Linguistics and the Word - 4 of 4

For your consideration...the following is an excerpt from a radio spot on KAPL radio, Jacksonville, Oregon, called " Akin For the Truth". To listen to the entire spot (a few minutes long), click the little microphone icon....Jack

In the last few sessions we have been discoursing about the history of language, and how the consensus of scientific and historical inquiry today has concluded that language shows no evidence of any relationship to animal communication. Gradualism is not seen in language. On the contrary, human languages appear suddenly, complex and ingenious.

Dr. Henry Morris summarizes well when he theorizes that either of two alternatives must explain the history of language:

(1) There was an original population of men, possibly up to four million years ago, with a highly complex language and culture. This original population somehow broke up into a number of separate populations, each developing independently for so long that the extreme peculiarities of its language emerged as a remnant of the ancestral language. OR….

(2) There was an original population of men several thousand years ago that once used a complex ancestral language, but then broke up into smaller populations. This break-up was accomplished in a traumatic separation, accomplished by a sudden transforming of the one original language into a number of distinctively and uniquely different languages.