Following the Experience
Sorry about the interruption in my discussion ofDaniel Dor ’s book,The Instruction of Imagination. Let me assure you that the problem was entirely due to life ’s trivialities and had nothing to do with the book itself, which is a very important, fresh look at language. One of the real pleasures of this blog is that it gets me to read books like this one.Dor ’s thesis is twofold: language is socially constructed and it is used “to instruct imaginations.” This latter point means that we use language to bridge the gap between the speaker’s and listener’s experience, so that the listener can imagine what the sp...
Source: Babel's Dawn - March 18, 2017 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs
Language and Imagination
What is language? The answer seems obvious until you think about it. Is language a set of rules that describe a particular tongue? If so, where are those rules? If the rules are in the heads of speakers, how did they get there? If speakers were taught the rules by their elders, how could language have begun? As Bertrand Russell said, we can hardly imagine some prehistoric parliament where people agreed on what words to use for what.If, as we just saw, a line of reasoning about human behavior suggests the activity could never have had a beginning, there may be something wrong with the reasoning. I have been reading a book b...
Source: Babel's Dawn - February 26, 2017 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs
The Benefits of Generations of Liars
My last post (Besieged by Lies) was inspired byDaniel Dor’s interesting paper, “The Role of the Lie in the Evolution of Language. ” That paper concludes, “Language would be much simpler had it evolved just for honest communication and we would be much less imaginative, suspicious and inquisitive and emotionally controlled. We would probably have very little symbolic culture, no myths, no propaganda, and we would also proba bly insult each other much more often.” The latter may be the most surprising claim as we live in an age with a leader who exults in both lies and insults.Dor ’s reasoning emerges from his un...
Source: Babel's Dawn - February 19, 2017 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs
Besieged by Lies
Most theories of language assume its main function is to make cooperation easier and richer, but that optimistic idea is challenged by lies. Lying is so easy and the benefits so notable that truth would seem to have little chance of survival. Yet a society of liars would seem to be doomed. If everybody lied, nobody would listen. How could language have become universal amongst humans if it is so easily used to disadvantage others?The standard answer to this puzzle looks outside language. A popular theory holds that people who develop reputations as liars are shunned. But is that true?An excellent paper on this subject appe...
Source: Babel's Dawn - February 15, 2017 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs
Embodied Knowledge
Last January Iwrote on this blog that our linguistic “understanding is sensual, not an abstract mentalese.” So naturally I am pleased to end this year by discussing a chapter in a new book that defends the same proposition. The book,Embodiment in Evolution and Culture, includes a chapter byThomas Fuchs entitled, “The Embodied Development of Language,” (availablehere) and is part of a movement to rid the cognitive social sciences of their dependence on symbols and ethereal meanings. They emphasize the physical body and the things we learn from actions and sensations.Bodies are unimportant to computers. It does not m...
Source: Babel's Dawn - December 28, 2016 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs
The Language-Unready Primate
Science Advances has published a briefreport byW. Tecumseh Fitch,Bart de Boer and others whose finding is summed up in the title, “Monkey vocal tracts are speech-ready.” The authors investigated the sounds made by monkeys and concluded that they show enough variation to permit a decent vocabulary. Thus, it cannot have been changes in the vocal tract that got speech rolling.I am reporting these results because of my respect for both Fitch and de Boer, and because theNew York Times picked up the story and had it covered by my longtime friend Carl Zimmer. But truthfully I cannot see why theTimes bothered. I suppose the re...
Source: Babel's Dawn - December 9, 2016 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs
Who Ate The Pie?
When I began this blog I agreed with the Sanskrit poet who said the greatest wonder of language is its ability to make public what is in our hearts. Work on this blog, however, has made me consider a second candidate for wonder: the transitive clause. For those who slept through that grammar lesson, a transitive clause combines two things into a single action: e.g., The lion stalked the zebra; I ate the pie; The arc of history bends toward justice. Some animals can voice emotions, but no other animal or mathematical communication system can use verbs to unite subjects with objects.Equally remarkable is the fact that all na...
