Chomsky's book & human language (Humans)

by dhw, Saturday, April 02, 2016, 13:43 (3156 days ago)

DAVID (under “More Denton”): A review of Chomsky's new book which takes a negative slant:-https://www.newscientist.com/article/2078294-why-only-us-the-language-paradox/-I shan't reproduce the criticisms you have already quoted, but here are some more extremely pertinent ones:-Moreover, there is clear evidence of interbreeding between Neanderthals and humans. The implication is obvious: both species must have had language. That being the case, this pushes the origins of spoken language back much further, perhaps even to half a million years ago.-In addition, research in primatology and animal behaviour suggests that some of the precursors for language do exist in other species, ranging from European starlings to chimpanzees - with the latter using a sophisticated gestural form of communication in the wild. In fact, gesture may well have been the medium that incubated language until ancestral humans evolved the full-blown capacity for it.-An influential, alternative view of the evolution of language is to take a bigger-picture perspective from the one that Berwick and Chomsky espouse. The alternative sees language as an evolutionary outcome of a shift in cognitive strategy among ancestral humans, fuelled by bipedalism, tool use and meat-eating.-This new biocultural niche required a different cognitive strategy to encourage greater cooperation between early humans. Building on the rudimentary social-interactional nous of other great apes, an instinct for cooperation does seem to have emerged in ancestral humans. And this would have inexorably led to complex communicative systems, of which language is the most complete example.-All this harks back to a discussion we had just over a year ago under “Animal language”, and I think it is well worth reproducing the post (11 January 2015 at 20.49) with which I opened that thread:-"A fascinating article in today's Sunday Times concerns research on gibbon language. Scientists believe that they and many other animals “use a system that is similar to early human language”. They also think they may be able to “construct a Rosetta Stone of animal communication because some animals not only have sounds for specific things, such as food, but also build these into sentences with rudimentary grammatical rules.”-By observing the behaviour of the animals after their conversations, the researchers are able to work out what must have been said. “They seem to comment on all sorts of events. It's not just warning calls.” The gibbons even sing songs.-The researchers are also working on the languages used by rats, whales, dolphins, bats and songbirds. For those of us who believe that we are descended from earlier organisms, this can hardly be surprising. Communication is essential to survival, but clearly it is also used for matters which humans in their arrogance assume are exclusive to themselves, including love, parental guidance, education, and in the case of the gibbons, even a fair division of the domestic chores! Our language and our range of thought have clearly evolved far beyond theirs, but they have enough for their needs. This is not anthropomorphizing animals. We ARE animals. They got there before us, and we have merely developed what they passed on to us."-I stand by this and by all the arguments I offered throughout that particular thread.