More about Languages and Evolution

Myself and my colleagues had a discussion on the evolution of languages and ultimately the evolution of man. So, this is a sort of continuation of my previous blog post - Linguistic Monograph. A few points that worth mentioning here are that

1. A language is said to be primitive (meaning old) if it has a fewer constructs.
2. The sounds (phonetics) used in a language is dependent on the sounds used / required by the people of a region, who were responsible for the growth of the language.

Based on the above, the language of Tamil was discussed. Tamil is now an officially declared 'classical' language. It has fewer constructs, but has a solid and good grammar. Perhaps this could be attributed to the use of languages for many years. Another conclusion that was derived in our conversation was Tamils or atleast the older Tamils did not require the sounds of 'sh', as it is only people who were living in higher regions need to produce high sounds or sounds from there stomach, as they need to communicate clearly. Tamils most probably should have lived in plains, and they did not find the need to produce 'gha' or 'sha' and they simply produced the sounds of 'ka' and 'sa'.

Another related talk was on the research done by a Prof. Dr. R M Pitchappan from Madurai Kamaraj University, who has done research on the immigration of man. Some of the details could be found at his site http://www.geocities.com/rdbgy/journey.htm