Origin of Language (Origins)

by David Turell , Monday, April 06, 2015, 15:22 (3517 days ago) @ dhw


> dhw: Thank you for bringing a piece of serious scholarship to the debate, though I know you have described all this before. Just a very minor disagreement: accents appear much earlier than 8-10.-You misunderstand my statement and I was not clear. In this country of immigrants children under 10 pick up English easily without a foreign accent, but will have the local accent.- 
> dhw: As always, I agree that the necessary physical changes can hardly have been the result of random mutations. Whatever it was that led a group of apes to descend from the trees (if that's what happened) and start the whole process of “humanization” would undoubtedly have required an increasingly complex form of communication to make use of an ever expanding volume of information (conventional use of the word). Perhaps this is where the inventive mechanism would have come into play, changing structures in the same way as it changes structures in response to environmental pressures or opportunities. -All we now is that it happened rather quickly for all the changes that had to occur.