How did human language originate?

[DrZoidberg]

The problems of chimps isn't that they're stupid or can't express infinite things. It's that they don't care. They're just interested in sex and food.

We can sublimate our sexuality. We can channel our sexual interests into completely unrelated things. We can become fascinated by studying butterflies, and do that our whole life. Or Charles Darwin who put off publishing his theory of evolution for 20 years because he just had to study earth worms a bit more. I think it's this that you are confusing with us being more innovative. We're really not. We're just governed by a slightly different set of instincts. But a difference that has led to dramatic effects.

 

[untermensche]

The problems of chimps isn't that they're stupid or can't express infinite things. It's that they don't care. They're just interested in sex and food.

We can sublimate our sexuality. We can channel our sexual interests into completely unrelated things. We can become fascinated by studying butterflies, and do that our whole life. Or Charles Darwin who put off publishing his theory of evolution for 20 years because he just had to study earth worms a bit more. I think it's this that you are confusing with us being more innovative. We're really not. We're just governed by a slightly different set of instincts. But a difference that has led to dramatic effects.

Chimps do not have an "internal computational system" capable of making sense of infinite unique phrases.

They really can't deal with phrases at all.

They can associate a finite number of symbols or gestures or sounds with things in the world.

The can make a few associations. Which is not language.

Chimps do not even have the beginning of human language which is an internal computational system that without effort produces and makes sense of new phrases for a lifetime.

 

[fromderinside]

There are real problems with amateurs using data about other species generated with human presumptions. Just as dogs can identify in indefininte number of odors and odor combinations so can apes, especially chimps, treat symbols important to them in numbers without apparent bound. Geez. A guy invents a paradigm and imposes it on beings completely unlike us and a 'science' reporter says something stupid. Any wonder scientists prefer to write their own science articles and restrict readership to other professionals.

You are no professional.

You have very little ability to logically deal with ideas.

You have ignorant prejudices like, reading Marx is a sin. Educating oneself is a sin.

You have no argument here.

Nothing but hand waving.

The key word you seem to be missing is EXPRESSIONS.

Symbol recognition is not a human expression in language.

To not comprehend that is to remove oneself from consideration as a professional.

Your opinion. My degrees and successes.

No. But IMHO catering to Marxist influenced leftist elites is pretty dumb.

Wasted statement. Looking for analysis leading to conclusion.

Again. Produce what was requested above.

Interesting comment since I didn't use that word in my comment. Setting up another straw man?

Again I didn't say it was.

....and to state what you just did is irresponsible and completely empty of meaning.

What you need to to is explain your cited meaning of symbol. Then, perhaps just perhaps, we can move forward.

 

[lpetrich]

Also, some negatives can indeed be proved. It can be proved that there is no highest number. untermensche, can you prove that?

Actually that is proving a positive.

There can always exist a higher number.

Victory by redefinition. untermensche, you can do better.

And there can always be another sentence the human can comprehend.

How do I prove that?

Again some logical limit has to be at least suggested. A hypothesis how the system of comprehension could somehow just suddenly stop.

Shifting the burden of proof. Claiming that something is infinite unless one can prove it to be finite. Common sense suggests finiteness, so the burden of proof is the other way around. untermensche, I'll give an example of burden of proof that you might relate to. Let's say that someone claimed that Noam Chomsky was an undercover KGB agent. If you could not prove that he wasn't, does that mean that he was?

 

[untermensche]

Victory by redefinition. untermensche, you can do better.

Pretend victory when shown your error.

Can you do better?

Shifting the burden of proof. Claiming that something is infinite unless one can prove it to be finite. Common sense suggests finiteness, so the burden of proof is the other way around. untermensche, I'll give an example of burden of proof that you might relate to. Let's say that someone claimed that Noam Chomsky was an undercover KGB agent. If you could not prove that he wasn't, does that mean that he was?

Common sense suggests no such thing.

Everyone has full confidence that they will be able to comprehend the new book bought.

Despite the unknown nature of what is contained within it.

 

[fromderinside]

lpetrich meant NKVD untermenche. Putin would burn any book by others than Chomsky.

 

[untermensche]

lpetrich meant NKVD untermenche. Putin would burn any book by others than Chomsky.

He is having trouble supplying a rational limit.

And is pretending to not understand what not having a limit means.

 

[fromderinside]

No one can't float upstream.

 

[lpetrich]

Shifting the burden of proof. Claiming that something is infinite unless one can prove it to be finite. Common sense suggests finiteness, so the burden of proof is the other way around. untermensche, I'll give an example of burden of proof that you might relate to. Let's say that someone claimed that Noam Chomsky was an undercover KGB agent. If you could not prove that he wasn't, does that mean that he was?

