language

From ScienceDaily: The vocal tract and larynx is similar in form and function amongst virtually all terrestrial mammals, including humans. However, relative to humans, non-human primates produce an extremely limited range of vocalisations. Published in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience, the new research investigates whether the reason primates are incapable of producing speech is because they lack the brain mechanisms needed to control and coordinate vocal production. … The academics, from Anglia Ruskin University and Stony Brook University, found a positive correlation between the relative size of cortical association areas and the size of the vocal repertoire of primates, which can range from just two call types in pottos to at least 38 different calls made by bonobos. Lead author Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: “A paper published in 2002 (Enard et al., Nature 418, 869-872) claimed there was a selective sweep relatively recently in human evolutionary history that could largely account for our linguistic abilities and even help explain how modern humans were able to flourish so rapidly in Africa within the last 50-100,000 years,” says senior author Brenna Henn, a population geneticist at Stony Brook University and UC Davis. “I was immediately interested in dating the selective sweep and re-analyzing FOXP2 with larger and more diverse datasets, especially in more African populations.” Henn says that when the original 2002 work was done, the researchers did not have access to the modern sequencing technology that now provides data on whole genomes, so Read More ›

From Geoffrey Pullum at Chronicle of Higher Education: Plenty of linguists have expertise in the analysis of sign languages, and none of them have ever independently confirmed Koko’s incipient linguistic competence. Koko never said anything: never made a definite truth claim, or expressed a specific opinion, or asked a clearly identifiable question. Producing occasional context-related signs, almost always in response to Patterson’s cues, after years of intensive reward-based training, is not language use. Not even if it involves gestures that a genuine signer could employ in language use. Neither journalists nor laypeople will ever be convinced of that. Such is their yearning to believe that Koko had mastered language, and had things to say, and shared those things with Penny Read More ›

Should young ID theorists study language origins, as retired linguist suggests below? From Ben James at The Atlantic: Oren Kolodny, a biologist at Stanford University, puts the question in more scientific terms: “What kind of evolutionary pressures could have given rise to this really weird and surprising phenomenon that is so critical to the essence of being human?” And he has proposed a provocative answer. In a recent paper in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Kolodny argues that early humans—while teaching their kin how to make complex tools—hijacked the capacity for language from themselves. That is provocative: hijacking a capability from “themselves”…? Kolodny’s arguments build off the groundbreaking experiments of Dietrich Stout, an anthropologist at Emory Read More ›

Tom Wolfe was the author of The Kingdom of Speech, in which he doubted a fully natural origin for human language. From Deirdre Carmody and William Grimes at the New York Times: In the end it was his ear — acute and finely tuned — that served him best and enabled him to write with perfect pitch. And then there was his considerable writing talent. “There is this about Tom,” Mr. Dobell, Mr. Wolfe’s editor at Esquire, told the London newspaper The Independent in 1998. “He has this unique gift of language that sets him apart as Tom Wolfe. It is full of hyperbole; it is brilliant; it is funny, and he has a wonderful ear for how people look Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: It’s very difficult to determine when, how and why human language began. While fossil primates provide important clues about human evolution, the sounds they made and the soft tissue involved in making those sounds weren’t preserved. But chimpanzees — one of our closest living relatives — provide important points of comparison for inferring the sorts of sounds our early ancestors may have made. During the 175th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, being held May 7-11, 2018, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Michael Wilson, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota, will present his group’s work searching for similarities between the vocal communications of chimpanzees and humans. “Chimpanzees give a range of different calls: hoots, pant-hoots, pant-grunts, pant-barks, Read More ›

From linguist Daniel Everett at Aeon: What is the greatest human technological innovation? Fire? The wheel? Penicillin? Clothes? Google? None of these come close. As you read this, you are using the winning technology. The greatest tool in the world is language. Without it there would be no culture, no literature, no science, no history, no commercial enterprise or industry. The genus Homo rules the Earth because it possesses language. But how and when did we build this kingdom of speech? And who is ‘we’? After all, Homo sapiens is just one of several species of humans that have walked the Earth. Does ‘we’ refer to our genus, Homo, or to our species, sapiens? To discover the answers to these Read More ›

From a 2016 paper by University College’s Chris Knight: Highlights • Language emerged in only one species, H. sapiens. • Such a system cannot evolve in a Darwinian social world. • Language emerged for reasons which no currently accepted theoretical framework can explain. Abstract: Language evolved in no species other than humans, suggesting a deep-going obstacle to its evolution. Could it be that language simply cannot evolve in a Darwinian world? Reviewing the insights of Noam Chomsky, Amotz Zahavi and Dan Sperber, this article shows how and why each apparently depicts language’s emergence as theoretically impossible. Chomsky shuns evolutionary arguments, asserting simply that language was instantaneously installed. Zahavi argues that language entails reliance on low cost conventional signals whose evolutionary emergence Read More ›

