Chomsky - different perspective

[alex gross]

> The other thing that gets me is why so many people care so much about 
> separating themselves from other animals, and why they assume that 
> everyone else cares.  No offense, but to me that's one of the least 
> interesting research questions I can think of.  Anyone who wants to 
> research it can go ahead, but they don't have to belittle my reasons for 
> studying language because they're not the same as theirs.

I agree completely, Angus, I wonder if these people may not be closet 
creationists without realizing it. The glory of Darwin's discoveries was in 
fact rooted in proving how connected we are to  animals, after all we share 
so very much with them, including ingesting, digesting & excreting our food, 
sexual reproduction, same-sex sexual couplings, tribal and/or species 
self-protection, merely listing the obvious...

Oddly enough, I believe our links with animals also include language--as I 
have painstakingly maintained ever since 1993 language can be readily 
interpreted as a development out of spray-markings, from the chemical spray 
of simple single-cell creatures to the scent markings of higher animals to 
the sound markings we call language. At each stage the number & variety of 
messages becomes greater but at the cost of creating species- or 
clan-specific systems of sound markings not understood by other species or 
clans, as the Tower of Babel falls & languages become "foreign" to one 
another.

I developed this outlook at least a decade before the Evolang crew started 
their boondoggle, encouraging academics from any field, often those with 
slight or shallow backgrounds in language, to hurl a dart at the board by 
advancing their own theories about how language began. Clearly many of these 
savants felt the need of some "higher" theory of language, something the 
Discovery Channel could bill as "the crucial step that separated man from 
all other creatures."

I have provided what I consider irrefutable proof that language evolved from 
spray & scent markings at  conferences of linguists and translators. I have 
simply asked the members of these audiences to hold up their hands to their 
mouths and whisper into their palms for 20 seconds while I went on speaking. 
Invariably they found that their palms were covered by a film of spray.

People desperately want to believe that somehow our existence on this planet 
is high & dry & abstract & sterile & if not eternal at least relatively 
permanent, unlike the existence of animals around us.

But face it, everything about our lives is moist, liquid, clammy, messy & 
impermanent--our weather, our lakes, our oceans, our meat, our fruit and 
vegetables, our sex drives, our entire bodies.  So why wouldn't the origins 
of language be moist and clammy too?

Offensive?  Sure, for some people.  But there are people who find offensive 
almost everything that isn't high-sounding & abstact. Perhaps they even find 
life itself offensive, which couldn't be more fluid.  As the cliche has it, 
life is a sexually transmitted disease that is invariably fatal.

All the best to you & everyone!

alex

PS: Two of my pieces advancing this theory of language origin:

http://language.home.sprynet.com/lingdex/ariadne.htm#totop

http://languag2.home.sprynet.com/f/evidence.htm#top

**************************************************************
The principal purpose of language is not communication but to persuade 
ourselves
that we know what we are talking about, when quite often we do not.

**************************************************************


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Angus B. Grieve-Smith" <grvsmth at panix.com>
To: <funknet at mailman.rice.edu>
Sent: Sunday, November 07, 2010 9:52 AM
Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] Chomsky - different perspective


> On 11/7/2010 9:29 AM, Denis Donovan wrote:
>> I would be most interested in reactions to Csibra and Gergely's thesis 
>> since it would appear to made the species divide even wider. Similarities 
>> across species are fascinating but they don't always have the same 
>> implications--which is why there is no need to deny similarities across 
>> species in order to appreciate the differences. After all, nearly thirty 
>> years ago Patricia Kuhl and J. D. Miller demonstrated that chinchillas 
>> perceive artificial stimuli along the da-ta continuum just as 
>> categorically as do humans. In fact, Kuhl and Miller found that when they 
>> plotted a graph of chinchilla da-ta discrimination the results were 
>> nearly identical to those of an English speaker.
>     I don't understand.  It seems that the chinchilla data contradict 
> Csibra and Gergely's thesis.  It's not like you can just say "da" on a 
> mountainside in Peru and the chinchillas will jump; they had to be trained 
> to respond to this distinction.  Although this training was presumably not 
> "natural pedagogy," it's pretty clear that chinchillas are receptive to 
> similar kinds of activities.
>
>     One thing that gets me about all this research is the circular nature 
> of it: We have activities that are uniquely human, and those activities 
> are what separates us from the animals.  Okay, then I want a grant to 
> figure out the color of George Washington's white horse.
>
>     The other thing that gets me is why so many people care so much about 
> separating themselves from other animals, and why they assume that 
> everyone else cares.  No offense, but to me that's one of the least 
> interesting research questions I can think of.  Anyone who wants to 
> research it can go ahead, but they don't have to belittle my reasons for 
> studying language because they're not the same as theirs.
>
> -- 
> -Angus B. Grieve-Smith
> grvsmth at panix.com
>
>