Hallo!

On Tue, 20 Apr 2010 15:08:27 +0200, Lars Finsen wrote:

> Den 19. apr. 2010 kl. 18.51 skreiv Jörg Rhiemeier:
> [...]
> > 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.
> >
> 
> You are probably right. Still we see certain societies with very  
> conservative cultures populated by modern Homo sapiens resist change  
> very effectively at least over hundreds of years.

Sure.  But hundreds of years are one thing; one and a half million
years (and that's how long the same kind of biface hand-axes were
in use) is something else entirely.  That science and technology
advance ever faster is of course in part caused by the growth of
population: thw more people are living on the planet, the more
gifted and inventive individuals you have.  Yet, I find it utterly
unbelievable that people as creative and inventive as we are, and
be they only a few hundred thousand, should not experience any
technological progress over more than a million years.

>       Inventive   
> individuals probably have a nightmare living with them, and/or  
> possibly they have been bred out. Such conservatism may be very  
> artificial of course, and can be counter-productive to survival with  
> the environment changes we have seen recently.
> 
> During those 100000 years of static material culture, the brain size  
> of Homo erectus increased dramatically, and there are those who claim  
> that their vocal organs changed as well. This indicates that the  
> complexity of speech gradually increased among them during this  
> period and was approaching the modern level by the end of it.

Likely.

> Before Homo e, what then? Well the tools of Homo habilis seems to  
> suggest their language was more sophisticated than Chimpanzeese. I  
> think evolution of language beyond that basic level is tied to the  
> evolution of a material culture. (See below.)

The key innovation of _H. habilis_ is certainly that he began
*making* tools, rather than just using found objects, which
_Australopithecus_ certainly already could do - after all, apes
do that as well.  I consider it likely that _H. habilis_ had a
more sophisticated "language" than chimpanzees.

> After Homo e, I think there must have been a (relatively) rapid  
> series of events leading to modern man fully formed, not just one  
> leap, because there are so many fundamental changes. After those  
> events, language has a complexity similar to ours, but before them,  
> that is, at the final phase of Homo erectus, I suspect it was more  
> different from modern language than the language of the final phase  
> of Homo e was from the initial phase. It's possible that this rapid  
> chain of events may have taken less than a 1000 years.

I also think that the change was rapid.  Some mutation opened up
new possibilities of grammar in early _Homo sapiens_, and then the
same kind of linguistic changes set in which are found in modern
languages, and resulted in the first fully-developed language.
That may have been about 75,000 years ago, when our species went
through a genetic bottleneck and barely avoided extinction.

Whatever kind of mutation it was, it also enabled us to think in a
new way, and the things we made started to change more rapidly.
(However, it probably was not the much-discussed FOXP2 mutation;
that was earlier, as the modern human form of the FOXP2 gene has
also been found in Neanderthals; in my opinion, the FOXP2 mutation
enabled us to produce articulated speech, but has little if anything
to do with grammar.)

> [...]
> > While, as I have said before, I am not a Whorfian,
> >
> 
> Yes, you repeatedly repeat this.

Oh, I am sorry about being so obstinate about it.  I sometimes lose
sight over what I have already said in a discussion like this, and
therefore repeat what I have said before.

>       Still, being a Whorfian I guess   
> means adhering fully to the whole Sapir-Whorf set of dogmas. But it  
> might be possible to embrace some of their ideas without embarrassing  
> oneself.

Sure.

> > this difference must have been reflected in their languages.
> >
> 
> The very character of modern language, alienating the word from the  
> concept, is crucial to the ability of alienating the mind from  
> immediate things and conceiving things that are not, but may come to  
> be. That has been my thinking for a long time.

Fair.  Language is not only a means of communication; it is also a
means of conceptualization, and Sapir and Whorf may not have been
completely off the mark.  Whichever way they may be connected,
language and thinking cannot be separated from each other, and just
as we speak with organs which also have other functions, the brain
circuitry we use to understand and formulate language probably has
other functions as well, and language and thought go hand in hand.