Source: Babel's Dawn - November 21, 2016 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs
I See the Small Step. Where's the Giant Leap?
In television trials, experts often testify that a piece of evidence is “consistent with” some theory of a criminal case. The phraseconsistent with does not contribute much to ending reasonable doubt, but it shores up a claim, or at least undercuts a counter theory. A recent paper inThe Journal of Human Evolution presents evidence that is consistent with this blog ’s working hypothesis that language in some form began 1.8 million years ago.A study of the upper jaw bone (maxilla) of aHomo habilis dating from 1.8 mya found that the scratches on the teeth suggested that the creature was right-handed. [See: D.W. Fray...
Source: Babel's Dawn - October 26, 2016 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs
Is Language Possible?
Chris Knight is an anthropologist with an interest in language origins. Along with his new book,Decoding Chomsky, (reviewedhere), in which he does a great job of pointing out this particular emperor ’s nudity, he has published an intriguing paper inLanguage and Communication, titled “Puzzles and mysteries in the origin of language” (abstracthere). He gets straight to his point: “Language evolved in no species other than humans, suggesting a deep-going obstacle to its evolution.” The point is critical. It is not enough to propose a reason for language’s presence among humans. You also have to explain its absence...
Source: Babel's Dawn - October 1, 2016 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs
Language-Came-Late Theory In Deep Trouble
Carl Zimmer's weekly science report in theNew York Times today (here) discusses 3 articles that appear in this week'sNature. Each of the papers studies human DNA amongst ethnic peoples around the world and together they reinforce a standard narrative: While Africans have been leading separate lives for as much as 200,000 years, the peoples of all the other continents trace to a single exodus from Africa 50 to 80 thousand years ago. Some of the people from that departure eventually encountered other Homo groups whose ancestors left Africa much earlier and mixed with them, but in every case the newcomers replaced the loc...
Source: Babel's Dawn - September 21, 2016 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs
How Language Got to Be This Way
The first [question lying behind my work] is, why is language as it is? Mankind could have evolved an enormous number of different semiotic systems; why did they evolve a system which has these particular properties that language has?– M.A.K. HallidayI have been reading a series of interviews with the Australian linguistHalliday and I ran across the above passage.Derek Bickerton asks this question as well. So it crossed my mind to see how far along I have come on this blog to answering it.New functions, of course, do not evolve out of nothing. They take what they have and build on it. In language ’s case it is plain th...
Source: Babel's Dawn - September 14, 2016 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs
A Classic in the Field
I thought I would re-read a classic article titled “The Origin of Speech” byCharles Hockett and published in theScientific American’s September 1960 issue, to see what has changed and what survived of the old way of thinking. Much has changed. Hockett was part of the age when behaviorism dominated psychology, when the difference between animal communication and language was still hard to define, and when evolutionary explanat ions tended to focus on the benefit to the species as a whole.Yet the article is still worth learning from because it is based on what Hockett called the “design features” of language. His l...
Source: Babel's Dawn - September 3, 2016 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs
Babel's Dawn in Top Fifty
You might want to check out thislist of the top 50 psychology blogs. Babel's Dawn, you know, but there are 49 others to check out. (Source: Babel's Dawn)
Source: Babel's Dawn - August 28, 2016 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs
The Evidence for Very Very Old Language
Neanderthal skullOne of the persistent questions about language origins asks when did it begin. This blog has always favored a very ancient date. Truth is, I suspect the earliestHomo genus had language, in the sense of using joint attention to consider a topic. At that stage speech might have been no more complicated than a modern 24-month-old toddler today. In other words, they could speak phrases, but not full sentences with two nouns and a verb. The evidence for that is two-fold: (1) all healthy, modern humans go through such a developmental phase today, and (2) chimpanzees and gorillas are already smart enough to use l...
Source: Babel's Dawn - August 13, 2016 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs
