Babel's Dawn

Fifteen Years Is Enough

The blog's author (Edmund Blair Bolles): Taken shortly before the pandemic when the whole world began to look a little queasy.

Sometimes random forces seem to gang up on you. Shortly, I must renew my site name, BabelsDawn.com and Google tells me that shortly after that they will cease offering the free subscriber service whereby over 100 fans receive the blog in their email. Neither one by itself is a big deal and I'm sure I could solve both problems with a tiny amount of effort. But I have been supporting this blog for 15 years and I'm about done.

When I started this blog I said I hoped it would become the site for news about the origin of speech. The statement made me laugh at its audacity. Was there even such a  thing as news about the origins of speech? It  turned out there was and for many years I posted something every week. (When I began I posted something every day, but that was crazy.)

I changed my mind about a number of things.

• Before I began this blog I had no thoughts about the importance of attention, and now see it as critical to language and knowledge in general.
• When  I began this blog I took the selfish gene theory for granted, but switched to a multi-level theory of selection. I'd never have been able to believe that there is a serious selective power favoring individuals who speak well, but I can see that a community would benefit if it could more successfully spread knowledge among its members. (See the history of colonialism.)
• When I was about to start the 6th grade, I was struck by the impossibility of speech's beginning. It is handed down through the generations and cannot have begun with a founding generation holding a meeting to agree on a language. By the time I started this blog I had made a little progress, seeing biological solutions and now I can put my 11 year old's wonders aside.

One thing I have not changed my mind about is my emphasis on speech. Commenters have sometimes been fierce in proposing that I talk about language, and I often do, but my subject in the end is speech. Language is an abstraction; speech is a behavior. Speech traits could be selected; language  could not. For some while I benefitted from the active participation of an intelligent woman who was hard of hearing and used sign language. She was an active proponent of the hypothesis that language first appeared as signing. She may be right, but that still leaves us with the question of how the system changed from signs to sounds. By the way, I'm sure gestures have accompanied speech from the beginning, but gestures and signs are different things.

So how do I think speech began?

• Long ago (perhaps 3+ million years ago) our ancestors began to use sounds, (babbling) as a way of interacting and bonding, to make up for the declining grooming opportunities as body hair thinned.
• A little less than 2 million years ago, the Homo lineage began using specific sounds to draw attention to things in the environment.
• Vocabulary grew. There were a couple of specific abilities that had to evolve in order to use modern language:
  • We had to be able to perceive subjects and objects (direct and indirect) at the same time so that we could express complete sentences. (I do not actually know that chimpanzees cannot do this, and would love to see the matter settled experimentally, I would not be surprised, however, to learn experiments find that chimpanzees can only follow part of an action (subject or object) at one time.)
  • We had to evolve the ability to think in metaphors, and thus think about the effects and actions of abstractions. Why do I think the capacity is biological? Because to this day some people are born without it, as part of a suite of difficulties with attention.

My plans are vague. Perhaps one day I will publish a book of selected posts. If you are interested in backposts  I have a completer hypertext file of the blog and can send you a copy if you contact me at [email protected]. 

Good day to you all.

 

Blair

Why Are We Hairless Bipeds?

Lake Manyara National Park

My recent posts have discussed Donald M. Morrison’s new book The Coevolution of Language, Teaching, and Civil Discourse among Humans. I am continuing with that theme now even though today’s topic is pretty speculative and not-directly related to language or cultural origins,  but every now and then this kind of investigation encourages other thoughts about human origins, especially the reason we walk on two legs.

Bipedalism is so distinctive for the whole Homo line and yet there is no clear reason to justify it. I mean, it is convenient to free hands for carrying tools and such, but that came well after bipedalism was established, and is not much of a reason to change a body plan, especially one like the quadruped that has been so successful. I mean even bats kept all four legs. They did not get rid of their front legs the way birds did.

Morrison makes these remarks without providing much follow-up: “location and habitat must have been coevolutionary. An increasingly efficient bipedal gait, along with other traits, including the ability to swim and dive, gave our ancestors access to an expanding foraging territory, which further shaped our brains and bodies. An increasingly bipedal ape could wade deeper …” (69) so it i not his fault that I'm going on a tangent. His talk about water reminds me if a theory I’ve encountered only once before, 50 years ago when I read a pop science book by Desmond Morris called The Naked Ape. Morris made an off-hand remark about a theory that the reason our few body hairs grow in the opposite direction from that of other apes is that our ancestors had gone through an aquatic period. I had never heard that before and never did again, until coming across the reference to water in Morrison.

Well, one has to be skeptical. I don’t think there are any fossils of our ancestors that indicate that we went through an aquatic period. But wait… I once had the opportunity of asking Mary Leakey what Olduvai Gorge had looked like when it was home to the Zinjanthropus fossil she had found. She replied that Olduvai must have been much like Lake Manyara.

That idea stayed with me because Lake Manyara National Park in Tanzania is one of my favorite places on earth. It is nestled directly beside the wall of the Great Rift Valley and boasts a woodland, open stretches of parkland, lake shore, and a large blue lake. The lake itself is a bit of a hell hole, an alkaline spread of water directly open to the furnace sun with huge waves of heat shouting stay away. Water birds, especially flamingoes, are often in super-abundance, but the bitter water and heat keep the lions away, even though the prey is quite visible from the shady shore.

On the other hand, if some protohumans were able to adapt to the conditions, they would have a source of food that would keep them fed without becoming lion food themselves. Presumably, they would not have to live on the water, but like hippos, hang out between lake and shore. It is a pretty good habitat, a kind of niche found in reasonable abundance in East Africa, and yet not exploited by that many predator species. Furthermore, it offers a reason for several of our anatomical peculiarities: our bipedalism, which has never been explained; our lack of body hair; and maybe even our protruding noses. I thought of that bit about the noses while pondering the fact that if we were once aquatic, why did we not replace our noses with blow holes. But hold on, neither did hippos, and come to think of it, we do not have apelike noses. Chimps and gorillas have flat noses while humans have showy, stick up noses. Most are not as fancy as the nostrils on a hippo, but they are not bad for a primate. Also, when we go underwater we automatically hold our breath. Even very young human babies do that. Do chimps? I’ll leave that for another to explore.

You may have noticed that this post has nothing to do with language, but that is my point. Here we have a whole suite of features—bipedalism, hairlessness, prominent nose, ease under water (?)—not shared by our ape relatives and yet having no role in language or culture. Surely that oddity suggests that between the time we split from our last common ancestor with the chimps and the day we became trusting, talking, teaching humans we got to doing something unusual and unrelated to whom we seem to be today. When we think of ancestral habitats we think of the Serengeti, a grassy savanna with woodland and forest patches. But East Africa also has a bunch of soda lakes, so we should not just ignore them. And maybe we never gave up entirely on a water niche. I always loved splashing in the ocean. Maybe the pleasure has deep roots. Maybe I will learn a little more before another 50 years roll by.

The Language Race

My last post reviewed Donald M. Morrison’s book The Coevolution of Language, Teaching, and Civil Discourse among Humans. This entry is a brief meditation inspired by my reading.

The fossil skulls of our Homo ancestors show an amazingly rapid growth of the Homo brain. Homo habilis (2.8 million years ago) had a brain only slightly larger than that of a chimpanzee. By 200 thousand years ago, the brain had tripled in size. 2.6 million years is long by most standards but is very fast for an organ to triple in size, and is especially impressive when you realize that sustaining neurons requires much greater support in calories than say muscle. The growth of the brain indicates a steady improvement in diet during those same 2.6 million years. How does that kind of steady growth persist for millions of years?

Morrison argues, reasonably enough, that the pressure to evolve so steadily over a prolonged time is usually an arms race and as predators gain speed so prey species improve their speed too and  the circle continues. Predators kill and eat the slower prey, so the faster prey is selected. The slow predators starve while the faster predators survive to have descendants. The enlarged brain permits the Homo genus to remember more, develop language, technology, and culture to a much higher level than our chimpanzees. Morrison's Chapter 4, “An Evolutionary Explosion,” does a fine job of considering the suite of changes made to the body of our ancestors to produce us, not just our brain size but our bipedal, gracile shape and reworked hands. (Some how he omits the loss of body hair that must have produced a serious crisis in a species that uses mutual grooming as a major means for social bonding.)

Morrison points out that there is a kind of trap in arms-race evolution. As you develop brains that require a changed diet, there can be no going back to the original diet. If the new foods become scarce, other high-power foods are required. If finding the food requires some improbable solution that calls for more than instinct, the species must be able to teach its children how the solution works. There is a cycle of dependency. Smart solutions demand that the solutions be passed on through the generations. They must be  taught. “Without language, it would not have been possible to engage in the kinds of cooperative, joint attentional activities that allowed hominin ancestors to afford their enlarging brains, thrive in the ancestral environment, spread across the face of the Earth, and fly to the moon.” (p. 79) Thus, language has to have already existed in some form while the brain was enlarging. It cannot be just the cherry on top of a long growing brain.

Missing in this discussion is a consideration of who we were racing against. It takes two to tango through an arms race. And there is a peculiar thing about evolutionary arms races; the species do not benefit so much from the process. The predators are faster, but the prey is faster too. That’s why prey are only a little bit faster than their predators. When naturalists encounter something like the pronghorn antelope of the American prairie which is far faster than any of its predators, they know to check the fossil history. The plains used to include cheetahs which could give the pronghorns a run for their money.  The cheetahs are gone and inevitably the pronghorns will eventually slow down.

But who were our ancestors competing against to get so smart? Homo habilis was already slightly larger brained than chimpanzees so they did not have to get much smarter to have a decisive intellectual advantage over their cousins. There is no point in getting much larger brains, and there may have been disadvantages. Smart as we are, we are physically much weaker than a chimpanzee. Chimps can tear us limb from limb and rip off our faces. You do not want to engage a chimp in a round of fisticuffs. Yet we got weaker and weaker and smarter and smarter.

So let’s take a hint from the speedy pronghorns and look to the fossils. There the evidence shows something remarkable. At first, varieties of the Homo genus began to multiply. Not that long ago, there were Neanderthals, Denisovans, and our own line thriving at the same time. The others died out leaving only us. Somehow we have outlasted them all. It suggests that populations of Homo rather than individuals were doing the competing. Neanderthals were apparently doing fine until our line joined them in Europe. Then, over many generations, the  Neanderthal population dwindled to nothing. A similar story can be told about the Denisovans of central Asia.

Morrison says at one point, “Groups with larger numbers of innovators outcompeted other groups,” (111) putting the competition at the group level. But he also says, “in a snowballing effect, more  complex technologies would have selected for individuals with the cognitive capacity to use them,” (112) putting the competition back on the individual level. I am very disappointed in this ambiguity because I thought I had found some company. Talk of an arms race that left us so much smarter than our nearest living primates, implies a race with competitors who are no longer around. The likeliest groups are other populations of big-brained proto-humans, so that’s likely to be who we were  racing against. Then, Morrison puts such an emphasis on the group benefits of language, especially teaching, that at first I assumed he was talking about group (or to put it technically: multi-level) competition. After all, that is how human history works today.

During the past 300 years many human populations have shrunk profoundly or died out altogether in the competition with expansive, imperial peoples. The Comanches, for example, did not meet their fate because individually they were not as tough as the newcomers. Quite the opposite; in one-to-one duels with the white newcomers, the Comanches almost always won. Yet within a human lifetime they were almost completely eradicated because they as a group could not match the technological and organizational strengths of their group-conscious enemies.[1] Just as we can ask when humans began to use language, we can wonder when their evolutionary story became more dependent on multi-level selection than on the selfish gene. I lean toward the proposition that language and group-competition are about equally old, and I am sorry Morrison does not tell us where and why he stands on the issue.

Instead he wants it both ways, “As the use of language became essential to both individual and group survival, individuals born with genetic programs that made them, in one way or another, slightly better at using language (e.g., slightly better short-term memory, slightly better at taking another person’s perspective) became slightly more likely to survive into adulthood, find suitable mates, and raise offspring to adulthood.” (113) I have never found a convincing argument that selection would actually favor the better speaker. I’d like to think that brains beat brawn and the pen is mightier than the sword, but I doubt the victory when we are speaking on a one-vs-one level. To counter this doubt, Morrison puts forward a remark by the psychologist Geoffrey Miller, “Language puts minds on display where sexual choice could see them clearly for the first time in evolutionary history.” (169) It is a fair point, one to think about, but, especially in the age of Donald Trump, we cannot assume that the revelation of a twelfth-rate mind will cause a person to live  the life of a Darwinian loser.

 

[1] See Empire of the Summer Moon, S.J. Gwynne

Teaching As a Human Trait

What did people have to talk about when language was new? They had been getting along fine without words, and suddenly they had a few, but what was there to say?

Donald M. Morrison has  written a book (The Coevolution of Language, Teaching, and Civil Discourse among Humans) that proposes language got up and running as a teaching system. Speculation about teaching is common, but usually limited to teaching how to make stone tools. Opinions are mixed as to whether language was necessary to teach how to make the early tools, especially Oldowan tools. Showing without talking might well have been enough to teach how to make these simple tools. And then these tools stayed unchanged for eons and could not have helped that much in advancing language. But Morrison takes the subject of teaching more seriously and imagines it had a role in much more than telling apprentices, smash here.

One thing I really like about this approach is that it provides a natural means for the evolution of the speech triangle, which, on this blog, is the defining relationship of language. The speech triangle is formed by a (1) speaker and a (2) listener paying joint attention to a (3) topic. Normal animal and machine communications are limited to a one-dimensional relationship in which a (1) controller manipulates a (2) controlee. There is no obvious way to get from the one-dimensional relation to the speech triangle, or at least I never spotted one until Morrison came along.

The teacher student relationship combines both the simple controller-controlee relation with the human speech triangle relation. The feat that makes this leap to the speech-triangle possible is joint-attention. To teach, the controller-controlee relation is a little more complicated than usual because it requires the two points to pay attention to the same thing. The speech triangle is a bit simpler because the speaker and listener are not changing places so much.

Morrison says: "Once a group of early human ancestors, for whatever reason, became accustomed to combining pointing with other signals—either vocal or gestural, or both—they would have been vastly better at engaging in joint attentional activities. And because joint attentional activities (crucially, cooperative foraging for difficult-to-acquire food sources) were becoming increasingly important to the survival of the group, individuals who were genetically even a  tiny bit better at using the new system would have been more successful…"  (p. 149)

So the story goes: our ancestors were growing more cooperative and combined pointing with other actions to get everyone thinking on the same page, resulting in groups capable of paying joint attention to things. Then language could be used to teach members of the group (especially younger members) and establishing the speech triangle as a unique communication relationship. At last language was off and running.

This covers plenty of good ground, and gets the unique, relational aspects of language into the scenario. Like all scenarios, it is speculative and cannot be proven, but it does establish that a process was possible. When I first was snagged by the mystery of language’s origins, the point that held my attention was that it seemed impossible to have a beginning. So whenever I am satisfied that some detail or other is possible, I feel I am making progress. We will never know the details of the narrative, but we can at least say it is not an impossible mystery that was somehow overcome.

That, by the way, is one of my objections to Morrison’s tale. He is perfectly willing to argue that something was unlikely but could have happened once in a sky-blue moon and the unlikely development became fact. He actually states, “The emergence of language in our ancestors was, in this account, a highly unlikely biocultural accident that might never have happened, but did.” (152) I much prefer things to be overdetermined.

I have never forgiven Chomsky for appealing to the miraculous origin of concepts, and I’m not about to accept miracles in this case either. Evolution, even quick evolution like the rise of the Homo genus from habilis to sapiens takes a long time and many generations. Something unlikely may happen, but for it to stay around it needs to survive many bad breaks. Luck evens itself out. A bad bounce can determine a World Series, but not a whole season of baseball. There ought to be a statistical reason for some novelty to persist through the ages.

The emergence of language, I would say, was so likely an event that it probably happened many times, where one group on, say, the Serengeti started talking and another group near maybe the Mombasa coast quite independently started using words and another group up around somewhere else like the modern Kenya/South Sudan/Ethiopia border hit upon a third unrelated vocabulary.

The key achievement of Morrison’s book is to establish teaching as one of the defining characteristics of the human lineage and its critical presence at language’s start.

I like to imagine what I call two-dimensional teaching. One dimension is practical, the other humanizing. Practical teaching is not limited to humans, although as Morrison points out, we engage in a great deal more practical teaching than any other lineage, but the humanizing side is the astonishing part. It deals with things a person need not know in order to live a successful life of feeding and reproducing. Those are the Darwinian requirements that every species must master.

Humanizing knowledge is the cultural stuff that can be irrelevant to survival or even impede it. Before the invention of writing, this was the knowledge that was always one generation away from being lost. It includes things like manners, i.e., the proper way of doing something. Shaking hands is an example of this kind of learning. In my own case, I was taught by my father to look the person in the eye, use a firm grip, and express pleasure at greeting that person. As a result, I am always aware when the person I shake hands with looks the other way. We shall never know, but it is possible that as long ago as Homo habilis (2.3 to 1.65 million years ago) our lineage had some taught ritual for greeting one another and folks were judged according to how well they reflected similar training in the greeting. That is what I call a humanizing lesson. Once it is lost; it is gone forever, but while it lasts it is a peculiarly human bit of behavior.

This kind of little thing can define great splits. In the film Zorba the Greek, Zorba says of a French woman living in the town that she was forever an outsider because she crossed herself the wrong way. The Orthodox in the town finished the action by touching the right side of the chest and then the left. The Catholic woman from France touched the left side first and then the right. So every time she prayed she showed her foreignness. Surely differences of that nature go way way deep in the lineage, reflecting different teaching traditions that had gone on for generations.

Morrison puts the possible origin of language at 3 million years ago, which would bring us back to the australopithecine era. Of course, whenever they began, the original languages were far simpler than any modern language (which Morrison suggests may have been as recent as 200 thousand or even 100 thousand years ago). So the humanizing lessons of manners, mythology, and specialized knowledge are at least as old as Homo sapiens and verbal instruction of some sort is much older.

By focusing on teaching, Morrison hits on a trait that is especially important in thinking about humans. We are able to evolve at a much greater rate than Darwinian processes allow. A mutation spreads generation by generation. But ideas can spread among a talking and teaching species at the speed of sound. Culture outpaces biology so rapidly that, by now, very little of our behavior is innate. Even gasps of astonishment vary from culture to culture. What is inborn is our ability and desire to learn from our elders.

At some point teaching becomes less common, to be replaced by mutual thinking. Morrison calls this a shift to “civil discourse.” His book continues to be interesting and provocative, but it moves a bit beyond the focus of this blog. So I will stop here. There are some other things to note about the book, so I will have a few more posts about it.

NOTE Morrison replies: " believe we're actually agreed on the role of something like "luck" in language origins. The fact that humans alone, of all remaining primate species, managed to escape Bicketon's "prison of animal communication" was not, I think we both agree, inevitable. But neither was it, as I think we also both agree, a "miracle." Nature, as I've written somewhere, doesn't need miracles to perform its work, just known evolutionary processes and mechanisms. But, while the spark that triggered the evolution of language must have been a kind of accident...a confluence of unlikely events...the explosive coevolution of brains, language, technology, etc. that followed was, like any explosion, unstoppable. "

Bilingual Logic

 

Monolinguists (people who speak only one language) often give different answers to the same question, depending on how the problem (say, responding to a pestilence) is framed. Frame a choice one way,--e.g., as lives saved--you get one answer. Frame it differently—as lives lost--you get a different response. That’s not terribly surprising, but now look at bilinguists  (people who speak two languages). Pose the choices in their dominant language and the frame matters, but if they hear the question in their second language, the framing bias goes out the window. Now they answer the question the same way, not matter how it is framed.

A finding that people are more logical and consistent when they are using a second language is truly surprising, and full of implications. Does tbis mean that scholars whose mother tongue is not English are more rational in response to academic papers written in English than are native English speakers? When Donald Trump frames a choice as a loss, does he make people who only speak English afraid while listeners whose first language is Spanish see through the frame to the speech’s lack of logic? Many religious thinkers pursue their questions using a second language like Latin or Hebrew; does that  remove emotion from their thinking? Would groups make better decisions if they ran their meetings in a foreign language?

Ai, yai yai. How topsy turvey can the world get?

These questions come up in a new book, The Bilingual Brain by Albert Costa. Sad to report, after examining the matter Costa concludes that a “foreign language [does mot have]  an effect on  logical problems that do not involve the emotional system.” [p. 140] So scholars do not have an advantage in a second language, and there is probably no need to conduct business meetings in Esperanto.  But still, the discovery has large implications for many things. Demagogues who sneer at foreigners will automatically be effective with natives who speak only one language, while emotional appeals in English to immigrants will not be as effective.

Too bad all this exciting stuff comes in the book’s last chapter. That’s where the engine begins to spark and  the facts point somewhere the heart can flutter. Most of the book is slow. The author is an expert writing too basically for other experts and too dryly for non-experts. Books for a general audience ought to take the findings of science and phrase them in language the readers’ mothers might use. Here, and I’m not kidding, the author introduces a question asked by his mother and promptly translates it into the dry jargon of the academy.

