Animals–the Roots of Language

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Searching for the origins of human language has taken RT to some amazing places recently.

For instance, what about animal intelligence? Reading around has left me with the impression that animals are smarter than I had suspected.

Here is a list of the cognitive abilities that animals have demonstrated:

1) object recognition (the ability to pick out an object in an animal’s field of vision)

2) problem solving (the ability to use cause-and-effect reasoning to achieve goals);

3) tool-use; 

4) language (the ability to communicate discrete concepts, instructions, and observations to other members of the same species);

5) cultural adaptation (the ability to create behaviors unique to a group of animals);

6) political bargaining (the ability to create alliances between certain members of a species to gain control over other members of the species) ;

7) an ability to count;

8) self-recognition; and even

9) ethical behavior.

Golly, gosh, and gee! That’s a lot of thinking going on. And many species have demonstrated at least some of these abilities, including: mammals (especially primates), birds, ants, and bees are among the animals that have shown remarkable abilities to learn, communicate, and cooperate.

And in case any of the cognitive abilities listed above seem too basic to be taken as signs of intelligence, the struggles that computer specialists have had in creating robots that mimic even the most widespread mental functions, such as touch and object recognition, tell a different story. None of these skills emerged overnight.

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But, truth be told, not many species demonstrate mental capacities that truly resemble our own. The short list: cetaceans, the great apes (chimpanzee, gorilla, orangutan, and bonobo); and perhaps, the elephants.

Some of these animals have mastered vocabularies that include hundreds of words. And I make no extraordinary claims here–after all, a human language contains about a million words. The question then becomes: what are the differences between our conversations and talking with, say, a chimpanzee?

RT says: stay tuned for the next installment on this.

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Photo: Bottlenose Dolphin; NASA; WikiCmns; Public Domain.

Build Me a Wing: The Ascent of Syntax

Studies for a Flying Machine; Leonardo da Vinci

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Grammatical adventurers, take note: We have emerged from the moist and hazy landscape of morphology onto the invigorating veldt of syntax. Here we will encounter all manner of fantastical beasts: Wh-movements lumbering about, trumpeting and flapping their huge ears while parasitic gaps crawl over their hides, carving crevasses as they go; nanosyntaxes scurrying here and there among the verbiage; modifiers (dangling or otherwise) chopping away industriously at large clusters of overripe sentences, even the endangered purple expletive, snorting and stamping and waving its fabled horn of interjection about.

Cut, cut, CUT! Folks, this is the wrong script…we need to move to Renaissance Italy, or maybe it’s classical Greece…

Ok, I admit it: I’m a ham. Here is the real deal about syntax (or at least as far as I understand it)–

1) Syntax is the study of the way that words are combined to create a sentence. One way to understand this is to say that syntax is morphology taken to the next level. The big difference here is scope: whereas morphology deals with the meaning of individual words–the combination of a word’s root meaning and the meanings created by its affixes, syntax deals with the way that words combine in a sentence to create a more complex meaning. And since there are various classes of words and a seemingly infinite number of ways to combine them, the study of syntax has generated many schools of interpretation.

2) Here, in broad strokes, are some of the principle interpretations of the way that sentences are constructed:

a) Traditional Grammar. This approach takes as its starting point the belief that language and its structure directly reflects the underlying structure and logic of thought. Because the underlying structure is universal, there must be a single best way to build a sentence.

Because TG was developed initially in classical times and maintained into the early modern era in Europe, its analysis reflects European trends in philosophy and the relatively limited sentence structures of European language.

Traditional Grammar’s standard analysis of a sentence follows: Subject + Copula + Predicate.

b) Generative Grammar. This is the first of the modern schools. GG recognizes that there are a multiplicity of ways that sentences are put together in languages around the world. Only some languages, for instance,  use the Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) order common in Europe. But, GG maintains, underneath the multitude of forms likes an inner language that all spoken languages follow. In other words, it is possible for people to understand each other, no matter what their native language might be. Noam Chomsky is the current (and longtime) champion of this school.

c) Non-Universal Grammar. OK, I’m really out on the proverbial limb here, since my understanding of this school is based on the reading of a single New Yorker article some years ago. Dan Everett, a linguist who has been living with the Piraha people in the Amazon jungle for upwards of 30 years, believe that Piraha, the language these people speak, demonstrates that language is not a uniform capability generated by all human brains. Our ability to speak (and think) is directly related to the number of concepts (i.e, words) we learn as children. That is, if you are introduced only to the numbers 1 and 2 when young, you will have difficulty understanding larger numbers as an adult. Since Chomsky has designated his approach to grammar “Universal,” Everett’s position could be called “Non-Universal.”

