Re: Conlang book report: The Unfolding of Language

Den 2. jan. 2007 kl. 05.54 skrev Amanda Babcock Furrow:
>
> Ok, I will attempt it...
Whoa, that was a *long* outline. But thanks!

> His first premise: that there existed a stage where language consisted
> of 2 or 3 word sentences, where the words were simple invariable words
> which probably did not pattern as nouns and verbs, although they would
> naturally have referred to objects and actions due to our
> experience of
> the world.  He does allow a basic world order of SOV (not sure how he
> squares this with "no nouns or verbs"!).  There are no adjectives,
> prepositions or other frippery.
I think attributive words must have come in very early, to divide
objects and events into categories like good, bad, dangerous, fun,
etc. as well as to express opinions about things and beings. He is
perhaps guilty of a typically male mistake by supposing that the most
fundamental things in our minds are the objects around us. Even
chimps have their own words for these attributes, and more.

> He starts at this stage because his claim is that existing, observed
> tendencies of language change can work on this stage to create modern
> language, but he believes that we cannot know what forces brought
> speech
> *to* the multi-word stage.
What the next generations of language origin theorists need to deal
with I think is the fact that much of the early development of
language took place in species that were differently equipped than
ourselves. Once we get to our species, I think language was rather
well-developed, or it developed to a pretty decent level of
sophistication rather quickly. Perhaps not with the same complexity
as today, but I do think we had the equipment to understand and
develop many of the complexities of language from the start, and used
it.

> Let me quote his initial example story, and perhaps you will see why I
> found it a bit patronizing-sounding:
>
> girl fruit pick     turn     mammoth see
> girl run     tree reach     climb     mammoth tree shake
> girl yell yell     father run     spear throw
> mammoth roar     fall
> father stone take     meat cut     girl give
> girl eat finish     sleep
>
> He states about this that "speakers of any language would be able to
> follow it without any problem, as long as they understood the meaning
> of each word"
Perhaps, except it sounds like he first gives meat to the girl and
then eats her. Or he cuts the meat, girl gives it to him, and she
eats it. No. Already at this stage you need a way to distinguish
subject from object, and/or perhaps pronouns.

> because it "does not rely on any rules peculiar to [...]
> the grammar of any other particular language", since "the words are
> strung together according to a few natural principles, which are
> rooted
> in the deepest levels of our cognition".  That may very well be true,
> but it is the sort of claim which sounds quackish.
Wrong wording perhaps. Today it's more fashionable to use terms like
"hardwired", I think.

> Next he goes into more detail about his "me Tarzan" stage of the
> language.
> He believes that we should start with only words for physical things,
> simple actions, and the closed class "this" and "that", which he
> justifies
> despite their abstractness since they usually accompany the act of
> pointing.
I also have noted that the distinction here, there, yonder is
something that seems to lie very deeply within us. Possibly something
we inherited from our ancestral species. It extends to this, that,
that yonder, and I, you, it, and perhaps other aspects as well, of
language as well as of other more or less traditional ways of
expressing ourselves.

> Next he attacks adjectives.  He shows that basic words for property
> objects have been known to develop from words for objects notable for
> that property, i.e., red from blood, sharp from shard.  Then he
> embarks on a completely gratuitous metaphor regarding the "double
> life"
> of property words, their "high life" as predicates (a word he does not
> use to avoid scaring us)
Yuh - scary word.

> and their "low life" as "appendages" to the
> noun.  This is the sort of ridiculous paraphrase he uses throughout
> the book, BTW.
You mean, to avoid using all that Latin terminology? Actually I'm not
too great a fan of all that Latin myself. Linguistic terminology
tends to need so much memorising, because they often lack any obvious
intuitive link to their content. Also because I came to them
relatively late in life, perhaps...

> Not so bad, really, and the examples are very good.  I just found the
> father-killing-(singlehandedly!?)-the-mammoth-for-his-daughter story a
> bit too precious.
The content of the story wasn't really the point I believe. But
perhaps the choice wasn't very good. A bit too much of an old-
fashioned hero-rescues-blonde type of story. Maybe girls should kill
their mammoths themselves? I reckon Ayla usually needs help from some
friends in order to slay one.

Thanks for the abstract. Interesting and more or less plausible here
and there. Some ideas on what's old and new in language are always
welcome. I didn't know that verbalising nouns was older than
nominalising verbs that way, though I've heard infinitives are fairly
recent. Have to check out that more.

LEF