Still, the tale has its moments. Of particular interest is the study of how infants come to recognize the sounds of the language spoken around them. Each language (Costa says nothing of sign languages) has its own set of sounds. For example, English has a bunch of words that begin with str-. (I pause to let readers think of their own examples.) Spanish has no such words. So babies destined to learn English keep an ear out for those sounds to signal the start of a new word, while future Spanish speakers do not. (Drive your baby crazy by reporting you have become estranged from something.) It turns out that infants with, say a mother who speaks to them in Spanish and a father who uses English with them, learn both sound systems. They listen for Spanish sounds from their mama and are tuned into English phonology when pop is doing the talking.

The book itself has a multilingual history. It was first published in Spanish and only later translated into English. The author reports that his first language was Spanish and he learned his second, Catalan, only later. Catalan is a language spoken in and around the city of Barcelona. Catalan was outlawed in the time of General Franco’s long dictatorship (1939-1975) when schools were forbidden to teach in it. In the years since Franco’s death, it has reemerged from the family scene and is in public view. (In the mornings during a visit to Barcelona, I was handed a newspaper in Catalan as I  boarded the subway.) I imagine that in Franco’s time there were lots of fables about how bad it was for children to learn two languages. But an American audience in 2020  is not part of that old struggle and needs little convincing that bilingualism is a good thing.

So I can recommend the book only with a caution. Readers of this blog should be interested enough in language to benefit from this book, but if you are not already interested in bilingualism, this may not be the  book to rouse your interest. On the other hand, if you re in quarantine, looking for something to do, reading the book's exciting last chapter should give you plenty to think about.

What Makes Language Unusual? Epilog

 

This is the last of a series of 5 presentations concerning what makes language unusual. This post examines why the differences between language and other forms of animal communication matters.

What Makes Language Unusual? Community

 

We continue our examination of what makes language unusual. This time we consider the need for a community of speakers and listeners.

What Makes Language Unusual? Joint Attention

 

Here is the latest video in my series on What Makes Language Unusual. This one looks at the role of attention.

What Makes Language Unusual? Topics

 

This post presents video #2 in a series of 5 about what makes language unusual.

What Makes Language Unusual? Introduction

Today I am beginning a series of videos on the features that make language so unusual and powerful. I will aim to post two a week for a few weeks. Thanks to my fine nephew, Fernando, for providing a clear audio of my text.

Back to the Drawing Boards

Anyone familiar with this blog knows of my frustrations with Noam Chomsky. He seems to be so smart and logical, and yet never says anything that sounds half-way right or even usable. For example, he recently published an essay (Catalan Journal of Linguistics, “Some Puzzling Foundational Issues”) that considers the evolution of language, by which Chomsky means “the evolution of the Language Faculty." Is that what most people mean when they consider the evolution of language? I doubt it. Any ordinary person picking up an essay on “the evolution of language” would probably be expecting an account of how people began to use words. The biggest conundrum would be how people reached an agreement as to what words meant what things. How have I and my neighbors come to share the word and meaning of shoe? Or whatever the first word was?

This obvious question involves various difficulties and the answer depends on more factors than are first evident. Is one of those factors a “Language Faculty”? It would seem plausible, but Chomsky defines his concept in such a way that it is irrelevant to the study of language origins. Yet I found his latest piece interesting because it reveals that Chomsky is beginning to admit to the usual difficulties when he tries to make his logic match reality. He has had to rethink a key operation in his theory, something called Merge.

Anybody who has studied Chomsky’s work has seen the pattern many  times. Chomsky proposes some simple principles about language. Then he offers a brilliant, and simple, solution to explain how the principles can be used to generate all the sentences of a language, at which point he and his disciples begin examining empirical evidence to demonstrate the simplicity and correctness of his idea. At first, the work claims success. Then difficulties appear and the simple proposal must be defended by increased claims that the difficulties can be ignored. Then the difficulties are too blatant to be waved away, and Chomsky announces a change of mind. The simple solution was wrong, a new solution has been found, and the cycle begins again.

Chomsky has won many admirers for his ability to change his mind, but he has never changed his initial principles of language—e.g., language structure reflects a computation; all languages rest on the same invariant rules; the ability to compute sentences according to the invariant rules rest on an inborn faculty of the mind. If we take another look at Chomsky’s work, we might say that instead of regularly changing his mind, he never changed it. From the beginning of his published work (in the 1950s) until today, over 60 years later, he has stuck by the same principles even though he has never found a way to make them work. All of the practical progress made in machine composition and translation has followed other techniques.

In his paper on “Some Puzzling Foundational Issues,” Chomsky is once again changing his mind without having to change his premises. The hand waving is getting desperate.

What might an alternative set of language principles look like? We might say that language allows communities to consider shared topics. It does this by drawing attention to whatever seems relevant. Different communities may be interested in widely differing topics and may have quite distinct notions of relevance. Thus, different languages can be profoundly unlike one another. Yet they will all share something abstract, a common method of directing and keeping attention on a topic and its relevant details.

There are other descriptions of language. I have given the one I happen to believe as a result of working on this blog, but my point is not that I am right but that we there are more possibilities than are found in Chomsky’s philosophy.

