The Neolithic Hypothesis

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

>And they are contradicted by the very fact that  there is a Grimm's law and
>there is an Indo-European language group and there  is a way the old sound
>laws can "predicatably" tell you if one word is  cognate with another even
>if they are centuries apart.

-- you're confusing description with prediction.  Language change _in the
past_ can be described and rules deduced, which can then be applied with
reasonable confidence to historic languages we don't have direct evidence
for.

None of this makes us able to predict how the language will change _in the
future_.

At most we can make educated guesses based on how one sound-shift is likely
to affect an adjacent phoneme, or describe how a change already underway is
likely to spread (eg., the example of the initial "wh" to "w" shift underway
in contemporary English brought up here recently.)

Linguistic change is an almost completely unconscious process, and it's
chaotic.  People, particularly children and youngsters, change the way they
speak all the time.  It's impossible to tell which innovations will spread,
and which will be "corrected" and die out.