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There's an interesting article on the transition of language from animal grunts to full-blown language on today's Nature Science Update: http://www.nature.com/nsu/030120/030120-3.htmlI wasn't able to make the link at the bottom of the page to the full article work. If anyone else can maybe there's more information there. I'd be interested in y'all's comments on this hypothesis.
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old hand
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I think you had to have a subscription to the journal to get the full text. I managed to access this through my university's online journal system. If anyone is interested in seeing the .pdf file (which I haven't read yet), PM me.
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Pooh-Bah
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This is fascinating stuff, Faldage. Thanks for the link (and the article returned a "not found" message for me, too)
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Carpal Tunnel
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Link opened fine for me...thanks, Faldage! We've had much intriguing discussion here on this subject. I know there's a long and interesting thread about it, but here's something I found from Aug. 2000 started by (look consuelo!) "yooper" while I'm looking for the other link: http://wordsmith.org/board/showthreaded.pl?Cat=&Board=words&Number=3225
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I've looked cursorily at the article Bean has thoughtfully provided. It is chock full of math.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
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journeyman
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Wow, I went into those old threads Juan posted and got lost in there. First I found something I wanted to quote, said by one of you guys 2 years ago(!) about human language and conceptual thought being locked in a spiral of mutual growth, each forcing the rapid development of the other. When I went back into the thread to see who exactly said that I found a whole new set of comments, which were hidden from me before.
And then I came upon an impertinent entry by dear Milum, when he was a 'stranger', calling all you old-timers 'exhalted grand pooh-bahs" or some such thing (my sentiments exactly when I first checked in). Then he took off on one of his wild and enjoyable rants. I liked it so much I have saved it in my word files.
When I looked at the date of that post, to see when he was so new to the board, it was September 10, 2001!
Oh, my. And as I went on I wondered what happened on the board that fateful next day, but as I continued, a few posts popped up for that day and even into the next. And while they were spare, they made not one mention of the disaster that shook our world. I am quite sure it came out in other places here. I assume that all of you would come here, to each other for reassurance and comfort, to express your shock and your anger, and perhaps profess your faith. But it just struck me that there was no mention of any of that whatsoever in that particular thread. The talk simply went on. Subdued, but it continued. And I guess that's ok as well.
But back to this thread.
So, *HUMAN language is what you are specifically talking about, I think. That does not then preclude the possibility of other forms of communication as language, be it cetacean, higher/lower primate or butterfly, from existing and functioning. I studied primatology, and deeply believe that the great apes (man included) are all capable of spiritual thought and self cognition, and I would venture at the least that the higher cetaceans are as well. Why not?
But the acquisition of (1)Human language bundled with (2)bipedalism, which allowed for (3)tool use (and *my have we gone off the deep end as a species with that one, up to and *including the use of a plane as a weapon of mini-destruction!)is the combination which leads us to *this place where we ask tsuwm for just the precise word to explain what we really mean to each other.
It's all good
mm
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journeyman
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While wandering around chasing the ghosts of some of you and some of these ideas, I found this reference to a special Sci Am that some of you may have seen, a whole edition on human language. Milum, did you ever get it? Anyone else see it? I'll try to find it in the library.
m
http://wordsmith.org/board/showthreaded.pl?Cat=&Board=announcements&Number=72418
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MM and anyone else posting URLs to AWAD threads: You don't need anything past the number identifying the post. Thus: http://wordsmith.org/board/ showthreaded.pl?Cat=&Board=announcements&Number=72418 works just fine. You can delete all of: &page=&view=&sb=&vc=1#Post72418This keeps the post, and, if you are viewing in flat mode, the thread from getting wider than the page you are viewing it on.
