Piotr, our esteemed associate, is a linguist. I admire the discipline of linguistics on many levels and some of my professional work has been in formal languages (computer languages, DNA languages). Noam Chomsky was noted for his contributions to computers, languages and psychology. Chomsky’s work was my first and only formal introduction to linguistics.
Piotr and I have different views of origins, and creationists have viewed language as also a special creation. But I’ve always enjoyed his discussion of languages.
One thing I will admit, I’ve been astonished at how rapidly and radically the English language has evolved in the history of the language. For example, the battle records of the Battle of Agincourt in 1414 are written in a way that is completely unrecognizable to me.
The English in the time of the poet Shakespeare and the King James Bible in the 1600’s is a little more recognizable to me. The English of the 1800’s is noticeably different from the 1600’s. Even watching old movies, I can hear subtle changes in accents. So it seems to me, from my limited perspective, languages can evolve and change quickly.
Whatever one thinks of origins of language, I found this article compelling:
http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2015/rapid-rise-human-language-0331
At some point, probably 50,000 to 100,000 years ago, humans began talking to one another in a uniquely complex form. It is easy to imagine this epochal change as cavemen grunting, or hunter-gatherers mumbling and pointing. But in a new paper, an MIT linguist contends that human language likely developed quite rapidly into a sophisticated system: Instead of mumbles and grunts, people deployed syntax and structures resembling the ones we use today.
“The hierarchical complexity found in present-day language is likely to have been present in human language since its emergence,” says Shigeru Miyagawa, Professor of Linguistics and the Kochi Prefecture-John Manjiro Professor in Japanese Language and Culture at MIT, and a co-author of the new paper on the subject.
…
Miyagawa has an alternate hypothesis about what created human language: Humans alone, as he has asserted in papers published in recent years, have combined an “expressive” layer of language, as seen in birdsong, with a “lexical” layer, as seen in monkeys who utter isolated sounds with real-world meaning, such as alarm calls. Miyagawa’s “integration hypothesis” holds that whatever first caused them, these layers of language blended quickly and successfully.
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Miyagawa’s integration hypothesis is connected intellectually to the work of other MIT scholars, such as Noam Chomsky, who have contended that human languages are universally connected and derive from our capacity for using syntax. In forming, this school of thought holds, languages have blended expressive and lexical layers through a system Chomsky has called “Merge.”
Sal,
I know you’re a YEC, but do you also take the Tower of Babel story literally?
I have never been surprised by the speed at which languages change. As a kid in the 60s, we had phrases and words that were totally foreign to our parents. I think that this was part of growing up, and one of the reasons that language changes so rapidly.
But it is not limited to adolescent rebellion. Just look at the words that have entered our vocabulary due to technology. There are completely new words like “google”, “hard drive” “download”, etc.. But there are also words that have also been redefined. “Program”, “access”, and many others.
We may think that this is a new phenomenon, but this would be wrong. There is a long history of English words completely flipping their meaning from what they used to be. “Nice” is an example.
In the medical field, we also have words who’s meaning has shifted from their original. “Idiot”, “moron” and “retarded” are examples of this.
I don’t really have a point to make other than the fact that language is flexible. The “language” that is the most flexible is likely to be the one to dominate.
Chomsky strikes me as being of the irreducible complexty school. He simply never accepted the idea that complex systems could emerge stepwise. The Behe of linguistics.
He also had little or no use for connotation. I’d like to hear someone defend him.
It used to be believed, back in the 19th century, that language changes (such as sound shifts) typically take several generations to be implemented, and are too slow to be observable directly. That was partly because linguists fixed their attention on idealised standard languages, largely ignoring synchronic variation (dialectal, social and individual).
We are poorly adapted for perceiving frequency changes. If, say, 28% of people in an English-speaking community pronounce the /t/ in often, 42% don’t, and 30% vacillate between the two pronunciation, and if twenty years later the respective proportions are 50:26:24, the change is likely to be below the level of social awareness (though sociolinguists will detect a lot of interesting change going on). Today, the study od language change as an ongoing process is something my students do as their MA projects. They collect speech samples “in the field”, identify competing variants (e.g. spectrographically different vowels), and study their distribution depending on sociolinguistic variables (age, gender, social status, etc.).
