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.

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.

Art's Crafty Birth

The Venus of Tan-Tan. Is this object the earliest known example of human craftsmanship? Or is it a stone that happens to look like a human figure and happened to lie amongst many 400 thousand year old tools? The delicate detail of the hands is what leans me toward accepting the work as an artifact.

We all remember the grilled cheese sandwich with the face of Jesus on it. Suppose that grilled cheese was 400 thousand years old and somehow survived for archaeologists to find. What would they make of it? Was the face a human artifact or a quirk of nature? The question is not entirely whimsical. Consider, for example, the “Venus of Tan-Tan,"  a stone found by Robert Bednarik among some 400 thousand (plus or minus 100 thousand) year old tools. The tools are plainly tools. The stone looks like it could have a crude human figure carved into it. So is it an artifact or a prehistoric grilled cheese? And if an artifact, so what? Answering that last question depends on how you understand what is peculiar about being human.

Abstract Thought Predates Homo Sapiens

It is often said that Homo erectus made the same handaxe for one and a half million years. Yet the axes came in many different sizes, although they kept the same proportions. How did they manage that?

The completely modern human mind began 2 million years ago,

writes independent scholar John Feliks in a paper published in a book titled Pleistocene Paleoart of the World. The paper, Phi in the Acheulian (abstract here), is new to me although it was read a couple of years ago in Lisbon at a conference of the International Union for Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences (UISPP). It proposes a radical solution to the biggest archaeological mystery related to speech origins. Biological data insists that speech must be very old, while archaeological data suggests symbolic thought is much more recent. How are these two lines of evidence to be reconciled?

Feliks offers a solution. His paper cites archaeological evidence that abstract thinking is very old, much older than the rock art and carvings of the so-called symbolic big bang that occurred only a few score thousand years ago.

The Rise of Untranslatability

The Rosetta Stone. When and why did translation become so difficult?

The January issue of Neophilogus includes an essay on the problem of translating Dante’s Divine Comedy into Arabic (abstract here). As you might expect, the challenge of translating a classic of medieval Christian orthodoxy into the language of the Koran is especially great. Setting aside the fact that Dante consigned Mohammed to hell’s eighth circle, the theological and literary differences between Catholic and Islamic civilizations are so extensive that it is impossible to get all of Dante’s Italian subtleties into the Arabic. I doubt that any of my readers are surprised by that news.

Meanwhile, these days I’m reading Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, a classic novel that I have read a few times before. This time I’m using the (fairly) new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, a husband-and-wife team who have set the literary world agog with their stylish translations of the Russian canon. Of course I can’t help wondering whether I’m enjoying Tolstoy or the translators when I come across a witty passage like, “Each had something demeaning and derisive to say about the unfortunate Mme Maltischev, and the conversation began to crackle merrily, like a blazing bonfire.” [p. 134]

“Began to crackle” really lets the reader perceive the way malicious gossip can enliven talk [the original, Constance Garnett, translation just says “crackled”], while “blazing bonfire” gives a strong sense of delightful destruction [Garnet: “a burning faggot-stack”].

Such thoughts eventually turned me toward my blog and I wondered how long it took for speech to become imperfectly translatable. How long was it before the story of Babel and the world’s confusion of tongues would have made sense to people?

Symbol Usage Date Pushed Back

A report in today's Nature (Oct. 18, summarized here and reported here in the Washington Post) describes a 164,000 year old site found in South Africa. At that time Africa is reported to have been mostly desert, so the site—a cave near the coast—and evidence of shellfish consumption in the cave suggests that early Homo sapiens found a new source of food in the water.

From the standpoint of this blog, the key discovery is the presence of red ochre, suggesting symbolic and ritualistic decorations at a much earlier date than has been previously known. Archaeologists have argued that, because the use of symbols is so 'recent,' there must have been a "big bang" in which language and other symbolic interactions were invented. It has been common to read passing mention in the popular press of language being about 70 thousand years old, and scholars often noted that the evidence of symbolic activity was only half as old as the Homo sapiens species, suggesting something dramatic had happened midway through our species' career. This blog has always been skeptical of that theory, and the new finding near Pinnacle Point, South Africa adds to the cause for doubt. Along with the shellfish consumption, the Nature report pushes evidence of symbol usage much closer to the birth of the species.

TwoTypes of Words

Words, words, words. Hamlet (2,2: 195)

Along with all the sophisticated issues that are part of speech origins, it is good to remember every once in a while that the primary fact was and is the rise of words. From one angle, they seem empty as a dead man’s glove. “Words, words, words,” sighs Hamlet as he laments hollowness itself. But move your head a notch and words look almost miraculous — sounds, voluntarily shaped, that signify. How did two people, or, on this blog, protopeople, ever come up with such a thing? A couple of recent articles, however, suggest that a word, or at least sharing words, is not so miraculous after all.

Moving Beyond the Interesting

So which of these things is the parlu?

Several new articles explore the question of where words come from. The basic association between sound and sense is the most obvious one and it explains why many mammals can learn to recognize their name and respond appropriately to certain ones. “Com’on boy,” you say to your dog, and you dog comes to you. We take the feat for granted, but it is no small thing to control an animal by means of speech and gesture alone. And when behaviorism ruled the psychology departments, association was considered the only way words could be learned. Even theorists now grant that the idea was as naïve as a middle-schooler in Kokomo, but what else in going on? How about some mind-reading?

Socrates the Unwise

I see that Marc Hauser and a number of his colleagues have published an essay in the current (Feb. 2007) issue of Mind and Language (abstract here) repeating the idea he promoted in his book Moral Minds (reviewed here) that we have innate moral principles which we cannot explain coherently in words. It is the kind of conclusion that is almost inevitable if you think that the essence of language is found in writing, but not at all persuasive if you think of language as speech.

Communication Types

By my count yesterday’s post brings to three the number of different types of communication that are peculiar to humans: meaningful, emotional, and now, how shall we call it?, maybe ceremonial.