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The Origins & Evolution Of Human Language / Languages

Technology Brings New Insights To One Of The Oldest Middle Eastern Languages Still Spoken
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 112140.htm


Tablets uncovered at Persepolis in Iran are covered with writing in Aramaic. The archive, being studied at the University of Chicago, provides new insights on the language, which has been written and spoken in the Middle East continuously since ancient times. (Credit: Oriental Institute, University of Chicago)

ScienceDaily (Oct. 16, 2009) — New technologies and academic collaborations are helping scholars at the University of Chicago analyze hundreds of ancient documents in Aramaic, one of the Middle East’s oldest continuously spoken and written languages.

Members of the West Semitic Research Project at the University of Southern California are helping the University’s Oriental Institute make very high-quality electronic images of nearly 700 Aramaic administrative documents. The Aramaic texts were incised in the surfaces of clay tablets with styluses or inked on the tablets with brushes or pens. Some tablets have both incised and inked texts.

Discovered in Iran, these tablets form one of the largest groups of ancient Aramaic records ever found. They are part of the Persepolis Fortification Archive, an immense group of administrative documents written and compiled about 500 B.C. at Persepolis, one of the capitals of the Achaemenid Persian Empire. Archaeologists from the Oriental Institute discovered the archive in 1933, and the Iranian government has loaned it to the Oriental Institute since 1936 for preservation, study, analysis and publication.

The Persepolis texts have started to provide scholars with new knowledge about Imperial Aramaic, the dialect used for international communication and record-keeping in many parts of the Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian empires, including parts of the administration at the imperial court of Persepolis. These texts have even greater value because they are so closely connected with documents written in other ancient languages by the same administration at Persepolis.

“We don’t have many archives of this size. A lot of what’s in these texts is entirely fresh, but this also changes what we already knew,” said Annalisa Azzoni, an assistant professor at the Divinity School of Vanderbilt University. Azzoni is a specialist on ancient Aramaic and is now working with the Persepolis Fortification Archive Project at the Oriental Institute. “There are words I know were used in later dialects, for example, but I didn’t know they were used at this time or this place, Persia in 500 B.C. For an Aramaicist, this is quite an important discovery.”

Clearer images delivered more quickly

Scholars from the West Semitic Research Project at the University of Southern California helped the Persepolis Fortification Archive Project build and install an advanced electronic imaging laboratory at the Oriental Institute. Together, the two projects are making high-quality images of the Aramaic texts and the seal impressions associated with those texts. They are distributing the new images to the international research community through the Internet.

Inked and incised texts pose different problems that call for different imaging solutions. Making high-resolution scans under polarized and filtered light reveals the ink without interference from stains and glare, and sometimes shows faded characters that cannot be seen in ordinary daylight. Using another advanced imaging technique, called Polynomial Texture Mapping, researchers are able to see surface variations under variable lighting, revealing the marks of styluses and even the traces of pens in places where the ink itself has disappeared.

Distributing the results online will give worldwide communities of philologists and epigraphers images that are almost as good as the original objects?and in some cases actually clearer than the originals?to study everything from vocabulary and grammar to the handwriting habits of individual ancient scribes.

Researcher Marilyn Lundberg and her colleagues from the West Semitic Research Project built two Polynomial Texture Mapping devices from scratch at the Oriental Institute. They trained Persepolis Fortification Archive Project workers in using them, and also in using filtered light with a camera equipped with a high-resolution scanning device. Now a stream of raw images is uploaded every day to a dedicated server maintained by Humanities Research Computing at Chicago, then uploaded for post-processing at the University of Southern California. Fully processed imagery is available on InscriptiFact, the online application of the West Semitic Research Project, and in the Online Cultural Heritage Research Environment, the online application of the Persepolis Fortification Archive Project.

Seeing the whole picture

The Polynomial Texture Mapping apparatus looks a bit like a small astronomical observatory, with a cylindrical based topped by a hemispherical dome. The camera takes a set of 32 pictures of each side of the tablet, with each shot lit with a different combination of 32 lights set in the dome. After post-processing, the PTM software application knits these images to allow a viewer sitting at a computer to manipulate the apparent direction, angle and intensity of the light on the object, and to introduce various effects to help with visualization of the surface.

“This means that the scholar isn’t completely dependent on the photographer for what he sees anymore,” said Bruce Zuckerman, Director of the West Semitic Research Project and its online presence, InscriptiFact. “The scholar can pull up an image on the screen and relight an object exactly as he wants to see it. He can look at different parts of the image with different lighting, to cast light and shadow across even the faintest, shallowest marks of a stylus or pen on the surface, and across every detail of a seal impression.”

“This is a wonderful way to look at seal impressions,” said Elspeth Dusinberre, another Persepolis Fortification Project collaborator. Dusinberre, an associate professor of classics at the University of Colorado, is studying the imagery and the use of seals impressed on the Aramaic tablets. “Some of the impressions are faint, or incomplete, on curved surfaces or damaged surfaces. Sometimes Aramaic text is written across them. You need to be able to move the light around to highlight every detail, to see the whole picture.”

The Persepolis Fortification Archive also includes about 10,000 to 12,000 other tablets and fragments with cuneiform texts in Elamite?a few hundred of them with short secondary texts in Aramaic. There are also about 4,000 to 5,000 others with impressions of seals, but no texts, and there are a few unique documents in other languages and scripts, including Greek, Old Persian and Phrygian.

“That’s what makes this group of Aramaic texts so extraordinary,” Stolper said. “From one segment of the Persepolis Fortification Archive, the Elamite texts, we know a lot about conditions around Persepolis at about 500 B.C. When we can add a second stream of information, the Aramaic texts, we’ll be able to see things in a whole new light. They add a new dimension of the ancient reality.”

Impacts are far-reaching

The collaboration between the Oriental Institute at Chicago and the West Semitic Research Project at Southern California began with support from a substantial grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 2007. To date, the teams have made high-quality images of almost all the monolingual Aramaic Fortification tablets. The next phase of the work, supported by a second Mellon grant that runs through 2010, will make images of the short Aramaic notes written on cuneiform tablets, seal impressions on uninscribed tablets and previously unrecorded Elamite cuneiform texts.

The tablets have been studied since they came to Chicago in 1936, and many of them have been sent back to Iran. Oriental Institute scholar Richard T. Hallock published about 2,100 of the Elamite texts in 1969, and Margaret Cool Root and Persepolis Fortification Archive Project collaborator Mark Garrison are completing a three-volume publication of the impressions made on those documents by about 1,500 distinct seals.

These publications have had far-reaching results. “They have transformed every aspect of modern study of the languages, history, society, institutions, art and religion of the Achaemenid Persian Empire,” Stolper said. “No serious treatment of the empire that Cyrus and Darius built and that Alexander destroyed can ignore the perspectives of the Fortification Archive.”

“If that is the effect of a sample of one component of the archive,” added Garrison, “imagine what will happen when we can have larger samples and other components, and not just the written record, but the imagery, the impressions made by thousands of different seals that administrators and travelers?the men and women who figure in the texts?employed.”

By 2010, the collaborating teams expect to have high-quality images of 5,000 to 6,000 Persepolis tablets and fragments, and to supplement these with conventional digital images of another 7,000 to 8,000 tablets and fragments. The images will be distributed online as they are processed, along with cataloging and editorial information.

“Thanks to electronic media, we don’t have to cut the parts of the archive up and distribute the pieces among academic specialties,” said Stolper. “We can combine the work of specialists in a way that lets us see the archive as it really was, in its original complexity, as one big thing with many distinct parts.”


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Adapted from materials provided by University of Chicago.
 
This Horizon programme starts off rather slowly, but it gets much more interesting as it goes on:

Why Do We Talk?

Talking is something that is unique to humans, yet it still remains a mystery. Horizon meets the scientists beginning to unlock the secrets of speech - including a father who is filming every second of his son's first three years in order to discover how we learn to talk, the autistic savant who can speak more than 20 languages, and the first scientist to identify a gene that makes speech possible.

