Babel's Dawn

Can There Be Joy in a World Without Music?

 

Egyptians express their joy at Mubarak's departure by mixing music with words. What words? I dunnot, but they sound cheerful.

Friday, Victory Day, people around the world watched Egyptians dancing in the street. The next day the Metropolitan Opera in New York broadcast live around the world a performance of an opera, Nixon in China. These incidents following so hard on each other's heels remind me of a great mystery. Music is found in all cultures, suggesting that it fulfills some basic function, and yet nobody can quite figure out what that function might be. In this regard, music is the opposite of language. Language is so universally useful that a thousand good reasons for its evolution present themselves . Leonid Perlovsky of Harvard has just published a paper--"Music. Cognitive Function, Origin and Evolution of Musical Emotions"—that proposes that music and language co-evolved in order to maintain a stability that language by itself undermines.

Interfering with Metaphorical Thinking

Lady Death by Jin Devil Kazama seems surprising. but perhaps the artist speaks a language in which the word "death" is a feminine noun.

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The relation between speech and thought is an old and contentious topic, but it got a new push in an Edge.org essay (here) by Lera Boroditsky that summarizes work she has been doing for years. One point that struck me was that the analysis was very much in keeping with previous discussions on this blog about the relation between speech and attention (see, e.g., Benjamin Lee Whorf Revisited).

Defining Language

        John Milton (1608-1674) was a master at using language, but did he know what language is?

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One of my most faithful readers and commenters asks (here) what I think of Derek Bickerton’s “notion that imagination, ‘de-localization’ or ‘offline thinking’ are the main characteristics of language.” It’s a worthy question and deserves a serious answer, so I suppose it is time to look at rival definitions of language.

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.

Meanwhile Back With the Group

The Group and the Individual are mutually dependent. Is there a way to talk about the whole as a unit, or must we choose between them whenever we talk about social change?

This blog’s long-time emphasis on the role of cooperation and community in human evolution got some extra attention this week. My alma mater,Washington University in St. Louis,  sponsored a conference on “Man the Hunted” which presented evidence that human evolution owes much more to the lineage’s role as prey than as predator. I thought about covering the event, but did not because its focus was too far from speech. However, I have also read a provocative essay in the latest issue of Group Analysis by a psychotherapist, Claire S. Bacha, on “Becoming Conscious of the Human Group” (abstract here). The paper is much too speculative to be received as the solution to any puzzles, but it is still important. I don’t believe I have ever read a more radical understanding of the nature of the “Human Group.”

Episodes on the Highway of Life

Post #300. The counter from the folks at Typepad.com tells me this is my 300th post. In words it adds up to a full novel by Charles Dickens. My persistence on this beat has only been possible because serious papers relevant to speech origins keep appearing. I have not yet hit the wall and hope I can keep on running.

One of the persistent mysteries of speech origins is the growth of complex sentences. Chomsky and his disciples argue that language began with full syntax and complex sentences in place. Their point is that baby speech—one, two, or three words combined without syntax—does not provide the kind of running start that makes syntactical speech any easier than it would be if you just jumped straight to the syntax. Thus, there is no reason to assume that the human lineage ever went through a stage of speaking baby talk or pidgin (also known as protolanguage). The logic is strong, but the penalty for this argument is that it ignores the fact that speech in children does begin with simple sentences and it forces theorists to abandon the idea that language evolved as a form of communication between individuals. Instead it began as a tool for superior thinking. (See: Chomsky’s Theory of Language Origins)

This blog presses the view that words pilot attention and that speech is a tool for creating joint attention. That idea does nicely with basic utterances, especially childish sentences like biggie doggie, but it does not really explain how or why we got around Chomsky’s objection and began spouting sentences with a subject and a verb. So I was happy to see that the January issue of Experimental Brain Research has a paper by New Zealander Michael C. Corballis that argues “grammatical language evolved primarily to communicate episodes” [p. 557]. If right, the Chomskyan objection will finally have a strong retort.

Presidents' Day

Abraham Lincoln knew how to woo an audience, and it was not just by adding a tall hat to his already impressive stature.

The past week saw the 200th anniversary of both Darwin and Lincoln’s birth. The coincidence of having two of the greatest men of the nineteenth century born within hours of one another seems like an astrologer’s dream. (Although as Cassius pointed out, a few cats were born then as well.) This blog has already noted Darwin’s birth and contribution to our efforts (see: Darwin’s Contribution), but I want to recognize Lincoln as well. Lincoln was the president who approved creation of the National Academy of Sciences which, I am very proud to say, published my book about Einstein. Relevant to this blog, Lincoln’s success with language helps illustrate the peculiarities of the human species, and how we are radically unlike other primates. I’m not so concerned with what the language tells us about Lincoln the speaker, but the insights it offers about us, the audience.