From Nicola Davis at the Guardian: “Erectus needed language when they were sailing to the island of Flores. They couldn’t have simply caught a ride on a floating log because then they would have been washed out to sea when they hit the current,” said Everett, presenting his thesis at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Austin. “They needed to be able to paddle. And if they paddled they needed to be able to say ‘paddle there’ or ‘don’t paddle.’ You need communication with symbols not just grunts.” It is unknown when language emerged among hominids; some argue that it is a feature only of our own species, Homo sapiens, which suggests a timing Read More ›

Robo-Doc will see you? Maybe, but not just now. This item popped up from the usual suspect tabloid paper sites while searching on AI and memristors. I have tracked down a couple of more reputable sources so, here goes from China Daily (which is also on the spot): >>A robot has passed the written test of China’s national medical licensing examination, an essential entrance exam for doctors, making it the first robot in the world to pass such an exam. Its developer iFlytek Co Ltd, a leading Chinese artificial intelligence company, said on Thursday that the robot scored 456 points, 96 points higher than the required marks. The artificial-intelligence-enabled robot can automatically capture and analyze patient information and make initial Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: It has often been claimed that humans learn language using brain components that are specifically dedicated to this purpose. Now, new evidence strongly suggests that language is in fact learned in brain systems that are also used for many other purposes and even pre-existed humans, say researchers in PNAS (Early Edition online Jan. 29). The research combines results from multiple studies involving a total of 665 participants. It shows that children learn their native language and adults learn foreign languages in evolutionarily ancient brain circuits that also are used for tasks as diverse as remembering a shopping list and learning to drive. “Our conclusion that language is learned in such ancient general-purpose systems contrasts with the long-standing theory Read More ›

Retired linguist Noel Rude writes to offer further thoughts on language and agency*: –0– English is, of course, quite capable of describing random and deterministic states and events. It is because the origin of life and its history are neither random nor deterministic that the materialists have such trouble. As for ambitransitive verbs, languages do differ. At one extreme is a Liberian language, Loma, that I once worked with. All its verbs are ambitransitive. In English, not all verbs are. Consider ‘eat’, for example. The Loma, however, can say (I don’t remember the words), He ate the food The food ate Where 2) is best translated by our passive: ‘the food was eaten’. At the other extreme are languages like Read More ›

That is, if we took your claims seriously. Linguist Noel Rude writes to say, — Human language is geared to purpose, to consciousness, to agency. The majority of verbs, as I may have noted before already, have “valence” for the semantic roles of Agent and/or Dative–Agent being defined as “the animate instigator of an event” and Dative (we’re talking semantic roles here–not noun cases) as “a participant whose consciousness is relevant to the proposition”–both of which are illusions to the hard core materialist elite. And so how then is the materialist to talk? What verbs can he use when blabbering about evolution? Aside from be, remain, rust, coagulate, etc., most verbs suggest consciousness and agency. Let’s consider ambitransitive verbs. Not Read More ›

Linguist Noel Rude (Native American languages) writes, Recently listened to “Noam Chomsky speaks about Universal Linguistics: Origins of Language” on YouTube. The talk was at Winona State University in Minnesota on March 20, 1998. This is about 20 years back, and the man could more comfortably sound like an ID person than he could now. He is a Cartesian, meaning that for all practical purposes he accepts the mind-body distinction, that is, that human language is creative yet operates within the parameters of grammar that is innate. Yet he says there is no physical-mental distinction because there is no physical. Newton’s law of gravitation–an attractive force at a distance–is as mystical and unexplainable as the telekinesis of a psychic (if Read More ›

Our new word for the weekend. From Ross Pomeroy at RealClearScience: Most thinkers, including famed astrophysicist Carl Sagan, agree that mathematics could serve as the foundation for our discussions. With that in mind, British scientist Lancelot Thomas Hogben rafted a language system called Astraglossa. Communicated over radio signals, short pulses called “dashes” would represent numbers, and longer batteries of pulses called “flashes” would represent mathematical symbols like addition or subtraction. Once the basics of arithmetic are established between our species, Hogben imagined moving the discussion on to astronomy, a hobby we would obviously both have in common. After all, two aliens species talking about space would probably be like two Earthlings talking about the weather. But maybe not. What if Read More ›