Mughal the Infidel.

[Hombre]

Quote: No other nation had more scientific discoveries then Islam - from Andalusia to China."
How conventionality he omits Ancient Greeks discoveries, to which we still celebrate today. In fact, most same discoveries which this guy (and other Muslims) brag about, were copied or otherwise translated from Greek.

Interesting through, he credits the Chinese for inventing the papers, but Muslims for proliferating its use throughout the region.

Finally. It is funny, when Muhammad is credited for Muslims desire to learn from others. If that is true, while himself never bothered learn read & write - despite the fact he had the best educated scribes under his disposal .

[Fernando]

I found this quite interesting, to be fair. His boasting about Islamic science was just his warm-up act. He was frank enough to admit that the Islamic world/Arabian empire began to decline when it became inward looking. He seems to put this down almost to accident, seeing the rejection of printing as a major cause rather than a sign of a bigger problem. I don't know enough about
the history ot this to be sure, but I always had the impression that the cause was the ascendancy of what you might call the religious right of those days. Rejecting modernity - as he agrees they did - not out of arrogance or isolationism but because of rise and dominance of religious conservatism. Depressingly, he concludes by doubting that Islam will ever fully adapt to modernity.

[Fernando]

As for all languages once being the same, I'd have to read a bit before I accept that. Certainly lots of languages are related and derive from an earlier one - eg from Latin. or earlier a hypothetical Indo-European, but ALL derived from ONE?

It looks as though I might be wrong Mughal, although the evidence has only just come to light. Sorry!

Humans may speak a universal language, say scientists

Humans across the globe may be actually speaking the same language after scientists found that the sounds used to make the words of common objects and ideas are strikingly similar.

The discovery challenges the fundamental principles of linguistics, which state that languages grow up independently of each other, with no intrinsic meaning in the noises which form words.

But research which looked into several thousand languages showed that for basic concepts, such as body parts, family relationships or aspects of the natural world, there are common sounds - as if concepts that are important to the human experience somehow trigger universal verbalisations.

"These sound symbolic patterns show up again and again across the world, independent of the geographical dispersal of humans and independent of language lineage," said Dr Morten Christiansen, professor of psychology and director of Cornell's Cognitive Neuroscience Lab in the US where the study was carried out.

"There does seem to be something about the human condition that leads to these patterns. We don't know what it is, but we know it's there."

The study found, that in most languages, the word for ‘nose’ is likely to include the sounds ‘neh’ or the ‘oo’ sound, as in ‘ooze.’

Similarly, the word for ‘leaf’ is likely to include the sounds ‘l,’ ‘p’ or ‘b’ while ‘sand’ will probably use the sound ‘s’. The words for ‘red’ and ‘round’ are likely to include the ‘r’ sound.

"It doesn't mean all words have these sounds, but the relationship is much stronger than we'd expect by chance," added Dr Christiansen.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/09/12/humans-may-speak-a-universal-language-say-scientists/

[manfred]

Similarly, the word for ‘leaf’ is likely to include the sounds ‘l,’ ‘p’ or ‘b’ while ‘sand’ will probably use the sound ‘s’. The words for ‘red’ and ‘round’ are likely to include the ‘r’ sound.

The Indonesian for leaf is "daun". (no l,p,or b)
Spanish: hoja (no l,p,or b)
Swahili : jani
Chinese: 叶 (pronounced ye, with the "e" sort of dropping of, as if you were telling someone off)
Arabic: ورقة الشجر (pronounced rather like waraqat alshajar(e)) (it has an "l" but that is part of the link word/article "al-")

Some languages have quite different words for a leaf of a tree and a "leaf" of paper, such as English, where we say "sheet of paper", other languages do not, Dutch uses "blad" for both.

I think the conventional theory is that languages come in "families" and as such are closer or more distantly related. Perhaps once there was only one language, a rudimentary one, and this diversified when mankind left Africa. It it equally possible that language developed separately in various isolated communities, and as these spread out and got into contact with each other, languages diversified and also influenced each other. To me that is more likely, as languages differ not only in words, but many have words for things other languages do not have, depending on environment, and grammar is wildly different... some languages have noun gender others do not, some have declension others do not, some do not even have tenses. And of course there are dozens of other differences. Sometimes these differences are so great that translation is tricky, and additional comment is needed to convey the entire meaning.

The notion that somehow Arabic was mankind's original language and even the divine language really is too silly to discuss.

[Fernando]

Thanks Manfred, that's interesting.
One way this could have happened is human bottlenecks. One is supposed to have happened as we left Africa, when only a small population existed who would perhaps all have had the same language (or grunts, depending on what stage in human development it occurred). I didn't know, though, that there are supposed to have been further, local bottlenecks as the wanderers split up and went their ways - although I suppose splitting, without further bottlenecks, could have been enough.
Either way, it must have been well after splitting that writing was separately invented, judging by what we see today.
http://www.techinsider.io/genetic-bottleneck-almost-killed-humans-2016-3

BTW, could this be an avenue for research?

Scientists discover dolphins talk to each other in sentences up to five words long

http://www.geek.com/science/scientists-discover-dolphins-talk-to-each-other-in-sentences-up-to-five-words-long-1670488/ (and widely reported elsewhere)

[Mughal]

[sum]

Hello Mughal

Will you please explain the relevance of the videos that you posted to the subject of this thread?

sum

[pr126]

Mughal is using FFI as an echo chamber.