Visualising Infinity: The Trouble With Languages : Hi JM, nice to see you again.

» rkhen - Hi JM, nice to see you again.

Hi JM, nice to see you again.

Well, the scientist in me gets very nervous when asked to draw moral or social conclusions from a scientific paradigm. After all, in the end, paradigms are only "what explains the most at the moment," and like other rules, made to be broken. Then too, history has recorded some truly horrible misapplications of "science." Social Darwinism, by which alleged Caucasians attempted to prove that they were biologically superior to other alleged races, is just one example.

However, the poet in me joins you in allowing compelling ideas to blow my mind. In fact, there are archaeologists who claim that every person on earth is descended from a single female hominid, whom they call Eve. (In the tradition of Leaky's Lucy, except that Eve is only theoretical.) This is not creationism; the scientists in question formulated their theory independently of any philosophy other than the scientific method, and have made no claim whatsoever about the moral implications of their conclusions.

At the risk of having an archaeologist expose my ignorance of the nuances of Eve theory, they seem to have applied rather the same "calculatus eliminatus" approach that historical linguists applied when they advanced the Mother Tongue theory. The "Eve-ists" followed a DNA trail that worms its way through all people, narrowing progressively until it gets lost in the mists of time, many millions of years ago. They theorise that at the very end of it, if ever they could get there, there is a single mother. Seems unlikely, but the evolution of life itself is all but impossible, statistically-speaking.

I think people can indulge in an innocent "what-if" or two, as long as they remember that's all it is.

I also enjoyed " Big Bear." I especially liked the fact that many whites spoke "Cree" (actually English) with the same "heap big" accent that Natives have been saddled with in so many movies. It really put things into perspective. From a linguistic point of view, I appreciated the depth of understanding the fake language gave us about the white characters, so that they were individuals and not just "them." By using the invented language for English and English for Cree, we were able to see that some whites spoke Cree very well, and we trust, knew Cree culture well enough to understand Big Bear's perspective. Other whites spoke terrible pidgin "Cree," leading us to understand that they had little clue, and perhaps little desire to have a clue, about who they were dealing with.

Thanks for stopping by, JM. It's fun to kick these ideas around.

-- posted by rkhen