Horizon also hears from the godfather of linguistics, Noam Chomsky, the first to suggest that our ability to talk is innate. A unique experiment shows how a new alien language can emerge in just one afternoon, in a bid to understand where language comes from and why it is the way it is.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0 ... o_We_Talk/

I was particularly impressed by the autistic man and his ability with languages, and with the alien (artificial) language experiment.
 
More detail here:

Suite of chatterbox genes discovered
18:00 11 November 2009
by Ewen Callaway

It is often thought of as one of the things that make humans unique. Now, researchers are uncovering the suite of genes that gave us our gift of the gab.

All of them appear to be controlled by a master-switch gene called Foxp2. When inactive, this gene causes severe speech and language problems in humans. Although other animals have versions of Foxp2, in 2002 a German team identified two small alterations in the protein the human Foxp2 produces that are not carried by our closest living relative, the chimpanzee. This suggested that the human version of Foxp2 may function differently, and be a key element in our unique linguistic abilities.

Earlier this year, Wolfgang Enard's team at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, spliced this human version of Foxp2 into mice. The mice didn't start speaking, but their sub-sonic vocaliszations changed, as did the shape and activity of neurons in a brain area that goes awry in people with Foxp2-related language disorders.

To discover what Foxp2 does differently in humans, neuroscientists Genevieve Konopka and Daniel Geschwind at the University of California, Los Angeles, grew human brain cells lacking Foxp2 in Petri dishes. To some they added human Foxp2 and to others the chimp version. They then recorded all the genes that were affected. Out of the hundreds of genes controlled by Foxp2, they identified 116 that responded differently to the human version of Foxp2.

This set of genes fits well with Foxp2's suggested role in the evolution of language and speech, says Konopka. Many control brain development or have been linked to cognition. Others are involved in controlling body movement and guiding the development of facial and laryngeal tissues that are essential for articulation.

Evolutionary studies of Foxp2 suggest it acquired its human-specific changes in the last half million years of human evolution – roughly when language is thought to have emerged. Geschwind has done preliminary studies of the evolution of the 116 genes that Foxp2 affects, which suggest they may have a similar history. "It brings up the possibility, which is not at all remote, that these genes may have evolved in concert," he says, adding that this may even be true for other genes involved in language.

While the results hint at a central role for Foxp2 in the evolution of language, Geschwind cautions against calling it "the language gene" as some have in the past. "Either Foxp2 itself is pretty damn important," he says, "or it's part of a regulatory circuit – something else is regulating Foxp2 that no one else has found yet."

Geschwind's team carried out a second experiment, comparing patterns of gene activation in adult human and chimpanzee brain tissue. They found a striking overlap between the genes whose activity was different in the human brain tissue and the set of genes that are controlled differently by human Foxp2.

The finding is preliminary, but if confirmed, it might mean a significant part of the difference between human and chimpanzee brains could be explained by two small changes in one gene, says Wolfgang Enard. "That would be really amazing."

With 116 genes to follow up on, Geschwind and Konopka have their work cut out for them, says Pasko Rakic, a neuroscientist at Yale University. "This paper provides a starting point for future molecular studies on the basis of the evolution of language."

Faraneh Vargha-Khadem, a neuroscientist at University College London, who studies patients with Foxp2-linked language disorders, says Geschwind's list makes sense. In addition to their speech problems, her patients' lower faces are partly misshaped as well.

However, Vargha-Khadem cautions against distilling the evolution and development of language down to a single gene and its multitude of effects. Foxp2 may have helped endow humans with the machinery to produce speech, but this does not explain how abstract ideas get translated into utterances, she says.

"Almost by magic these muscles move to produce the sound sequence that makes sense to the listener," Vargha-Khadem says, adding that science has a long journey ahead to understand how the machinery works, let alone how it expresses our thoughts.


http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1 ... vered.html
 
Note that Fox2p is the gene that was implicated in the BBC Horizon progmamme mentioned above by Rynner. A family of people in England have a mutation which gives them a specific language disorder, and that mutation is at the Foxp2 location.

More details about this gene here
http://www.evolutionpages.com/FOXP2_language.htm
 
Chomsky’s ‘scientific’ fairy tales about language and its or

Prof Chris Knight of the Radical Anthropology Group really sticks the boot into Chomsky. Full text at link.

Anti-Marxist myth of our time

Chris Knight examines Noam Chomsky’s ‘scientific’ fairy tales about language and its origins

“If Marx were alive today, he would reject a good deal of the corpus of work that we call Marxism.”[1] Noam Chomsky’s words recall Marx’s own rueful verdict, as recorded by Engels: “If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.”[2]

“Now, as for dialectical materialism,” Chomsky went on, “in my view this is a rather obscure notion … It is clear that people do use the word ‘dialectic’ as if they understood it, but I personally have never understood it. In fact, my own feeling is that it is a kind of ritual term which people use when they are talking about situations of conflict and so on. Personally, I do not find it a very useful idea.”[3]

Chomsky continued: “As for my own methods of investigation, I do not really have any. The only method of investigation is to look hard at a serious problem and try to get some ideas as to what might be the explanation for it, meanwhile keeping an open mind about all sorts of other possibilities. Well, that is not a method. It is just being reasonable, and so far as I know, that is the only way to deal with any problem, whether it is a problem in your work as a quantum physicist or whatever.”[4]

Chomsky was addressing a radicalised audience in Managua, Nicaragua, seven years after a popular insurrection in that city had overthrown the United States-backed Somoza dictatorship.[5] Supportive of the speaker’s socialist politics, his listeners were struggling to reconcile the public figure they knew with that more distant Chomsky respected for his apparently incomprehensible linguistics. “What is the relationship between linguistics and politics?” someone asked.

Chomsky tried to explain: “Well, do these two concepts have anything to do with one another? They may. It could be that there’s a connection between the creative aspect of language use … and the idea of a distinctively human need for productive and creative work (including intellectual work) under one’s own control - that is, control of producers over production - which is the essence of Marxist thought, among other intellectual traditions. So there may be a connection between these two things. They’re conceptually rather similar …”[6]

His two interests may connect up, Chomsky conceded. But equally they may not. Where Marx is concerned, there is no connection at all. Even if “we try to extract ideas from Marx’s thought that are valuable for our enquiries today”, as Chomsky explained, “we will find very little, I think, that has any bearing at all on the study of language, so in this sense his ideas neither hamper nor facilitate this study.”[7]

Two temptations

Few in that audience felt entirely satisfied and the arguments have rumbled on. A decade later, Chomsky was about to deliver a lecture in Delhi. Setting aside the usual niceties, his host - a certain professor Agnihotri of Delhi University - introduced the visiting speaker with a challenge. He was bewildered that a person “so deeply touched by human suffering” could ignore the roots of both happiness and suffering in his scientific work. Noam Chomsky, continued the professor, insisted on viewing language as a “purely biological cognitive system” unconnected with “sociological power-games”. But isn’t language a key tool used by the powerful to deceive, exploit and oppress? How can Chomsky turn a blind eye to such things in his linguistic research?[8]

http://www.cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1002551
 
Radical Anthropology ... what’s this?

Menstruation and the Origins of Culture”. Wow, there’s a book I want to read.
 
I've long given up on trying to figure what Chomsky is on about.

It is incomprehensible as far as I can tell.
 
If you actually read the first article, you'll see that Chomsky uses his hypothetical 'fairytale' models, to keep linguistics and early language acquisition apart and distinct from the actual social use and manipulation of language.

Anyone who knows a bit about 'wolf children' will know that Chomsky is probably right. The young child's brain seems to be a hardwired to learn and use language, almost automatically. It even seems to come prepared with a potential set of grammatical rules. However, the young child loses the deep language acquisition function very quickly and it soon becomes almost impossible for the child to learn human language and the necessary social skills to communicate and become a normal, socially integrated, member of society. The wolf children already seem to be locked into their roles as members of the animal group which appears to have adopted them.

