But Lamarck and Lysenko suggest that the Brothers Grimm just may have been blowing smoke.Īlready Lamarck and Lysenko’s research is making waves. Below: Don’t try this at home: This slide shows students in the History of the English Language how to apply Grimm’s Law to show how Latin cannibis is the exact same word as English hemp. No wonder it put generations of college students to sleep.Ībove: Grimm’s Law, like the other Grimms’ Fairy Tales, put generations of college students to sleep. For Lamarck and Lysenko, this proves that language doesn’t change, because both Old English and Modern English exist at the same time.įor Lamarck and Lysenko, this means that Jacob Grimm’s so-called law, which purports to explain the sound changes that took place as Indo-European evolved into Germanic languages like English, is as much a fairy tale as everything else that he and his brother Wilhelm cooked up. Below: A postcard of Beowulf from the British Library gift shop. Both forms of the language exist at the same time! QED.”Ībove: The opening lines of Beowulf, in Old English, from the British Library’s manuscript, Cotton Vitellius A xv. Lamarck gave this example: “You can go to the British Library and read the manuscript of Beowulf, which is an epic poem in Old English, and then you can go to the British Library gift shop and use Modern English to buy a postcard with a reproduction of a bit of that Anglo-Saxon manuscript on it. Lysenko added by way of explanation, “Maybe you took History of the English Language in college, where you had to memorize the IPA and Grimm’s Law and the Great Vowel Shift? But our research shows that language change is just a theory, and that it’s just as likely that Old English and Modern English were coæval, which is a big word that cognitive biophysicists use that means existing at the same time.” ![]() "And it’s important to remember that people don’t cause language change,” Lamarck added, echoing the anti-climate-change rhetoric. "Just as there’s no proof that dinosaurs lived before humans, there's no reason to believe that language existed before there was writing, so it couldn't have evolved,” Lysenko said, a statement sure to make him popular with the young earth crowd. That’s the myth-the great language change hoax-that these scientists are so eager to expose. "You may say tomahto, but actually, you're wrong, it's tomayto. Hence, no change," he said. More important, the researchers conclude that althoughlanguage may vary, it doesn’t actually change over time. ![]() Variation, according to Lamarck and Lysenko, isn’t change. ![]() “No one’s going to doubt that Chicago is slightly warmer by the lake and cooler in the suburbs, just as no one doubts that I say tomayto and you say tomahto,”said Lysenko. Lamarck and Lysenko do admit that language, like climate, can vary. “That’s why we can be objective about it.” “We don’t even like language,” Lamarck told attendees at the SPE conference. Linguists, the researchers usually associated with language study, are too close to their subject matter, thus too subjective. The authors of the study, Jon Lamarck and Tori Lysenko, are cognitive biophysicists at Hudson University who feel that explaining language is best done by scientists who know nothing about language. To support their efforts, they’re citing a new report, “The Great Language Change Hoax,” presented last month at the annual conference of the Society for Pure English in Toronto. Arguing that language change is just a theory, not a fact, they’re launching efforts to remove it from the school curriculum. ![]() Deniers of global warming, the big bang, and evolution have a new target: language change.
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