The aim of Chomsky’s latest paper is to present what can be rescued from the wreckage of his latest crash, and frankly I don’t care what his salvage operation looks like. I’m more interested in the elaborate hocus pocus by which he waves away rivals that might question his unchanging principles.

The biggest rival to Chomsky, because it is the most commonsensical, is the idea that the rules of language can be known by studying languages as they are used. Thus, if you want to understand French, read and parse French documents, or listen to French conversations. Sixty years ago, Chomsky got a lot of respectful attention in the intellectual press by denying this point. He said that a sentence in French, English or any language had a surface structure that could be directly examined. But he argued, things cannot all be explained by surface structure, so we have to examine a deep structure, and that deep structure follows the same rules, no matter what the language.

To the objection, what about grammatical mistakes—if we have some innate set of rules, why do we speak so badly?—Chomsky distinguished between linguistic competence (the rules we know) and linguistic performance (the errors we make as a result of a variety of frictions and impediments to perfect behavior).

Surface and deep structure, linguistic competence and performance—with these tools Chomsky set out to conquer linguistics. By the mid 1960s he had abandoned the search for a common deep structure in favor of the quest for a Universal Grammar (UG) that would generate sentences in any language. By now there is a complex set of interfaces that replaces concepts of competence and performance. The UG generates the formal sentences that define an Internal (I) Language. A second language, the External (E) Language is made public by speech, writing, hand signs and other means. The language we find around us is generated by the UG in the form of I-Language sentences which are then translated by the body’s sensory-motor system into the more familiar E-Languages of the world.

The problem with this account has always been in the translation of universal to communal languages. It did not work with the switching from deep to surface structures and it still isn’t working. What has changed is that Chomsky no longer even pretends to be looking for a way to get from one form to the other. For many years, in his lectures Chomsky would introduce the I-Language/E-Language distinction and say he was interested only in I-Language and proceed to ignore language as it is encountered everywhere. That’s why I sat up when I saw in this paper that he now attempts, at least partially, to justify ignoring E-language.

Here is his presentation:

• First, he looks at the interfaces where the language is handed off for further processing: the core I-language (internal language) generates solely representations on one interface: C-I (Conceptual Intentional interface), essentially a kind of language of thought. And that’s probably close to, or probably we will discover totally invariant among human beings. [There it is, the  restatement of the all-languages-are-alike doctrine he has preached since the middle of the 20th century.]
• Next, Chomsky endows E-Language with all the properties that most people would like to understand when they think about language: It seems that the complexity, the variety of language arise overwhelmingly if not completely from the ancillary operations which lead to externalization which we know draws upon our sensory motor system. And it’s pretty natural that that should be complex and vary because you have to match two systems that essentially have nothing to do with one another. [Tada! This is a huge concession. Chomsky now grants that E-Languages are now seen as radically unlike I-Languages.] The internal system seems to have arisen pretty suddenly along with modern humans [Note: modern humans did not arise suddenly but gradually over a couple of million years!] and the SM (Sensory-Motor) system have been around for hundreds of thousands, in some cases millions of years, and have absolutely nothing to do with language. So when we try to connect these two things, it’s necessarily going to be a complex operation, and in fact the external operations, although they certainly follow principles and rules of a restricted variety they nevertheless violate just about any principle of computational complexity one can imagine, and they do vary a lot, change a lot, generation to generation and so on.[Another tada.]
• Finally, after admitting that E-Languages bear little to no resemblance to I-Language, he throws E-Language out the window and declares for the study of I-Language: So I’ll just assume that, admittedly without any arguments – it’s been discussed elsewhere – and take a look at the generative mechanisms for the core I-Language mapping to C-I.

Usually, I am stuck between frustration and admiration when Chomsky pulls one of these maneuvers. The frustration is over the use of con-man tricks, pulling notions from thin air and saying they are what matters, not the money you are being asked to contribute to the cause. Yet I have always been impressed by the audacity of the man, the sheer gall of waving aside questions that generations have wondered about, as though they were a mere bag of shells (to quote Ralph Kramden).

This time, however, I have a happier response; I smell victory here. Chomsky seems to have finally realized he cannot forever dismiss his critics and their data. At least he now concedes that we  cannot learn French without examining French language as a thing in itself. Furthermore, he grants that linguistic performance (to use an abandoned bit of jargon) depends on mastering sensory-motor skill. True, he also says the sensory-motor system has absolutely nothing to do with language, but this assertion is empirically false and can be shown so.  Starting with Italian linguistic philosophers and then spreading to points around the globe, a school has developed that argues the various grammars for individual, natural languages are based on how words and phrases focus and redirect attention (attention is part of the sensory-motor system). If that school is right and natural language structure depends on sensory-motor powers, the whole of I-language becomes irrelevant and can be ignored as though neither a UG nor an internal-language even existed. In the end, it is surface structure and utterances of the E-Languages that matter.

Chomsky has had a long career and a much celebrated one. Along the way many people have tried to adapt one or the other I-Language systems to their own field of interest and eventually have discovered the emptiness of the metaphor. It is worth remembering the practical question that kicked off these studies: how can you build a machine that can generate any of the sentences found in a particular language and not generate any sentences not found in the language? There is no point in going back to the drawing boards to better define an I-Language if the sentences of every public language "violate just about any principle of computational complexity one can imagine, and they do vary a lot, change a lot, generation to generation." No machine will generate all and only the sentences of any particular language if it sticks to a simple computation based on invariant syntax.

