----- Original Message -----
Sent: Sunday, May 21, 2000 12:46
AM
Subject: Re: [phoNet] Digest Number
25
I perfectly agree with you that language is innate (whether there
is an innate relationship between the language faculty and the hearing /
speaking ability is another issue) but this does not mean we have a universal
phonological structure in our head. I honestly don't know what we have in our
head, but I am convinced that most if not all of phonological 'universals' can
nicely be explained on a purely phonetic ground. What is innate is the
perfection of our ability to adapt ourselves to our phonatory
organs.
I don't think "universal phonology" is all encoded in our brains in
symbolic form. If by postulating explanation on purely phonetic grounds you
mean that our phonological preferences depend e.g. on the anatomy and
innervation of the vocal tract (which ARE genomically determined and
somewhat variable structures), or the logically inevitable physical
constraints on effective communication by acoustic means, I agree with you
on that point. Did you hear of that recent experiment in which young
ferrets' auditory and visual nerves were "switched round" so that the
auditory cortex had to learn to see -- and it did? If the communication
system of some early hominids was gestural, it was chiefly the visual cortex
that was engaged in understanding "linguistic" signals -- and the same
happens when we learn to read, or can't hear and communicate using sign
language (which also has an analogue of phonological structure!). Given the
versatility of human behaviour all learning is certainly data-driven and
cannot rely on parameter-setting in predetermined patterns. Which doesn't
mean that there are NO innate guidelines for pattern-recognition, also in
phonology.
>How would _you_ account for the total absence of clicks from
languages outside the African "Clickland"?
That is an interesting issue
-- I would attribute this to coincidence. Bantu languages in contact with
Khoi-san quickly acquired those clicks. If history had been different... maybe
the entire world would click !
True, but remember that the Nguni Bantu languages have very small
click inventories as compared with Khoisan. If I remember aright, Xhosa has
nine click phonemes, while in a Khoisan language a system with thirty clicks
would count as modest-sized!
The issue is -- why aren't clicks a part of the basic segmental
inventory of all languages if they are perceptually so easy to distinguish ?
Pronouncing a click on its own is easy, but to accompany it with a vowel is
more difficult articulatorily ; using clicks as consonnants is more difficult
than using them as simple sounds in communication.
You could say the same of other phonation
types, especially ejectives and implosives, which are however much more
common than clicks and can be found scattered here and there all over the
globe.
I have an idle proposal for the clicks in
Khoi-san languages (that is not testable but still nice to think about).
Language is more ancient than the homo sapiens (maybe even more than the homo
genus), it was independently invented progressively by different species of
hominids. The modern human languages are polygenetic and are descendent from
languages invented by different species of men. One of those proto-languages
used clicks and handed it down to now because clicks are, as you observed,
extremely resistant to sound change. The others did not. They didn't developp
those clicks either because, well, they did not think about it. Clicks already
had a use as a sound (like whistling). Their languages were already
developped, so they couln't have introduced an entire series of new
features in them. Introducing clicks in your language is not possible without
an explicit reason like borrowing. Click cannot come from phonetic changes in
normal consonnants.
I agree languages are most likely
HIGHLY polygenetic, though on the other hand I don't think the family-tree
metaphor has much validity for the early stages of linguistic evolution,
when languages probably formed entangled networks rather than neat families.
A split that existed, say, 200 kyr ago would have been obliterated not much
later owing to areal convergence. If clicks have been used in southern
Africa since time out of mind, it appears all the more likely that some kind
of barrier has prevented them from spreading farther north and out of
Africa.
Piotr