Re: lexicon

----- Original Message -----
From: "Andreas Johansson" <andjo@...>

> Quoting "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...>:
>
> > On Sat, May 31, 2003 at 12:24:50AM +0100, michael poxon wrote:
> > > I'm not sure anyone knows what language was created for (does
> > > there have to be a reason?) - but in any case that kind of
> > > argument tends to imply a wilful act of creation. I think you'll
> > > find that 'arts' came before everything, and included language.
I basically agree, but I would emend 'art' to 'ritual.'  My flip remark to
Garrett the other day that words were used for mystical purposes before they
were communicative was not entirely flip.  I remember reading somewhere the
various theories about language acquisition.  Ritual purposes may have been
the oldest.

Mark wrote:
> > Only if you include Creation as an art and take literally
> > something like the Genesis story of God creating through words.
This seems a little extreme.

Mark wrote:
> > But if we restrict the discussion to Human language and Human
> > art, then there's no doubt that language came first; it's
> > a built-in instinct, whereas art is a cultural construct.
Doesn't "culture" go hand in hand with "language" and "ritual"?  How can you
separate any of these?  For heaven's sake, LANGUAGE is a cultural construct.

Andreas wrote:
> How can we be sure of this? Who says there can't have been cultural
constructs
> before hominids learned to speak? One might think that chimpanzees' "tool
> traditions" might classify as cultural constructs, and chimps don't speak.
True.

But what if everything evolved together for humans?  Why does there have to
be a before and after sequence?  I've even heard language described (I think
by Chomsky himself) as evolving along with human motor skills.  In theory,
the fine-tuning of the nervous system for hand movement and fingers (to
build things) evolved along with the fine-tuning of the tongue...that both
came from the same advanced brain developments.

Andreas again:
> (Lest someone invokes the experiments regarding teaching captive chimps to
> speak, let me point out that chimps out in the jungle certainly does not
speak
> anything like a Human Language, and it's they who have the "tool
traditions",
> by which I mean the fact that certain groups use tools/techniques that are
> learnt from the earlier generation and does not occur in other groups.)
Yes, but they don't also have by far the developed manual motor skills that
humans do, and concomittantly the same lingual developments.  They can make
and use tools, but they aren't building rafts, building fires, or making
ritual drawings in caves.  Clearly the ability to think in abstractions is
there, but the sign language that chimps and gorillas use with humans is a
human/simian relationship.  It's been observed that few of these animals
teach the sign language to their infants.  It's not as though we can plant
the discovery in them, turn them back into the wild, and voila!  the
chimpanzees will teach this technology to their fellow chimpanzees in the
jungle, vastly expediting their development.  My point is that I can't think
of tool-making and language as a "before" and "after" scenario.  Who knows
why our fellow apes did not or cannot evolve the way we did?   Who knows why
*we* did so?

Sally Caves
scaves@frontiernet.net
Eskkoat ol ai sendran, rohsan nuehra celyil takrem bomai nakuo.
"My shadow follows me, putting strange, new roses into the world."

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