You rang?
I hate how this story has gotten so much press attention - not because I'm inherently predisposed against historical linguistics, but because there's so much cooler and more relevant language science research out there that would never in a million years get the press attention than this completely random blip (which, almost assuredly, is full of lies, as any sort of stupid "Proto-Five-Million-Language-Families" paper is). Meanwhile, perfectly reasonable replies to this article will be manifestly ignored by the press, and I'll be badgered for a few months by uninformed people about what I think about this amazing language finding that assuredly is of incredible importance for my research, right? Blah.
In any case, I'm amused that people haven't challenged jmfcst on the main premise of his post, given that, as he says himself:
This article doesn't even propose a Proto-World language like some fools have proposed, just a Proto-Mostly-Languages-Westerners-Have-Heard-Of language. Good luck reconstructing a language that can successfully model every world language, from English to
!Xóõ.
Also, to contradict people's assertions about there having to be a time when everyone spoke the same language even if one doesn't take Genesis literally, that's not necessarily true. Let's say that language is the result of multiple genetic changes. At some time point, it's possible that some some number of groups independently had the genetic changes that led to language; the founders of such populations would thus speak unrelated languages, as they were each kind of "blank slates" for whatever it is that makes language special. Well, not quite "blank slates"; there seems to be cultural variation in quite a few other animals, so by that point maybe "proto-language" had been culturally diversified by then, too. A similar situation emerged for
lactase persistence in humans, as the trait seems to have emerged simultaneously in multiple parts of the world.