Gosh, golly, and gee! I began writing this post thinking that syntax is the combination and structuring of smaller units of meaning into larger “machines” that could catch the underlying currents of meaning–much in the way that a bird’s wings depend on air and its currents for flight. But it now seems to me that far from having a single, more-or-a-less universal feather-and-wing design, syntax may depend on a large variety of designs to capture meaning. Or it may be that the parts of syntax’s wings themselves generate the air and current.  Whoa!   RT

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Image: Src: Wikicommons; License: Public Domain

The petroglyph remains

From fellow-blogger cross-ties:

The petroglyph remains

Habilis

Habilis

at the bottom of the mind

     lies a stone

a place of earth and rain

       blowing through the

                                        mouth

we lie in a silence

                       not absolute

                      staring, alert

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     the stone remembers

       the first hand

       the hip smooth

          with its socket, scattering

      our feet across the world.

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and our hearts knotted,

                                            the nervous

knock-knock, knock-knock of our time

     chipping loose the fragment, the

        thought, razor-edged &

                                           dangerous

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the stone is rising,  split and veined

       fleshy and not an apple

     involute and not a mind, but many

              wet strokes of thought

              blood in the mouth            & tongue

 

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              and fire, stonestruck.

 

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leaf-flakes, handloom, and heddle

     parure of pins & beaded blood—

                      What else? The shining, cut eye.

—the Rag Tree

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Note: The title refers to H. Habilis, the first ancestor species to exhibit significant brain expansion over the chimpanzee (650 cc. vs. 400 cc. for a chimp). Habilis means “handy,” “dexterous” in Latin.

Image: G. de Mortillet, 1903; src. WikiCommons

The Zen of Being a Monkey

Artist: Pisanello; Srce: WikiCmns; Dte: 15th c.

This is the deal: New World monkeys are supposed to be really dumb: small brains, can’t talk, at most only our distant relatives. What are they good for?

Back in the day (when I used to see a movie every Friday night I had the cash), one of the theaters in town ran an ad for an environmental non-profit with the previews. This was no ordinary ad: on black-and-white film, it showed a monkey leaping from one tree to another. The leap was shown in slow motion with some dramatic music to emphasize the point: how did the monkey manage this leap? I mean, the two branches must have been 20 or more feet apart, and the space the monkey was leaping through was filled with stray branches. No human could have done what the supposedly pathetic little monkey accomplished.

If I were teaching a class in poetry somewhere (which I’m not), I would use this ad on the first day to answer the question: What is poetry? People think that they would have to be really smart, have gotten a lot of academic degrees, to be a poet. But what lies at the heart of the enterprise is a kind of supreme concentration, the kind of awareness that makes leaping between trees possible. Professional athletes call this trance the Zone. But poets and athletes couldn’t have anything in common, could they?

Poetry is buried deep in the mind, coming out of the same place that makes superb physical coordination possible. So I would tell my students: sure you can be a poet; you just have to practice. RT

2 million years

That’s how long we’ve been speaking.

It was thought for many years that the first ancestor species to possess speech was Homo Habilis, a hominid discovered in the early 1960s by the Leaky family in east Africa. Habilis lived from around 2.4 to 1.7 million years ago, and its average skull size was larger than a chimpanzee’s (5-600 cc vs. 400 cc). Most importantly, it used hand-modified stone tools and possessed Broca’s area, a bulge in the brain associated with speech (the bulge is accommodated by a bump in the skull).

Then things got more complicated. Another species, Homo Ergaster, was discovered, which possessed all Habilis’s evolutionary advantages, larger average brain size, and a larger larynx. And here’s the coup de grace: Ergaster remains have been found in the Republic of Georgia, far beyond Habilis‘s range. Ergaster lived somewhat later than Habilis, surviving down to about 1.4 million years ago. It is believed to have given rise to the breakout ancestor species, Homo Erectus, whose remains have been found in northern China and Java.

Ergaster was almost certainly the first species to speak with a human voice. We might as well call them the first people.

& let’s give Habilis its due: it was the breakthough ancestor species, pushed by fierce competition and predation to the use of elaborate hand signaling and sophisticated verbal communication (that is, a pre-language) not quite reaching the complexity of full speech.

The word is a venerable and powerful gift….

(illustration courtesy WikiCommons; information from Wikipedia)