Deciphering a Metaphor
I have been thinking about my lastpost andHubert Haiber ’s argument that “Natural languages have the properties they have because they reflect the properties which our language-learning and language-using human brain capacities can cope with.” ( SeeAn anthropic principle in lieu of a “Universal Grammar) This principle might seem self-evident, even circular, but it is a direct challenge to the concept of an innate, universal grammar. Indeed, Haiber is attacking Chomsky ’s innate (a.k.a. nativist) principle directly: “Nobody has ever been able to produce immediate and compelling evidence in favour of the strong n...
Source: Babel's Dawn - October 14, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs
The Germ of Language
Louis Pasteur (1822-1895)Let ’s begin with a ridiculous question: there are many possible grammars, most of which are too complicated for humans to speak, and yet all the thousands of grammars used by humans just happen to be grammars that we can learn to speak, and learn quite readily. How did that improbable truth com e about?Presumably everybody can see immediately that only learnable grammars will be used and passed down through the generations, so of course we all use learnable grammars. There is, however, a hidden assumption in this explanation. Grammar itself must have been selected to fit the human cognitiv...
Source: Babel's Dawn - September 23, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs
Twixt Brain and Tongue
I have been pretty busy of late, but I have an urge to say something if only to prove I’m still alive so I thought I’d summarize what I know about the brain’s evolution and language. The main thing we know for an absolute certainty is that the brain suddenly got a lot bigger, about 3.3 times larger than the ape brains of Australopithecus of 2.5 million years ago.Brains are expensive body parts. They put heavy metabolic demands on the system and they do not forgive malnutrition, especially in childhood. So the expansion of the brain size was only possible if food was reliable throughout the year. There are som...
Source: Babel's Dawn - August 9, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs
Sprechen sie Neanderthal?
Is language very, very old or just really old? By “just really old” I mean 80 to 100 thousand years. Our own line of Homo sapiens was until recently dated at about 200 thousand years and now seems to be 300 thousand years old. The thought that for 2/3s of its history, even Homo sapiens was without language is startling, since so much of our species seems built for language. Our vocal system includes features like a wind pipe that is exposed to the mouth, increasing the risk of food going down the air pipe to the lungs by mistake. We got rid of the air sacs in our chests (still p resent in other apes) that redu...
Source: Babel's Dawn - February 18, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs
A Blog for Internet Neutrality
I try to keep my political opinions to myself on this blog, but I must speak up when the blog itself is under threat. It has been possible for me to maintain this blog (now in its 11th year) because the Internet infrastructure plays no favorites. Google, Facebook and Amazon are big but not so big that they block out access to all the tiny voices that the Internet makes possible.Internet neutrality, simply put, forbids Internet Service Providers from favoring certain providers. In effect, it prevents the rich Internet sites from slowing down or blocking entirely the sites of other, less rich websites. In other words, a no-m...
Source: Babel's Dawn - November 21, 2017 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs
Chimpanzees Warning Calls -- How Close to Language?
The New York Times has astory in today's Science section about chimpanzees changing their warning call if they think other chimps already know about the danger:The significance of the finding, Dr. Crockford said, is that it challenges the view that only humans keep track of what others know and change their communication to match. “This experiment shows they are monitoring their audience,” she said of the chimps.That part did not interest me much. Chimps are smart and know something of what their fellows think. This is the kind of finding that gets a reaction when the finder (and Times reporter) have no theory about wh...
Source: Babel's Dawn - November 16, 2017 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs
