Spooks or Angels Diagnosed a Brain Tumour + Tangent on Jimmy Akin's Other Positions · GMS Reasons for Deconversion - My Answers to Some · Language is Not a Product of Evolution (with JuLingo)
If someone quibbles about my transcribing "toast" as "töwst" rather than "towst" - I am from the dialectal region of Sweden where "full" and "förr" have the same vowel, and have difficulties telling "alors" from "à l'heure" if the latter is pronounced to quickly (I pick them apart by rhythm, otherwise).
The origins of language - how was language created?
JuLingo, 19 Aug. 2022
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ea75JoOvuAE
0:35 No, an insoluble one.
[not just complex]
The argument for a supernatural origin is very solid.
Human language has notional non-pragmatic and non-immediate meanings, bestial ones haven't.
Any animal can say "let's eat" but only man can say "I ate toast for breakfast" (or in my case, a banana). It is non-immediate, since "I ate" means it is already past. It is non-pragmatic, since any ape which would prefer toast over banana or the reverse could in the immediate situation simply point.
How is this possible? "I ate toast" can be written more phonetically as "aj ejt töwst" (or if you ask some, "towst") ...
It is a complete meaning, which fully describes the non-immediate situation. Any animal version of "let's eat" would fully describe the immediate situation, so would also give a complete meaning.
But the complete meaning can also be subdivided in human.
1) aj 2) ejt 3) töwst
Each of these subdivisions has some kind of notional meaning in itself, an incomplete meaning which does not fully describe a situation. Let's change each.
1) ju ejt töwst - means I wasn't myself the one eating toast, but the one I am talking to was (a distinction beasts can't make, note I made a certain "translation" impersonally "let's" avoiding both "eat" as in command and "I want to eat" as in a request).
2) aj mejd töwst - whatever the reason to underline "mejd" rather than "ejt" it follows that
a) I didn't have the occasion to eat them ("when the door rang")
b) or wasn't the one intended to eat them or eat all of them ("so today it's your turn")
c) or, unusually for me, didn't appeal to someone else making them ("but you make them better")
3) aj ejt sirjöls - with or without milk, but arguably not with butter.
Each exchange of a unite of incomplete meaning means the situation is somewhat differently described.
But this requires quite a LOT of units of incomplete meaning.
1) aj = a -> j
2) ejt = e -> j -> t
3) töwst = t -> ö -> w -> s -> t
Note, the jod sound is not unique to either one of 1 and 2. The t sound is not unique to either one of 2 and 3. The sounds so analysed are not at all units of meaning, complete or incomplete, notional or pragmatic. They are parts of a cipher coding for the (larger) units of incomplete meaning.
This is very different from bestial, since in so far as a communication is a sound, it could be a gesture, that one sound (or with bird calls interval) is the complete meaning. Which limits the number of possible complete meanings.
The structures at the very most basic level are so different and incompatible as to exclude evolutionary transitions. You can rebuild a house until it's another house. You can resew a trouser until it's another trouser. That's how languages develop until they are other languages. But this would be more like rebuilding a house until it's a trouser or resewing a trouser until it's a house.
2:24 "different alarm calls for different types of danger"
Because they elicit different responses. With a lion, you can climb a tree. With a bird of prey, you can hide below a bush. With a snake, you can run.
Vervets can't run from lions, because lions can run faster. Vervets can't climb trees from snakes, because snakes can ramp up along the stem. And either response would just make them more visible to birds of prey, while the ducking under a bush would be as inaedquate to lions and snakes.
Illustrates the point I just made : an animal communication conveys a full meaning at one go, no subdivisions. It is also pragmatic, not notional. The alarm signals don't incorporate different notions about lions, birds of prey or snakes, they are different pragmatic signals.
So, vervets are not "precursors of notional meaning" ...
2:48 Call for apples different from call for jackfruits ... I'm impressed, didn't think chimps would have that much distinctions, but OK, not too impressed, you eat apples and jackfruits in different ways, so it is pragmatic.
7:22 In other words, impossible for anything evolving from apes to invent a system like grammar. Even if a mutation provided them with the slot you describe.
While they are in the window, they don't do systematical inventions.
After they are out of it, they cannot learn it, and therefore cannot invent it either.
7:40 The Mowgli girl you mention was arguably NOT a feral child.
A feral child could arguably not even do "orange Tim car in" ... and we have evidence she was not a feral child:
Sauf que l'histoire est en réalité loin d'être aussi belle. Le quotidien britannique «The Guardian» livre une toute autre version, qui s'appuie sur le témoignage de JP Singh, responsable forestier, qui affirme que la fille a été repérée au bord d'une route et non en plein coeur de cette zone boisée située à côté de la frontière népalaise. «Si elle vivait avec les singes, c'était seulement depuis quelques jours», estime-t-il.
This is from Le Parisien,
[Inde : «Mowgli girl» serait en fait une handicapée abandonnée par sa famille
Par R.B. Le 9 avril 2017 à 14h32
https://www.leparisien.fr/archives/inde-mowgli-girl-serait-en-fait-une-handicapee-abandonnee-par-sa-famille-09-04-2017-6838932.php
9:15 Can you document any pidgin actually becoming a native language?
