Grumble, Mumble Rumble

I ended my last post with a grumble about the impoverished view of humanity that I often encounter when I read linguistic musings. Most of the articlesI report on do not seem to grasp how much had to change for a lineage of apes to become a lineage of, say, Kalahari hunter-gatherers that can sit around a fire and tell each other about their emotions. We had to go through an evolutionary process that involved a lot more than  developing a recursive function. We are at least as different from apes as ants are from grasshoppers, and any theory of language evolution ought  to acknowledge that language requires unusual kind of animal. Yet students of language origins rarely seem to even hint at how radically communal language is. The whole generative tradition with its emphasis on i-language (for internal language) seems madly solipsistic, and that ignorance of community's possibilities is probably what makes the field so barren of appeal to outsiders. It does not address anything serious about who we are or what our culture is. I still think that one of the most important insights I have gleaned from writing this blog came in one of my first posts, a review of Nicholas Ostler's book, Empires of the Word which reports that a "language does not grow by the assertion of power, but through the creation of a larger community" [p. 556]. The great historical examples of the growth of languages make this same point. The rise of creoles and the newborn sign languages are part of the...
Source: Babel's Dawn - Category: Medical Scientists Authors: Source Type: blogs