Hallo!

On Mon, 19 Apr 2010 12:49:25 +0200, Lars Finsen wrote:

> Den 16. apr. 2010 kl. 20.24 skreiv Jörg Rhiemeier:
> [...]
> >    Hunting is hard and
> > dangerous work, even if it may be more "natural" to us than tilling a
> > field or staring at a computer screen.
> 
> Hunting may be hard and dangerous, still the participants enjoy it.

Yes.  It is evident even from the recreational behaviour of modern
post-industrial people.

> They are mostly men, and in many early farming societies we can  
> assume that farming is left to the women, as is the case in several  
> societies even today. I don't propose that hunter-gatherers live in  
> eternal happiness, but they are by no means entirely miserable  
> either.

No, they aren't.  They know happiness and grief, like everybody.

> Even the women seem reasonably content in the accounts that I   
> have read. And I would guess male farmers in non-modern societies are  
> considerably more miserable than male hunters. Farming is clearly  
> related to gathering, which is largely a female activity everywhere,  
> and this is probably the reason for the appearance of any matriarchal  
> societies in the past. Women became the chief providers. Hunting  
> became secondary. Men were required to help in the fields, and the  
> fun was over. The extremely patriachial societies that arose later in  
> some regions possibly is some kind of a revenge.

I seem to remember reading somewhere that in many agricultural societies,
men look after the animals and women work the fields.  I don't know
whether this pattern is really very widespread, though.

> > Even hunter-gatherers have an
> > incentive to improve their equipment and their methods in order to
> > make work easier and more efficient.  And then, fashions and artistic
> > styles change rapidly *without* any material need to change them.
> > It is just that people want to experience new things, at least
> > occasionally.
> 
> Yes, it's because new things are exciting. But if they clash against  
> the right way to do things, there may be a problem.

Right.  Many new ideas get nowhere because the community is not willing
to adopt them, but the idea of what is the right way of doing things
also changes over time.  It is in my opinion inconceivable that beings
who are as inventive and creative as we are continue to make the exact
same kind of stone tools over more than 100,000 years.

> > The things left behind by _Homo erectus_, Neanderthals and their ilk
> > show an extremely slow change in toolkit and techniques, and an
> > absence of objects made just for their artistic value.  What we find
> > are hand-axes, spears and other useful things; while they are often
> > indeed quite beautiful, their forms are entirely dictated by their
> > functions.  We find no clear examples of art, and no musical
> > instruments (while flutes have been found at Upper Paleolithic _Homo
> > sapiens_ sites from as early as 35,000 years ago).
> 
> They probably did not have as inventive genes as we do. The  
> exceptions that are found could be due to individual variations in  
> inventiveness, possibly from cross-breeding with our kin. But we see  
> large variations in inventiveness amongst us as well. And  
> inventiveness is probably related to language.

That is just what I think, too.  The key change that gave our species
an edge over the other hominid species, enough to displace all of them,
must have to do with a qualitatively greater inventiveness and creativity 
which enabled us to do things other hominids could not even *think* of.
While, as I have said before, I am not a Whorfian, this difference must
have been reflected in their languages.  They certainly could not talk
about things they could not imagine, and their imagination was apparently
restricted to the immediately perceivable real world.  They probably had
words for the things they knew, and their languages may have sounded like
human languages, but they probably had little grammar, and no way to make
hypothetical statements - they had only indicative and imperative moods
or something like that.

> [...]
> > The arbitariness of the sound-meaning relation is indeed a key feature
> > of human language, cultural transmission (as opposed to genetic
> > programming) another.  Another key feature is "duality of patterning":
> > the smallest building blocks of language utterances, the phonemes,
> > are meaningless in themselves; the smallest *meaningful* units, the
> > morphemes, usually consist of more than one phoneme.
> 
> "Duality of patterning" must be yet another linguistic term made up  
> to obscure concepts to dilettants. But the concept in this case, the  
> fact that the building blocks are meaningless in themselves, actually  
> is a vital clue to understanding the origin of language. Why didn't I  
> see it before? I must have been blind. (And why do I sound like  
> Hercule Poirot all of a sudden?)

