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Biggest open mysteries of Human Language | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4947 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes  Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 1 of 29 10 June 2015 at 4:51pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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What do you guys think. Off the top of my head:
Was human language a sudden "mutation", appearing pretty much as an entire toolset within a generation (or within a certain "mutation population group") or did it evolve through very slow stages of howls, grunts, vocalizations, preset memorized sequences, to "proto-language" (something like a pidgin, to then full-blown grammar? Is there a bias towards simplification? It is obvious that all Indo-European languages have streamlined cases, declensions, tenses, gender, and even plurality (dual, etc), as time has gone on. Why? Anecdotally from what I have read of the Sino-Tibetan languages, they also had richer morphology, and have been simplifying. If that is the case, and if the same trend holds true for the Austronesian languages, why do we see this, and never (but I could be wrong and correct me!), a case of a language in the historical era that began as very analytical and evolved cases, more complex plurals, etc? (Of course, I will be the first one to argue syntax and word order is a form of complexity, and in Mandarin for example the rules are quite complex, something required when dealing with a language that marks relations almost solely via word-order. It is also amazing how flexible the language remains to alternative word-orders to express the same ideas. But I don't want to claim inflection-based systems are the only form of complexity). As an extension to this question, and assuming the above postulate is true, why did ancient languages evolve such richness in complexity in the first place? What possible evolutionary advantage could it have brought to have three genders, three plurals, eight cases, six declension classes, etc, for example? Is there perhaps a statistical bias between the written records and the ACTUAL spoken language, which may have been far simpler than the written? The above questions hold for phonology too. Generally speaking, in the historical records, daughter languages attrition sounds that were once clearly distinct. Some languages even had clicks, and today no longer do. Again, to me, the trend seems simplification. I understand why people would want to simplify if the job of communication can still be accomplished, but again the question arises why did most languages in the past seem to require more complexity in grammar, sound, and word order to function properly? Any other mysteries yet unresolved? 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5530 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 29 10 June 2015 at 6:47pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
My personal hypothesis is that language involved in several steps over a long period of time. This is based on a very loose notion that Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, though perhaps only very roughly. In other words, we might be able to learn something about how human language evolved if we look closely at how toddlers learn to speak. You can find a detailed overview here, but basically kids start out with isolated words, then one or two word sentences, then short sentences with primitive grammar, and then the complexity begins to build quickly. I think it's pretty well established that several species of great apes can use nouns and verbs (via sign language), but the linguist Steven Pinker argues that they basically have zero sense of grammar. I'm willing to believe that Koko the gorilla has about the same raw linguistic ability as a child in the 1-word or 2-word stage, although maybe this is the equivalent of linguistic genius for a great ape. :-) And if you start from that point, and if you gradually add more words and structure, then every new development would provide a clear evolutionary advantage. So natural selection would be able to conserve and spread each tiny advancement over a long period of time. But this means—to put in terms familiar to HTLAL—that there were probably once bipedal apes that functioned at a level vaguely analogous to CEFR A1 in their native "languages". But this is a completely unsupported hypothesis, with no evidence whatsoever. Take it with a grain of salt. :-)
One popular theory says that language complexity goes in a cycle:
An isolating language will often tend to attach grammatical particles onto words, becoming aggultinative, and an aggultinative language will often tend to compress elements together, becoming fusional. But a fusional language may wear down over time, and introduce new, isolated words to communicate ideas that were once handled by complex conjugations and declensions. Or so the theory goes. You can actually see a process like this happening with the French verb. Take an -er verb, for example:
Here, the forms (1), (2), (3) and (6) actually sound identical when spoken. And form (4) is almost always replaced with form (3) on parle in everyday speech (except in constructions like parlons de tout). So the six endings normally simplify to two. As you can tell from the spelling, this change in the spoken language has occurred in relatively recent history. But at the same time, the French verb appears to be in the process of gaining prefixes. For example, if I say, Je lui parle "I speak to him", the lui "to him" is called a clitic pronoun. French clitic pronouns follow complex but absolutely rigid rules—they must appear directly before inflected verb, in a very precise order, and some of them can never appear anywhere else. Some linguists argue that these pronouns have already become an agglutinate part of the verb:
In other words, if French writing wasn't constrained by history, you could validly write je lui-parl or even (arguably) jeluiparl as a single inflected form. In other words, there's good evidence that complex fusional French verb suffixes are disappearing, while at the same time, ordinary French pronouns have mostly passed from isolating to aggultinative. Give it another thousand years, and maybe those pronouns will smoosh together into a fusional mess, and the cycle will start again.