Nature, or nurture? Obviously, nurture is important, however, as social animals, there are aspects of early human learning which appear to be fixed by nature and language acquisition is one of them.
 
Most of Academia is trying to get the boot into Chomsky:

" His boldness and clarity infuriates opponents - academe is crowded with critics who have made twerps of themselves taking him on." (Birthdays, The Guardian, December 7, 1996)

SMEARING CHOMSKY - THE GUARDIAN BACKS DOWNIntroduction
On November 4, we published a Media Alert, 'Smearing Chomsky', detailing the Guardian' s October 31 interview with Noam Chomsky by Emma Brockes. The alert produced the biggest ever response from Media Lens readers - many hundreds of emails were sent to the newspaper.

The Guardian has since published a " correction and clarification" in regard to Brockes‘ piece by ombudsman Ian Mayes, which we discuss below (‘Corrections and clarifications. The Guardian and Noam Chomsky,' The Guardian, November 17, 2005). The Guardian editor has also sent a form letter advising of the paper‘s retraction and apology. The letter notes:

" The Guardian has a fully independent readers' editor, who has sole charge of a daily corrections and clarifications column on the most important page of the newspaper, alongside the leader columns. No other daily British paper has such an office or mechanism. It takes only one complaint to trigger his attention. The Chomsky case was highlighted by more than one website, some of which urged their own readers to write in and complain.

" While we welcome all correspondence, this had no bearing on the action of the Readers' Editor. It is, obviously, difficult to respond personally to such a quantity of email." (Rusbridger, forwarded to Media Lens, November 17, 2005)

This letter represents a significant change for the Guardian, which generally ignores emails from Media Lens readers as the work of a manipulative " lobby" organising a robotic and ignorant response. This would be reasonable if we were inaccurate or dishonest in representing the issues under discussion. It would also be reasonable if readers' letters were not overwhelmingly cogent and thoughtful.

Journalists and editors would do well to recognise that, while we +do+ facilitate public criticism of the media, that criticism is nevertheless often very rational and very sincere. In reality, the whole mass media system inclines readers to view what we write with scepticism. After all, we are not well-known professional journalists working in high-profile media companies, and we are often not in agreement with what most mainstream journalists are writing. We are also writing for an audience with little tradition of directly challenging often highly respected ' liberal' media from a left perspective. We believe that readers are therefore inclined not to respond unless they feel our arguments are genuinely compelling - exactly the reverse of the Guardian view.

It is clear that the Guardian' s distortions were so obvious on this occasion - and so obviously damaging to its reputation - that the editors felt obliged to respond seriously to complaints. We are willing to accept the Guardian claim that Mayes - who deserves real credit for the newspaper' s apology - would have published his correction if just Chomsky had complained. But the editor' s additional reply to readers clearly suggests that mass public engagement +did+ raise the issue to a higher level of seriousness within the Guardian. For example, a number of correspondents wrote to the editor saying they had been buying the paper for many years - sometimes as long as 30 or 40 years - and would not be doing so again. This is something the Guardian could ill afford to ignore - a point well worth reflecting on for all who aspire to a more honest and democratic media.

Fertile Fabrications - The Guardian Story Spreads
On November 6, the Independent on Sunday published a short account of events up to that point:

" Noam Chomsky and The Guardian are still at loggerheads over an interview with him the newspaper published on Monday. The American academic and activist was incensed at what he calls 'fabrications' in the Guardian piece, and had a letter published on Wednesday in which he accused Emma Brockes of inventing 'contexts'. Chomsky denies saying that the massacre at Srebrenica has been overstated, as Brockes had claimed. But, to Chomsky's fury, the letter was printed next to one by a survivor of the massacre, both under the headline, 'Falling Out over Srebrenica'.

" Cue further letters to The Guardian's ombudsman, Ian Mayes, protesting that such a juxtaposition was further misrepresentation and stimulating a false debate. 'As I presume you are aware, the " debate" was constructed by the editors on the basis of inventions in the article you published,' Chomsky wrote.

" Mayes, who is also president of the international Organisation of News Ombudsmen, is no longer replying to Chomsky's emails. He was unavailable for comment." (Media Diary, Independent on Sunday, November 6, 2005)

As ever, the focus was on dissident fury and anger. This was reinforced by the observation that ongoing disagreement provoked " further letters" from Chomsky to Mayes who was " no longer replying to Chomsky's emails" . This suggested Mayes had given up on an irate, hectoring Chomsky. In fact, Mayes had not replied to +any+ of Chomsky' s letters at the time the Independent' s piece appeared.

Meanwhile, the Guardian had published a piece by columnist Norman Johnson which also smeared Chomsky (‘Yes, this appeaser was once my hero,' November 5, 2005). From the emails we received, it is clear that many readers are not in on the Guardian' s joke - they are unaware that Norman Johnson is a pseudonym, and that the column is intended as a spoof of the ‘Cruise Missile Left' : commentators such as David Aaronovitch, Nick Cohen, Johann Hari and Christopher Hitchens.

Whatever the intention, Johnson' s piece struck many people as yet another attack on Chomsky. Given that the paper was now under significant public pressure – having published its initial fabrications about Chomsky, and also the further smear pairing his letter with that of an understandably outraged Bosnian survivor - this ‘spoof' was in extremely poor taste, to say the least.

Guardian comment editor Seumas Milne nevertheless responded to one Media Lens reader:

" As to the Norman Johnson article in today's paper, most readers take it to be a spoof column satirising a strand of liberal/former left thinking now in sympathy with the neocon project - so I hardly think it can seriously be regarded as an attack on Chomsky." (Email forwarded to Media Lens, November 5, 2005)

Edward Herman, co-author with Chomsky of the book Manufacturing Consent, disagreed:

" Johnson obviously tries to be a wit as he writes, but the piece on [Chomsky] drips with venom and is larded with straightforward errors and misrepresentations that are in no way spoofing."

Herman added:

" Johnson has mastered the art of error or lie by implication, arguably more dishonest than a straightforward error or lie." (Email to David Cromwell, November 7, 2005)

For example, the Johnson article included this comment:

" It wasn't easy for me, either, when I realised the brilliant academic [Chomsky] whose linguistics lectures had once held me spellbound, that the political theorist I'd revered for his unsentimental computation of Mao Zedong's balance sheet, and firm evaluation of Pol Pot's achievement in creating modern Cambodia, had morphed into an unfeeling appeaser to whom the murder of Milosevic's victims could be assessed with an amoral sophistry that might have been lifted, with barely an adjustment, from the speeches of Douglas Hurd." (Johnson, op., cit)

It seems remarkable that this could have been published as a spoof, just three days after the Guardian had published a letter by Chomsky strongly attacking the Guardian' s " distortions" about essentially this same charge of " amoral sophistry" , and after many emails had already arrived challenging the Guardian smear. After all, the charge was clearly taken seriously by senior figures within the Guardian. For example, on November 11, the following exchange was published between the Croatian journal Globus and leading Guardian columnist and former editor, Peter Preston:

Q: "In an interview to the last week's Guardian Noam Chomsky stated his opinion about the crime against the Bosniaks in Srebrenica, supporting those who hold that that crime is exaggerated. What do you think of that?"

A: "I don't agree at all with Chomsky's opinion. I think it's impossible to rewrite history that way. After all, about Srebrenica speak mostly mass graves that were discovered and are still being discovered. I think to deny the crimes like that one in Srebrenica is in vain and wrong, because there is a clear position in the political and intellectual circles about them, to what, I must say, my colleagues from the Guardian have contributed a lot. That position is based on irrefutable facts and known scenes from Srebrenica."

Q: "Why does Noam Chomsky has a need to revise those facts?"

