Formation of Language
Although children are taught a great deal about how to read, write, and speak, they learn almost nothing about how language develops. At most, they "learn" a few "facts" about how romance languages "evolved" from Latin, which supposedly explains why English and Spanish have similar words for some things, like "soap" and "sopa," or "embarrassed" and "embarazada."
This "theory" of origins is given to our children without examination, but it has more than a few holes in it. For example:
- Language is far too complicated to have been invented by anyone. Just look at human-created languages like Esperanto and Interlinqua -- how many people speak them these days? None, that's how many. Why? Because they were created by humans and are therefore unable to do the job.
- It is impossible for language to evolve. Think about it: they would have us believe that a child's language differs from a parent's, and that that child's language differs from that of its child and so on. But if this were the case, then a parent couldn't understand the speech of its own child, let alone its grandchildren!
- Couldn't the evolution of a new language be just the buildup of small changes over time? No! A language might gain new words and phrases, but it can never evolve into a different language. Such a thing is impossible because whenever someone tries to speak differently they are constantly being corrected by those around them.
- Science is involved with the investigation of things that can be seen. We don't see languages evolving. When was the last time you heard of a new language appearing? Wouldn't you be shocked if tomorrow everyone in Brooklyn was speaking in a new way so that only other Brooklynites could understand them? Of course you would! And since we can not see new languages appear, we have to imaging them appearing in the past. Studying things we have to imagine isn't science -- it's playing pretend.
- If Latin evolved into English, then why don't the descendents of everyone who spoke Latin speak English?
So where did all the new languages come from? It makes much more sense to believe that there was one language originally spoken by humanity, and that at some point people were divided into groups and each group was given a new mode of speech by some kind of language maker. Science can not tell us the nature of this language maker, but experts at the Institute for Linguistic Science (ILS) reason that the language maker must be all powerful, all good, and deserving of worship. They also infer that there must have been an incident that sparked the creation of new languages, possibly involving an insult to the language maker such as the building of some kind of large structure in an attempt to reach the language maker's home. Because ILS is a scientific group, its experts cannot speculate beyond the evidence, however they do point out that, interestingly, these findings fit well with the beliefs of certain morally superior religious traditions.