Well, left to their own devices, native speakers speak as quickly as they can while still being understood. As Scott Aaronson half-jokingly suggested:
The linguist John McWhorter argues that languages, left to their own devices, tend to become fearsomely complex. I mean, some people feel that written French is full of irregularities, but you should see some of crazy complexities of highly informal French as spoken in Quebec, as documented by HTLAL's own Arekkusu. McWhorter also argues that one major simplifying force is the introduction of a large number of poorly-integrated adult L2 speakers who never pick up the finer grammatical details. So major languages like English and Chinese might have a bias towards being isolating, but anthropologists studying small, isolated groups can sometimes find mind-blowing complexities. Do I agree with McWhorter? Maybe not entirely; he seems to think on some level that adults are very poor language learners, which I don't really believe—adults have some isolated weaknesses, certainly, but they can reach very high levels if they're fully integrated with a new culture. Also, don't assume that just because a language seems complex to you, as an outsider or a beginning student, that actual speakers of the language feel the same way. For example Swahili has 16 separate noun classes, which work sort of like genders, and that certainly seems as bad as any of the old Indo-European languages. But the language blogger Khatzumoto (of AJATT fame), who grew up in Africa, describes it as follows:
My guess is that most "complex" languages seem perfectly straightforward to people who speak them. I mean, even French grammar started feeling basically sensible and intuitive once I had listened to and read enough French. :-) Edited by emk on 10 June 2015 at 8:36pm 8 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6595 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 3 of 29 10 June 2015 at 8:27pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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Basically what emk said.
Also when one thing is simplified, something else becomes more complex. When Latin lost most inflections, the word order also became rigid. When vowels merge, the distinction can become tonal, etc etc etc. And yeah, when people describe their native language as complex, that's usually diglossia, prescriptivism and preservation of old distinctions in writing. Edited by Serpent on 10 June 2015 at 8:31pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4252 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 4 of 29 10 June 2015 at 9:02pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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I'm currently reading The Symbolic Species by Terrence Deacon, which I believe has been very influential in how it rethinks a lot of basic assumptions about how language evolved, although the overall explanation is still very speculative and based on evidence that isn't universally agreed upon.
Basically my understanding of his argument, is that he thinks one shouldn't think of language as an isolated module that evolved on its own, but rather as something that's built on a lot of other brain functions important for socializing throughout the animal kingdom, and what's unique about humans is taking a smaller step towards symbolic logic (not making a sound to indicate something directly in your environment, but that refers to something abstractly that can be mixed with other symbols). Then when a basic symbolic language was established, this co-evolved along with humans, in that languages themselves evolved (went through randomization and selection pressures) to have features that were useful for our various social interactions and easily learn-able for young humans, and the use in turn affected human evolution in selecting habits that encouraged and facilitated this symbolic communication. His argument is that this would explain why language evolved so much more rapidly than human brains, which he claims other evolutionary explanations don't account for. A few key quotes in case I'm misrepresenting his ideas since I'm not as widely ready in various linguistic theories.
