Sociological Linguistics

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>Patrick C. Ryan

>As far as language change is concerned, there is no observable process in
>this universe which is not, at least potentially, understandable,

-- that's not the issue.  You have been arguing that languages change in a
particular direction; ie., that they become more complex, less ambiguous, and
more expressive.

As has been exhaustively demonstrated by postings which you apparently do not
read, the type of linguistic change which we can observe or reconstruct does
_not_ involve languages becoming more complex, does _not_ involve languages
becoming less ambiguous, and does _not_ involve languages becoming more
expressive.

PIE is has the same overall degree of complexity, ambiguity, and expressivity
as its descendant English, 5-6000 years down the road.

With the addition of some vocabulary for items and concepts developed since
then, we could conduct this conversation in PIE without the least loss of
precision or any other functional aspect of communication.  The languages are
essentially interchangeable in that respect.

The same can be said of every language spoken by humans now, and of every
language humans have ever spoken that we have any record of, and of every
solid reconstructed language as well.  We could say exactly the same things
in Sumerian, Chinese, or Proto-Semitic.

The fact that, at some point over 50,000 years ago or 150,000 years ago, our
remote ancestors may have started out with a primitive language of grunts and
gestures is, to coin a phrase, irrelevant.  Irrelevant to any extant
language; irrelevant to PIE.

By the time any language which has left an unambiguous observable trace came
along, language had _already_ developed to the current state.