Before you mention Tok Pisin, is there any proof it ever started out as the kind of pidgin you just described?
11:26 Indeed. Here we come up with morphological evidence from palaeontology and human archaeology there is a real divide between man and beast.
Ears. Australopithecus and Paranthropus have too big parts in the ear to hear consonants.
Homo Sapiens, Homo Neanderthalensis, even Homo erectus soloensis haven't.
Broca. Australopithecus and Paranthropus haven't.
Homo Sapiens, Homo Neanderthalensis, even Homo erectus soloensis have.
Hyoid bone. Usually not found, but one Australopithecus has a fully ape one, and one Neanderthal has a fully human one. It's internal tear and wear shows the tongue was used exactly as by modern man.
Any good cranium, that is, any well preserved one, will clearly show itself human or ape, never between the two.
13:35 While Australopithecus hasn't been gene tested, it will have a fully ape version of FOXP-2.
The Neanderthals had a human version of FOXP-2. Perhaps some differences, perhaps some handicapping differences, but still human.
15:02 "Many factors facilitated language appearance: new environment, walking on two feet, usage of tools, hunting"
None of these factors have a direct impact on changing a structure with one sound = one complete meaning, pragmatic to a structure with one complete meaning, notional or pragmatic, = several morphemes, one morpheme = several phonemes.
15:37 "good communication was key"
Also not an explanation for appearance of language.
If it was so key to supposed (not yet quite human) ancestors that the non-appearance of system phoneme < morpheme < phrase would have doomed them, they would have been doomed rather than invent language.
15:42 When you improve a trouser, you don't turn it into a house.
When you improve a house, you don't turn it into a trouser.
Human language is not an improved version of the communications apes use.
16:10 I would even say Homo erectus soloensis had a language with notional meanings, infinite productivity, recursivity and the three tier system of phrases consisting of morphemes, morphemes consisting of phonemes. They were human.
I would not agree on dates like "100 000 years ago" we have no credible documentation of such a history.
Egyptian and Sumerian lists involving god kings as rulers over any individual thousands of years are not credible documentation.
Non-carbon dating techniques are not credible dating at all, and carbon dating can only be tied to 100 pmC in the atmospheric carbon for as far back as we can confer carbon dates with documents. And as pre-Assyrian and non-Biblical chronologies break down very quickly when it comes to detailed chronological exactitude, this means, carbon dates can be trusted basically as they are from the Fall of Troy and on.
17:58 Or, if we discard the non-carbon dates, the disparity of language capacity could be that some Heidelbergenses were more genetically damaged than others, like more influenced by Nephelim ancestry before the Flood.
18:44 The necessity of notional information does not produce the capacity for it in individuals who have not grown up learning language before the age of 3.
19:33 "More and more words appeared, at some point, the speech of these ancient proto-humans may have resembled a pidgin language."
The grammar of ape with phoneme = phrase doesn't allow for appearance of more and more words, just a few more, here and there.
The grammar of human with phoneme less than morpheme, morpheme less than phrase doesn't come from no-where and also doesn't come from ape.
Ergo, it comes from God (once we agree that the material universe is not from eternity so neither can man be so).
19:47 "when they become native languages, they obtain their grammar"
How would you proceed to prove Tok Pisin ever was a pidgin (linguistic sense) like russenorsk?
How would you try to prove it didn't rather start out as a flawed acquisition of English, first as a second language, which then became a native language?
Chomsky will always be honoured for stating the obvious differences between human language and any other communication, but his analysis of creoles is flawed. Tok Pisin is a creole, in the sense linguists use this word pair, not a pidgin. Now, he argued, creoles started out as pidgins. The regularities of creoles then provide information about the most basic settings of human grammar. This was pretty well refuted by John McWhorter in his The Missing Spanish Creoles. He argued, slaves from West Africa were being taught languages like Portuguese or English from palace slaves who had only mastered vocabulary, but used them with West African grammars - in an area of West Africa with isolating grammars, like Chinese.
This rules out the idea of pidgins and creoles as a study in grammar arising from non-grammar.
20:14 How would your specially talented Heidelbergensis baby have transmitted grammar to others?
First, grammar has to be there before it can simply be picked up. There never was a non-grammar pidgin which then became a creole by transmission to the next generation.
Second, a baby that doesn't get an input of grammar will not learn it. The Mowgli girl you mentioned, if she could say actual words, it was because she was not a real Mowgli case.
Third, a baby haphasardly inventing a thing could only retain it if it was picked up by others, adults. Say a baby sang a melody and the parents liked it, yes, the parents could perpetuate the melody and so the baby retained it to adult age. B U T, grammar, as you have already shown, is a thing adults who haven't learned it cannot pick up. After age three, if you can pick up Japanese grammar (good luck, by the way!) it's because you already have a grammar to compare it to. If you had been a real Mowgli case, this would not have been possible. But on your view of the case, all these adults around the Heidelbergensis baby would, at least as far as grammar is concerned, have been real Mowgli cases. They couldn't have picked up the grammar from the Heidelbergensis baby.
And therefore, the Heidelbergensis baby would have grown up forgetting his own or her own invention, just as most melodies a baby sings are forgotten because the parents aren't picking them up. Grammar would never have had a chance.
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