Just How Long Ago Did Adam Eat that Apple?

In thinking about how language might have begun, one of the tempting details of the human vocal system has been the “laryngeal descent.” The larynx (aka, the voice box or the “Adam’s apple”) moved a bit down the throat. This anatomical detail was long thought to be exclusive to humans and was also believed to be important in producing certain acoustic distinctions between vowels, so that English speakers can say poke or puke without causing confusion. As the descent appears to have been only 200,000 years old, it seemed that the descent might have had something to do with the introduction of speech, which many people believe to be at most 200,000 years old. Put crudely, the hypothesis said that the human cognitive features needed to support language developed first, but speech only appeared after the laryngeal descent.

This hypothesis supported the Chomsky school of linguistics which asserts that language first emerged as a tool for supporting thinking and only later interfaced with the ability  to vocalize and engage in speech.

It has been known for some  time now that the laryngeal descent is not found only in humans. A report in the latest Science magazine—"Which way to the dawn of speech?” by Jean-Louis Boë et al—reviews the work on laryngeal descent and determined that the previously accepted date for the descent was a bit late. In fact, the paper claims that the trait belongs to many apes, is not essential for making vowel distinctions, and has been part of the human ancestral lineage for at least 20 million years. The surviving great apes all share much of that lineage with us, thus falsifying the conjecture that the laryngeal descent was one of the last steps in evolving speech.

Boë et al go on to ask, “While speech had been thought of as an enabling communication of already developed linguistic cognition, should it now be thought of as an early driver of linguistic cognitive development?” This blog has never expressed the process in quite that way, but it has long supported the notion that vocalizations led to words which led to phrases and, ultimately, to modern language. This latest report does not prove the point, but at least it removes some theoretical obstacles to accepting this blog’s position.

 

Bonobos Converse

 

Grooming.

Here is part of the scenario for language origins favored on this blog: long ago our ancestors began losing body hair with potentially ruinous dangers to the species. It reduced the ability to form bonds based on grooming and it made it difficult to move with a baby who, in previous generations, held on tightly to mama’s hair. The solution was bonding via babbling and sharing responsibility for the baby. For a long time, the human lineage made meaningless sounds that provided emotional ties, and eventually particularly sounds became associated with specific things or people.

I defend this argument by pointing out that vocal-based bonding still precedes language today. Infants go through a period of babbling before they talk and sometimes their babbling becomes quite social. Youtube is full of anecdotal evidence in the form of babies engaged in pseudo-conversations where they take turns exchanging noises. [example of 10 month old twins conversing without words].

There is also evidence that a language only flourishes when it is used as part of a social system among equals. Pidgins are languages that are limited to carrying out trade or giving orders. They turn into full languages (creoles) when they become a medium for conversing between peers. Second languages (e.g., the English language today) can become common as people interact with representatives of some imperial power, but they fade  as  the imperial power fades. Second languages only become first languages if the speakers themselves are assimilated into the larger community.

Arguing against this idea is the lack of vocal bonding in our immediate, evolutionary relatives. Chimps, bonobos, and gorillas do not engage in pseudo-conversations, taking turns making emotionally-charged but meaningless exchanges. Thus, I have had to argue that human communities are quite different from ape societies and evolved by breaking firmly with ape ways. The argument would probably be more persuasive if it could  be tied a bit more fully to our ape origins.

And now, at long last, some scholars have reported finding evidence from the primate world that seems to bolster this blog’s story that we developed vocal bonds before we got meaningful talk. (See: Florence Levréro et al, Scientific Reports, “Social bonding drives vocal exchanges in Bonobos.”) Bonobos are tied with chimpanzees as humanity’s closest living  relatives. They are less hierarchical than chimps and have attracted a lot of attention in recent years, but this blog has not joined in the general shouting… until now. Chimpanzees, which have been studied ceaselessly in the wild for over 50 years have not been very encouraging about conversations. Levrero and team reports, “ No evidence of spontaneous vocal coordinated exchanges has been found in wild chimpanzees, who display complex social interactions and cooperative abilities. Indeed, Arcadi found that chimpanzees do not ‘respond’ to the majority of calls they heard (within 5 sec), and that instead, bonded males tend to chorus together, matching each-other’s pant hoots.”  

Bonobos, however, have now been studied making vocal coordinated exchanges in captivity. The critical observation reported was that, “Vocal affinity (the frequency of vocal interactions for each given dyad) was only explained by the ‘social affinity’ of individuals while the sex of callers, age differences and kinships were not significant predictors. Thus the stronger the ‘social affinity’ between two individuals, the more they are preferred vocal partners.” In less scholarly words, the chances of having a pseudo-conversation increases along with the increase in social bonding between pairs.

The authors conclude, “bonobos did not randomly respond to any group members but preferentially to some specific conspecifics with whom they maintain close bonds. This finding is consistent with the evolutionary function of call exchanges or chorusing which is often linked to social bonding. Interestingly, we observed an unbalanced vocal response rate between individuals (individual B systematically calls after individual A but the contrary is not true) that suggests that vocal exchanges may reflect an active search of building bonds.”

The authors assert that, “It is widely considered that socially-ruled communicative behaviour shared by humans and nonhuman primates may have been a crucial step in the coevolution of language and social life.” I can think of many linguists who do not say such a thing, but I am happy to nod along, since the authors’ data supports the blog’s thesis that very tight, vocalized bonding is older than meaningful conversations involving topics. In the face of an evolutionary crisis that reduced bonding by grooming, the human lineage already had a behavior that could be developed as an alternative: vocalized, emotional bonding, a.k.a. babbling.

