More about Languages and Evolution

Myself and my colleagues had a discussion on the evolution of languages and ultimately the evolution of man. So, this is a sort of continuation of my previous blog post – Linguistic Monograph. A few points that worth mentioning here are that

1. A language is said to be primitive (meaning old) if it has a fewer constructs.
2. The sounds (phonetics) used in a language is dependent on the sounds used / required by the people of a region, who were responsible for the growth of the language.

Based on the above, the language of Tamil was discussed. Tamil is now an officially declared ‘classical’ language. It has fewer constructs, but has a solid and good grammar. Perhaps this could be attributed to the use of languages for many years. Another conclusion that was derived in our conversation was Tamils or atleast the older Tamils did not require the sounds of ‘sh’, as it is only people who were living in higher regions need to produce high sounds or sounds from there stomach, as they need to communicate clearly. Tamils most probably should have lived in plains, and they did not find the need to produce ‘gha’ or ‘sha’ and they simply produced the sounds of ‘ka’ and ‘sa’.

Another related talk was on the research done by a Prof. Dr. R M Pitchappan from Madurai Kamaraj University, who has done research on the immigration of man. Some of the details could be found at his site http://www.geocities.com/rdbgy/journey.htm

About a Linguistic Monograph

Today I received a mail from my colleague just having this link.
http://www.datanumeric.com/dravidian/index.html

It pointed to a detailed document on “Discovery of Dravidian as the common source of Indo-European”. A lot of examples and a detailed narrations are put up to that effect.

That said, I think whenever a person is exposed to a new language all of a sudden, he tries to correlate it with the language that he knows best. Thus, if you are exposed to many new languages, and if you come across similarities between the one’s you have mastered and the new ones, you get a feeling that all languages in the world might have sprung up from a very few common sources, if not a single source.

I also believe the origin of man and the various races and immigration issues also matter in the context of languages. It is widely beleived now that man would have originated from Kenya and spread the entire africa and a group moved towards central Asia, India, south Asia to Australia.