>Since you study comparative linguistics, I'm interested in your >views on
>Chomsky.
Gee, _I_ would be interested in my own views on Chomsky, if only I had a
better grapple on his theories other than a very passing knowledge of its
existence. That goes for Piaget too.
As far as language origin itself is concerned, despite my ignorance of
Chomsky or Piaget, I do have my own viewpoints on this matter that I've
arrived at intuitively since I do enjoy reconstruction of ancient languages
and am studying anything I can on Nostratic and Dene-Caucasian with a very
cautious but thorough examination. (Warning: I'm not trying to reconstruct
Proto-World or Proto-Alien or any far-fetched science-fiction language based
on some badly contrived theory, thank you for your understanding that I'm
not a lunatic :)
I also don't understand why "language origin" can possibly be a problem for
people but I'll speak my view on the matter and you can mark me "singe" or
"sage". (A little French humour :P)
I always start by saying to people I talk to on this that to understand
language origin, you must first understand what you mean by "language".
There are many forms of "language" that may include anything from vocal
communication, sign language, simple gesture & body language or even
(photo-)chemical interaction. In the extreme, we could say that two volatile
substances when mixed together are "communicating" with each other. Hey, we
could go mad with poetic liberty and say that the universe itself is alive
with whispers and yells and that the one, true, original language is called
Quantum Mechanics! :P
When I hear the topic of "language origin", I assume that the definition of
"language" implied is that of human vocal communication which is not really
unique to humans, per se (especially regarding elephants and whales).
Moreover, it's probably implied by many that "language" is meant to mean
everything about human vocal communication including the nitty-gritty stuff
like grammatical structures, phonologies and so forth that certainly could
not have arisen out of the blue for simple logical reasons and yet if it had
evolved gradually from a simpler form, what form could that possibly be?
It seems natural to me to conclude that there is no simpler form of vocal
communication that could be used by our early societies than the languages
that we now find ourselves using in the 21st century. There is certainly no
"underdeveloped" language and this is not simply neo-PCism on my part to say
so. But if this is so, do we not run into a paradox?
Vocal communication is by nature "abstract" and therefore the meaning of any
given sound is not intuitive. A phoneme or syllable by itself when taken out
of context means absolutely nothing of accuracy to a random group of
listeners. The sound may be perceived to mean something specific based on
their own respective languages but nothing that would be commonly and
intuitively viewed as meaning anything. Thus when saying /tu/ out of
context, the syllable will be interpreted as meaning the "two" in English
but in French it will mean "all" and it will mean "you" in Spanish. The
abstractness of vocal language is vital in striving to understand language
origin.
Many people don't understand this first concept and consequently fail
miserably in their irrational theories.
However, in contrast, a point with the finger or even the "evil eye" speaks
volumes to most human beings. In fact, it's quite safe to say that even a
dog who lacks the ability to speak like we do, does indeed have ability to
_understand_ language, whether spoken, by gesture or through body language,
since he has been able to interpret all kinds of our commands for some
10,000 years of domestication from the wolf.
This combined with many experiments with different primates that have been
succesful in at least teaching them rudimentary sign language shows that our
early ancestors, whose brains had evolved gradually over a long period of
millions of years over and above that of existing primates, must have had at
least the ability within them to:
a) understand language at least as well as primates
b) be manually dextruous enough to sign if they were to
discover for themselves how (and certainly a million years
is a long time not discover this ability with that large
brain of theirs)
In conclusion, there seems to me to be many logical reasons to conclude that
the "simpler" form of communication from which "vocal communication" had
arisen is in fact through _sign_ language that itself would have evolved
over long periods of time from primate body language.
Consider this, deaf people who speak sign language often mutter
incomprehensibly in accompaniment to their signing. They of course cannot
hear this muttering. Any extra cues from the speaker would be from visual
only but they do it automatically and unconsciously.
If we imagine a community of early well-hearing humanoids that didn't have
the ability to speak as we are able to (except some simple phonemes) but
fully had the ability to sign because of their manual dexterity and
intelligence, they would probably mutter incomprehesibly in accompaniment
too but they would _hear_ it and take from it as a kind of cue. The
"muttering" is in effect analguous to our own tendencies to use gesture as
accompaniment to our words, to add emphasis or subtle change of meaning to
the main focus of the communication, sound.
Now, it is very easy to see how sign language can arise from simple body
language that we observe in animals. The superior manual dexterity of early
humanoids undoubtly would have spurred such an invention as sign language to
communicate more effectively and precisely than previous. These are obvious
advantages to social animals stuck in the wild.
The transition of sign language to vocal communication is tough to justify
in terms of survival value for me without intently reading books on language
origin as you all may have done but it's clear that the transition could
very easily take place gradually if the accompanying "muttering" from sign
language were to gain importance in terms of listener focus over and above
the focus and main meaning imparted on traditional sign language.
As such, vocal communication can indeed evolve slowly over millenia or
millions of years during our development as human beings from sign language
which in turn stems from simple body language and there is no need to
suppose special "language organs" or other strange titles of theories that
I've heard about and am afraid to inquire too much about due to their
perceivable hokeyness.
It's just plain ol' evolution and shouldn't be a "problem" but I could be
wrong...
Of course, this theory would then disqualify any efforts to reconstruct the
original language of mankind since there is none. The transition from sign
language to vocal communication or even body language to sign language would
have been so gradual that it could have easily occured at many different
sites independantly from each other over a wide span of time.
Of course, food for thought: this doesn't mean that all modern language is
_not_ related to each other. It's just the Eve hypothesis used on
linguistics whereupon many languages had developed but only ONE ancestor
language won the fight for survival in the end many tens or hundreds of
thousands of years ago: Shall we one day reconstruct "Proto-Evian" perhaps?
:)
- gLeN
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