Human evolution; Chomsky Everett language fight (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, September 11, 2020, 21:09 (1315 days ago) @ dhw

QUOTES: "You find that same pattern—things that get attached to the verb—in language after language. That tells me there’s some underlying deep structure to how human language organizes sentences."

"Our general cognitive abilities have a subset of concepts. And some subsets are available to human languages and some are not. No one understands why. It’s a total mystery. But it speaks to this universality of the idea that, in a sense, there’s one human language."

DAVID: He is with Chomsky and feels Everett is wrong. He supports the idea we are born with a basic language mechanism.

dhw: We all know that animals don’t speak any human language, and human language is a wonderfully versatile instrument, and it is no surprise to find that all human languages attempt to convey concepts – and why not add perceptions and instructions and emotions and so on? Nevertheless, it should be pointed out that our fellow animals also use sounds to convey meanings, and so one should be wary of confining the word “language” to human language. And yes, we all know that we are born with a basic language mechanism because surprise, surprise, all humans speak a language. Neither animals nor humans would be able to speak if they didn’t have mechanisms for communication and for formulating whatever they want to communicate. But of course I agree that animal languages are different from human languages in so far as ours are infinitely more complex. As far as I know, humans tend to speak the language that is spoken in their particular part of the world. I have never yet heard a newborn baby speak any human language at all, and when the toddler does start to speak, I have never heard him or her speak anything but what he or she has learned from his or her immediate surroundings. And if our author has studied languages in different parts of the world, he will know that the sounds, the vocabulary and the grammar differ from one language to another. And so while it is true that as far as we know, all languages have some form of grammar, and they all use words to which we have given various classifications - also using words - and they all use ways of linking words together, there is no such thing as a universal grammar, let alone one that is inborn, and this speaks to the “universality of the idea that, in a sense”, there are thousands of human languages. This discussion is one long quibble over terminology.

The argument is whether we are born with a basic mechanism in our brains for grammar and syntax, which would certainly suggest a designer introduced it into our current iteration of the human brain. I will differ with you. There are universal rules that seem to apply to all languages. The battle over recursion, however, seems to be difference over semantics. This author suggests strongly Everett is alone.