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If you have human language – you have something to talk about
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One fundamental idea shared by many researchers is that in order to evolve language you will first have to have something to say - as opposed to, for example, going about your life, developing language out of the blue, and then finding you have a lot to talk about. The search for the origin of language thus includes a search to uncover what ultimately was so worth relating that our ancestors began to ratchet up their communication skills in order to do so. In trying to work this problem out, it helps to know what kind of thought goes on in the heads of nonlinguistic creatures. For a long time, we have assumed that not much does.
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Many of the animals that demonstrate complicated thinking turn out to have a fair bit in common with us. Even though many of them are not that closely related to humans, they share many traits that seem as important as DNA. Hyenas, whales, elephants, baboons, and parrots all have long lives, extended periods of childhood, complicated systems of communication, and their societies are made up of individuals with distinct roles and relationships. Accounting for the connection between phenomena like individuality and cognition is a fairly recent development. In most studies of long-lived animals with elaborate social systems, the individual is extremely important because they have extremely varied experiences.
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Elephants are biologically distant from humans, yet like us they live long lives in structured societies where childhood is an extended period of learning out of which individualistic behaviour emerges. The social demands of elephant society are intense. They include growing up in a crowded community with members that change and develop over the years.
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Other researchers have commended on the sophisticated ways that members of animal groups relate to one another. Frans de Waal calls the set of rules and relationships found in such complicated groups a social syntax.
Ray Jackendoff agrees there is a parallel to be drawn between the role of syntax in language and in social situations: „If you look at what the other primates are doing, you have to attribute some concepts to them. Not all of them by any means, but tracing who is related to whom and therefore who one is entitled to commit aggression against, these kinds of things require combinatorial structure, and they suggest that the meaning was around before the language.“
The more we learn about what is going on in the heads of other animals, the more we realise that many different species have a lot to think about and there ways of thinking are quite sophisticated. Despite centuries of believing otherwise, we now know that it is possible to have a complex inner social life without syntax and words. Most significantly at this stage of language evolution research, the overwhelming accumulation of evidence for animal cognition resets the parameters of the problem - there can be no more easy assumptions about human uniqueness or the special status of our mental lives.
Researchs differ in how much they think our mental platform interacts with language, though most agree that it has to have some role. At the most general level, examining the thinking of a broad range of species suggests how common certain types of ignition are among many animals. Narrowing the focus and looking at animals that live similar lives to ours helps to consider what the mental life of our ancestors might have been like. Based on the abilities of the chimpanzees, dolphins, parrots, described in this chapter, we can assume that their thought processes were already fairly complicated.
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What does language bring to the mix? Ray Jackendoff argues that when you introduce language into the well-developed mental platform of prelinguistic hominids, you get profound ramifications of thought, material culture, and social structure: „Language does help us think better. It doesn't enable us to move from zero to actual thought. Monkeys do have thoughts, and you have two have something to say before there is something adaptive in saying it.“
Jackendoff outlined four logical possibilities for thinking about language evolution.
First, some things that are necessary to language must have undergone no change at all from our pre-linguistic ancestors. Lungs and the basic order to resist them belong in this group.
Second, certain traits have appeared only in the human lineage, are relatively new, and are necessary for language but also serve a larger function. This group includes phenomena like pointing and the ability to imitate.
Third, there are probably aspects of language that only humans have and that are used exclusively for language but are based on some alteration of a shared primate trait, like the shape of the vocal tract.
Fourth, parts of language may be used exclusively for language and arise from a trait that this completely new and unprecedented in the lineage we share with other primates.
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In a paper he co-wrote with Steven Pinker, Jackendoff described many ways of thinking that are not possible without language. These include fatherhood, more raw concepts, tools made of three parts or more, ideas and systems of thought like the supernatural and formal and folk science, and kinship systems that make complicated distinctions like cross cousins and parallel cousins.
Language and the concept of time:…as with most other animal cognition research we are just beginning to get a handle on how animals may think about time, whether consciously or subconsciously. Until recently we believed that animals lived forever in the present, unable to think about the future. But in 2006 Nicolas Mulcahy and Joseph Call showed that orangutans and bonobos could plan for a future event. In a number of experiments they demonstrated that both kinds of animals were able to select from a range of tools the appropriate instrument for getting food out of a specially constructed device, even though they wouldn't have access to the device for up to 14 hours. This series of experiments is the first to show that nonhuman apes can plan for a later need.
It is probably not possible to learn the way we carve up time without language, wrote Jackendoff and Pinker: „The notion of a week depends on counting time periods that cannot be perceived all at once; we doubt that such concept could be developed or learned without the mediation of language“..
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A new generation of experimenters has begun to engage in earnest with the ways language, ideas, and thinking may interact. Gary Lupyan believes that language may shape cognition: „The idea that language effects thought has a great deal of intuitive support. We feel that we think in language and think differently in different languages. Languages around the world vary to an enormous degree, and so it would seem people speaking these languages ought to categorise and think about the world differently. Language seems to embed itself in so many aspects of our everyday cognition that we must start considering how language has altered the functioning of cognitive mechanisms we share with other animals“.
Boe: Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
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Lupyan: Separating language and thought is hard but it is precisely because of this that we have to start thinking of them as not to separate things, but as a system. As language is learned, it alters how we treat a face - it's not just a face, it's my friend Mike - so learning language results in our automatic labelling of objects, actions, salads, and even more abstract categories like emotions. This labelling categorises the item and links it to other instances of the category“.
Other language and thought experiments have looked at how we process number.
Piraha: Peter Gordon, Daniel Everett
As experimenters become more sophisticated in their methods, it is reasonable to imagine that the ways that thought is ramified by the complexities of language will become more apparent. In the meantime, the work of Gordon,Lupyan, and others suggests that words are not just convenient labels for things; rather, they are extremely powerful mental devices. And if there is one aspect of language that appears to be uniquely human and relatively recent innovation, it has to be the sheer size of a vocabulary. It is thought that speakers can have a vocabulary of sixty thousand words. But how old are words, exactly? Do animals have them? And if they do, does that mean that words have been around longer than humans?
Christine Kenneally
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