Language Similarities: Indication of a Young Earth?

 

CLAIM: Languages. Similarities in languages claimed to be separated by many tens of thousands of years speaks against the supposed ages (e.g. compare some aboriginal languages in Australia with languages in south-eastern India and Sri Lanka). (Batten, 2019) (Baugh & Wilson, 1992, p.156-157)

RESPONSE: This argument is both puzzling and unsubstantiated. The paper cited by Batten (2019) does not reference the claimed similarities between Aboriginal Australian languages and those spoken in southeastern India and Sri Lanka. While there is ongoing speculation in linguistic literature about a monogenetic origin of language - a hypothetical "mother tongue" supposed to date back to the Paleolithic 200,000 years ago - this idea remains highly controversial and far from a consensus view. As Markov et al. (2023) emphasize, the hypothesis is not widely accepted as a "for granted" model within linguistics.

It's also worth noting that Batten puts forward a straw-man since no known language can be traced back "tens of thousands of years". The oldest written language, represented by the Sumerian Kish tablet, dates back just over 5,000 years (around 3500 BCE). Even the ancestral roots of the Afro-Asiatic language family, which includes some of the oldest languages still spoken today like Hebrew and Arabic, extend to a maximum of only 20,000 years. (Moul, 2023; Tu, 2023) Additionally, I wasn't able to find any credible studies - either in mainstream academic or creationist literature - that establish a model for a direct linguistic lineage between Aboriginal Australian languages and Dravidian languages (the dominant language family in southeastern India and Sri Lanka). There is, however, a more plausible explanation for why such similarities might exist: cultural exchange. Research indicates that Northern Aboriginal Australians can trace up to 11% of their genomes to migrants from India who arrived roughly 4,000 years ago. These migrants also introduced advanced tool-making techniques and the ancestors of the dingo. (Yong, 2013) This genetic and cultural exchange provides a more plausible explanation for any similarities that might have been adopted by the Aborigines - at the very least, this borrowing is more plausible than a radically different development path for both language families. (Merani, 2019)

REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING

Markov, I., Kharitonova, K., Grigorenko, E. L. (2023) Language: Its Origin and Ongoing Evolution. Journal of Intelligence, 11(4), 61.


Moul, R. (2023, July 26) What Is The Oldest Written Text That Has Ever Been Found? IFLScience.


Tu, L. (2023, August 24) What's the World's Oldest Language? Scientific American.

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