Babel's Dawn

Encyclopedia of Life

A new "Encyclopedia of Life" has appeared on the Internet (here). It aims to become a site listing every species on earth. That sounds ambitious. Normally something like this project would take forever, but things grow so fast on the web that this site might grow quickly into something useful and informative. I'm hoping it will also become a listing of every known fossil species. It would be great for this blog to know in detail the constiuents of, say, the Homo habilis environment. You can read a news story about the site here.

Chomsky's Theory of Language Origins

Noam Chomsky's interview on language with Ali G. Proof that Chomsky can suffer fools... well, if not gladly, at least gently.

The founder of modern linguistics, Noam Chomsky, was famous for decades for his dismissal of interest in the evolution of language. In recent years he has moderated his position and in a lecture recently made available on line (here, registration required) he outlines his scenario for how language evolved. It is about as different from the account being developed on this blog as a theory can be, making it of keen interest because it forces me to ask whether I have gone hopelessly astray and should change course quite sharply.

How the Brain Supports Conversation

The attention triplet has appeared several times on this blog, and can now be illustrated as including the interaction of different brains.

A visitor to my blog, Janet Kwasniak, tipped me to an article reporting a possible neurological basis for humanity’s unique powers of joint attention. Regulars on this blog will know that it leans toward an attention-based view of language. My working assumptions are that words are tools for piloting attention and that speech requires a speaker and a listener paying joint attention to a topic. Thus, the evolution of speech required the evolution of joint attention, so I was delighted when Janet told me about an article in last October’s Current Directions in Psychological Science, “Attention, Joint Attention, and Social Cognition,” by Peter Mundy and Lisa Newell (abstract here).

The article holds that human brains have two distinct attention systems which, when working together, produce joint attention. The older system, located in the rearward (posterior) part of the brain is reflexive and tracks external stimuli. When something moves, this system responds. A separate, voluntary system is located in the brain's frontal (anterior) region and pays attention to one’s own purposeful behavior.

These systems exist in humans and chimpanzees, but in humans the two can be integrated into one unified system that permits joint attention. For example, two people are seated in a restaurant booth facing one another. Suddenly the posterior attentional system of one customer directs his eyes toward the sight of a waiter pouring soup on a diner’s head. Meanwhile the customer uses his anterior system to say to the companion, “Will you look at that,” and point to the unexpected scene. Joint attention comes from the capacity to integrate these two, separately-developed brain systems.

The Rise of Untranslatability (Part 2)

Red ochre has been used to reveal some untranslatable aspect of the user's identity since before there were Homo sapiens.

Inspired largely by reading Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and an essay on the problems of translating Dante into Arabic (abstract here), last week’s post (here) asked when and why did languages become untranslatable? This week proposes an answer.

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?