Indeed, duality of patterning is the prerequisite of an open vocabulary.
Without it, you get either a language in which all morphemes are exactly
one phoneme long, which would be necessarily oligosynthetic, require a
huge phoneme inventory and would be broken by the first sound change it 
undergoes; or you'd have to throw out discreteness as well and get a
system of graded signs, where I don't see how it could have the full 
expressive power of language.

> Most animals have a fixed set of instinctive signals, consisting of  
> sound, chemicals, gestures, colours or whatever, and no way to extend  
> them.

Yes.  These systems are closed - new signs could not be added.  Also,
they lack grammar.

>       But in the case of Chimpanzees, it seems to have evolved a   
> little further. They do have a fixed set of calls to express their  
> emotions. But they also have personal names and calls to inform of  
> the character and location of foods, and those are made of a mixture  
> of various emotion calls, *and a small number of other calls that  
> aren't connected to any emotion*.

At least in captivity, chimpanzees are capable of learning systems with
hundreds of arbitrary symbols.  Yet, the experience shows little evidence
that they understand grammar.  A chimpanzee asking for a banana may "say" 
"give me banana" or something like "me banana banana give give give".
Also, most of the sign systems used in training chimpanzees do not have
the property of duality of patterning; usually, they are some kind of
logographic symbols (called "lexigrams" by primatologists).  Even where
chimpanzees are trained to understand simple English sentences, it is
far from certain that they break up the words into phonemes.  After all,
even dogs can learn to understand a few dozen English words.
 
> So they seem to be on their way to a true "duality of patterning".  
> The step that we have made from the position of the Chimps actually  
> is very small in comparison to the leap they have made from the  
> strict emotion call set situation. You just have to extend the idea  
> that they came up with. Our own ancestors probably were at the same  
> stage as them once, at least I think it is very likely considering  
> how closely related we are.

Certainly, the great apes are among the smartest animals that ever
lived on this planet, and their communicative skills are a good deal
more sophisticated than those of most other animals.  Yet, there is
no evidence of grammar, and no clear evidence of duality of patterning.

> Den 16. apr. 2010 kl. 20.51 skreiv R A Brown:
> >
> > Steve Mithen proposed that Neanderthals had an elaborate system of  
> > communication which was more musical than modern human language,  
> > and which predated the separation of language and music into two  
> > separate modes of cognition. I would love him to be right        :)
> 
> I don't think he was right. Rather their language was more like  
> Chimpanzeese.

That is in my opinion an overstatement.  I think Neanderthal language
was more similar to Homo sapiens language than to "Chimpanzeese" in
many respects.  As I said above, it may have sounded quite much like
human language, with vowels, consonants and syllables, even with words
that are more or less arbitrary in their sound-meaning relation; but
with more restricted grammar.  In this important point it may indeed
have been more ape-like than human-like.

>       And Chimps as far as I know don't sing. I think singing  
> is taking the development in the opposite direction to language.  
> Singing after all addresses the emotional instead of the logical  
> compartment of the mind. We humans must consider ourself lucky to  
> have both. But our understanding of exactly how music communicates  
> emotion seems still to be very poor compared to our understanding of  
> language. Composers still seem to mostly use the instinctive  
> approach, along with some empirism.

Yes.  It is impossible to assign a "truth value" to a piece of music,
because music expresses and appeals to *emotions* rather than making
statements about the real or a imagined world.

>       Perhaps that's why we still don't   
> understand birds or dolphins, who have taken the other road and  
> developed emotion calls into singing instead of logical  
> communication. Wonder if we'll ever know to what extent.

This may be the case.  We are far from understanding the songs of birds
and cetaceans.  What we know is that they are often very complex; their
*meaning*, however, if that is the right words, remains unknown.

> Humans still have some emotion calls, of course. And phonemes are  
> only in principle exempt from meaning. That some such instinctive  
> meaning remains can be seen in some a priori words, for example  
> "twit" and "twat", where the former, at least they way I perceive it,  
> means a silly, harmless person, while the latter is a more obnoxious  
> one, while still silly. (Hopefully, I have at least been promoted to  
> the latter by now.)

Indeed.  Communicating emotions is an important facet of language use,
and words expressing emotional states often behave in odd ways, being
often quite iconic.  While logic plays a great role in language, it is
in my opinion not possible to reduce language to logic.  This is a point
where loglangs will always fail - either they have to walk the Vulcan
way and suppress emotions, or they have to admit them but thereby cease
to be purely logical languages.

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