Singing Nonsense
I'm going to go ahead and copy-paste from a conversation I just had via e-mail with Jared.
Jared suggested that I read this nifty article about a new book, The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body by Steven Mithen.
I responded with the following objections that I have to the idea that language evolved:
1. To accommodate the production of speech, humans evolving from apes had to evolve a lower larynx to open up the vocal tract and allow for sounds other than nasals (if not, all we could produce would be "mmmm, nnn" kind of sounds), but this made us more prone to choking. Seeing that apes do a fairly good job learning basic signs of sign language, even though they aren't capable of putting them together in a language-like way, it doesn't make sense that if communication was so important for our survival and sign language was such a viable option for communication that we would evolve in such a way as to increase the risk of choking to death.
2. Linguists are constantly pointing to the simplification of grammar and saying that there are a set number of grammatical categories, and we don't invent new ones; we don't seem to innovate language to make it more complicated, but to make it easier or more efficient (the loss of difficult to produce sounds over time, the loss of fine-grained grammatical distinctions, etc.). To say that we started from scratch and added more complexity only to at some point turn the trend around and start getting rid of stuff again doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
3. We see that babies isolated from input don't seem to learn language, so the question is, how did we ever begin inventing language in the first place without some sort of linguistic input to start us off? If we were capable of doing that, did we lose that ability? That seems to put us at an evolutionary disadvantage.
Jared suggested that I read this nifty article about a new book, The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body by Steven Mithen.
I responded with the following objections that I have to the idea that language evolved:
1. To accommodate the production of speech, humans evolving from apes had to evolve a lower larynx to open up the vocal tract and allow for sounds other than nasals (if not, all we could produce would be "mmmm, nnn" kind of sounds), but this made us more prone to choking. Seeing that apes do a fairly good job learning basic signs of sign language, even though they aren't capable of putting them together in a language-like way, it doesn't make sense that if communication was so important for our survival and sign language was such a viable option for communication that we would evolve in such a way as to increase the risk of choking to death.
2. Linguists are constantly pointing to the simplification of grammar and saying that there are a set number of grammatical categories, and we don't invent new ones; we don't seem to innovate language to make it more complicated, but to make it easier or more efficient (the loss of difficult to produce sounds over time, the loss of fine-grained grammatical distinctions, etc.). To say that we started from scratch and added more complexity only to at some point turn the trend around and start getting rid of stuff again doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
3. We see that babies isolated from input don't seem to learn language, so the question is, how did we ever begin inventing language in the first place without some sort of linguistic input to start us off? If we were capable of doing that, did we lose that ability? That seems to put us at an evolutionary disadvantage.
posted by Elizabeth | 2:54 PM
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