Classical generativism began with the same simplifying assumptions as 19th-century historical linguistics. If you concentrate on the inner competence of “an ideal speaker” rather than the population behaviour of a whole language community and its communication networks, you will gain no insight into language evolution. It would be like carrying out a careful study of a single sequenced genome, ignoring population genetics, selection, drift, recombination, linkage, population structure, gene flow, etc.
The rates of language change may look surprising, but that’s because people (including, I suppose, most historical linguists) assume that language is “inherited” in a quasi-biological way: you get it from your parents and hand it on to your children. It’s a naive mistake, in my opinion. Linguistic elements have much shorter “replication cycles”, not constrained by biological generation times. People constantly re-adjust their linguistic behaviour to their social environment, learning new vocabulary, modifying their use of syntactic patterns, adapting to pronunciation changes, and — last but not least — becoming familiar with other dialects and languages, and borrowing stuff from them.
petrushka,
Chomsky’s views have evolved somewhat more recently — I believe he’s pretty open-minded — but indeed his “classical” view was that some features of syntax are irreducibly complex and can’t have evolved gradually. Recursiveness either isn’t there (and you can’t handle embedded structures) or is there (and you can embed things ad infinitum: I know that you believe that Mary claims that we imagine that everybody knows that Mike told Tom that George was in love with someone that he’d met at that party that we had last month). He basically believed that the innate linguistic faculty as we know it sprang out of nothing by some sort of evolutionary miracle.
As Theodosius Dobzhansky remarked “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution” and the evolution of language is undoubtedly biological. Language has to have co-evolved with increase in brain capacity both to control all the appartus necessary for speech and hearing and to process the information transmitted and received.and the adaptations for speech production such as the hyoid bone. The hyoid bone and large brain are seen in H erectus fossils from half a million years ago so I guess calling language evolution rapid depends whether you consider 500,000 years rapid.
The analogies between biological and language evolution are easy to come up with. Off the top of my head. Luca and proto language buried in deep time and direct evidence non-existent. The pattern of speciation and extinction of language is observed. The recent explosion of global communication has allowed a remix of “alleles” so speciation of English (into US speak and Aussie speak, for example) seems to have halted. I’m sure others can think of more.
Oh yes! There’s the element of sexual selection.
Sal,
I haven’t read Miyagawa’s article yet, but it seems to me that the essence of his claim is this: human language arose rapidly through the reorganisation and exaptation of many preexisting structures, present also in other animals (you may call them preadaptations). Not unlike avian flight. I’ll be able to comment in more detail when I get down to reading the paper.
Alan Fox,
The rise of language is the last of the “evolutionary transitions” proposed by Maynard Smith and Szathmáry (note that they regard it as part of biological evolution, and not just something vaguely analogous).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Major_Transitions_in_Evolution
I’ve read that the ability to learn the rule for regular verbs is absent in some people. Such people speak normally, but learn the tenses of all verbs as special cases.
Could be one of those bullshit pop science articles on the back page of Discover magazine.
I’ve observed language acquisition in three children, and would argue that there is tremendous variability in the order of learning language features.
By no means. See Van der Lely & Ullman (2001).
Note also that our ability to handle recursion is a tricky business and we shouldn’t overestimate its power. Sentences like this one cause no problems:
But here’s a similar sentence of the same syntactic complexity:
It isn’t just stylistically awkward but practically unparsable by an ordinary language user. Even if you write it down and identify the embedded clauses, it still doesn’t feel like something produced naturally by humans:
I asked Sal:
Judging from this, the answer seems to be ‘yes’:
Sal (here):
Writing symbols? Even today, there are hundreds of languages without a written standard. My mother tongue began to be written down regularly less than one thousand years ago. In many parts of the world writing was introduced much more recently by European colonists. Language existed for hundreds of thousands of years without any “writing symbols”.
