Babel's Dawn

Was the First Language Tonal?

I want to expand on last week’s post (about the FoxP2 gene) by considering another piece of research about genetics. A paper  published last May by Dan Dediu and Robert Ladd of the University of Edinburgh (author’s summary available on-line here, complete with links to the full article) argues that a population’s “genetic structure” can exert an influence on the features of the language spoken by that population. Specifically, they demonstrate that populations that speak tonal languages have one sort of genetic structure, while non-tonal populations have another.

Tonal languages are those like Chinese and many African languages that distinguish between words by altering their pitch. Non-tonal languages use consonants and vowels. Tonal languages use consonants, vowels, and pitch. A non-tonal language like English distinguishes between words by changing a vowel, a consonant, or both. Thus, we distinguish between do and shoe by keeping the vowel sound but altering the consonant. Grammatical distinctions can be made by the same changes. The Latin amas (you love) amat (he loves) depends on a change from s to t to make a grammatical distinction. In Swahili the change from k to v can distinguish between singular and plural forms: kitabu (book), vitabu (books). Tonal languages have three ways to change a word; thus, Chinese can keep the same consonant-vowel pattern do and do, and yet still distinguish between the two words by speaking one with a high pitch and the other with a low pitch. Tones can also make grammatical distinctions. The Masai language, for example, says the equivalent of saw he she, no matter who did the seeing and who was seen. Speakers use tone to indicate which word is the object and which the subject. Personally, I’ve always been glad I never had to learn a tonal language.

The Dediu and Ladd paper says there is genetic difference between populations that speak tonal languages and those that do not. For this blog, it raises the question of what kind of language was originally spoken, a tonal or non-tonal language. More generally, it suggests a new way of thinking about the process of speech origins.

The Latest on the FoxP2 Gene

Echolocating bats fly in the crowded darkness and find food.

Surprising news from China finds extensive indications of evolution in the so-called language gene, FOXP2, among bats that use echolocation to find prey on the wing. The FOXP2 gene was first identified as an object of special interest when it was found that a family with a hereditary speech disorder had a mutated FOXP2 gene. Further examination of this gene found that it was unusually stable. Mice, gorillas, and chimpanzees have almost identical FOXP2 genes, while the human FOXP2 gene differs from the chimpanzee’s by two adaptive amino acids. A further exploration found that rabbit, marmoset, armadillo, baboon, and orang utan FOXP2 genes are very stable. This kind of stability argues that the gene is already optimal and allows for very little drift. A team led by Gang Li of the East China Normal University in Shanghai has a new paper available online from PloS One (here) that reports their discovery about bat FOXP2 structure in considerable detail. Bats may seem an unlikely source for any insight into speech, but the paper makes a strong argument against that prejudice. Bats are great vocalizers and, like humans, must attend to very brief differences in sounds if they are to understand the meaning of what they hear.

Repressing the Obvious

The repressed dancers' ball. It don't mean a thing when it ain't got that swing.

The story so far: Steven Pinker’s new book The Stuff of Thought argues that the meaning of words is found in the abstract concepts that are either inborn or assembled from inborn concepts (thesis summarized in Pinker’s Anti-Whorfian Hypothesis).  If Pinker is correct, an account of the origin of speech has to include the evolution of a system for translating the abstract concepts into concrete words. But a system for expanding abstract information into true, apt information isn’t plausible (see The Abstract/Concrete Divide). It’s also simpler and more in keeping with human behavior to consider speech as operating at the level of conscious attention rather than unconscious concepts (see Concept or Attention?).

Steven Pinker writes like an extremely gifted novelist who is also terribly repressed. His work is imaginative and energetic, but in the end it boils down to nothing much. We expect more from both science and literature. The problem occurs too often in works of psychology that promise much and then, like hack fiction, collapse in their endings. The author had little to say, after all.

Concept or Attention?

What was the name of that actor in the black hat? Jack ... Jane ... Jawarharlal?

The story so far: Steven Pinker’s new book The Stuff of Thought argues that the meaning of words is found in the abstract concepts that are either inborn or assembled from inborn concepts (thesis summarized in Pinker’s Anti-Whorfian Hypothesis).  If Pinker is correct, an account of the origin of speech has to include the evolution of a system for translating the abstract concepts into concrete words. But a system for expanding abstract information into true, apt information won’t work (see The Abstract/Concrete Divide).

One difference between speech and computer output is the way people revise themselves. “It was a smooth ride …well, not that smooth. In fact at one point we hit a pothole.” Or they correct themselves, “I saw Tom Jackson the other day. I mean Pete Jackson. His name is Pete.” Or they notice something unintended, “I made my fame at that poker game. Ha, fame game. I’m a poet and don’t know it.”

Because of these sorts of changes I completely agree with Pinker’s basic thesis that our thoughts govern our language. Yet these sorts of changes also make me still more doubtful about his claim that these thoughts consist of abstract concepts. The concepts he describes are too close to language to provide a second opinion, so to speak. They are some sort of computational language that generates output in whatever cultural language we happen to speak. Meanwhile, real speakers are struggling to put what they think into the right words. And I know Pinker is familiar with what I’m saying. He writes way too well for his book to be anything close to a first draft.

The Abstract/Concrete Divide

Jumping the Divde. It's not easy to move from an abstract world to a concrete one.

The thesis of Steven Pinker’s new book, The Stuff of Thought, (in stores today, 9/11) is that the words we use are determined by a set of abstract concepts built into the brain. So, for speech to have begun we must have evolved the ability to transform those abstract concepts into concrete words. The trouble is, jumping the abstract/concrete divide from the abstract side of the gap is like building an anti-gravity machine. It contradicts something fundamental.

Pinker's Anti-Whorfian Hypothesis

Stephen Pinker’s new book, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window on Human Nature will be published this Tuesday, 9/11. The book’s virtues are what any reader of Pinker expects—wit, clarity, and more clarity. For many language mavens the big story is likely to be that Pinker, a one-time member in good standing of the Chomsky school, has broken with its number one doctrine; Pinker places semantics above syntax. I sympathize with that bias, yet the book also has a more regrettable feature that I have also come to expect from Pinker. It tells a story that is hard to credit in the face of how evolution works. And, oh, yes, if his theory of language is correct, this blog’s long focus on the roles of attention, joint attention, and listening have been a waste of time.

Summer Over Already?

It's Labor Day over here in the USA, so I'm taking this week off to eat a hot dog and watch a ball game.

See you next week when I plan to be doing double duty.