A: "I have to admit I don't know. Perhaps it's his need to be controversial? I think the crime in Srebrenica has become part of planetary humanity, like Nazi crimes in the WWII, and it is really strange to draw the attention to oneself by denying that fact. I think that a much more important public duty would be to point out the fact that those who ordered that crime, Karadzic and Mladic, are still at large." (http://www.globus.com.hr/Default.aspx?BrojID=133)

Preston thus accused Chomsky of " denying" the crime in Srebrenica, but offered no evidence for this serious accusation. Was this also a spoof?

One might have thought Preston would have been aware of the growing furore surrounding the Guardian' s fabrications at the time of his comments.

Two days later, Chomsky wrote that he had by then received a print copy of the Guardian interview. He responded in an open letter:

" ...the print version reveals a very impressive effort, which obviously took careful planning and work, to construct an exercise in defamation that is a model of the genre" .

Chomsky pointed to the photographs that accompanied the piece:

" One is a picture of me ‘talking to journalist John Pilger' . The second is of me ‘meeting Fidel Castro.' The third, and most interesting, is a picture of me ‘in Laos en route to Hanoi to give a speech to the North Vietnamese.'

" That' s my life: honoring commie-rats and the renegade who is the source of the word ‘pilgerize‘ invented by journalists furious about his incisive and courageous reporting, and knowing that the only response they are capable of is ridicule." (‘Chomsky answers Guardian,' November 13, 2005; www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?)

Chomsky' s letter outlined the actual events and background behind the photographs used by the Guardian, adding:

" Quite apart from the deceit in the captions, simply note how much effort and care it must have taken to contrive these images to frame the answer to the question on the front page.[Q: Do you regret supporting those who say the Srebrenica massacre was exaggerated? A: My only regret is that I didn't do it strongly enough.]

" It is an impressive piece of work, and, as I said, provides a useful model for studies of defamation exercises, or for those who practice the craft. And also, perhaps, provides a useful lesson for those who may be approached for interviews by this journal.

" This is incidentally only a fragment. The rest is mostly what one might expect to find in the scandal sheets about movie stars, familiar from such sources, and of no further interest."

Bad Arguments For Good Faith
In its correction and retraction, the Guardian accepted that Chomsky has never denied that a massacre took place in Srebrenica. It noted that the headline answer printed at the top of the article was in response to a question that had not been posed to Chomsky in that form in the interview. It also accepted that the juxtaposition of a letter from a survivor of Omarska with Chomsky' s letter exacerbated his original complaint.

While this is indeed a remarkable and humbling apology from the Guardian - Mayes describes it as " unprecedented in my experience in this job over the past eight years" (Email forwarded to Media Lens, November 19, 2005) - it is seriously flawed. Note, for example, the following comment:

" Prof Chomsky has also objected to the juxtaposition of a letter from him... with a letter from a survivor of Omarska... At the time these letters were published... no formal complaint had been received from him. The letters were published by the letters editor in good faith to reflect readers' views."

This is outrageous. In fact, the letters only add to overwhelming evidence that the whole affair was carefully planned and managed at the editorial level. How, after all, can a pair of letters be published under the title " Falling out over Srebrenica" when one of the letters deplores the massacre and the other says nothing at all about it, asserting simply that the author takes no responsibility for anything written in the original interview, where everything relevant was "fabricated" - the word the Guardian asked Chomsky to remove from his letter, but which they knew he had used? This is a logical impossibility, and the editors who paired the letters and wrote the headline are surely capable of elementary logic.

This, and much other evidence, gives the lie to editor Alan Rusbridger' s astonishing claim to readers:

" I believe Professor Chomsky's concerns about a wider editorial motive behind the interview, suggested in an open letter, are wholly without foundation." (Rusbridger, op. cit)

Mayes also also wrote in his correction:

" Both Prof Chomsky and Ms Johnstone, who has also written to the Guardian, have made it clear that Prof Chomsky's support for Ms Johnstone, made in the form of an open letter with other signatories, related entirely to her right to freedom of speech. The Guardian also accepts that and acknowledges that the headline was wrong and unjustified by the text.
Ms Brockes's misrepresentation of Prof Chomsky's views on Srebrenica stemmed from her misunderstanding of his support for Ms Johnstone. Neither Prof Chomsky nor Ms Johnstone have ever denied the fact of the massacre."

Brockes' s misinterpretation surely also stemmed from her " misunderstanding" of Diana Johnstone' s honest and courageous work. In an earlier response, Johnstone added a more general corrective that is missing from the Guardian apology:

" Neither I nor Professor Chomsky have ever denied that Muslims were the main victims of atrocities and massacres committed in Bosnia. But I insist that the tragedy of Yugoslav disintegration cannot be reduced to such massacres, and that there are other aspects of the story, historical and political, that deserve to be considered. However, any challenge to the mainstream media version of events is stigmatized as ‘causing more suffering to the victims‘ - an accusation that makes no sense, but which works as a sort of emotional blackmail." (Diana Johnstone, ‘Johnstone Reply,' http://www.zmag.org/, November 9, 2005; www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?)

Conclusion - Where Egos Dare
It is remarkable that such a deceitful and incompetent piece of journalism could pass unhindered up the Guardian' s editorial chain. Where were the paper' s fact checkers, the editors insisting on some small semblance of fairness, the experts advising on the issues under discussion? Who, other than Brockes and her G2 section editor Ian Katz, was behind the article? To what extent, for example, was Ed Vulliamy involved?

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that standards collapsed in deference to a clear decision by one or more senior figures on the paper to target Chomsky for a carefully planned attack.

It is surely the case that the intense liberal dislike of one of the world' s leading radicals - someone they perhaps imagined had little power or inclination to defend himself - played a role in blinding the Guardian editors and journalists to their folly.

This bias is exactly reversed when the Guardian interviews powerful figures such as Bill Clinton - then instinctive support for fellow ' liberals' and keen awareness of their ability to hit back with real force combine to produce fawning hagiography, as we have discussed elsewhere.

The Guardian' s bold as brass smear and subsequent pained retraction inevitably call to mind an insightful comment made about Chomsky in, ironically, the Guardian itself. As we have once again seen, it is an observation that can of course be broadened to mainstream journalism:

" His boldness and clarity infuriates opponents - academe is crowded with critics who have made twerps of themselves taking him on." (Birthdays, The Guardian, December 7, 1996)
 
Chomsky's a fucking star. His generative grammar theory was core linguistics when I studied it at university.

He's spoken out on political issues since the Vietnam war.

If the hard left could give over sticking the knife in one another's backs for two minutes people might not consider them such a pathetic joke.

:imo:
 
The Weekly Worker won't back down!

Chris is a Knight in shining armour and does a great imitation of a chimp!
 
Pietro_Mercurios said:
If you actually read the first article, you'll see that Chomsky uses his hypothetical 'fairytale' models, to keep linguistics and early language acquisition apart and distinct from the actual social use and manipulation of language.

Yes, I know that one - but have you read any of this later stuff? I couldn't make heads or tales of it and neither could the Prof at Uni. We tried to study one of his books in a seminar and kind of gave up. :lol:

Ye, he is a star for many of the hard left, but for his politics, not his linguistics.
 
Was it Chomsky who gave that very bizarre interview to the BBC the night of Obama's election win? Tried to search for it on youtube but no luck.
 
Ah yes, of course it was Vidal, couldn't believe how funny that was when I saw it on election night.
 
DougalLongfoot said:
Ah yes, of course it was Vidal, couldn't believe how funny that was when I saw it on election night.

And I can't believe I spelt "you're" as "your". Oh, the shame of it all...
 
Book review: Through the Language Glass, by Guy Deutscher
-------------------------------------------------------------------

In his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell created
Newspeak, a language constructed to render its speakers incapable
of articulating any idea contrary to the dogma of the ruling party.
The implication behind Orwell's creation is that the language you
speak controls the way in which you think, limiting the concepts
you're able to understand.

