Oahspe
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The First Language of Man
In 2001 a group of scientists and linguists formed a research group to discover the Evolution of Human Language (EHL). They deduced that there must have been one original language, and have identified a time some 16,000 years ago when there was a common world language. But they concluded that human language must have existed as long ago as 50,000 years before present, for without language, they reason, humans would not have been able to develop beyond very primitive culture. A rise in complexity of human culture (as evident in artefacts of around 50,000 years ago), indicates that human language must have existed then too. (Full extract below)
These deductions have helped linguists, anthropologists and other scholars to come closer to the reality of man's development. Indeed without his Language man would not be man. And so we point out that while complexity of culture is one sign of human language, one should not assume that a simpler language did not previously exist with more "primitive" man. In 1882, Oahspe had already revealed the first language, which appeared first with Asu (the first animal man) around 75,000 years ago when the angels from the arc of Wan came to earth to raise man upright. This first language was in the form of simple sounds that mimicked and reflected the things that Asu saw and heard around them. But it was only with the greater spiritual and intellectual capacity of the I'hins (the first hybrids between animal man and angel) that human language could convey more spiritual/abstract meanings. Such advance in language and comprehension was required for the uplifting of man from the animal state, and was to be achieved over a long period of time through both the intermittent mixing of the races of man and the development of their languages, intellect and spirituality.
The disappearance of articulate man some millennia following their appearance around 50,000 years ago is also explained by what Oahspe reveals --- that those capable of speech other than the I'hins, had degenerated through retro-breeding with those who were closer to the original Asu, animal man such that by 25,000 years before present articulate man virtually became extinct (other than the I'hins of Pan).
Also confirmed by the evidence of an original language traced as far back as 16,000 years before present, is the story of the Flood. For by the time of the sinking of the Pacific continent of Pan some 25,000 years before present, the races of man across the world, had degenerated to the point of losing their ability to articulate in fluent language, (except for a small remnant of I'hins of Pan). They had lost most of their culture, language or spirituality. (This lack is also confirmed in archaeology where little or no artefacts of human culture are found during a period of some 10,000 or more years from about 28,000 BCE.) With the submersion of the great pacific continent (the flood) the small remnant of I'hins migrated to the four corners of the world carrying one common language, "Panic", with them.
Oahspe, Lord's First Book; 11/1.74.
|| God said: Now the world was of one language and one speech; in all the places of my people, they spoke alike, person to person. ||
Once the I'hin settled in various parts of the world and another hybrid man sprung forth (as a result of a mixing of native primitives in those places and the I'hin), the first language again was spoken by the new hybrids. From that time, as various languages descended from original Panic they retained common words that were intentionally preserved by decree of the Creator to be kept till the Kosmon era (The Kosmon Era began in 1849 CE and continues during this present time) to testify to the sinking of the continent of Pan and the origin of our I'hin ancestors and their language.
Oahspe, Lord's First Book; 11/1.61-73.
||God said: Behold, my chosen shall manifest many signs and words common to one another in these different divisions of the earth.
They shall remember the flood.
They shall repudiate idols, but worship the Great Spirit, Jehovih.
They shall have the crescent.
They shall have the triangle.
They shall preserve the four days of the change of the moon as sacred days, and they shall be called mass (moon's) days [Sabbaths].
They shall be circumcised.
They shall remember the seven tetracts: Dibbah, the enticing evil; Ra, the flesh evil; Zimmah, the joking evil; Belyyaal, worthlessness; Aven, vanity; Anash, delight in destruction; and Sa'tan, desire for leadership, which is the captain of death.
They shall have three great lights: Or, the All Highest; God, son of Or; and Lord (Adonya), executor of heaven and earth.
They shall have three lesser lights: God's angels and Lords; the prophets; and the rab'bahs.
They shall have three representative symbols of light: The sun, the moon and the burning flame.
The Lord said: And my chosen shall use these lights and symbols, signs and seasons, in all the divisions of the earth where I have settled them.
And in the Kosmon era I will come and show them the framework of my building, which I raise up to the Almighty.||
Oahspe, Book of Aph; 10/13.12
||.....the tetracts were some of the words selected in heaven to be given as everlasting names, by which, in after ages, the tribes of Faithists could be discovered; and they were given alike to the Faithists of Guatama, Jaffeth, Shem and Ham, who were the sons of the arc of Noe preserved on the earth in that day. For these words, inherited by the Hebraic, Vedic and Algonquin languages, were provided to be synonymous till the coming of the Kosmon era.||
Linguists of the EHL project have traced some common basic words of language groups bringing to fruition the above prophecy in Oahspe. Significantly an obvious word associated with the flood --- "water" is one of those common words.
Ruhlen and Bengtson have noticed that a word roughly corresponding to "water," which they render in proto-sapiens as "AQWA," appears in many languages. In Latin it's "aqua"; in Japanese, "aka" means "bilge water"; in Chechen, meanwhile, "aq" means "to suck"; in an African Kung dialect, "kau" means "to rain"; and in Central American Yucatec, "uk" means "to be thirsty."
Critics of the one language hypothesis attribute cross-lingual similarities to monosyllabic sounds rather than to a shared root language, i.e. the sound a bird makes will sound the same if said in any language. And such similar sounding syllables were then combined in diverse forms among various languages. However, according to Oahspe the development of syllable combinations was a progression built upon the first language. The extreme of which was the Yi-ha language which preceded the Fonecian language of combined sounds as symbols.