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| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4705 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 5 of 29 11 June 2015 at 3:43am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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Just because there is less morphological inflection doesn't mean the language is
simpler. It means it is up to context more often what people mean, and that, paradoxically, makes it harder, as you cannot rely on explicit statements. The advantage of very fusional morphology is that they make certain distinctions explicit which are left entirely unsaid in other languages. Mandarin is a good example of extremely context-dependent grammar. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6701 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 6 of 29 11 June 2015 at 9:52am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
I find find it absolutely inconceivable that human language should have appeared without warning as a fullyfledged communication system. The differences between our language and grunts and screams of other apes are 1) that we have standardized morphemes, 2) that we have a syntax which isn't limited to word order and (maybe) 3) that we are capable of imagination in areas where the other apes can't follow us. This last capability may have evolved alongside our linguistic system, but thoughts don't leave marks in the bones so there isn't any final proof. A few apes have had the opportunity to prove that they can deal with artificial symbols and even combine them into meaningful units, but so far they haven't demonstrated the capability to make complicated constructions, and their thoughts mostly are concerned with immediate concerns like food, company, places to go and feelings. Impressive, but not abstraction at a human level. And they didn't invent those communicative systems - we did, and we taught those systems to a few lucky apes. In fact 'teaching' isn't practiced among apes - but learning through imitation is. So basically our big invention was to subdivide the gamut of immediate sounds and treat them as building blocks and to do the same thing with meaningful units, thereby producing grammar. On top of that we have seen some physiological changes that facilitated a fine-tuned and deliberate production of sounds. One important part of this, the FoxP2 gene with a few important mutations, apparently existed in Neanderthals too and by inference in our common ancestor, Heidelberg man, so it happened long. An adult Neanderthal voice would have sounded different from an adult sapiens voice, but so does the voice of a sapiens voice. And we have absolutely no way of knowing how complicated the grammars of the Neanderthals were or whether they spoke about other things than killing animals and sex. As for the 'development wheel' it is easy to see that the Indoeuropean languages generally have become more and more analytic, i.e. more and more based on inflexible bits and pieces. But following the hint of emk, the tendency to established fixed patterns involving those bits and pieces may lead to a system that effectively constitute a complicated agglutinative system, which over time through phonologically motivated changes may evolve into a fullfledged inflectional system. The French clitic pronouns have definitely entered this stage, and it is only the influence of a traditional writing system and their (mostly) initial location that prevent us from classifying them as inflective elements. I have also read somewhere that Ancient Chinese was more isolating than Modern Mandarin, but others have to elaborate on that. So the wheel may actually rotate, but it still seems that the direction of the wheel is determined by erosion of existing complicated elements combined with fixation of certain patterns among those eroded elements. And it also seems that languages which are adapted by lots of second language learners have a tendency to loose some of their most hairy edges in the process simply because the 'new' learners never learn them. Extremely complicated languages tend to be spoken by isolated tribes and small communities, and nowadays that's a loser's game. But arbitrary habits can evolve even within presumably simple languages precisely because idiomatics and stylistics aren't changed in a regular fashion though sound laws. And that can happen within any kind of language structure. Supplementary question: why don't we all click like the San? Did our ancestors long ago click, or did the click languages separate from the general run of the mill at some point in the distant past? Edited by Iversen on 19 June 2015 at 1:12pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| DaisyMaisy Senior Member United States Joined 5378 days ago 115 posts - 178 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish Studies: Swedish, Finnish | Message 7 of 29 19 June 2015 at 7:55am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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Iversen, I've been wondering that very same thing about the San clicks.
