>>12796372>Is that true? Yes, that's why Piraha lacking recursion is such a big deal. It's something absolutely unique.
>Are any of those languages older than Piraha? Piraha, being spoken by a illiterate hunter gatherer tribe, was described only recently so it's hard to say how old it is. No reason to think it changes slower than other languages - if anything, if I remember correctly, languages without written form change and evolve faster than the written ones.
>You think recursion just vanished from this one language? Surely it would be easier to put it in than to take it out?Your hypothesis would require that every single language family on Earth independently gained recursion, and only ancestors of one isolated language survived all those tens of thousands of years migrating from Asia to America never gaining recursion - and then every other language in Americas got recursion, but this one was sonehow spared. The alternative hypothesis is that of the whole diversity of languages on Earth, one happened to take a really weird turn - but nowhere near as weird as preserving some original recursion-less state for tens or hundreds of thousands of years (for comparison, Australia was settled some 40000 years ago before Americas and stayed isolated since, and yet their languages have recursion too).
The other alternative, the one from OP, is even more outlandish - since by 3000 BC all the Earth was settled except for some islands, if languages only gained recursion by this date, then this would mean that all those different peoples with their languages invented recursion independently, with not a single exception across thousands of African, Asian, European or Australian languages, and only one exception among American languages.