One formulation of this idea is called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis,
though neither Edward Sapir nor his student Benjamin Whorf actually
published anything so succinct and even the name is a construct of
later commentators. The hypothesis has largely been dismissed, in
particular because of Whorf's many errors, which have overshadowed
the work of his teacher, and has been out of fashion among
linguists for the past half century.

Guy Deutscher's thesis is that it was wrong to dismiss the ideas of
Edward Sapir, in particular that a person's native language can
affect the workings of his mind. Some researchers argue against
Noam Chomsky's theory that we are born with a genetic template that
allows us to learn language and that therefore all languages must
be alike at a deep level. Instead, the hypothesis is gaining ground
that infants' brains are mouldable and that early in life they
generate the structures they need in order to understand language.
This might mean that speakers of different languages do indeed view
the world differently. The idea that our interpretation of the
world may be influenced, albeit subtly, by the language we learn as
infants is becoming more widely accepted through recent research
into language diversity, supported by neurological experiments.

Many of these experiments have involved colour perception and Guy
Deutscher starts his exploration with this aspect. Many societies
have a curious lack of colour words, often limited to black, white
and red, where the first two are used generally for dark and light
colours respectively. Their speakers have perfect colour vision,
but in the environment in which they live they don't need colour
descriptions that are more complex. The reverse of the Sapir-Whorf
view is therefore certainly true - that one's environment and
culture control one's language. Recent research has demonstrated,
however, that colour concepts in one's mother tongue do interfere
subtly with the way the brain processes colour.

Another major theme in Deutscher's book is the way that languages
describe directions. Most use schemes related to the observer
("turn left at the traffic lights and take the third turning on
your right"). A few languages, however, use absolute directions,
including Guugu Yimithirr of Australia (famous as being the source
of the word "kangaroo"). Speakers might warn you that a stinging
ant was "north of your foot" or say that they left something "on
the southern edge of the western table" in a room. Their scheme is
appropriate for a group living in open country with few natural or
human-made landmarks, but in our more complex civilisations the
relational one works better. The Guugu Yimithirr method requires
its speakers to acquire an absolute sense of direction, a marvel to
the rest of us who don't possess it and a strong indication that
language does indeed in some cases modify thought.

Deutscher argues that the key to differences between languages is a
contained in a maxim of the linguist Roman Jakobson: "Languages
differ essentially in what they *must* convey and not in what they
*may* convey." As an example, he quotes the English statement, "I
spent last night with a neighbour", in which we may keep private
whether the person was male or female. In French there is no such
privilege: one must say "voisin" or "voisine".

This is a most entertaining book, easy to read but packed with
fascinating detail.

http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/krzi.htm
 
rynner2 said:
As an example, he quotes the English statement, "I
spent last night with a neighbour", in which we may keep private
whether the person was male or female. In French there is no such
privilege: one must say "voisin" or "voisine".

Yeah, don't you just hate that gender thing in some languages?
Weird and pointless.
I mean, how do you *know* whether to apply 'le' or 'la' to an inanimate, genderless object? You don't, which is why we Brits get it wrong so often.
 
Yeah, don't you just hate that gender thing in some languages?
Weird and pointless.
I mean, how do you *know* whether to apply 'le' or 'la' to an inanimate, genderless object? You don't, which is why we Brits get it wrong so often.

Native speakers of those languages just learn the gender pronoun as part of the word. It seems weird to us but comes naturally if it's your first language.

English dispensed with these gender pronouns centuries ago, and the familiar form of "you" more recently - my recently deceased grandmother still used "thee" and "thou" very occasionally - and, despite its idiosyncratic spelling is apparently quite an easy language to learn to speak.

It's an example of an interesting phenomenon which is that as languages develop, they become less complex. Some ancient languages are phenomenally complex. It's weird and the complete oppoiste of what we would expect...
 
Knight tilts against Chomsky again. Full text at link.

The pope and the Pentagon
http://www.cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1004261

How is it that Noam Chomsky's latest linguistic theories can acquire such a devoted following? Chris Knight of the Radical Anthropology Group continues his examination of Chomsky's life and work

In 1966, Noam Chomsky (pictured) published his Cartesian linguistics. The book was a survey of rationalist conceptions of language and mind, focusing heavily on the French mathematician and philosopher, Réné Descartes (1596-1650). In his early years, Chomsky had been working within the structuralist tradition of Ferdinand de Saussure, Roman Jakobson, Leonard Bloomfield and his own teacher, Zellig Harris. Chomsky wrote Cartesian linguistics in order to signal to the world his change of mind. His distinctively 'Cartesian' approach, he now clarified, was a rebellion against the entire 20th century tradition of structural linguistics.

By 'Cartesian', Chomsky meant 'scientific' in the natural science sense. Anything else - anything social or political - would be repugnant and politically dangerous. As he explains, referring to the atmosphere he encountered on arriving in Boston in 1951, "Computers, electronics, acoustics, mathematical theory of communication, cybernetics, all the technological approaches to human behaviour enjoyed an extraordinary vogue. The human sciences were being reconstructed on the basis of these concepts. It was all connected … Some people, myself included, were rather concerned about these developments, in part for political reasons, at least as far as my motivations were concerned … because this whole complex of ideas seemed linked to potentially quite dangerous political currents: manipulative, and connected with behaviourist concepts of human nature."[2]

For linguistics to qualify as a genuine science, it would have to be 'Cartesian' - pure in the sense that mathematics is pure. Science should be completely free of reactionary politics and, indeed, free of political contamination of any kind.
'Cognitive revolution'

It was this impulse which led Chomsky to celebrate Galileo and the scientific revolution of the 17th century. In principle, natural science should be pursued in complete freedom from political pressure. The secrets it uncovers are those of nature, not society. Unlike society or politics, the puzzles of nature promote intellectual honesty and cooperation. Natural science can embrace the study of language - realising the full promise of the 17th century 'cognitive revolution' - but only on one condition. The term 'language' must refer to nature, not culture. Chomsky redefined 'language' as an object in the head. Linguistics was redefined as the study of that object and nothing else.

The human soul, according to Descartes, has its "principal seat" in the pineal gland, buried in the centre of the brain.[3] From here, it connects with the tongue and lips, as we express our thoughts. When we speak, thanks to this gland, we can proceed unaware of the complex tongue and lip movements involved:

"… when we speak, we think only of the meaning of what we want to say, and this makes us move our tongue and lips much more readily and effectively than if we thought of moving them in all the ways required for uttering the same words. For the habits acquired in learning to speak have made us join the action of the soul (which, by means of the gland, can move the tongue and lips) with the meaning of the words which follow upon these movements, rather than with the movements themselves."[4]

Language depends, then, on that little gland through which the soul - spontaneously, efficiently and independently of conscious effort - activates the organs of speech. For Descartes, this doctrine was theologically required:

"For after the error of those who deny god … there is none that leads weak minds further from the straight path of virtue than that of imagining that the souls of beasts are of the same nature as ours, and hence that after this present life we have nothing to fear or to hope for, any more than flies or ants. But, when we know how much the beasts differ from us, we understand much better the arguments which prove that our soul is of a nature entirely independent of the body, and consequently that it is not bound to die with it. And since we cannot see any other causes which destroy the soul, we are naturally led to conclude that it is immortal."[5]

Since body and soul are so utterly distinct, they should be investigated in quite different ways: the body on the basis of experimentation and careful measurement; the soul on the basis of devout, but informed introspection.

What makes the soul so utterly different from the body? Descartes offers a thought experiment. Imagine mechanical dolls replicating the appearance and behaviour of various beasts. In principle, he says, they might be constructed so cleverly that no-one could tell that they were fakes. This is because animals really are just machines, their movements mere responses to stimuli from outside. But what of mechanical men?

