Piotr is a professor of linguistics. I was curious to hear his view on the phylogeny of human languages. It is clear many human languages evolve and split off into dialects and maybe form their own new language from a common ancestor language.
However, I’m of the opinion despite some language phylogeny, there is not one universal common ancestor language. In Harold Morowitz’s book Emergence he points out the general belief language appeared suddenly on the scene in human history in several widely dispersed geographical regions at around the same time. Even he found such a coincidence astonishing.
Many people of faith accept the Tower of Babel account which essentially says there are independent language lines that emerged suddenly by a miraculous act of design.
Beyond that, I would definitely accept the hypothesis of human intelligent design of novel languages. For example, the Korean written language has a date affixed to the official sponsoring of its alphabet. And there is language design and some independent origin in cryptographic “languages”. And in the world of modern communication and computers, there are definitely times when a language or “dialect” was considered invented.
Many of the languages in the world of computation first have layers that are driven by the hardware (machine language) and then a layer put on top (assembly language) and then higher language (compiled and interpreted language) on top of that, and even language layers above that.
I’ve been studying the grammars of DNA, and it seems also there are DNA grammars that seem to have independent origin and design. For example there seems a clear divide in the grammars of a Eukaryote and a Prokaryote. They seem to have independent linguistic origin if one is willing to look simply at the linguistic constructs and the necessary hardware needed to implement each language.
DNA grammars of Eukaryotes and Prokaryotes may have some commonality (like the 64 codon to amino acid table), but definitely have distinct differences that suggest independent origin of the grammars. To change the low-level language of each, one has to change the hardware, but the gradual physical transition from one mode of language to the other seem implausible.
Human written and spoken languages do not have such hardware barriers as found between cellular architectures. A child can be brought up to learn any of the existing human languages on the planet. But it still seems to me that human written (and likely spoken languages) have at least of few lines of independent, intelligently designed origin.