And what’s wrong with the “words first, grammar later” scenario, or the lexicon and syntactic patterns evolving in parallel? A grammar without a lexicon would admittedly be strange, but you can communicate quite well using single words or very simple phrases (plus body language) without any sophisticated syntax. Have you ever gone shopping abroad?
Creationists don’t say language was a special creation.
There is nothing impressive about language.
Its the thinking being behind the language that is impressive.
Our languages are no different then our cats.
They are just segregated sound combinations mutually memorized.
In fact a poster here shows that my reorganizing a sentence. same words but not easily understoof. this because we memorized the order of the words and not just have memorized meaning of words.
Its all mere memory operation.
Evolutionists have the problem of have this complex memorized sound system coming out of dumb apes and that very slowly. Grunts to grammer is very unlikely in a evolving society of primates.
IEvolutionists smell this is a problem and so a PE idea of fast/stasis is proposed in the paper mentioned.
either primates were already smarter then their sounds/language was up to communicating or their language/sounds was advanced to their smarts.
no way around it.
Adam spoke right away and so his language must be a logical conclusion of combining thoughts. God didn’t create human language. Then babel changed everything but in a logical diffusion.
Any child can learn any language they first grow up in.
This because its about memory and the languages are not that complicated.
We write because there are few sounds to have figures for. We use few sounds.
Language complexity is overrated.
The thinking being, called humans, are underrated for complex thinking.
Our languages don’t do justice to our brilliance of thought.
In fact thats why our tones of voice are as important as words.
From our tones comes another language called music.
Genesis is the lead paper on this stuff.
See? Robert can ignore the rules of syntax and punctuation and still get a simple message across (well, almost).
One which also needs to pack considerably more evolution and divergence into 6,000 years than that proposed by any ‘evolutionist’.
Keiths,
Sorry for the delay in responding. The answer is “yes”, I personally believe the Tower of Babel account. There are some figurative descriptions as far as the tower reaching to heaven and man being able to have unhindered progress. Imho, the world trade center was taller. However, I do believe the arrival of language was miraculous and sudden.
There is probably little in the way of empirical proof at this time, and secondly since humans are also intelligent designers, there is not necessarily an absolute a need for a miraculous God to create human languages. Humans make computer languages, they create coded languages, etc.
The only morsel of some hint of the Tower of Babel account being true is the decrease in the vocabulary of some languages over time. The first thing to do of course is to establish whether this is really happening, and for how long has it been happening. I don’t know, I defer to linguists on that issue.
ST, do you believe the arrival of Italian or English was sudden? Or modern Greek?
Piotr,
Thanks for you comments.
Not very much, once in Kuwait, but thankfully many spoke English. Lot’s of Filipinos too in Kuwait, so I could occasionally communicate in Tagalog. Scary experience to me being in a country where I can’t understand the language. You are braver than I. 🙂
That would be computer languages! They do have a minimal lexicon after implementation known as “reserved words”, but after that, the programmer creates his own lexicon. My understanding is computer languages are usually conceived of in terms of grammar first, lexicon second.
When I used to play in casinos with a partner, we created a coded language to communicate information. It was basically grammarless lexicon. I used this to communicate to my partner who usually drew less scrutiny because she was female.
Coded Gesture: hands to the neck (like choking, but not to overtly)
Translation: leave gracefully after a few hands
Coded Gesture: hand to the neck (like throat cutting, but not too overtly)
Translation: I must leave urgently, casino hostile to my presence
Coded Phrase: “Good luck!”
Translation: most of the Aces and 10s are out of the deck, casino has the advantage, lower your bet
Coded Phrase: “…blackjack…”
Translation: most of the Aces and 10s are still in the deck, player has the advantage, put out a maximum bet
No.
I think many languages evolved from ancestral languages.
I’ve been astonished at the rapid evolution of written languages. Hebrew symbols, Egyptian hieroglyphics, etc. I’m frankly amazed we can still decode ancient manuscripts even for known languages because some of the symbols have changed so much.
