This means nothing: all language are approximately the same age, with the possible exception of creoles and mixed languages.DV82LECM wrote:that there are languages still in existence which possess epically large inventories that appear to be somewhat ancient in their development
migrations have taken toll on these inventories and have "Hawaiianized" (decreased) the number of sounds, with a small amount of exceptions
"Small amount of exceptions"? Mate, Proto-Bantu is reconstructed with 11 consonants. Compare that with pretty much any modern Bantu language and you see that they haveexpanded that inventory, in many cases to an extreme degree.
Similarly, with Indo-European, there is no such correlation of migration with inventory size (the relatively peripheral Germanic languages have massive vowel inventories, while the equally peripheral Aryan languages have massive consonant inventories, which have been expanded on since PIE). With Turkic and Na-Dene long-distance migration is not accompanied by phonological change of any kind.
The only language family where this even appears to be a trend is Austronesian, and even then only in Polynesian, where it can probably best been seen as a general family-internal trend towards inventory simplification, rather than as some general principle.
I can't understand what you're trying to say here either.In these exceptions, there appears to have been what I imagine was a bunching up of people to have collected, almost, a synthetic feel to the amount of sounds a people in the past developed. These effects appear natural. I do feel that sometime in humanity's past, speech WAS far more capably complex than we were taught and might even be today for most of the planet.
What are you trying to say? Are you suggesting the Caucasus as some kind of naturally-occurring Babel?The fact that the NWC family is even remotely close to area which was where the supposed "Garden of Eden/Tower of Babel" gives some credence in my mind that our myths display a truth to human language having a common ancestor we have yet to discover -- not a proto-World, but a fact that human speech in the ancient past was, for some reason, vastly more complicated.
It's no good "feeling" that this is a natural assumption when the science clearly disproves this. Again back to Austronesian: whichever reconstruction you subscribe to, PA did not have an inventory which was especially large or above the world average, and most of it daughters have a similar number of consonants. The same goes for Proto-Turkic and Proto-Indo-European, and for Proto-Bantu as we saw above the parent language had a consonant inventory which was way below the world average.I would venture that migrations out of Africa can be marked by the splitting off of large inventories from a much larger one than before. I know that changes occur which will combine and recombine sounds with clustering, but I will always feel that there is some truth that it is as natural to assume that areas with massive phonologies were the spearheads of migrations.
Basically don't try and make general sweeping statements like until you become familiar with the languages you're referring to.