No matter how cleverly these were designed, writes Descartes, "we should still have two very certain means of recognising that they were not real men. The first is that they could never use words, or put together other signs, as we do in order to declare our thoughts to others. For we can certainly conceive of a machine so constructed that it utters words, and even utters words which correspond to bodily actions causing a change in its organs (eg, if you touch it in one spot it asks you what you want of it; if you touch it in another it cries out that you are hurting it; and so on). But it is not conceivable that such a machine should produce different arrangements of words so as to give an appropriately meaningful answer to whatever is said in its presence, as the dullest of men can do."[6]

While a mechanical doll might be equipped to respond to specific situations, Descartes continued, none could be equipped with reason - defined as a universal instrument for responding appropriately to all possible situations. Unlike a machine, then, man is both linguistic and rational.

"Now in just these two ways," continues Descartes, "we can also know the difference between man and beast. For it is quite remarkable that there are no men so dull-witted or stupid - and this includes even madmen - that they are incapable of arranging various words together and forming an utterance from them in order to make their thoughts understood; whereas there is no other animal, however perfect and well-endowed it may be, that can do the like."

Are animals dumb merely because they lack the requisite external organs of speech? Do they have rational minds, lacking only the physical means to express them? Descartes considers this possibility, but dismisses it: magpies and parrots, after all, can imitate speech but evidently without actually thinking what they are saying. Meanwhile, physically impaired humans, deprived of the ability to hear or to produce speech sounds, can readily resort to manual signing in order to express themselves. "This shows," concludes Descartes, "not merely that the beasts have less reason then men, but that they have no reason at all."[7] Animals show no trace of speech for the simple reason that they do not have a soul.
Descartes

After much agonising, Réné Descartes concluded that the soul lies beyond the legitimate remit of science. Its complexities, he decided, should be left to the theologians. What exactly prompted this momentous conclusion, destined to shape the development of western intellectual life for three centuries? Let Descartes explain in his own words. In November 1633, he had been "quite determined" to send his friend, Mersenne, a copy of his latest Treatise on man:

"But I have to say that in the meantime I took the trouble to inquire in Leiden and Amsterdam whether Galileo's World system was available, for I thought I had heard that it was published in Italy last year. I was told that it had indeed been published, but that all copies had immediately been burnt at Rome, and that Galileo had been convicted and fined. I was so astonished at this that I almost decided to burn all my papers or at least to let no-one see them. For I could not imagine that he - an Italian and, as I understand, in the good graces of the pope - could have been made a criminal for any other reason that he tried, as he no doubt did, to establish that the earth moves."

If a moving earth was punishable heresy, the consequences for Descartes were frightening:

"I must admit that if the view is false, so too are the entire foundations of my philosophy, for it can be demonstrated from them quite clearly. And it is so closely interwoven in every part of my treatise that I could not remove it without rendering the whole work defective. But for all the world I did not want to publish a discourse in which a single word could be found that the church would have disapproved of; so I preferred to suppress it rather than to publish it in a mutilated form."[8]

In any list of topics liable to get Descartes into trouble, independent thinking about the soul must have come close to the top. But he had no appetite for personal martyrdom. Excusing himself for reneging on his promise to send Mersenne his treatise, he wrote that if his views "cannot be approved of without controversy, I have no desire ever to publish them".

In the event, despite this, sections of Descartes' Treatise on man have come down to us. "First," announces the author at the outset, "I must describe the body on its own; then the soul, again on its own; and finally I must show how these two natures would have to be joined and united in order to constitute men who resemble us."[9] But in the sections of the treatise to have survived, Descartes says almost nothing about the soul. In the light of what happened to Galileo, it is not difficult to understand why.
A second substance

Historians of science tend to view Descartes' invention of a 'second substance' as a transparently political manoeuvre. Was he not just offering the Vatican a face-saving formula? It smacked of a carve-up: he would allow them exclusive rights over man's soul, if only science could be left undisturbed with the body. The arrangement might work if the two were so utterly separate and unconnected as to render mutual interference unthinkable. Viewed from this perspective, Cartesian dualism makes good sense. As Descartes put it, "… the soul is of such a nature that it has no relation to extension, or to the dimensions or other properties of the matter of which the body is composed."

This is obvious, he continued, "from our inability to conceive of a half or a third of a soul, or of the extension which a soul occupies. Nor does the soul become any smaller if we cut off some part of the body, but it becomes completely separate from the body when we break up the assemblage of the body's organs."[10]

Soul is not subject to bodily interference. It does not obey any of the laws of natural science. The bishops and cardinals should therefore stop worrying and relax.

In Cartesian linguistics, Chomsky celebrated Descartes' line of reasoning, while reformulating it in supposedly more up-to-date terms.[11] The mind in its activities, Chomsky insisted, is 'stimulus-free' - autonomous with respect to bodily action and experience in the world. This is most strikingly evident in the case of language. Since grammar is autonomous with respect to other cognitive domains, it makes sense to restrict linguistics to the study of 'competence' - what the speaker knows - without having to complicate the picture by including the use of that knowledge in 'performance'.

This was presented as fidelity to Descartes and, in a sense, it was. More profoundly, though, Chomsky's was the fidelity of a camera obscura, turning the French philosopher upside-down. As a sympathetic biographer comments on Chomsky's book title, Cartesian linguistics, "The term 'Cartesian' is not used here according to its generally accepted definition; Chomsky extends that definition to encompass, as he puts it, 'a certain collection of ideas which were not expressed by Descartes, [were] rejected by followers of Descartes, and many first expressed by anti-Cartesians'."[12]

When Chomsky tells us that 'competence' can be studied to the exclusion of 'performance', he is echoing Descartes' distinction between body and soul. But what for Descartes was a concession to the religious authorities becomes, for Chomsky, science itself. "Now I believe," as he explains, "and here I would differ a lot from my colleagues, that the move of Descartes to the postulation of a second substance was a very scientific move; it was not a metaphysical or an unscientific move."[13] Descartes' 'second substance' idea, he continues, was 'scientific' in that it anticipated Newton:

"In fact, in many ways it was very much like Newton's intellectual move when he postulated action at a distance; he was moving into the domain of the occult, if you like. He was moving into the domain of something that went beyond well-established science, and was trying to integrate it with well-established science by developing a theory in which these notions could be properly clarified and explained."[14]

In the event, Descartes spectacularly failed - a point which Chomsky concedes. "But then," he continues, "that poses for us, I think, the task of carrying on and developing this, if you like, mathematical theory of mind …"[15]

In contrast to Chomsky, Descartes in his scientific role was a materialist. By assuming the body to be a machine, as he put it, we can explain "the digestion of food, the beating of the heart and arteries, the nourishment and growth of the limbs, respiration, waking and sleeping, the reception by the external sense organs of light, sounds, smells, tastes, heat and other such qualities, the imprinting of the ideas of these qualities in the organ of the 'common' sense and the imagination, the retention or stamping of these ideas in the memory, the internal movements of the appetites and passions, and finally the external movements of all the limbs …"[16]
 
A response to Knight.

For Chomsky
http://www.cpgb.org.uk/letters.php?issue_id=852

Our comrade Chris Knight appears to have completely lost the plot in his apparently never-ending critique of Noam Chomsky's work in linguistics.

Before commenting specifically on his latest three-page tirade in the Weekly Worker, perhaps we could recapitulate Chomsky's contributions, beginning with his review of Fred Skinner's Verbal behaviour (1957). Based on many years of research in behavioural psychology, Skinner had stated: "... the basic processes of verbal behaviour were now well understood ... the methods could be extended to human behaviour without serious modification". In his review, Chomsky argued that, although Skinner's insights from laboratory research might be genuine, they could only be superficially applied to human behaviour; behavioural prediction of a complex organism (like the human body/mind) requires knowledge of the internal structure of that organism - we need to know how it processes information received.

