Babel's Dawn

PDFs of Posts to be Made Available

Starting with the previous post I will include a link for downloading a PDF of the post. They make for easier printing and forwarding to interested parties. I never quite know how a project on this blog will turn out, but I hope that all future posts will include this feature.

Is Language a Technology?

Thomas Edison was a well-publicized inventor. Was there an even greater long-ago inventor who gave us language?

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Last week’s post drew a comment (here)  that said language began, “The same way the wheel usage and invention began.” It’s a commonsense idea and worth pursuing. Is language a technology, an instinct, or something else?

The subtitle of the paper discussed last week is, “Language as Technology.” The phrase built on an idea quoted from Edward Sapir’s  Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech , “Walking is an inherent, biological function of man [but] speech is a non-instinctive acquired, ‘cultural function.’” [pp. 3-4]

Was Sapir right? Or was Steven Pinker correct-when he wrote, “Language is no more a cultural invention than is upright posture. …[It is] a biological adaptation to communicate information.” [The Language Instinct, p. 5]

Humanized Mice

In my next post I planned to discuss a paper in the latest issue of Cell titled, "A Humanized Version of FOXP2 affects Cortico-Basal Ganglia Cells in Mice" (abstract here). A large team lead by Wolfgang Enard of the Max Planck Institute has substituted a human FOXP2 gene for a mouse FOXP2. I was amused to see that one result has been to display decreased exploratory behavior, but of course we cannot yet make any statements based on this technique yet. It is the start of a long inquiry. But I see that Carl Zimmer has posted a pretty good report on the paper on his blog, "The Loom" (here) and since I have something else I also want to discuss anyway, I'm going to refer the curious to that post.

Classical Linguistics Defended

Ferdinand de Saussure (185701813) is generally considered the person who formalized many common sense ideas about language and thereby turned philoogy into linguistics.

The editors of the online journal Biolinguistics are a bold lot, publishing articles that question the journal’s chief axiom that there is such a thing as a biological, language faculty. The current issue has a long paper (available here) by Dutch linguist Jan Koster that rejects the whole idea of any kind of biological organ or special faculty for language. Instead it presents a classical humanist portrait of language. Classical humanism can be summed up the pithy statement of Protagoras, “man is the measure of all things.” It contrasts with the religious notion that God is the measure of all things, and also with the more modern doctrine that physics, chemistry, and computation is the measure of all things. He sums up his case in the paper’s main title, “Ceaseless, Unpredictable Creativity,” and argues that “language is primarily a cultural phenomenon … [and like] the biosphere … human culture is ceaselessly creative in ways that are fundamentally unpredictable and presumably non-algorithmic or machinelike” [pp. 61, 69].

I’m sympathetic to the proposition, although when taken to Koster’s extreme it pretty much does away with this blog’s role. The origin of speech in his eyes is as biological as the origin of computer programming.

Darwinius masillae

This blog rarely has occasion to notice a 47-million year old fossil, but watching CBS News last night I heard Katy Couric declare the discovery of the long sought missing link between humans and animals (video here). The claim is absurd on its face even if you take the notion of a missing link seriously. That link is supposed to be THE fossil that connects humans with apes, so presumably it cannot be a fossil that is millions of years older than the apes. It seems to be quite a lovely fossil, but has nothing to offer this blog.

If you want a more detailed look at the story, check out Carl Zimmer's post here and the AP's debunking story is here.

The First Words

I’ve been on the road for most of this week, but I want to post at least a short note on a report that adds a bit more evidence to last week’s post that wondered if the earliest languages were much more stable than current ones. While traveling I read Mark Pagel’s  paper in  Nature Reviews: Genetics (“Human language as a culturally transmitted replicator,” abstract here).  He discusses the most stable words in languages and not surprisingly they are also the most basic words.  Qualities that make them stable include: frequency of use, no need to borrow an alternate term from another language, and their references are so basic there is no need to revise them when cultural shifts occur. Thus, even without the arguments discussed in last week’s post we should expect the early language to be more stable than languages today. 

Also valuable in the article is reference to what many of the first 200 words might have been. Morris Swadish compiled in the 1950s. I’ve heard vaguely of the list, always with a dubious tone of voice, but Pagel persuades me that it is a valuable heuristic device. In plain English, it provides a rule of thumb that can get people started thinking about a particular language. And now that I have read through the list there is plenty of food for thought. One thing that seems likely is that most of the first 200 words ever used are indeed on it. Snow might have come later, but and, at, and there… how long can any speaker get along without them? The full list:

A Cultural Law of Gravity

Alfred Russel Wallace was the co-discoverer of natural selection. His paper provides a framework for thinking about how culture and environment constrain varieties to stay true to type and also how changes enable varieties to stray indefinitely from the original type.

It is now well established that language cannot follow just any old rules. Linguists a few decades back thought there was no limit to the variety of language, but research has since identified a number of formal constraints that mark boundaries. Language can work within those borders, but not cross them. The trouble with those borders is understanding what these constraints mean psychologically and neurologically. There must be some reason beyond the formal rules for why these constraints existed. We hardly know how to think about these matters, let alone explain them. A letter in the most recent issue of Nature reminds me, however, that clues are coming in from, of all places, songbirds.

Loaded Questions

The Ptolemaic system of the universe explained many things and defined which questions were legitimate and which should not be asked. The system was destroyed by people who asked questions it had no place for.

Late in his book Adam’s Tongue, Derek Bickerton presents a list of conditions that any theory of language origins must satisfy. They are:

• The selection pressures had to be strong.
• The selection pressures had to be unique.
• The very first use of language had to be fully functional.
• The theory musn’t conflict with anything in the ecology of the ancestral species.
• The theory must explain why cheap signals should be believed.
• The theory must overcome primate selfishness. [pp. 165-166]

Mathematicians and metaphysicians can think in this absolutist way, but scientists should be more cautious.