Common sense suggests no such thing.

Everyone has full confidence that they will be able to comprehend the new book bought.

Despite the unknown nature of what is contained within it.

untermensche, do you understand the difference between a large finite number and a mathematical infinity?

Consider a deck of standard playing cards. There are 52 distinct ones, and thus 52! possible orders of them. But since one gets a different order each time one shuffles them, does one conclude that there are an infinite number of possible card orders? untermensche, that is what you seem to be arguing.

 

[untermensche]

Common sense suggests no such thing.

Everyone has full confidence that they will be able to comprehend the new book bought.

Despite the unknown nature of what is contained within it.

untermensche, do you understand the difference between a large finite number and a mathematical infinity?

Consider a deck of standard playing cards. There are 52 distinct ones, and thus 52! possible orders of them. But since one gets a different order each time one shuffles them, does one conclude that there are an infinite number of possible card orders? untermensche, that is what you seem to be arguing.

Linguist Noam Chomsky among many others has argued that the lack of an upper bound on the number of grammatical sentences in a language, and the lack of an upper bound on grammatical sentence length (beyond practical constraints such as the time available to utter one), can be explained as the consequence of recursion in natural language.[1][2] This can be understood in terms of a recursive definition of a syntactic category, such as a sentence. A sentence can have a structure in which what follows the verb is another sentence: Dorothy thinks witches are dangerous, in which the sentence witches are dangerous occurs in the larger one. So a sentence can be defined recursively (very roughly) as something with a structure that includes a noun phrase, a verb, and optionally another sentence. This is really just a special case of the mathematical definition of recursion.

This provides a way of understanding the creativity of language—the unbounded number of grammatical sentences—because it immediately predicts that sentences can be of arbitrary length: Dorothy thinks that Toto suspects that Tin Man said that.... Of course, there are many structures apart from sentences that can be defined recursively, and therefore many ways in which a sentence can embed instances of one category inside another. Over the years, languages in general have proved amenable to this kind of analysis.

Recently, however, the generally accepted idea that recursion is an essential property of human language has been challenged by Daniel Everett on the basis of his claims about the Pirahã language. Andrew Nevins, David Pesetsky and Cilene Rodrigues are among many who that have argued against this.[3] Literary self-reference can in any case be argued to be different in kind from mathematical or logical recursion.[4]

Recursion plays a crucial role not only in syntax, but also in natural language semantics. The word and, for example, can be construed as a function that can apply to sentence meanings to create new sentences, and likewise for noun phrase meanings, verb phrase meanings, and others. It can also apply to intransitive verbs, transitive verbs, or ditransitive verbs. In order to provide a single denotation for it that is suitably flexible, and is typically defined so that it can take any of these different types of meanings as arguments. This can be done by defining it for a simple case in which it combines sentences, and then defining the other cases recursively in terms of the simple one.[5]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursion

 

[lpetrich]

Now we are getting somewhere. untermensche, do you understand what recursion is? Can you write a simple recursive function for us? Like for calculating factorials.

#160

A computational system capable of dealing with infinite expressions does not arise step by step.

You don't go from understanding 10 expressions, to 100, to 10,000 ......and so on to infinite.

As I'd posted earlier, that's the creationist half-an-eye argument. It's not necessary to go through that sort of intermediate to get to infinity. All one needs is to invent recursion. I suspect that it may have been simpler than that. All one needs to do is ramble and one's listeners can infer the connections. This could eventually be improved with conjunctions and the like, words like "and".

untermensche, you ought to study formal grammars some time. It doesn't have to be some university course. All you may need to do is work through some simple examples.

Noam Chomsky's theory requires that several things emerge together:

• Generation of sound sequences
• Recognition and interpretation of sound sequences
• Full-scale syntactical complexity

That's why it seems quasi-creationist. To get all those abilities together, one would have to have something like a big bout of genetic engineering by extraterrestrial visitors. The nice thing about the singing hypothesis is that it gets the sound sequencing generation and recognition without needing much semantic load, as little as birdsong and whalesong seem to have. That makes all-at-once evolution unnecessary.

 

[untermensche]

Now we are getting somewhere. untermensche, do you understand what recursion is? Can you write a simple recursive function for us? Like for calculating factorials.

I just posted a link to a Wikipedia article about it.

Have you stopped claiming an unending recursive system, infinite system, is impossible?

s I'd posted earlier, that's the creationist half-an-eye argument. It's not necessary to go through that sort of intermediate to get to infinity. All one needs is to invent recursion. I suspect that it may have been simpler than that. All one needs to do is ramble and one's listeners can infer the connections. This could eventually be improved with conjunctions and the like, words like "and".