> Still there are animals without language showing inventiveness. Like  
> the tits learning to steal milk through aluminium bottle caps, for  
> example. And cats seem to be strong thinkers without having a real  
> language. There is a limited set of ways to open a door, for example,  
> and individual cats seem to settle for a favourite method of their  
> own after an early experimentation phase. Cats have some incredibly  
> predictable instincts and behavioural patterns which you can  
> recognise from individual to individual. And then they have an  
> amazing knack for developing peculiar personal habits and likings,  
> often apparently the result of some logical thinking.
> 
> At least, language may be a tool for inventiveness, but not a  
> necessary requirement for inventiveness.

Sure.

> [...]
> > 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.
> >
> 
> The description above is gleaned from studies of Chimpanzees in their  
> natural environment. As for grammar, they can't be expected to  
> understand the complexities of modern English. But their own language  
> has rudiments of grammar. There are two word classes:
> 
> 1. interjections - the emotion calls
> 2. nouns - the name calls and the food calls.
> 
> Of the subclasses of nouns, the name calls are undeclinable. But the  
> food calls have some grammar. At least they each contain two pieces  
> of information, the type of food, and its location. The location info  
> can be viewed as a kind of clitic, perhaps.
> 
> Anyway, that's what there's to it. Very simple system. But a huge  
> leap compared to most other animals.

Certainly.  This means that there is some grammar in chimpanzees;
however, that grammar is not recursive as human language grammars
are (or is it?).  Perhaps the point that distinguishes _Homo sapiens_
languages is recursive structure, i.e. the presence of rules of the
form X -> PXQ, such as subordinate clauses, or noun phrases with a
theoretically unlimited number of attributes.

> Whatever brought us from there to here? I think it is related to the  
> habit of standing on your feet and freeing your hands to handle a  
> large variety of objects.

That certainly was the first step, beginning already with
_Australopithecus_.

>       The idea of possession. Chimps don't have   
> possessions (the lucky bastards), except it's considered bad manner  
> to take picked fruit out of someone's hands (but done nonetheless).  
> Clearly the above simple system cannot cope with this. Do you need  
> pronouns if you don't have possessions? The Chimps do fine without  
> them. Dealing with a growing number of objects to handle and the  
> social consequences of this requires more words and soon more word  
> classes. More words require ways to better distinguish them from each  
> other, inducing the development of new phonemes. All of these  
> survival factors.
>
> The Chimps have taken their first steps towards releasing phonemes  
> from individual meaning, like our ancestors did many years ago. With  
> a growing material culture, symbolic words will take over from  
> instinctive signals and dominate over them, but not replace them  
> entirely, just add a new layer on top of them just as in so many  
> other aspects of biological evolution.

This makes very much sense.  Language grew with culture.

> > Even where
> chimpanzees are trained to understand simple English sentences, it is
> far from certain that they break up the words into phonemes.
>
> 
> Hm, I think it's far from certain that humans break up words any more  
> into phonemes when they learn them.

True.  The fact that we use a learned loanword such as _phoneme_ for
them shows that the notion is not basic to human life.

> >> 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.
> >
> 
> Well, you may be right. My comment was a bit rash. Although their  
> material culture is comparable to Homo erectus, it is conceivable  
> that their language could have advanced a bit more.

Yes, that is likely.

> > 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.
> >
> 
> Some composers, like Bach and Mozart, have made experiments applying  
> mathematics rigidly to music. Although I enjoy certain others of  
> their work, I find those pieces positively painful. Music speaks to  
> me most exclusively emotionally, but I reckon that many others have a  
> more varied approach.

Well observed.  Constructing music mathematically does not work
well.  The resulting pieces tend to be "soulless".

> > 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.
> >
> 
> There is a good reason for their complexity. As there are many  
> species of singing birds, there has to be a way to distinguish them  
> from each other. So you can't just tweet. There are several species  
> of whale, too.

Sure.  A female blackbird looking for a breeding partner would be
screwed if she could not distinguish the song of a male blackbird
from that of a male nightingale ;)
 
> Once you develop the complexity to meet that end, it's not such a big   
> step developing it further. Their singing probably doesn't have  
> precise meaning in the same sense that we use it in language. But  
> very evidently it does mean something to them. And to others who  
> listen in.

And even to those who don't know its "true" meaning.  Everybody probably
agrees that bird song is beautiful and heart-lightening!

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