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It amazes me that anyone would think to, or want to, quantify the differences between a speaker's preferences and a listener's preferences, though I suppose it could serve some purpose. But I don't think we need to know the value of the relative weightings to tell us that language development can come in leaps. All it takes is common sense. Start with the fact that we are a species full of high curiosity, and that we need/want to know everything we can about the world around us. This would have been especially true of homo erectus--they would have needed to know, for ex., that "grnk" meant, "Run! A lion is chasing me!", not, "Hi, how are you today?" Once they realized how handy language could be, don't you think they would have expanded it as fast as possible? Look at infants: once they grasp the fact that things can be named, and that they can use language, they just take off, linguistically. From using maybe 2 or 3 words at a time, which is typical of 18 months old, they'll most likely be using full sentences by 24 months. Look at Helen Keller: once the memory of wah for water was brought back to her, her desire to learn was insatiable. About Sept. the 11th., mm, yes, we did have threads on that. Nerves, needless to say, were on edge, and a couple of times the discussions got fairly heated. That was when it was decided that discussing politics, esp. potentially-fraught politics, here, was better not being done. I too, went back to those threads (not sure I 'preciate being referred to as a ghost, though!  ), and noticed something: when I clicked on a link to another AWAD thread here, a new window opened with it. However, in one of those links when I clicked a link to another thread, that one took over the window of the one I'd been looking at, instead of opening up another window. Anybody know why?
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Anybody know why?
sounds like somewhere along the line, the code was changed for links...
formerly known as etaoin...
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journeyman
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Jackie,
Talking (writing) amongst one another in here is one thing...in semi-real time, even though these minds appear somewhat disincarnate in cyberland (am I making any sense? I'm at work. I think much more clearly at home in the wee hours of the morning).
Reading through the old threads from over a year ago is more like chasing ghosts....none of you are there anymore, so I can't even jump in and converse. You've all moved on, and in fact *some intriguing souls have disappeared entirely from this place (and long ago, though I have only just met them!). That's all I meant. And as the 'codes changed to links', or whatever is happening to reveal different threads each time one wanders back in there, it is a bit unusual.
As you get to know me, you'll find that I am mildly obsessed with all my (beloved)ghosts...(and I am sorry to say that I have more than my share) It wasn't meant to be offensive, or even *about you all.....
and it *was supposed to be about human language, and the uniqueness of it all....until as usual, my mind got spiraling off in another direction. Oh, where is spongeman when I need him?
m
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I wasn't offended, Sweetie (note the wink). You're right, in a way: I am not the same person I was a year ago; I doubt that any of us are. Something that has always rather saddened me is the thought that my graduate school experience was gone forever, the moment I graduated. I just loved it; that is the only time in my life that I have had a whole group of close friends. But it would certainly be different if I were to re-enroll with a whole new class. And even if somehow every last one of us were to go through as a group again, it still wouldn't be the same, because we would have changed: new experiences, new outlooks. I guess I'm just not a person who lets go very easily; even with things that I know must end and should end, most of the time I heave at least a small sigh of regret.