The nature-nurture debate has remained a central question in psychology since its beginnings in ancient times. Skinner argued from the point of view of his 'learning theory', working on the assumption that a child learns language by "operant conditioning": whenever infant babbling produces a sound remotely resembling a word, the child engenders positive reinforcement (a smile?) from an adult. From this reinforcement the child 'learns' the word. (To be fair to Skinner, it's not quite as simple as that.)

The implicit assumption from Chris Knight is that Skinner might be on the right track here … 'language learning' is grounded on social interaction, nothing more. In fact, no child arrives in the world as a blank slate. It comes with a great number of innate reflexes, as every mother-to-be learns when attending her antenatal clinics. There are 'rooting' and 'sucking' reflexes: if the neonate is stroked on the cheek, it turns its head towards the stroke and will suck a proffered finger or nipple; the 'grasping' reflex, where a finger placed in its palm will be held (new-borns can usually support their own weight at birth!); the 'swimming' reflex, where an infant placed face down in water, automatically paddles and kicks in a swimming pattern (many readers will have seen them 'in action' on TV adverts!). Most of these reflexes will have disappeared by the age of four to six months. Incredibly, a neonate, just 36 hours old, can 'imitate' a smile or frown from a parent facing them. Just stop for a while and consider the implication of these instances regarding neonates' perception of the world and propensity to cope with it. We cannot as yet explain how these innate actions originate, but we can surely hypothesise that we inherit rather more than we might have anticipated.

Chomsky's starting point was an attempt to explore the child's amazing ability to learn language. Three factors require explanation: (1) the ability of infants to attend specifically to speech elements in preference to all the other noises in the environment; (2) the ability of the child to master the complex language system in less than four years, at a time when other intellectual achievements are severely limited; (3) in spite of the enormous amount of speech they hear, much of it from ungrammatical and/or imperfect environments, children can construct meaningful sentences themselves, many of which they will not have previously heard. Irrespective of which particular language experienced, children learn it with equal ease (at the age of one week they can distinguish one language from another!). Furthermore, babies born deaf 'babble' in sign language in exactly the same way as their hearing contemporaries 'play' with the sounds they make; surely explainable only in terms of maturational underpinning?

Chomsky's hypothesis to answer these astounding feats was to suggest children are "wired" with an innate hypothesis-making ability - a "language acquisition device". They instinctively 'know' language is rule-governed and make a series of hypotheses underlying the speech they hear around them. All children are born equipped to learn grammar - all know that languages have similar features, use consonants, vowels, syllables, subject-predicate, nouns, verbs … and children learn any language with equal ease. Given what we know of other biological, 'innate' abilities, I am mystified by the hostility of Chris Knight.

Knight objects to Chomsky's "fairy-tale hypotheses" for the ('primeval'?) origins of these abilities, unshared with other species. How did the language learning capacity come about for the human mammal? None of us knows the answer. But it seems reasonable to hypothesise that, in the distant past, our ancestors acquired an upright posture (and bipedalism), associated with a descending larynx (it is situated much higher in the apes), producing the ability to make discrete 'noises' required for the development of language. Probably, firstly, as a means of communication, eventually - as Trotsky's friend, Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, believed - language became a 'tool' for our intellectual development. (He researched the 'use' youngsters make of language for their thinking - by talking to themselves to help them solve problems.)

Chris keeps reminding us that Chomsky has no idea how these physiological changes came about - and "plays around" with "rays from outer space" or Platonic "souls". Today's researchers, working in the field of machine intelligence (where most of language research takes place), long ago left behind any possibility of 'self' or 'soul' entities in any literal sense; but Chris Knight is determined to attack the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor on these theological grounds. Added to that, Chomsky keeps "changing his mind" (actually it has happened more frequently than Chris delineates), as if that, in itself, is a fault. That's what happens in real science, Chris!

My mind boggles at the thought that perhaps the day will come when Chris Knight decides to take Isaac Newton apart - another guy who kept modifying his views, combined with an obsession with theology. When he died, a third of Newton's books were works of a philosophical/theological nature - twice as many as any addressing the scientific questions for which he is most remembered. Elsewhere, 5,000 additional pages of handwritten notes were discovered, all relating to his attempts to 'decode the Bible' in order to discover the definitive date for the prophesied apocalypse. Although Isaac would not have been regarded as a 'Christian' by the church, then or now, he did believe the scriptures, whereas only Chris Knight regards Chomsky's "magic rays" as serious hypotheses.

Bob Potter
 
I think this fits in here.

Historical context guides language development
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-04-his ... guage.html
April 14th, 2011 in Other Sciences / Social Sciences

Not only do we humans enjoy talking -- and talking a lot -- we also do so in very different ways: about 6,000 languages are spoken today worldwide. How this wealth of expression developed, however, largely remains a mystery. A group of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, has now found that word-orders in languages from different language families evolve differently.

This contradicts the common understanding that word-order develops in accordance with a set of universal rules, applicable to all languages. Researchers have concluded that languages do not primarily follow innate rules of language processing in the brain. Rather, sentence structure is determined by the historical context in which a language develops.

Linguists want to understand how languages have become so diverse and what constraints language evolution is subject to. To this end, they search for recurring patterns in language structure. In spite of the enormous variety of sounds and sentence structure patterns, linguistic chaos actually stays within certain limits: individual language patterns repeat themselves. For example, in some languages, the verb is placed at the beginning of the sentence, while with others it is placed in the middle or at the end of the sentence. The formation of words in a given language also follows certain principles.

Michael Dunn and Stephen Levinson of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics have analysed 301 languages from four major language families: Austronesian, Indo-European, Bantu and Uto-Aztecan. The researchers focused on the order of the different sentence parts, such as "object-verb", "preposition-noun", "genitive- noun" or "relative clause-noun", and whether their position in the sentence influenced the other parts of the sentence. In this way, the researchers wanted to find out whether the position of the verb has other syntactic consequences: if the verb precedes the object for example ("The player kicks the ball"), is the preposition simultaneously placed before the noun ("into the goal")? Such a pattern is observed in many languages, but is it an inevitable feature of how languages develop?

"Our study shows that different processes occur in different language families," says Michael Dunn. "The evolution of language does not follow one universal set of rules." For example, the "verb-object" pattern influences the "preposition-noun" pattern in the Austronesian and Indo-European languages, but not in the same way, and not in the other two language families. The researchers never found the same pattern in word-order across all language families.

Since the 1950s, the American linguist Noam Chomsky has been defending the view that there are universal similarities between all languages. He claims that this is due to an innate language faculty that functions according to the same principle in any human being. On the other hand, the linguist Joseph Greenberg does not put forward the existence of a genetically determined "universal grammar", but does speak of a "universal word-order", whereby the general mechanisms of language-processing in the brain accordingly determine word-order and sentence structure. These new results are inconsistent with both of these views. "Our study suggests that cultural evolution has much more influence on language development than universal factors. Language structure is apparently not so much biologically determined as it is shaped by its ancestry," explains Stephen Levinson.

The next step for the scientists is to examine the evolutionary processes governing language structure in other language families, as well as to examine the diversity of other linguistic features within this evolutionary perspective.

More information: Michael Dunn, Simon J. Greenhill, Stephen C. Levinson, Russell D. Gray Evolved structure of language shows lineage-specific trends in word-order "universals" Nature, Advance Online Publication, 13 April 2011

Provided by Max-Planck-Gesellschaft
 
Evolutionary Babel was in southern Africa
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2 ... frica.html
* 19:00 14 April 2011 by Ferris Jabr


Where did humanity utter its first words? A new linguistic analysis attempts to rewrite the story of Babel by borrowing from the methods of genetic analysis – and finds that modern language originated in sub-Saharan Africa and spread across the world with migrating human populations.

Quentin Atkinson of the University of Auckland in New Zealand designed a computer program to analyse the diversity of 504 languages. Specifically, the program focused on phonemes – the sounds that make up words, like "c", "a", and "tch" in the word "catch".

