Babel's Dawn

One Year On

The blogger. Edmund Blair Bolles at a reunion of Peace Corps Volunteers in October 2007. Photo taken by fellow volunteer Marilyn Kelly.

Last month, without my noticing, I passed the first anniversary of this blog. Now that I have noticed the event, I thought this might be a good time to update the “declaration of purpose” with which I began this blog (here). Visitors to the site regularly check out that original post, but I did not read it once it went up. So I looked it up and find that, at least, the main ambition of the blog has held steady and stayed in my mind:

…become the main source of news and information about the evolution of speech, from primate vocalizations to meaningful exchanges. … The questions that concern this blog are where did [speech] come from? Why did we evolve it? When did we evolve it? How did we evolve it? Somewhere along the human line our ancestors began speaking while chimpanzee ancestors did not. What accounts for the difference?

My anticipated reward for success at understanding the origins of speech is also the same as I suggested at the outset, gain “a good, detailed knowledge of just what it is that made humans human,” although it is plain that not everybody who writes in this field looks for the same reward. Some expect to find that the differences between animals (including the great apes) and humans are overrated and that we are part of a continuum of species, not an outlier. Others are looking for mechanical and computational explanations of speech’s details. How did we become talking machines? But whatever goal drives one’s curiosity we are all faced with the same data and are pushed in the direction it points.

What has changed is my sense of the elements of speech. The original declaration of purpose listed a series of “elements of speaking” that now needs revising. Below is my current list of elements. If we understood their development we would have a good detailed knowledge of how we came to be human, although, as I said in my original post, “we must admit that with so many circumstances lost forever, the best we can hope for is probably a very grainy story. But right now, grainy sounds good.” Grainy still sounds good, but perhaps the list is a bit more clearly focused:

Just How Old Are Noun Phrases?

Scholars and apes have different interests, but how similar is the form of their thoughts?

The thinking that supports a sentence’s basic, two-part structure of topic and comment may be much older than either humanity, the great apes, or even primates, suggests James R. Hurford in a paper in the March issue of Lingua (abstract here, paper here).

Over 40 years ago, as part of a search for linguistic universals, Charles Hocket wrote that

Every human language has a common clause type with bipartite structure in which the constituents can be reasonably be termed ‘topic’ and ‘comment.’

In English, topics and comments are generally united in a sentence that divides into a noun phrase (NP) and a verb phrase (VP); e.g., The president [topic] lied [comment]; General Sherman, on his March to the Sea, [topic] occasionally showed a little mercy [comment]. A few languages, Hurford cites the Polynesian language of Tonga, do not distinguish between nouns and verbs and therefore cannot have NPs and VPs, but they too use the topic + comment structure.

Hurford’s paper builds on the observation that a full sentence can be turned into a topic: e.g., The lying president…, Sherman’s occasional mercy on his March to the Sea…. In these phrases the topic + comment of the earlier sentence has turned into a solitary topic. Hurford examines the reason that

language has evolved in such a way that in actual English [The president lied] exists alongside [The lying president…].

That existence of two ways of stating the same proposition is the central issue of Hurford’s paper and in the course of proposing an explanation he breaks with a very old philosophical and theological tradition that says the function of language is to state the truth.

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.

The Origins of Attention

Leopard at Seronera. Could it be that they don't have enough of an attention span to hunt in packs?

Language is unusual in the way so much of it functions on the conscious level. Both speaker and listener (if all goes well) are conscious of what is being said and where their attention is directed. Speech has unconscious supporting elements, but the point of an exchange is to direct and share conscious awareness of some topic. Presumably, it is that shared awareness that long kept philosophers blind to the unconscious elements of behavior, but consciousness itself is such a hazy concept that it had been hard to build on the fact of its importance. So I was glad to see in the Oct. 15 issue of the New Yorker the physician/writer Jerome Groopman discussing an emerging medical definition of consciousness (article available online). The piece provides an introduction to the mental prerequisites for speech’s evolution.

Do Genes Bring Up the Rear?

The Masai of central Kenya and Tanzania use tones to distinguish between the subject and object of a sentence.

My previous two posts were about genes and language. One (about the FoxP2 gene, here) was about the kind of thing we take for granted these days; a gene has been found that causes speaking problems when it mutates. If you have the mutation, you have a problem articulating properly. This process makes easy sense to us because we expect genes to affect the individuals who carry them. The other post (about tonal language, here ) reported the much more surprising idea that individual behavior can be affected by the genes of an entire population. Thus, for example, if you live among a people where the ancestral  variety of the Microcephalin gene  predominates, you probably speak a tonal language, even though you have a more recent variety of the gene. Meanwhile, another person with that gene who lives among people where the ancestral variety is rare, probably does not speak a tonal language. I have the feeling that this discovery is one of those things, like Robinson Crusoe observing a footprint, that changes many expectations. The Dediu-Ladd paper on the relation between tones and genes (see here) calls for a new way of thinking about thinking. The nature-nurture discussion just took a new turn.