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old hand
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I'd be interested in y'all's comments on this hypothesis. ~ Faldage Language evolved in a leapConflicting needs may have driven rapid development of communication. 22 January 2003 PHILIP BALL
Speakers want few words; listeners want many. Language probably leapt, not crept, from squeaks to Shakespeare, two physicists have calculated. Human communication, they propose, underwent a ' phase transition', like solid ice melting to liquid water.  First out I'd like to thank these two nice physicists for taking time away from doing real science and attempting to straighten out this sorry word mess that we language speaking people of the world find ourselves in.The richness of human languages is a fine-tuned compromise between the needs of speakers and of listeners. Just a slight imbalance of these demands prevents the exchange of complex information.  Said the same thing to a guy on the bus yesterday. He said "Bullshit!" What a jerk! So languages between those of present-day humans and the limited signalling of some animals cannot really exist. There must, at some point, have been a switch from rudimentary to sophisticated language. Exactly. My dog gets confused when I say "fetch".  This contrasts with some linguists' view that language evolution was a gradual affair in which new words accumulated steadily.  If I say the word l.i.n.g.u.i.s.t. I must spit. A language that conveyed all information unambiguously, would have a separate word for every thing. Such a language would be formidably complicated for the speaker: the green of grass, for example, would be represented by a totally different word to the green of sea, an emerald or an oak leaf. But it would be ideal for the listener, who wouldn't have to work out any meanings from a word's context. Ideal for the speaker is a language of few words, where simple, short utterances serve many purposes. The extreme case is a language with a single sound that conveys everything that needs saying. Some might suggest that teenagers prefer this kind of minimal-effort tongue that forces others to figure out what their grunts actually mean. Yes,yes,yes, the politician who speaks but a few words and we want more, the teenager who grunts. Uh, moving right along... We have devised a mathematical model in which the cost of using a language depends on the balance between these conflicting preferences. We calculate the properties of the lexicon that requires minimal effort for different degrees of compromise, from exhaustive vocabularies to one-word languages. We find that the change from one extreme to the other does not happen smoothly. There is a jump in the amount of communication, from very little to near-perfect, at a certain value of the relative weightings of speaker and hearer preferences.  Yeah, I get it...like a jump...yeah, like a...like a quantum Jump!  Human languages seem to sit right on this sudden change. When it happens, the frequency of word usages develops a distinctive mathematical form, called a power law. The power law disappears on either side of the communication jump. It has been known since the 1940s that human languages do indeed show just this kind of statistical distribution of word usage - the social scientist George Kingsley Zipf spotted the power-law behaviour. But it has never been satisfactorily explained before, although Zipf himself speculated that it might represent some kind of "principle of least effort".  Look fellows I don't want to hurt your feelings or anything but obviously your forte is not mumbo jumbo. That's the domain of linguists. Would you mind going to the back room and cooking up some nice neat math. We'll supply the wild theories, you supply the mathematical voo doo to give them class. Thanks guys, for your support.
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The perspective of language being "crunched" into sets of numbers reminds me a bit of why serialist composers never really got widespread exposure or developed as a form as jazz has (or communicative, for that matter).
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I can study music with a number of theories and I'll get a number of different results. I can listen to music in a number of different settings and I'll hear a number of different sounds.
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When a theory creates *art, theoretically, you should get a very artful theory.
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is that voo-doo, or voodoo? the whole math/language thing is a bit like early sampling that digitized sound at a chunky rate that didn't quite get all the subtleties of the information. myb... maybe, or mind-your-own-business?
formerly known as etaoin...
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is that voo-doo, or voodoo?Is that math/language or math\language? (I accidentally hit *Spellwreck® and they want vortex for voodoo! )
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I think it's manglage...
hey, did I just kine a word, or did I chop yart's liver?
formerly known as etaoin...
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or did I chop yart's liver?What in reinyartnation® are you talkin' about!?
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haha. actually, it should be: mangluage · when math and language get mangled together. and isn't it rei-nyar-tation?
formerly known as etaoin...
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Manglage is a real word--who'd'a thunk it? Google should get you about 13 hits; most of them seem very strange...
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well mangluage netted me two: this one is pretty interesting: http://homepages.ihug.com.au/~jhannon/woof.htmguess I'll have to keep working for that ®
formerly known as etaoin...
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Wow, it sure is! It has a web bs. generator that gave me, "reintermediate front-end functionalities", among other gems. It also has a Post-Modern Text Generator, to produce a unique fully-referenced academic paper. You can See the Aliens who Landed in Alice Springs. For all of you who sit unwillingly through business meetings, try W Word Bingo.
Ohmigawd! Did you see at the bottom? "Poor bugger of the week:
Michael Jackson, who has been diagnosed with imagined ugliness syndrome."
Oh, I lurve down-under humour!
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yes, I laughed my way through the hyphenalities... but then I found a link(from the graffiti page) to a very disturbing site: http://www.shutupandshop.wild.net.au/endhunger/frames.htmldisturbing because of the statistics of the way we all live on the planet... well, chin-up, and keep doing my best.
formerly known as etaoin...
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