Oahspe Book of Saphah 35/B.1.1-19.
|| The Tree of Language said:
China, India, Europe and America, the four branches of the earth, languages from one root. What was the tree, and where did it grow, that none can find it? Where does the submerged continent, the forgotten world, lie? What place did struggling mortals escape from, to float to far-off continents and tell the tale, in all lands, of a mighty flood or deluge? ||
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Pan, the first guttural sounds approximating words. Poit, beginning of labial word-sounds. Gau. Hiut, first acquiesced language. Fus, written word-signs. Chine, monosyllabic. Yi-ha, combination words. Abram, first words; original text. Fonece, following the sound, but not the signs (writing). Aham, amalgamation. Ebra, the old; the sacred. Vede. Sanscrit, mixture. Araba, teeth and thorax. Algonquin, after the sacred name, E-Go-Quim. Greek, Latin, French, Spanish, German, English.... Kosmon.
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"Primitive" man had to learn to express and articulate sounds before he could progress to abstract concepts and build upon them. Oahspe reveals that the first language, Panic was based on mimic of sound -- the first of man, Asu's (Asu was first race of animal man who existed prior to the I'hins. The I'hins were the first hybrid of angel and animal man -- Oahspe, Book of Jehovih) ability to recognize and mimic sound was the beginning of this language. Phonetic (Phoenicean) languages that arose much later obscured their origins as they adopted combinations of sounds that were arbitrary to original meanings.
While the researchers of The Evolution of Human Language project lack the revealing information found in Oahspe, and consequently postulate scenarios as one who shoots arrows in the dark, their basic premise that present day languages arose from a common location and common root language is on the right track.
Languages Evolved from One Common Language
||.....[Anatomically modern humans] suddenly began behaving differently. Until then, their conduct scarcely differed from that of their hominid cousins, the Neanderthals. Both buried their dead; both used stone tools; and as social apes, both had some form of communication, which some think was gestural. But then, "almost overnight, everything changes very rapidly," says Merritt Ruhlen, a lecturer in the Anthropological Sciences Department at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif. Humans began making much better stone tools. They started burying their dead with accouterments that suggested religion. And perhaps most telling, Homo sapiens, the "wise" apes, began creating art. "People started having imagination at this time much more than they had earlier," says Dr. Ruhlen.
Many scientists think that fully modern human language enabled this "great leap forward." Language enabled abstract thought, the deciding factor in archaic humans becoming --- well, us. And because scientists surmise that language arose only once..... all humankind spoke one language. Linguists have dubbed it "proto-world" or "proto-sapiens."
A multidisciplinary team of scientists at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico is working toward reconstructing that mother of all languages. Headed by Nobel Laureate physicist Murray Gell-Mann, the international Evolution of Human Languages (EHL) project is developing a freely accessible etymological database of the world's languages. Where possible, EHL linguists are attempting to reconstruct --- and then compare --- ancestor languages, moving ever closer to the first human language. Viewed by many linguists as a fringe movement, the project has attracted much criticism. Many linguists say that historical languages cannot be studied beyond an 8,000-year threshold; they change too much, they say....."Languages that have been separated 8,000 years get down to a low percentage of common words. However, that low percentage seems to be very stable." And there begins EHL's approach. Within languages, linguists think that because certain words --- including the pronoun "we" and the number "one" --- form the basis of a functional language, they are much less likely to change or be lost. EHL linguists begin by comparing this "basic lexicon." They include "words that are thoroughly essential and must have been in human language before significant cultural advances were made," writes EHL team member George Starostin, a linguist at the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow, in an e-mail. Using this method, EHL has grouped all the world's languages into 12 linguistic superfamilies. They've tentatively grouped four of these superfamilies, which include languages of Eurasia, North Africa, and some Pacific islands (and maybe languages of the Americas as well) into one super-superfamily dubbed "Borean." An ancestor to a large share of today's languages, Borean was spoken some 16,000 years ago.....
EHL linguists use several methods. One --- the most controversial, but not the most widely used, says Starostin --- involves matching words and meanings across languages. For example, Ruhlen and Bengtson have noticed that a word roughly corresponding to "water," which they render in proto-sapiens as "AQWA," appears in many languages. In Latin it's "aqua"; in Japanese, "aka" means "bilge water"; in Chechen, meanwhile, "aq" means "to suck"; in an African Kung dialect, "kau" means "to rain"; and in Central American Yucatec, "uk" means "to be thirsty." But critics look at etymologies like these and see only problems. They're too loose with meanings and sounds, they say. And too many alternate explanations exist: Maybe the word was borrowed from one language and spread to the others. Perhaps it's onomatopoetic, a word that sounds like what it is. ("Cock-a-doodle-doo" is an onomatopoetic word that appears in similar form in many languages, but that doesn't prove relation.) Finally, the shorter the word --- in some of the languages, just one syllable rather than two or three --- the greater the possibility of a chance match.
Human genetic evidence appears to support EHL's basic assumptions. The human genome indicates that all humanity traces its ancestry to as few as 1,000 individuals who lived between 50,000 and 60,000 years ago. This small founding population may explain how the capacity for language spread so quickly. "Bottlenecks play a very important part in human evolution," says Ruhlen. "This was the first major bottleneck.".....||
The EHL project was originally founded in 2001, due to the joint efforts of Murray Gell-Mann, Sergei Starostin (1953-2005), and Merritt Ruhlen, a generous grant from the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and plenty of support from the Santa Fe Institute.
All Oahspe references are from the Standard Edition Oahspe of 2007
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