And this is a fine objection but it is besides the point.

The hypothesis is that some single mutation somehow connected consciousness to an already existing recursive system, possibly even something involved in the creation of vision or movement or both.

You have to address the actual hypothesis, not a strawman.

 

[untermensche]

Noam Chomsky's theory requires that several things emerge together:

• Generation of sound sequences
• Recognition and interpretation of sound sequences
• Full-scale syntactical complexity

• 
  
  It would only be so if Chomsky claimed language emerged at once.
  
  The hypothesis is that the capacity emerged at once.
  
  And the capacity is a capacity of thought, not verbal expression.
  
  Humans most likely already had a crude animal communication system. So the ability to make and understand sounds was already there.

 

[fromderinside]

No one can't float upstream.

Amazing what adding a "'t" does to a post.

 

[fromderinside]

So I take it then that mice and some birds might have the capacity for thought.

 

[untermensche]

So I take it then that mice and some birds might have the capacity for thought.

The question is: What does a mouse use to order it's thoughts?

Humans probably already had a pre-existing crude form of animal communication. So humans were probably already using words.

They were probably already articulating words.

What they didn't have was this hierarchical system of underlying "grammar" that takes an animal from using a few words as labels to filling libraries with books made up of words.

 

[lpetrich]

There are some plausible intermediate states, states that some of our ancestors may have employed.

A simple one is conjunction: saying A B C D E ... and interpreting it as A and B and C and D and E ...

A computational system capable of dealing with infinite expressions does not arise step by step.

You don't go from understanding 10 expressions, to 100, to 10,000 ......and so on to infinite.

There is a simple kind of step that can generate infinities: recursion. Using  Backus–Naur form, we can express conjunction as
ELEMENT ::= A | B | C | D | E ...
PHRASE ::= ELEMENT | ELEMENT and PHRASE

That's not to say that we generate and parse in recursive fashion, only that one can use recursion to describe some grammatical constructs. In this case, we'd likely look at A B C D E ... in sequence -- iteration.

This recursion makes it unnecessary to have a separate parse rule for each number of elements. It also makes conjunction infinite. So one does not need some mysterious quasi-creationist jump.

This does not exclude the singing theory of the origin of language. In fact, it can easily be part of that origin. The first step would be inventing words, sequences of sounds for discrete entities and the like. Next would be combining the words, and the simplest type of combination is conjunction. Since it is easy to make conjunction infinite, we have infinity right there. After that would be more elaborate grammar.

 

[lpetrich]

I'll now look at human child development. Since children start out with limited versions of language, child language may give us clues as to how our language abilities evolved. This seems a bit like biologist Ernst Haeckel's jawbreaking phrase, "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny", or in simpler words, "growth reruns evolution" ( Recapitulation theory). Embryonic development is only a partial rerun of evolution, it must be noted. So it may be with child language development. Like:

• Look Who's Talking! All About Child Language Development
• Speech and Language Development (Milestones)

Children start off with single words and gradually learn how to string them together in more and more complicated combinations. It isn't some big jump at some age.

 

[iolo]

I'll now look at human child development. Since children start out with limited versions of language, child language may give us clues as to how our language abilities evolved. This seems a bit like biologist Ernst Haeckel's jawbreaking phrase, "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny", or in simpler words, "growth reruns evolution" ( Recapitulation theory). Embryonic development is only a partial rerun of evolution, it must be noted. So it may be with child language development. Like:

• Look Who's Talking! All About Child Language Development
• Speech and Language Development (Milestones)

Children start off with single words and gradually learn how to string them together in more and more complicated combinations. It isn't some big jump at some age.

Do they? How do they know which noises are 'single words'?

 

[untermensche]

I'll now look at human child development. Since children start out with limited versions of language, child language may give us clues as to how our language abilities evolved. This seems a bit like biologist Ernst Haeckel's jawbreaking phrase, "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny", or in simpler words, "growth reruns evolution" ( Recapitulation theory). Embryonic development is only a partial rerun of evolution, it must be noted. So it may be with child language development. Like:

• Look Who's Talking! All About Child Language Development
• Speech and Language Development (Milestones)

Children start off with single words and gradually learn how to string them together in more and more complicated combinations. It isn't some big jump at some age.

Do they? How do they know which noises are 'single words'?

That is so insightful.

But it's importance flies right over the head of most.

The brain needs to come ready made to make sense of verbal sounds.

And it needs to come ready made to make sense of sentence structure.

The human does all this because they have a language capacity. There is no effort.

Not merely a learning capacity.