One word that I often hear in the King James Bible, but which is no longer used in modern language:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ye_(pronoun)
Brings home the point how rapidly and radically a language can change.
Natural language does not look at all like the kinds of languages that humans design. In fact, it does not seem at all designed. But then, again, biological organisms don’t look designed either.
Spoken languages evolve much faster than written language. Many varieties of English have changed so much in the last few hundred years that it takes great effort for people to understand each other. I cannot understand the spoken language of many British and Americans. Not to mention Scots and Irish. Australian is okay with me.
No one designs these changes. In fact, the language designers usually try to prevent change. Efforts to design languages — such as Esperanto — fail the test of natural selection. they simply don’t propagate.
On the other hand, internet typos, such as pwn, teh, doge, and LULZ start as accidents and become common through selection. There is no predictability or intentionality behind which neologisms become common.
stcordova,
Nothing very radical here. You was the inherited accusative/dative of ye. They probably sounded much the same when unstressed, and the oblique form tended to creep into the nominative. There are sporadic examples of you used as the subject of a sentence already in the 14th century, so the replacement must have taken at least about 300 years (ten generations of speakers) to complete.
At the same time the old 2sg. pronoun thou/thee began to disappear, getting replaced by the “polite” plural you. The latter change was more radical, but hardly sudden. The frequency of thou decreased from generation to generation for a few centuries, until it became obsolescent in spoken English, and then came to be regarded as rare, poetic and formal (a value reinforced by its use in the King James Version).
Paradoxically, it went out of use in the 16th/17th centuries because it was too familiar (and therefore unsuitable for polite address and likely to cause offence). You can see in King Lear how Lear switches between parental/condescending thou and formal/polite you when addressing his daughters, depending on his mood and the formality of the situation.
Thee and you seem to be the English equivalent of sie and du.
Interesting that the formal/informal connotation seems reversed.
Regarding thou/you the usage seems to have been influenced by Norman French and the tu/vous distinction which is an absolute minefield for non-native French speakers. The strangest example I saw was a bedroom scene and girl, slightly younger than bloke, in the midst of heat and passion, says:
Je vous aime!
which translates as;
I love you, but you are a little older than me and we only recently met!
ETA this was a film I was watching.
I’ll let Chomsky parse that one.
petrushka,
It’s accidental (and misleading) similarity. Actually, German du is a cognate (homologue) of thou (and, by the way, of Latin tu, Russian ty, etc.). German 2pl. ihr/euch/euer are homologous to English ye/you/your, with minor complications.
Modern German polite Sie is of course of 3pl. origin, unrelated to any Modern English pronoun. The North Sea Germanic dialects such as English, Frisian and Old Saxon had a different set of third-person pronouns, not shared with High German. By the way, Modern English they/them/their represent horizontal transfer from Scandinavian. They spread from the Norse-influenced dialects of the Danelaw, replacing the native 3pl. pronoun hi/hem/here (Chaucer still used the old oblique/possessive forms with initial h-, though he already had the borrowed nominative thei).
Here’s a light summary of changing norms in French:
Quote:
Just like Elizabethan English (except that the democratic tu seems to be winning).
Since the OP Is asking about Chomsky and his descendents, I seriously ask how Chomsky analyses social status signifiers, particularly as they are in transition.
petrushka,
Sociopragmatics and language change are of precious little interest to hardline generativists ;). As long as both Je t’aime and Je vous aime are “grammatical” (when addressed to a single person), they don’t care in what situations they are used.
I haven’t read much Chomsky. Most of what I read is about him. I have the feeling that he treats human language as something like a computer language.
Which I think misses about 90 percent of communicated meaning. Except in the most formal writing.
But formal writing — law, science, apologetics, philosophy — is rather recent in human history. And judging from results, does not avoid miscommunication.
ETA misread double negative
I’ve heard that but rather:
Comme vous voulez
In the south, absolutely!