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| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 4030 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 8 of 29 29 June 2015 at 2:07pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Here is my reply to you: 1st paragraph: No, many modern IE conservative languages have fewer forms but they are vastly more idiosyncratic, irregular, and inconsistent often with gaps and random replacements hither thither. It always makes me want to throw a shoe out my window when someone says "Lol, English has only 3 forms for a verb, x has 80!" When such a phrase completely misses the point! Each of those 3 forms may have an irregularity while a language with "80" forms may derive them from a 6x6x2+whatever format with no irregularities like Turkish. The morphology of many sino-tibetan languages are not ancient, they evolved very recently but some have not stuck and fell out not due to creolization but the fact that analyticity is a regional feature there. I may be wrong in this statement in some areas but the idea is generally correct. 2nd: Only one family did, certain neighboring families took on likewise features, the morphology of Latin and Ancient Greek resembled something out of a newbie conlang artist who decided to pile everything up, they are the exception not the rule. Modern descendants are exceptions not rules too. 3rd. I agree, it is strange mergers keep on occuring but many languages never got phonologically complex to begin with, look at Papua New Guinea (except for Yele which is rather complex) and Australia as well.
John Mcwhorter is the kind of person who is extremely spot on at times but makes me want to bang my head since some of his ideas are incredibly riddled with holes. In one of his books he presents two particular statements that ruffle me to this day: "Foreigners often say that English language is "easy." A language like Spanish is challenging in its variety of verb endings (the verb speak is conjugated hablo, hablas, hablamos), and gender for nouns, whereas English is more straight forward (I speak, you speak, we speak). But linguists generally swat down claims that certain languages are "easier" than others, since it is assumed all languages are complex to the same degree. For example, they will point to English's use of the word "do" -- Do you know French? This usage is counter-intuitive and difficult for non-native speakers. Linguist John McWhorter agrees that all languages are complex, but questions whether or not they are all equally complex. The topic of complexity has become a hot issue in recent years, particularly in creole studies, historical linguistics, and language contact. As McWhorter describes, when languages came into contact over the years (when French speakers ruled the English for a few centuries, or the vikings invaded England), a large number of speakers are forced to learn a new language quickly, and this came up with a simplified version, a pidgin. When this ultimately turns into a "real" language, a creole, the result is still simpler and less complex than a "non- interrupted" language that has been around for a long time. McWhorter makes the case that this kind of simplification happens in degrees, and criticizes linguists who are reluctant to say that, for example, English is simply simpler than Spanish for socio-historical reasons. " English is simpler than Spanish in many ways, but not all! He may not have written this but the person who did certainly puts forth many misconceptions already. He (likely John mcwhorter referring to himself in third person, being manipulative already) reminds me all too well of the "linguist" who wrote the well known economist articles "Tongue Twisters" which states similar tripe in a smug tone that would make anyone wish to throw a shoe out of a window. But back to Mcwhorter: He claims in his book for instance that "Mandarin" is not an "English" but a Dutch and that an "English" would be a Mandarin with no tones and no final consonants which is strange considering such a language would except for the usage of measure words be extraordinarily simpler than English. He regularly claims things such as dialectal Arabic being "simplified" but modern Romance languages to not be except for a few shavings, or that such and such language is not simplified despite being simpler than a "simplified" language and so on. He never touches on languages like Turkish with no irregularities, small phoneme inventories, barely any idiomatic adpositional usage (same word for "in,on,at" and "out of, from"), no articles, etc the kind people like the writer(s) mentioned never touch ("english only has "the", my language is so difficult I have trouble with it, you must not know any other languages", and other doggerel being common from their mouthes).
Yes and no, we have to stop assuming just because an isolated tribe speaks a language, that is is fiendishly complex. I have explained over and over how many have tiny phoneme inventories, no idiomatic usage of preposition/adpositions, very transparent agglutination, simple syllable structures, etc etc. If you think Tagalog is "complex" then yes they are complex, but many in Rainforests, Papua New Guinea (except for Yele), Australia, Pacific Islands, Central America, etc are practically as complex as Turkish in the end. They have some of the most transparent derivation to add, often having one or two morphemes for making a causative for instances while something like Russian hypothetically has 2 dozen random ones with further irregularities along with half a dozen constructions that are used when there is a typical gap due to the inconsistency of how the grammar is shaped, almost comical in sheer excess and lack of mental economy really. Edited by Stolan on 29 June 2015 at 2:38pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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