Adam Reisman's Response, Mr. Flibble's Debate

Correspondence of Hans Georg Lundahl: Tomasello Not Answering · New blog on the kid: How did human language "evolve from non-human"? · Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere: Adam Reisman's Response, Mr. Flibble's Debate · Andrew Winkler's Response and Debate · Creation vs. Evolution: Odd Perfect Numbers? Less Impossible than Abiogenesis or Evolutionary Origin of Human Language!

Q

How was the creator of the first language able to explain this concept and be understood and make others come to a consensus?
https://www.quora.com/How-was-the-creator-of-the-first-language-able-to-explain-this-concept-and-be-understood-and-make-others-come-to-a-consensus/answer/Adam-Reisman

Adam Reisman

B.A. in Linguistics, University of Southern California

Nov 23

We know absolutely nothing about the origin of human language, but it doesn’t seem likely that it started with one individual “creator”.

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Saturday, St. Catherine of Alexandria

25.XI.2023

Hans-Georg Lundahl

How did human language "evolve from non-human"?

Adam Reisman

That’s a very interesting opinion.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

Care for a debate?

A

Adam Reisman

No. A debate on this is pointless. Also, I don’t have an opinion on the origin of language 😀

28.XI.2023

B

Mr. Flibble

I left a comment with some thoughts on the topic. Hope that was alright. I tried using my Google account which I use here but it seemed to be having issues, so I commented “anonymously.”

Edit: it was too long, so I’ll post it here after all:

This may be a little rambly but perhaps it can be of some interest.

Lexical complexity (in the sense of compartmentalization and semantic distinction) tends to be greater among speakers who inhabit more technologically advanced and socially complex environments. The need to disambiguate a greater number of objects and concepts in one’s world necessitates a larger amount of differing lexical items.

Meanwhile, grammatical complexity seems to be unaffected by the level of technological development of a society. While this doesn’t provide any direct clues as to the early evolution of speech in prehistoric humans or their hominid ancestors, it does show that homo sapiens have already reached a ubiquitous threshold in terms of linguistic development and capability. Since the capacity for language complexity shows no apparent spectrum across human populations based on level of technological development, we can safely assume that there was at least some arbitrary point when human speech ceased “evolving” (for lack of a better term) —perhaps because the computational niche for our current brain has effectively been reached, which may be why there appears to be an upper bound on the level of complexity within natural languages based on the trade-off with practical use and retention.

So what does this tell us about the origin of human language? Well, not a lot, to be frank. It suggests that the cognitive skills which allow for language development have reached their apex within the current demands of human activity, and that any further degree of complexity is offset by the computational load involved in retaining and retrieving information.

The question then becomes: when was this reached? To that there doesn’t appear to be much of an answer, other than general statements about when anatomically modern humans reached a cognitive capacity similar or equal to current members of the species. We can assume that the existing capacity for language acquisition and use must be at least as old as anatomically modern humans, which at gives us a rough benchmark for when we can expect modern linguistic complexity to have reached its maximum level of development (or potential for development). As for what came before that is up for debate.

The evolutionary gap between the closest related species to Homo sapiens (chimpanzees and bonobos) is so great that it doesn’t really provide any major insights to the kinds of developments, and the speed at which they occured, in our ancestors.

Our ability to conceptualize objects displaced locally or temporally —our capacity for abstract thinking— is almost certainly a prerequisite for the ability to map concepts to what are [from an evolutionary standpoint) inherently unreliable vocalizations. Unlike most other animal vocalizations, human speech is not intrinsically “trustworthy.” The meaning of speech sounds are removed from any external stimuli or internal state of mind. Sounds like screams or laughter, while capable of being “faked,” have meanings which cannot be interpreted any other way than what they represent. Animal cries, even ones which convey non-emotional information (such as some monkeys’ different calls for the approach of different predators) are reinforced not through social cooperation, but rather through evolutionary adaptation. The monkeys which heeded a particular sounds produced in response to an oncoming predator went on to have more children, and overtime an instinctive reaction developed which became reinforced with each subsequent generation. The difference here is that no planning was involved, no cooperative effort by the population to introduce a particular sound to a specific stimuli.

This means that in order for language to have begun, humans (or early hominids) would have needed to have reached a point of social development where interpersonal trust was high enough to allow for such cooperative coordination of thought and voice to occur (this likely also applies to non-vocal communication, voice merely being a medium with greater variability and thus greater application). Sadly, determining when this happened in the history of our species is probably unknowable.

Anyway, if you read all this thanks for listening. And maybe it could of been of some interest, though I probably am merely retreading old ground you have already covered.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

"The need to disambiguate a greater number of objects and concepts in one’s world necessitates a larger amount of differing lexical items."

The prerequisite for this being of course one has concepts in the first place.

Other than of emotions and things to immediately do.

But we only see human individuals learn these things as they learn language, the exact thing which the scenario is supposed to explain.

"Meanwhile, grammatical complexity seems to be unaffected by the level of technological development of a society."

Indeed. But very much affected by humn kind versus beasts.

Human : vocalisations are (mostly, except laughter etc) phonemes, which make up the morphemes standing for concepts and meta-concepts, which in their turn make up phrases that are the message.
Animal : vocalisations are (like human laughter) the message.

"Our ability to conceptualize objects displaced locally or temporally —our capacity for abstract thinking— is almost certainly a prerequisite for the ability to map concepts to what are [from an evolutionary standpoint) inherently unreliable vocalizations."

And vice versa. Feral children don't seem to show it.

Hence the exact problem.

Which is not a problem for the thesis God gave the first man the first human language.