Piotr Gasiorowski,
Thou(also rendered tha)/thee remain alive in Yorkshire English, and retain some sense of differential formality. There is a passage which I think is in James Herriot where an irritable elder says to a youngster who has presumptuously used the wrong form of address: “Tha thees ’em when tha’s thee and not ‘afore!” (I may have misremembered the precise form). It is dying out; Herriot was writing about the 1930’s.
Allan Miller,
Petyt’s 1985 study of dialects and accents in three West Riding industrial towns (Bradford, Halifax, Huddersfield) found that tha ‘thou’ and thee were still alive in colloquial speech there. 50% of his sample (about 75% men and 25% women across different age groups) used the T-forms on some occasions (“in a bit of fun”, “with my mates”, “to old people”, “when I’m in a temper”, etc.). However, only a minority were aware of the “familiar” force of ‘thou’. Some rural areas are more conservative as regards this tutoiement: there are categories of people tha’d better not “thee and thou”, lad.
Some Quakers in the US still use ‘thee’, but in an odd way: it acts as both subject and object, and the associated verb form is the same as the third-person singular: “thee is”, “thee has”.
To someone like me who was raised on the King James Bible, that usage is like nails on chalkboard.
There’s even some intra-Quaker conflict on the question. From a 1938 article on the subject:
Piotr Gasiorowski, ,
Yes, it may have been “Tha thous ’em when tha’s thou and not ‘afore!” – Google couldn’t locate the actual passage. It is often used ironically, particularly when aping Yorkshire speech – “sithee down, lad”, “get thissen’ ‘ome”. People often ape my own Liverpool accent with words I have never heard a Liverpudlian actually say – other than ironically!
There is an interesting parallel with the thorny old issue of morality when it comes to grammar. I am what my kids call a Grammar Nazi – there are certain popular forms that really grate, and I am not shy of saying so. It is ‘as if’ there is an objective standard, though of course there is not. We cleave to that which we have learnt as ‘correct’.
In partial defense of grammar nazis (and usage nazis in general): while language evolution is inevitable, some linguistic changes really are undesirable, such as lost distinctions.
For example, the meaning of ‘infer’ is lamentably expanding to include ‘imply’, rendering sentences such as the following ambiguous:
In the long run, language evolves so that needed distinctions can be conveniently drawn, but the changes can be annoying in the short run.
Allan,
The pecking order of British accents is mysterious to me. I know that RP is at the top, and Brummie near the bottom, but not much else. How does the Liverpool accent stack up, and did the success of the Beatles affect its rank?
Salvador believes the account of the tower of Babel in Genesis is to be taken literally. Except it’s not to be taken literally.
Salvador apparently also believes that language first originated at the Tower of Babel.
” I do believe the arrival of language was miraculous and sudden. ”
How on earth did people communicate before the Tower of Babel?
Salvador:
Pathetic.
Mung,
Give Uncle Richard a kiss. He misses you.
Only Quaker joke I know, learned at a Quaker college.
A farmer/pioneer jumps out of bed upon hearing an intruder, shoulders his hunting rifle and aims at the miscreant. Friend, he says, I would not harm thee for all the world, but thou standest where I am about to shoot.
keiths, upon your second coming at UD, were you once again banned?
shame
You mean “shame” that Barry Arrington once again behaves like a banana-republic dictator, shutting down any dissent against himself, pretending to be the “beloved leader”, and keeping the populace ignorant of BA’s action behind the screen?
Yeah, that. A shame.
That’s right hotie.
I’ve never been banned fromTSZ
Is that because the rules here at TSZ are so lax that any anyone can say anything?
No one has ever been banned from TSZ!
Not true. Your BFF Joe Gallien is the one and only person ever banned at TSZ and that was for posting a link to some rather disgusting hard core porn.
Lizzie isn’t like the egotistical clown who runs UD and who bans posters just for disagreeing with him. Even blowhards like the regulars at UD are allowed to post their ideas here. Most won’t because they don’t have the dictator of UD to protect their anti-science idiocy from rebuttals.
righteous mods at tsz!
All hail righteousness!
Ban the unrighteous!