Comments | aliothsan: V. S. Ramachandran wrote...

aliothsan

V. S. Ramachandran wrote...

Sep 15, 2006 21:33

[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, ( Read more... )

critique me, links, lx, neurocog

Comments 12

arujei September 16 2006, 05:23:41 UTC

Interesting. Before reading zompist I would have thought that words would become more formalized over time, starting with single words, and moving up in complexity over time. But it'll take me some time to actually understand what he exactly means.

aliothsan September 17 2006, 04:28:05 UTC

I'm not sure I understand what you mean - elaborate? Do you mean that (say) the word "complex" evolves/comes into usage before the word "complexification"? Or do you mean that the word "dog" gets invented before the word "discrete"? (Of course, I'm talking about equivalents in Proto-Whatever.) (Also, you should totally read/queue The Language Instinct.

arujei September 17 2006, 05:06:03 UTC

Yeah, I suppose I could be clearer. What I meant was that words for concrete and simple things usually come before those of ideas and non-physical entities, ex. 'tree' instead of 'antidisetablishmentarian'.

aliothsan September 19 2006, 19:44:55 UTC

That's a perfectly fine/sense-making way for vocab to develop. What about grammar? (You could join the non-speculation frenzy going on below, if you so desire.)

saizai September 19 2006, 00:22:14 UTC

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 September 19 2006, 00:35:36 UTC

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 September 19 2006, 03:11:45 UTC

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 September 19 2006, 05:30:57 UTC

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 ( ... )

Thread 8