language

From Marek Kohn at New Scientist, in a review of Chris Knight’s Decoding Chomsky: Researchers have devised different ways to create firebreaks between values and data. According to anthropologist Chris Knight, Chomsky’s strategy was as radical as his politics – and he developed it in order to enable himself to sustain his left-wing political commitments. In his new book Decoding Chomsky, Knight (who mounts his own critique from a position on the radical left) argues that Chomsky needed to deny any connection between his science and his politics in order to practise both while based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an institution that was heavily funded by the US military. … This required detaching language from society altogether. Chomsky Read More ›

Iconic culture commentator Tom Wolfe, author of The Kingdom of Speech told Spanish paper, El Mundo (second after El Pais” ): I started reading a bit and I had more and more the feeling that it was a myth. A myth like Thor and Wotan. The theory of evolution does not meet any of the standards of a new theory because, first, it is not testable. Evolution means you can not see what will happen unless you are going to live for seven million years. It can not be explained, it is completely impossible. If you tried to find facts that are true, evolution would vanish. No new investigations have been opened and it is not a testable theory. I think that if Read More ›

The Kingdom of Speech Here: When The Kingdom of Speech, Tom Wolfe’s new book-length essay, was published in late summer, it received generally respectful reviews in the popular press, fitting for the Grand Old Man of Letters that Wolfe, through no fault of his own, has become. … This time around the notable exception was found in a ferociously negative review in the Washington Post. The reviewer was Jerry Coyne, a biologist from the University of Chicago and a volunteer border cop who patrols the perimeter where science and popular culture meet, making sure that scientists are accorded the proper deference. The Kingdom of Speech is deeply transgressive in this way. Wolfe makes sport of scientific pretensions generally and neo-Darwinian Read More ›

The Kingdom of Speech From Alun Anderson at New Scientist, a surprisingly balanced take on Tom Wolfe’s The Kingdom of Speech: It is a dramatic fable, but at the end of the book we have not reached a real ending. Everett’s work is not enough to convince linguistics researchers, as Wolfe might wish, that they had “wasted half a century by subscribing to Chomsky’s doctrine of Universal Grammar”. But Everett is surely right in thinking that language is not going to be explained by the study of grammar alone. We need to look at how humans evolved cooperative cultures in which effective communication was at a premium, and at “theory of mind”, which gives humans knowledge of the intentions of Read More ›

The Kingdom of Speech From E. J. Spode at 3 AM Magazine (“Whatever it is, we’re against it”), a longish review of Tom Wolfe’s The Kingdom of Speech: Because, in this day and age, it isn’t about finding the truth; it’s about winning the news cycle. This attitude is pristinely reflected in a review of the book in Canada’s Globe and Mail. “Wolfe is a reporter and an entertainer, an opinionated raconteur rather than a scientist, and that is why we will always report on his jocular provocations. And if they serve as an excuse to explain what universal grammar was in the first place – as it has done – then Chomsky should be thrilled.” Right. Because what could Read More ›

Now and then, we’ve talked about the Voynich manuscript, a strange mediaeval work whose baffling code seems undecipherable. From Libby Plummer and Abigail Beall at Daily Mail: Many experts argue that the text contains similar features to natural languages, suggesting that it may be a code. However, Gordon Rugg, a computing expert at Keele University claims to have worked out a simple system that produces similar results in a new study. … The researcher was able to generate a series of words that follow a linguistic pattern, but are actually meaningless, using a rudimentary grid system based on Voynichese words. More. “Clones” of the book are to be made available for under $10k. The new theory is intriguing but will Read More ›

From neurosurgeon Michael Egnor, reflecting on Tom Wolfe’s new The Kingdom of Speech at Evolution News & Views: I have argued before that the human mind is qualitatively different from the animal mind. The human mind has immaterial abilities — the intellect’s ability to grasp abstract universal concepts divorced from any particular thing — and that this ability makes us more different from apes than apes are from viruses. We are ontologically different. We are a different kind of being from animals. We are not just animals who talk. Although we share much in our bodies with animals, our language — a simulacrum of our abstract minds — has no root in the animal world. More. No, language has no Read More ›

With all this talk of language, what with Tom Wolfe’s The Kingdom of Speech coming out, here’s an interesting new approach: From Sarah Knapton at Telegraph: The discovery challenges the fundamental principles of linguistics, which state that languages grow up independently of each other, with no intrinsic meaning in the noises which form words. But research which looked into several thousand languages showed that for basic concepts, such as body parts, family relationships or aspects of the natural world, there are common sounds – as if concepts that are important to the human experience somehow trigger universal verbalisations. The study found, that in most languages, the word for ‘nose’ is likely to include the sounds ‘neh’ or the ‘oo’ sound, Read More ›