Earlier research has shown that the more people speak a language, the higher its phonemic diversity. Large populations tend to draw on a more varied jumble of consonants, vowels and tones than smaller .

Africa turned out to have the greatest phonemic diversity – it is the only place in the world where languages incorporate clicks of the tongue into their vocabularies, for instance – while South America and Oceania have the smallest. Remarkably, this echoes genetic analyses showing that African populations have higher genetic diversity than European, Asian and American populations.

This is generally attributed to the "serial founder" effect: it's thought that humans first lived in a large and genetically diverse population in Africa, from which smaller groups broke off and migrated to what is now Europe. Because each break-off group carried only a subset of the genetic diversity of its parent group, this migration was, in effect, written in the migrants' genes.

Mother language

Atkinson argues that the process was mirrored in languages: as smaller populations broke off and spread across the world, human language lost some of its phonemic diversity, and sounds that humans first spoke in the African Babel were left behind.

To test this, Atkinson compared the phoneme content of languages around the world and used this analysis to determine the most likely origin of all language. He found that sub-Saharan Africa was a far better fit for the origin of modern language than any other location.

"One of the big questions is whether there was a single origin of language", or if it emerged in parallel in different locations, says Atkinson. "This suggests there was one major origin in Africa."

"It's a compelling idea," says Sohini Ramachandran of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, who studies population genetics and human evolution. "Language is such an adaptive thing that it makes sense to have a single origin before the diaspora out of Africa. It's also a nice confirmation of what we have seen in earlier genetic studies. The processes that shaped genetic variation of humans may also have shaped cultural traits."

Fighting talk

The findings are likely to create something of a stir among linguists, who have typically been reluctant to draw conclusions about how languages were evolving at the dawn of humanity. "Most linguists do not think it's possible to trace linguistic history past 10,000 years," says Merritt Ruhlen of Stanford University, California. "There is a lot of anger and tension surrounding that kind of analysis."

"The study deals with something that happened maybe 50,000 to 100,000 years ago, which is not even close to the time span that most linguists are comfortable with," agrees his colleague Brenna Henn, who nonetheless agrees with its conclusions. "Most linguists say you can't possibly provide evidence of how languages were related to each other that long ago."

Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1199295
 
i apologize for the vagueness of this reply - its late here and im kinda fuzzy headed - but i find it worth mentioning that grammatical gender in language has nothing to do with gender as we know it biologically. the use of the word "gender" in terms of grammar is pretty arbitrary. for example, if i remember correctly, in french the word for vagina is "masculine," while the world for penis is "feminine." gender, grammatically speaking, is just a way to (seemingly arbitrarily) class nouns, and is used as a way to distinguish various concepts without creating entirely new words... other languages (not that i can pick them out at the moment) use gender as a way to distinguish between animate and inanimate things.
im sure theres a more thorough and accurate explanation out there, but as i said, its certainly time for bed and not in-depth linguistic analysis.....
 
I've often wondered how far the pervasiveness of music and dance goes back in human evolution; if dancing in nightclubs to attract the opposite sex is in fact the continuation of ancient mating rituals. Alongside that, I've also mused on the whole idea of singing songs is to share stories or other social purposes. Our complicated throats are perfect for singing and evolution would favour the most vocal amongst us if that was the case. Songs for different occasions, when spread socially, could become signifiers for actual things. For instance a song about eating tea that goes "eating eating eating eating eating"... OK, you get the drift. But maybe our first steps to language were as singing apes.

But as romantic as that musing seems, I'd expect what's more likely is that our increasing grey matter naturally boosted our communication skills and social requirements for it. Those of us who were most eloquent and capable of learning language prospered. Once we invented the chat up line, those non-talkers were history...
 
Another one to add to the debate.

Artificial Grammar Reveals Inborn Language Sense, Study Shows
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 112256.htm

A new study by cognitive scientists confirms that human beings are born with knowledge of certain syntactical rules that make learning human languages easier. (Credit: iStockphoto/Felix Manuel Burgos-Trujillo)

ScienceDaily (May 13, 2011) — Parents know the unparalleled joy and wonder of hearing a beloved child's first words turn quickly into whole sentences and then babbling paragraphs. But how human children acquire language -- which is so complex and has so many variations -- remains largely a mystery. Fifty years ago, linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky proposed an answer: Humans are able to learn language so quickly because some knowledge of grammar is hardwired into our brains. In other words, we know some of the most fundamental things about human language unconsciously at birth, without ever being taught.

Now, in a groundbreaking study, cognitive scientists at The Johns Hopkins University have confirmed a striking prediction of the controversial hypothesis that human beings are born with knowledge of certain syntactical rules that make learning human languages easier.

"This research shows clearly that learners are not blank slates; rather, their inherent biases, or preferences, influence what they will learn. Understanding how language is acquired is really the holy grail in linguistics," said lead author Jennifer Culbertson, who worked as a doctoral student in Johns Hopkins' Krieger School of Arts and Sciences under the guidance of Geraldine Legendre, a professor in the Department of Cognitive Science, and Paul Smolensky, a Krieger-Eisenhower Professor in the same department. (Culbertson is now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Rochester.)

The study not only provides evidence remarkably consistent with Chomsky's hypothesis but also introduces an interesting new approach to generating and testing other hypotheses aimed at answering some of the biggest questions concerning the language learning process.

In the study, a small, green, cartoonish "alien informant" named Glermi taught participants, all of whom were English-speaking adults, an artificial nanolanguage named Verblog via a video game interface. In one experiment, for instance, Glermi displayed an unusual-looking blue alien object called a "slergena" on the screen and instructed the participants to say "geej slergena," which in Verblog means "blue slergena." Then participants saw three of those objects on the screen and were instructed to say "slergena glawb," which means "slergenas three."

Although the participants may not have consciously known this, many of the world's languages use both of those word orders-that is, in many languages adjectives precede nouns, and in many nouns are followed by numerals. However, very rarely are both of these rules used together in the same human language, as they are in Verblog.

As a control, other groups were taught different made-up languages that matched Verblog in every way but used word order combinations that are commonly found in human languages.

Culbertson reasoned that if knowledge of certain properties of human grammars-such as where adjectives, nouns and numerals should occur-is hardwired into the human brain from birth, the participants tasked with learning alien Verblog would have a particularly difficult time, which is exactly what happened.

The adult learners who had had little to no exposure to languages with word orders different from those in English quite easily learned the artificial languages that had word orders commonly found in the world's languages but failed to learn Verblog. It was clear that the learners' brains "knew" in some sense that the Verblog word order was extremely unlikely, just as predicted by Chomsky a half-century ago.

The results are important for several reasons, according to Culbertson.

"Language is something that sets us apart from other species, and if we understand how children are able to quickly and efficiently learn language, despite its daunting complexity, then we will have gained fundamental knowledge about this unique faculty," she said. "What this study suggests is that the problem of acquisition is made simpler by the fact that learners already know some important things about human languages-in this case, that certain words orders are likely to occur and others are not."

This study was done with the support of a $3.2 million National Science Foundation grant called the Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship grant, or IGERT, a unique initiative aimed at training doctoral students to tackle investigations from a multidisciplinary perspective.

According to Smolensky, the goal of the IGERT program in Johns Hopkins' Cognitive Science Department is to overcome barriers that have long separated the way that different disciplines have tackled language research.

"Using this grant, we are training a generation of interdisciplinary language researchers who can bring together the now widely separated and often divergent bodies of research on language conducted from the perspectives of engineering, psychology and various types of linguistics," said Smolensky, principal investigator for the department's IGERT program.

Culbertson used tools from experimental psychology, cognitive science, linguistics and mathematics in designing and carrying out her study.

"The graduate training I received through the IGERT program at Johns Hopkins allowed me to synthesize ideas and approaches from a broad range of fields in order to develop a novel approach to a really classic question in the language sciences," she said.

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by Johns Hopkins University.
 
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