And the languages spoken by the newly created human race in Poul Anderson's Genesis will also be descended because:
robots disguised as human raised the first generation from infancy;
Gaia gives occasional guidance in the form of gods in which her people would in any case have believed at an early stage of their social development.
So they did not have to start language again from scratch although it would have been an interesting experiment if some of them had had to.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
It does make me wonder, how and when did human language start? Did all human languages from a single, original tongue spoken by primitive men (e.g., see "The Little Monster")? Or did primitive humans independently develop languages at different times and places?
Yes, most likely Gaia had her robots teaching the humans she "recreated" a probably simplified form one of the languages in her database. And, over 50 000 years that language would inevitably split and diverge into many other languages.
Ad astra! Sean
Human intelligence and language probably co-evolved, so you can't really point to a "first language". In any case that's lost in time's entropy gradient. The techniques of reconstructive analysis have their limitations; we can produce an accurate (though limited) version of Proto-Indo-European or Proto-Semitic, but attempts at pushing it further back ("Nostratic" et. al.) are too speculative to be credible.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree, you would need to somehow be able to travel into the past to really learn more about the origins of language.
Ad astra! Sean
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