V. S. Ramachandran wrote...

[aliothsan]

[WARNING: linguistic speculation ahead - those of you who know a hell of a lot more than me, please correct me.]

"Did language appear completely out of the blue as suggested by Chomsky? Or did it evolve from a more primitive gestural language that was already in place?"

Ehhhmm, how about neither?

In this article about mirror neurons,

Comments

[saizai]

1. Suppose you have a community of modern homo sapiens babies raised in the wild together without any language whatsoever. Would they evolve a language? How and how long would it take?

2. Is this a valid analogy to the question you were posed?

[aliothsan]

1. I have no idea. I'm inclined to think they would, but IANAL.

2. Probably not, but I'm not sure which point you're referring to. B?

[saizai]

1. Aww, cm'on. Speculate. :-)
2. Referring to the general "how did language start / evolve". How well does the answer to my #1 inform it?

[aliothsan]

You seriously want blind speculation? All I've read on the subject is The Language Instinct and Zompist's essay that I mentioned. I don't have the knowledge to come up with anything but wawa, and I don't have the balls to defend anything I say.

That said...

1. I'm inclined to believe that the babies would develop language fairly quickly, in <5 generations. First, something pretty far below a pidgin, but above the level of ding-dong, bow-wow, or lemurs' "quasi-referential alarm calls" (Pinker). Then, in two or three generations depending on how far the first generation gets, they reach what we'd call a fullsize pidgin. (How fuzzy is this definition

[saizai]

1.
a) A pidgin is impossible by definition since there are no contact languages involved. Could you clarify what level of grammar / vocabulary you meant by this?
b) How exactly would the bootstrapping process go? Once you have a vocabulary and some elementary grammar, syntax, etc., it is relatively clear. It's the formational phase that's more interesting.

2. My intent in asking this question was to get at cultural transmission of language as a 'technology'. In human civilization it is nearly unavoidable and the few cases that we have turned out not to be able to learn language much at all once reintroduced.

Thus one can question whether we are in fact special, or whether we merely happen to be born into a world where the technology happens to exist.

[aliothsan]

"It's the formational phase that's more interesting."
And exactly what I'm completely unqualified to comment on. :-P I have no idea.

I suppose what I meant by a pidgin was a language with vocab for things like 'tree' but not for complicated or abstract things, and a grammar that's generally workable for simple SVO sentences but doesn't provide explicit rules for complicated phrases/nesting etc. [insert many disclaimers here]

Yes, I'm aware that I totally haven't addressed your questions. I don't think I'm able to, properly.

[saizai]

You opened this post with a speculation clause.

So SPECULATE!

I'm not asking for proof, just a speculative chain of events.

[aliothsan]

a. To be a total nitpicker, I told people to correct me, not invite further wawa.

b. Why aren't you speculating?

c. It's not that I won't speculate - it's that I CAN'T. Would you ask an everyman for ideas on how tree-structuring evolved? He doesn't even know what that is. I can't speculate on how grammar evolved, except at a very basic level, because I don't know about it. Give me time to read Describing Morphosyntax, at least - I assure you you'll know when that happens because I'll be superexcited and squeeing aplenty will ensue. (Alternatively, poke me on IM, not here.)