of other places.)

Well, I *have* occasionally run into people who actually assume that
the American "Indians" used only sign-language (and had no spoken
languages) until the explorers arrived and the "Indians" imitated the
strangers' speech to some extent.

The folks who assume this, as far as I could find out, hadn't run into
Hal Urban's theory: I presume they picked up their notions about
"Indians" from cowboy movies where the indigenes often sign in lieu of
speaking, or else sign while saying the same thing in imperfect
English.

(Since these movie portrayals of course merely reflect, several
indigenous North American cultures' historically documented use of a
sign language with those known or suspected of not understanding the
culture's spoken language,
I suppose that — with equal logic — someone listening in on a
French-born pilot flying for Japan Air Lines and speaking English with
airport tower staff in Berlin could "reasonably" conclude that the
French, Germans, and Japanese must have all spoken English before
somebody from the airports taught them how to speak French, German,
and Japanese.)

For that matter, I've also run into people who (untenably,
in my opinion) allege an eastern Mediterranean origin for the American
"Indians" — I suppose that any proponent of that origin-claim could
(if s/he also accepted Hal Urban's claim) argue that the ancestors of
the "Indians" must have learned speech from their Phoenician neighbors
before migrating westward.

I haven't yet run into anyone who actually did survive both Mr.
Urban's book and (say) a course in paleoanthropology or historical
linguistics ... but it seems at least possible that such a person
somewhere exists, and somehow manages to believe (simultaneously)
contradictory data-sets without sensing the contradiction.

After all, when I took historical linguistics at college the class
included a number of students who quite literally believed in every
word of the Bible, including Genesis' story that the existence of
multiple human languages did not pre-date city-dwelling and, in fact,
began only long after humans had learned to forge iron.
Although some of the Bible-believing students dropped the
historical linguistics class and changed their majors because of the
evident bad fit between such beliefs and a linguistics major (where
you learn early on that language divergence LONG pre-dates cities and
the Iron Age),
at least as many of them actually did not even seem to notice
that the Bible said one thing and their coursework said another: they
just believed both, apparently with no mental conflict.

Rather than recognize Genesis and their studies as
irreconciliable — rather even than work out some sort of
rationalization/reconciliation, such as calling the Bible story
metaphorical or symbolic of something-or-other — these students
appeared to actually lack the concept of "contradictory." If you asked
them how they could simultaneously believe, as literal fact, two
exactly contradictory statements, they just blandly informed you that,
well, "just because it's true that language diversity goes all the way
back to African hunter-gatherers tens of thousands of years ago,
doesn't mean it isn't also true that language diversity doesn't go
back any further than Middle Eastern city-builders at a much later
date."
Since at least some of them got their diplomas *still* thinking
that way (if one can actually call it thinking?), I have to imagine
that they'd have had no particular problem simultaneously attributing
the origin of speech to _Homo_erectus_, the Phoenicians, European
explorers, space aliens, and Elvis Presley: with equal and
simultaneous literal truth (of all these theories) simply Not Felt As
A Problem.

(And if you Don't Feel A Problem With Contradictory Data, obviously
you regard it as silly even to perceive contradictory data as a
problem to solve ...

rather like what C. S. Lewis says in MIRACLES about how a person who'd
never noticed that the Sun rises in the east wouldn't even wonder —
let alone look for an explanation — if one day the Sun rose in the
west.)


Kate Gladstone — http://www.learn.to/handwrite
.

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