From Tom Wolfe’s The Kingdom of Speech, By now, 2014 [when Chomsky’s critic Everett appeared], Evolution was more than a theory. It had become embedded in the very anatomy, the very central nervous system of all modern people. Every part, every tendency, of every living creature had evolved from some earlier life form—even if you had to go all the way back to Darwin’s “four or five cells floating in a warm pool somewhere” to find it. A title like “The Mystery of Language Evolution” was instinctive. It went without saying that any “trait” as important as speech had evolved… from something. Everett’s notion that speech had not evolved from anything—it was a “cultural tool” man had made for himself—was Read More ›

From Paul Ibbotson and Michael Tomasello at Scientific American: The idea that we have brains hardwired with a mental template for learning grammar—famously espoused by Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—has dominated linguistics for almost half a century. Recently, though, cognitive scientists and linguists have abandoned Chomsky’s “universal grammar” theory in droves because of new research examining many different languages—and the way young children learn to understand and speak the tongues of their communities. That work fails to support Chomsky’s assertions. The research suggests a radically different view, in which learning of a child’s first language does not rely on an innate grammar module. Instead the new research shows that young children use various types of thinking that Read More ›

From Tom Wolfe’s The Kingdom of Speech, Speech ended not only the evolution of man, by making it no longer necessary for survival, but also the evolution of animals. Today the so-called animal kingdom is an animal colony and we own it. It exists only at our sufferance. If we were foolish enough and could get the cooperation of people all over the earth, in six months we could exterminate every animal that sticks up more than a half inch above the ground. Already all cattle, chickens, and sheep in the world and the vast majority of pigs, horses, and turkeys—we hold the whole huge gaggle of them captive, all of them… to do with as we wish. (pp 262-263, Read More ›

Re Wolfe’s The Kingdom of Speech. From Jerry Coyne at Washington Post: Here Wolfe’s victims are two renowned scholars, Charles Darwin and Noam Chomsky, whom he considers the most vocal exponents of the “hardwired” school of language. But Wolfe’s argument ultimately backfires, for the book grossly distorts the theory of evolution, the claims of linguistics and the controversies about their connection. Finally, after misleading the reader for nearly 200 pages, Wolfe proposes his own theory of how language began — a theory far less plausible than the ones he mocks. Using the surgical kit of New Journalism, Wolfe flays Darwin and Chomsky as imperious, self-aggrandizing snobs, each humiliated by a lower-class “clueless outsider who crashes the party of the big thinkers.” Read More ›

The Kingdom of Speech Noel Rude (native American specialist) kindly writes to say, re Tom Wolfe’s The Kingdom of Speech: — But maybe we should pause a moment and ask just what the beef is between Daniel Everett and Noam Chomsky [addressed by Wolfe in detail. – ed.] –as seen by actual linguists. I can tell you what it isn’t. Hardly any linguist would now challenge the fact that language is creative and that there is at present no materialist theory whatsoever to explain this–though of course this fact is seldom mentioned. Language, you see, divides between the physical medium (sound, symbols, words, grammar) and the nonphysical message. The big beef is not about the latter but the former. Chomsky Read More ›

The Kingdom of Speech From Dwight Garner at New York Times on Tom Wolfe’s The Kingdom of Speech: Mr. Wolfe, now 85, shows no sign of mellowing. His new book, “The Kingdom of Speech,” is his boldest bit of dueling yet. It’s a whooping, joy-filled and hyperbolic raid on, of all things, the theory of evolution, which he finds to be less scientific certainty than “a messy guess – baggy, boggy, soggy and leaking all over the place,” to put it in the words he inserts into the mouths of past genetic theorists. … Scientists will be likely to shrug at Mr. Wolfe’s lucid if overexcited synthesis of other people’s ideas and respond this way: We’ll get there, in terms Read More ›

The Kingdom of Speech In “Piecing together a celebrity scientist,” Tom Bartlett writes re Tom Wolfe’s recent book, The Kingdom of Speech might seem an unlikely project for a white-suited literary legend who hung out with Ken Kesey back in the day and later wrote best-selling novels in the social-realist vein. But it actually fits nicely alongside two other books in the Wolfe ouevre: The Painted Word, and From Bauhaus to Our House, both extended essays that send up pretension in the worlds of art and architecture, respectively. My paperback copy of The Painted Word bears the following cover blurb: “Another Blast at the Phonies!” Wolfe is on the hunt for phonies here, too. In the first half of the Read More ›