Babel's Dawn

Symbols Don’t Imply Language?

The presence of symbols in a culture is no evidence of the presence of language: so say six authors* (mostly generative linguists) of a paper just published in the International Journal of Evolutionary Biology. ("The Archaeological Record Speaks: Bridging Anthropology and Linguistics" is available here.) Their point is that the discovery of ancient symbols (from, say, a hundred thousand years ago) does not prove that the people of that period had a "faculty of language." Where this matters is in the case of Neanderthals. They had symbols, but, say the authors, that doesn't mean they had language. A better indicator of the language faculty, the authors suggest, might be the presence of knots.

Last Common Language was in Africa

Victoria Falls on the Zambia/Zimbabwe border is near the location where the Last Common Language was spoken.

Science magazine's latest issue has a paper reporting that the Last Common Language was spoken in Africa before Homo sapiens migrated to other parts of the world. All exisiting languages are descended from this one, according to a New Zealand psychologist, Quentin D. Atkinson. 

Larger Than Ourselves

Symbols can be "pure," referring to things within the symbolic system or that can be "applied," related to the real world. How did speakers and listeners come to understand that linguistic symbols are not pure, but refer to a reality beyond themselves?

One of the big mysteries of language is also a mystery of perception—how does (language/ perception) reach outside itself to have a meaning? I can say, "My pet dog loves to scratch itself," and you can know what I'm referring to even though the meaning reaches out beyond the sentence to describe the world. Similarly, I can see my pet dog scratching itself and know what I'm seeing even though the meaning reaches out beyond the image and its neurology to show me the world. The similarity is one more bit of evidence that language is perception by other means. It is social perception.

300 Years of Wondering

Hugh Blair (1718-1800), one of the founders of the Scottish Enlightment (and a distant relative of the blogger) was an early systematic thinker concerning the evolution of language.

The history of ideas becomes especially provocative when it shows people wrestling with thoughts we still haggle over today; those old struggles reminds us that everything we know is hard won, and they keep us humble too by pointing out that very clever people can be missing things in front of their face. If those serious thinkers of old could be fooled, what spares us today?