What Motivated the First Speakers?

An early (Oldowan) chopping tool.

I have received a letter from a reader who goes by the handle jgkess. Under the title the origin of communicative intent in the use of hominem proto-language he (or maybe she) writes: “The idea was to get another to Do something, (or not do something) either proximally or distally (in a temporal sense), by way of getting him to think or feel in an intended way. There was no "generic" intent just to "inform" another---that would be insufficiently motivating, and communicative behaviour is, after all, motivated behaviour. In the pragmatics of hominem proto-linguistic communication, I think, lie the seeds of the evolution of our kind of general intelligence---this is a kind of take on Dan Sperber's work.”

Seventy years ago, Norbert Wiener published a book entitled Cybernetics or Control and Communication in  the Animal and the Machine. It publicized secret wartime achievements in getting machines to control one-another by communicating (i.e., by exchanging information). Back in the early 1970s I finally read the book, which describes communication entirely in terms of making something separate from the communicator act in certain way. Cells within an organism control one another, ants control one another, computers in a network control one another, Employees in a military organization control one another. So there seems to be much in favor of this idea of control, but while the book was eye-opening and powerful it did not persuade me that control is the main function of language.

As an English major, I immediately protested that humans also can recite Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn, or talk about what they did the previous weekend, or argue over politics, report a piece of news, or teach a course in advanced calculus. None of these tasks have a cybernetic function. The difference becomes obvious when you compare a high-level computer language like C++ with any natural language. C++ tells a machine what to do. It cannot be used for any of the purposes I listed at the top of this paragraph. Meanwhile, telling people what to do (writing procedures) is a special skill  that earns technical writers a livelihood. One of the guiding principles of this blog is that natural languages and computer languages are different things and it is a category error to refer to one and draw conclusions about the other (e.g., it is a mistake to argue that computer languages are not ambiguous, therefore natural languages should not have to be ambiguous either).

A natural question for this blog is why don’t apes talk? They seem smart enough and probably have a higher IQ than some people who do talk.  Forty years ago  there were a series of experiments in which apes were taught sign languages, proving they were smart enough to use some language. The problem was that apes could not get  beyond cybernetic motives. They used signs to signal their wants to humans and also answered questions creatively (e.g., Human: what’s that (pointing to a swan), Ape: water bird.) So apes are smart and creatuve, but they only volunteered one kind of statement: requests. They told humans they wanted a hug, or an apple, or even that  their tooth needed fixing. So they could signal their wants. Intriguingly, apes that knew how to sign did not start chatting with one another. I assume that was because apes already had ways of making requests of one another and found no advantage in signalling to their fellows they wanted an apple. Get it yourself, one can imagine Ape¹ telling Ape².

 

In his book, Origins of Communication, Michael Tomasello notes that among wild chimpanzees it is common for a youngster to lose sight of its mother and to begin to howl in anxiety. Other chimpanzees probably know what  the fuss is about and could point mama out to the upset toddler, but they never do that. They never use language or signaling to share their knowledge with others. They do not have the motivation to come to the youngster’s rescue.

But humans pitch in to inform others, even strangers, all the time. It is common for strangers in an area to ask for directions and receive them. jgkess denies that originally there was a  “‘generic’ intent just to ‘inform’ another---that would be insufficiently motivating” but it seems that the motivation has come along somehow since informing others is a routine part of daily, human existence,

It is common for two-year-olds to shout out the names of things they see. A toddler shouts doggie and a mother glances toward a TV screen and says, Yes, that’s a big dog. That is a fairly clear example of a human using language to inform another human for no good  reason beyond the drive to express what the human knows. Human communication is distinctive in function as well as structure from other known communication systems. Babies get adults to do things for them by using a communication system older than language: they cry.

On  this blog, I have insisted for years that the sine qua non of language is the speech triangle: speaker and listener paying joint attention to a topic. Not every utterance is defined by the speech triangle (e.g., Stop in the name of the law) but a communication system that cannot form a speech triangle is not a language.

If you want to imagine hominems first using speech to tell each other what to do, I cannot stop you or prove you wrong, but only when the hominems started using a speech triangle did they begin to use even a proto-language. We can see that almost 2 million years ago, the Homo lineage was passing along knowledge -- specifically, they taught new generations how to make Oldowan tools, We cannot prove they used language to  teach the tool making. They may have just shown students how to smash rocks together to get a cutting edge. The knowledge was passed along for a million years or more and spread over a  wide area. Nor did passing along knowledge stop. The tools eventually became more complex and required more teaching, This steady tradition of passing along knowledge is possible because of humanity’s unusual communal nature.

We depend on one another to become who we are. We become members of whatever community raises us, speaking its language, sharing its  tastes and customs, assuming its assumptions. About the only instinct we have left is the instinct to be like those around us (especially,  those who are raising us). Presumably, Homo habilis was not so dependent on its culture to make its members who  they were, but we have been heading in our current direction for a very long time. At some hazy patch along the way, we introduced language as an especially powerful tool for getting us to share information and thoughts, organizing human communities so that anybody’s genius could be shared. Sharing information, not controlling others, is and has been  the secret of the Homo lineage’s success.