The importance of human language (Animals)

by David Turell , Thursday, June 27, 2024, 14:09 (128 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: Ah, dear Matt, you always provide us with fascinating new topics. Yes, this one should have a thread of its own! As usual, I’ll select those comments I think require further discussion.

xeno: The thing that makes humans special--is that we have learned to utilize language.

dhw: Different forms of life have different forms of language, and they are all utilized for the same purpose, which is communication. As far as we know, our language is only special because its range is almost immeasurably greater than the “languages” of other species. This leads to complex questions of anatomy, and cause and effect.

Anatomy: I would suggest that as humans gradually extended their experiences of the world, they needed more and more sounds to convey their increasingly complex thoughts. The effort to produce new sounds would have brought about the anatomical changes that make the new sounds possible (in the same way as pre-whale legs would have evolved into flippers, through their constant use in water instead of on land).

Cause and effect: The thing that made humans special in the first place was the expansion of our intelligence as it graduated from immediate needs (animal level) to the almost infinite range of things we can think about now. In the early days, Mr Ugg thought he needed something sharp to cut an animal skin. Only when he had made it did he name it “knife” (or “couteau” or “Messer”.) In other words, language is the result of what makes us special, not the cause, as we needed new sounds to communicate new thoughts, and eventually new structures, as our thoughts became increasingly complex. (And of course we continue to expand language in order to keep up with the novelties our intelligence provides.) However, what is also unique is the sheer range of our means of communication. Through our language and our inventions (above all, writing), we can pass on every thought/idea/concept/invention that ever existed, and later generations can build new ideas and words out of EVERYTHING that has been thought in the past and present. This has resulted in our actually thinking in words, because for instance, someone had a concept of some strange being that might have created the world, and they invented the word God. So now we think in terms of God (or Allah or Jehovah) and we take for granted what the word means.

xeno: we built up vocalizations to be the rich tapestry of language that we have today, a difference that does make us different, but I can't say different in kind exactly. Take away language and you take away humanity. And many philosophies have gone down a wrong path using that difference "in kind" to justify terrible behavior towards other species (and even our own.)

dhw: Oh, you are so right – but I don’t think this is a matter just of language. It is our range of thought, our mighty inventions, our ability to find means of controlling other species and other humans that lead to some humans’ arrogant attitude towards other forms of life.

xeno: But coming back to Jaynes, he details the process of metaphor building and extension that to my mind unlocks the key as to bbbhowbbb we ended up dominating the planet, which ought to be a fascinating question for most of us. It also explains why we were relatively "silent" prior to recorded history--we lacked the language that allowed us to spill into new places.

dhw: But we did spill into new places! Our non-sapiens and our sapiens ancestors’ bones are to be found all over the world, as are their artefacts. It’s not language that enables exploration and invention, though no doubt exploration and invention would have resulted in an increased vocabulary of sounds. Again, I’d say it is our intelligence that has given us domination, and our language is a tool invented by our intelligence but also enabling us to use, communicate and expand our intelligence to maximum effect.

Thank you for raising this subject. I’m sure you will have plenty of wise comments to make on all the above!

There must have been a time when communication was 'sign' hand gestures and proto words. That sufficed in exploring the Earth, driven by our intelligence which arrived long before language. When considering natural evolution, as dhw does, what caused such a complex brain to appear? Our ape cousins survived easily without it. Bipedalism preceded the brain and can be said to drive the brain's development, but what caused bipedalism? This is why design is so appealing. Natural development does not make sense.