|
|
Post by faskew on Apr 10, 2013 7:13:49 GMT -5
Hints of Human Language Heard in Lip-Smacking Monkey Talk www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/04/geladas-language-origins/The short video is creepy. There's only one bit that sounds human, but that's enough to mess with your brain. Imagine what hanging around these monkeys all day would do. 8-> Fred Askew |
|
joan
Member
Posts: 1,407
|
Post by joan on Apr 10, 2013 9:07:10 GMT -5
was creepy, like a sigh. reminded me of the 'fly' movie, where the human head screams 'help me', as if there is some human trapped in that ape.
thanks fred, you never let me down, always have something of interest for me!
|
|
|
|
Post by raybar on Apr 10, 2013 13:54:58 GMT -5
Interesting, but obviously claiming any similarity between this and the beginnings of human speech is speculative. We may never know with any certainty what happened, but it seems safe to say that it must have grown out of vocalizations made by older ancestor species.
At what point might an observer say "This is real language whereas a generation or two back it wasn't?"
|
|
|
|
Post by faskew on Apr 11, 2013 14:44:28 GMT -5
We can't even properly define language now, let alone in the Way Back Days. Debates rage over apes using sign language, critters than make various noises for different situations, etc. At some point, our ancestors probably pointed and make grunting noises (like ages do today) and somehow that developed over time, in very, very small increments. But we'll never know the exact point that it changed into "language". If language is using the same noise over and over to mean "danger" (or whatever), then lots of critters do that now. If language has to have syntax, verb declinations, etc., then many humans don't have language now. Visit your local Wal-Mart for research into the lack of language in modern humans. 8-D
Fred Askew
|
|
|
|
Post by raybar on Apr 12, 2013 14:17:46 GMT -5
I doubt that a "proper" definition of language is important to anyone other than academics who want to write the definition. A definition just tells us what to call something, what box to put it in, where to draw the line between this and that. I'm much more interested in what happened than in what we call it.
I doubt that there was ever an "exact point" when language appeared. If you could go back in time and chose the point, your selection would be somewhat arbitrary and would be based on your definition. In the same way that you could never say "this animal is a different species than its mother," you could never say "this guy speaks real language, but his parents don't."
Certainly, at some point, we would all agree that we were seeing real language, by any human standard you might mention. Likewise, further back in time, we would all agree that the communication we were seeing wasn't yet ready to be called real language. But I suspect that there would be a period between those times, perhaps a long period, where it would be difficult to decide whether it was real language or not. As you said above, progress in small increments over time, but perhaps with some breakthroughs that led to rapid advances at times -- punctuated equilibrium in language development.
A three-year-old girl (now 30 something with a three-year-old of her own) was trying to tell me something that required her to use a subordinate clause in the middle of her sentence. Her first attempt didn't work. Whatever she said was nonsense, and she knew it. She started again, and when she got to the point in the sentence where a comma would go, she paused with that "I'm thinking as hard as I can" look on her face, and then spit out the rest of it.
That moment was a breakthrough for her. She had a new and better way to say something, and I never saw her stumble over that kind of sentence structure again. Our ancestors probably had breakthroughs like that when someone found a new way to say something, perhaps a way to say something that couldn't be said at all before then due to the limitations of their (pre)language.
I REALLY want a time machine.
|
|
|
|
Post by faskew on Apr 15, 2013 7:24:50 GMT -5
Even if you had a time machine, you wouldn't know when (or where) to go. Be off by a couple hundred kilometers or by a year, and you'd miss the "event". 8->
Fred Askew
|
|
