Science Forums 2

[LogicTech]

Originally Posted by Buffy

Actually you're imposing a *lot* of restrictions on the term "language" that really have nothing to do with language per se.

No, I'm just stating what the traditional definition of language has been. Communication and language don't mean quite the same thing, as we use language as a way to communicate.

Here you run into trouble because as experiments like those with Koko the gorilla have shown, many if not most primates actually have a pretty good handle on abstractions of objects and ideas *without* a language like ours. ......


Now obviously what we do is a little bit more sophisticated, but the crux of the problem in answering your question is that many of the distinctions here are of *degree* and not *kind*: that makes it virtually impossible to pick a "day the universe changed."

......Things like an "oral tradition" really are a confluence of intellectual, linguistic and social components each of which evolved over a long period of time.

The great apes are also known to understand numbers too, and to be able to recognize themselves in the mirror too. But I never said that they couldn't have abstractions, but rather that their ability to express them is rather very limited.

Also, there is quite a bit of evidence that language does indeed effect one's way of thinking, and the way you understand the world. So, language and abstract thought are very related. Since oral traditions does require a very sophisticated way of making abstractions about the world around them, they are certainly tied to the languages in which they are expressed. Social and intellectual components just come as an afterthought.

Now, while animals certainly do and can have abstractions, it's nowhere near the level that humans could do. I'm pretty certain my cat doesn't have a concept of the world beyond my house and backyard...

As a result, picking a date like 10,000 years ago is really getting into something akin to arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, because everyone is going to have a different opinion about which combination of things are important and what point that that combination was surpassed in degree when there is absolutely no evidence that we can even conceive of proving this.

Not at all actually. Angels don't have a meaningful existence beyond our own imagination, and certainly cannot be seen in nature.

However, there is boatloads of evidence that modern ideas of art, culture, language, religion, music, empirical thought, etc. originated some 50k-60k years ago, as that's when they all appeared rather abruptly. This also coincides right around the time when humans began to migrate out of Africa, which is what makes it so intriguing.

Now, there are theories that state that all of that might have arisen gradually throughout modern homo-sapians existence, but there are problems that need to be addressed, such as the fact that very early on their behavior was little different from other species from the "homo" genus.

Read this: Behavioral modernity - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


This is all moot anyway, because I don't particularly care when, but how it had arisen, and why seemingly so abruptly? Why not 100,000 years ago, or among other genus...

I'm unfortunately too lazy to look this up, but there was indeed some stuff published in the last year that showed that Neandertals and other homo species physical characteristics necessary for language, but more importantly that the DNA recovered included elements that are related directly to the development of speech centers in the brain.

Well, I would like to see this. Because, as far as I know, that is actually disputed and the argument is far from settled. Besides which, even if their anatomical structures were similar, that doesn't necessarily mean that they were capable, or that they did indeed produce a meaningful language. And this notion that they didn't is strongly supported by archaeological evidence, in the types of tools they built, their behaviors, etc. Neanderthals didn't produce any art, nor did they display any noticeable technological progress (i.e. they never made any watercraft, unlike modern humans). In fact, the only time they did start displaying any of these behaviors was when the Cro-Magnons came along.

As for the 50k years, this article is where I got the figure from: Klein: Behavioral and Biological Origins of Modern Humans 3 of 3

You will notice that modern behaviors and a recognizable culture originated around that time. It is therefore likely that language also appeared on the scene too, as language is very heavily influenced by a given culture.

You need to be careful about being overly anthropocentric about this sort of thing. It's the very thing that has held back all sorts of areas of science from anthropology to sociology: many behaviors and traits in "lower" species are in fact very closely tied with our own behaviors, but we like to think that we do these things only because we're "smart", something that unfortunately we all to often prove isn't the case!

But I'm not disputing that though. The fact that we have many traits in common with animals in very obvious and well known. But our cognition, and the way we think about things, is certainly very different. "Smart" is a very subjective term by the way.

You have to realize that while animals can certainly reason, communicate, make abstractions, use/make tools etc. They don't have a culture (as Michio Kaku put it when trying to recognize sentient life on other planets on a T.V. show I once saw). They don't have a philosophical tradition, or a way of generalizing or understanding relationships in the world around them. And they certainly appear incapable of coming up abstractions to describe things.

Dogs can be trained to respond to certain commands like "sit", but I doubt they actually understand what that actually means, other than the fact that when you hear a certain noise, you must sit down. Apes can learn sign language, and there is a monkey in Japan (I forget the name of it) that was documented to have "discovered" that geysers are a way to keep clean, but only after humans have trained them to do that. And you can certainly program a computer to be human like. BUT, could they have come up with such things independently? It is very, very unlikely....

The phrase "if you have enough monkeys on a keyboard, they will eventually produce Shakespeare" illustrates this well known fact...

In order to justify the stance that "our" language is the only "real" kind of language, many do as you did here:

If I were creating a computer language, I'd agree with you, but actually probably the vast "history" of "human language" probably had no syntax or grammar at all, just nouns and verbs with no necessary structure, and if any, probably localized to tribes. This is one of the reasons why its so easy to trace the lineage of languages and explains the huge differences between Indo-European languages from Oriental and Native American languages which truly bear no resemblance to one another.

Language is well defined though, there is nothing ambiguous about it. And the fact that there is a structure to all languages ever found in all human tribes and societies, even isolated ones, clearly contradicts your statement. It is very clear, from a linguistic point of view, that it was developed independently. But they certainly have a structure and a set of rules that allows us to derive meaning from them. This is a universal trait in all human societies, even the most isolated ones.

Again, every single modern human society ever found has a recognizable language with a syntax, and with that language has a recognizable culture, philosophical/intellectual tradition, oral tradition (or written once they learned how), etc. And can be traced for tens of thousands of years.

So, I don't see how you can conclude that the earliest languages didn't have a syntax, because that's a requirement of language. All this shows is that you underestimate just how intelligent early humans were, as they very clearly recognized the need for a syntax. What I'm wondering is how they derived such principles, and why so abruptly (or was it that abrupt, maybe the rules just kind of fell together very early on before there was a need to formalize them)? Why didn't it happen earlier in time, why did they wait 80,000 years for it to happen...

Again: "abstract ideas" is not a linguistic issue, and many lower species have them, so if this is your way to distinguish "true language" it really falls apart.

Read above, that's not quite what was being argued. This is basically a strawman on your part.

There's mounting evidence that this is not the case, as was part of the recent research I mentioned earlier: we've actually identified language processing parts of the brain, and they've been around quite a while....

You mentioned it, but cited no sources. And when I looked, it is actually an issue that is far from settled. The brain size and anatomy might have been there, but that doesn't mean that the brain structure was. Read the links I provided, this notion is very clear from archaeological evidence. Rather, all the evidence very clearly supports the idea that it came rather abruptly and is a phenomenon specific only to modern humans.

I believe that justice is instinct and innate, the moral sense is as much a part of our constitution as the threat of feeling, seeing and hearing,
Buffy

That's great, but rather irrelevant and off topic on this thread....