Re: glossogenesis (was: Indo-European question)

> Date:         Tue, 19 Jun 2001 18:46:10 +0000
> From: Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...>
>
> I don't think we need go back to monocellular organism.  We can get much
> closer; no primates, other than Homo Sapiens has AFAIK evolved anything
> comparable to human speech.  I'm not expert in this field, but I'm told
> that chimps have mentalities comparable to five-year old kids; but
> five-year old humans talk pretty fluently - no chimp does.
If we're talking about signing chimps, I don't know if they are any
slower, or need to see signs slower, than five-year old human signers.
But they are less capable of using complex language structures.

One problem may be that most research has focussed on young chimps.
Well, humans learn language perfectly well before puberty, so it's
natural to assume that a three-year old chimp has learned all the
language it's ever going to, even if the five-year mental age is
otherwise only reached by very old individuals.

But I saw an interesting snippet somewhere about a group doing
experiments with a second-generation signing chimp. I.e., a baby whose
mother learned to sign when she was young. And someone noticed that
the mother seemed to pick up some of the complicated structures that
the younger one didn't. (Sorry, no reference).

So perhaps chimps do have the same sort of language capability that we
do, at least qualitatively. It just develops slower after a certain
point because they grow up and have to concentrate on survival. And
because their lifespan is so short, there are never enough individuals
in a troop at the start-a-language level for it to take off.

This opens the intriguing possibility that once the hominids started
out on the neotenic path, with longer childhoods and lifespans, the
proportion of language-ready individuals in each troop would rise
quickly, until language just caught like fire in one of them --- and
that language might have been surprisingly modern.

Perhaps relevant is the idea that the brain structures used for
language, at least the syntax part, also serve to enable modelling of
exterior events, planning, and ultimately consciousness --- which may
explain the evolutionary advantage of developing them before language
got started.

(I also read that the best problem-solvers among chimps seem to be
older troop leading males --- perhaps because they've had to think
about defending the troop and keeping the peace continually for many
years. So they might be the ones we should try and talk to).

Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) <thorinn@...> (Humour NOT marked)

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