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b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] verb forms - Isaiah 56:6-7 was dying you shall die

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  • From: Isaac Fried <if AT math.bu.edu>
  • To: Peter Kirk <peter AT qaya.org>
  • Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] verb forms - Isaiah 56:6-7 was dying you shall die
  • Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2007 08:21:11 -0400

Peter,

According to the opinion of the vast majority of biologists we were all, "Semites", "Aryans" etc., at one point (many many years ago) exactly as intelligent as an amoeba. By the universal law of continuity, one may argue, we were, at one time or another, at every stage in-between. Some people credibly believe that man was created complete, language and all, ready to make poetry. But even according to the bible man was not as intellectually and emotionally astute before he ate from the tree of knowledge as he was after the fact.

It did not occur to me to even raise a hint of a claim that technologically "primitive" people are less intelligent than people who heat their TV dinners in microwave ovens.

To my utter sorrow I am at a loss to know if the Neanderthals spoke some sort of Proto-Semitic or some sort of Proto-Esperanto. It is really not clear to me how Mr. Neanderthal conveyed to his wife his deep wish to have his bear well done.

I think you will agree with me that the phenomenon of Linguistics is curious: Here you have super-intelligent, high-powered, goodly- supported, vastly-educated, all-knowing, computer-toting, professors ponderously discussing a language originally developed by people who barely knew how to start a fire.

Language, spontaneously developed, extended by consensus (no books, no schools), must be inherently very very simple and systematic. This should be the primary axiom of Linguistics, I think. The problem is that people have a natural propensity to unwittingly spoil its pristine beauty.

Isaac Fried, Boston University

On Apr 19, 2007, at 6:32 AM, Peter Kirk wrote:

On 19/04/2007 03:50, Isaac Fried wrote:

... Language was created by utterly "primitive" people, and was developed by consensus by still utterly simple minded, yet supremely practical, people (unless you believe in its divine origin). ...

Isaac, you seem to assume here the old but generally discredited idea (put forward originally by people who also tended to think that we Aryans are less primitive than you Semites, a theory I utterly reject) that "primitive" people in ancient times were less intelligent than modern people. I don't think there is any evidence for this at least since the emergence of Homo sapiens. So, unless you want to claim that Hebrew was originally spoken by Neanderthals or other pre-sapiens species of Homo, then you should not assume that any human language is simple.

--
Peter Kirk
E-mail: peter AT qaya.org
Blog: http://www.qaya.org/blog/
Website: http://www.qaya.org/






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