From hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu Sat Mar 8 10:03:30 2003 From: hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu (H.M. Hubey) Date: Sat, 8 Mar 2003 05:03:30 -0500 Subject: [language] [Fwd:"Savage Girls and Wild Boys" by Michael Newton] Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> "Savage Girls and Wild Boys" by Michael Newton Kids raised by wolves? It happens, says an English academic. But the mute and bizarre children in these outlandish histories don't grow up to be Tarzan. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Laura Miller Feb. 12, 2003 | If you visit the Capitoline Museums in Rome, you'll find them pretty quiet except for the little cluster of people gathered around the statue of Rome's mythological founders, the twins Romulus and Remus. What attracts the visitors isn't patriotism or historical interest, though, but the hypnotic weirdness of the 2,500-year-old bronze sculpture: It depicts a standing she-wolf with two human infants sitting under her belly, nursing from her dangling teats. Romulus and Remus are two of the most famous legendary examples of feral children, the subject of Michael Newton's new book, "Savage Girls and Wild Boys." There are plenty more of them, too, from Rudyard Kipling's Mowgli ("The Jungle Books") to Tarzan. This is one of humanity's favorite fables, a tale of cross-species benevolence touched by fate. In stories, the abandoned child raised by wolves or bears or apes tends to come from exceptional, if not downright noble, stock, and in the wilderness he acquires the honest, pure, courageous spirit so lacking in his decadently civilized brothers. When he rejoins his own kind, it's usually to run a nation or take some other position of authority where his virtues can be admired by all. That's a far cry from the fate of most real-life feral children. Yes, they do exist -- at least Newton thinks so, and his judgment seems sound enough -- even if their stories are clouded by mystery and doubt. The author opens his book with a contemporary example: Ivan, a Russian 4-year-old who in 1996 fled his mother's home for the streets, where he took up with a pack of stray dogs, trading scavenged and begged food for the animals' protection, companionship and bodily warmth during the long winter nights. The police had a hell of a time capturing him, since the dogs turned out to be far more committed to his safety than his own flesh and blood had been. Full text http://www.salon.com/books/review/2003/02/12/wild_boys/index_np.html BBC Radio Four The Material World http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/thematerialworld.shtml Thursday 27 February 2003 Ivan Mishukov (Found 1998) The moscow boy who chose to live with a pack of wild dogs. Reproduced with permission of Moscoop Picture Library, Moscow. Wild Children This week's Book of the week on Radio 4 is "Savage Girls and Wild Children" by Michael Newton - a history of the feral child. The feral child in myth and legend goes back to Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome. One of the the first documented cases was Victor, the wild boy of Averyon. He was a child captured in 1800 in France. He was the first to be "scientifically" studied to be seen if he could be made "human" and develop language. What does the study of feral children tell science and how do they influence scientific thinking? The famous case of "Genie" found in a Los Angeles home abused and isolated by her father she became "the forbidden experiment" of the 20th century. Linguists and psychologists cared for her and worked with her to try and understand how her development and language had been affected. Did she confirm or deny - Chomsky's idea that children are pre-programmed to acquire language? Modern day cases in Russia might be turning up some interesting evidence about the window of opportunity for acquiring language. Feral children are still being found - how have they been treated by science and in turn, how have they influenced the science itself and what it can tell us about what it means to be human? Quentin speaks to Michael Newton, Part time lecturer at UCL and author of "Savage Girls and Wild Children" and to Dr James Law, Professor of Language and Communication studies at City University, London. Animal Coat Pattern Formation Animal coat pattern formation is one of those things that turns out to be a lot less random that you would imagine. In fact, mathematical models and equations are able to predict how they form. Alan Turing initially came up with the idea that mathematical equations related to chemicals in the bodies of animal that related to coat pattern. Although this turns out to be not quite true, it was certainly very close. In actual fact it seems that there is a genetic component to this pattern formation, which drives, as Turing puts it, Morphogenesis. The organism also involves the laws of physics and chemistry in its response as well. Quentin speaks to the Professor Ian Stewart from the Institute of Mathematics at Warwick University and to Professor Philip Maini, head of the Centre for Mathematical Biology at Oxford University who is taking Turing's work and adding to it to create complex mathematical models of how animals form their patterned coats. Listen to the programme http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/rams/materialworld.ram Savage Girls and Wild Boys Michael Newton Hardcover - 192 pages (18 February, 2002) Faber and Faber; ISBN: 0571201393 AMAZON - US http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/031230093X/darwinanddarwini AMAZON - UK http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0571201393/humannaturecom/ Editorial Reviews >From Publishers Weekly As a child, literature professor Michael Newton (University College, London) was captivated by Tarzan movies and Kipling's The Jungle Book. It's only fitting, then, that his first book, Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children, would investigate the history of children raised by (among others) wolves, monkeys and wild dogs. If these children help us understand "our continuing relationship with the savage image of ourselves" they also serve as a useful mirror of society's ills. As Newton argues, the medical treatments, therapeutic interventions, and general media hoopla following the discoveries of these children sharply reveal the intellectual and political fixations of their particular historical milieu from Victor, the "Wild Child of Aveyron," in 1800, onward. As interesting as such stories are in themselves, however, Newton's real strength lies in his ability to recognize how these children, seemingly helpless yet astonishingly self-contained, inevitably awaken our rescue fantasies and parental longings. Newton is a consummate storyteller, and this richly detailed study will work just as well outside of academe as within it. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. Reviews Amazon.co.uk Review Stories of abandoned children and those children supposedly raised by animals have long fascinated us, as the legend of Romulus and Remus makes clear. More recent stories also capture the imagination. The Wild Boy of Aveyron, caught running naked in woods in provincial France in 1800, has been the subject of biography and fiction and the attempt by the physician Jean Itard to educate the boy formed the basis for a memorable film by Truffaut. The appearance of Kaspar Hauser in the streets of early 19th-century Nuremberg, after a mysterious 16-year imprisonment in a dark and tiny cellar, evoked fantastic tales of a lost prince and rightful heir cruelly shut away. He too was the subject of a film--a visionary and visually inventive masterpiece by the German director Werner Herzog. Michael Newton's Savage Girls and Wild Boys: a History of Feral Children tells these stories and many more like them--wolf-children in 1920s India, a Russian boy living on the streets of Moscow and scavenging with a pack of wild dogs, a boy brought up by monkeys in Uganda. Much more than just a frisson-inducing account of the weird and the bizarre, Savage Girls and Wild Boys is an ambitious exploration of what these stories (and our fascination with them) tell us about the shifting boundary between nature and civilisation.--Nick Rennison Synopsis This is an account of feral children - those brought up with no human contact, sometimes raised by wild animals, unable to speak or perform many of the functions we consider human. The cases discussed include those of Kamala and Amala, twin girls reputed to have been brought up by wolves in India in the 1920s; Genie, a girl kept in a single room in New York; a boy raised in a hen house in Northern Ireland; and a boy found among wild dogs in Moscow. The book examines their lives and the experiences of those who "rescued" them, looked after them, educated them or abused them. News in Brain and Behavioural Sciences - Issue 87 - 1st March, 2003 http://human-nature.com/nibbs/issue87.html Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ ---<><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights/"Fair Use": http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html The "fair use" exemption to copyright law was created to allow things such as commentary, parody, news reporting, research and education about copyrighted works without the permission of the author. That's important so that copyright law doesn't block your freedom to express your own works -- only the ability to express other people's. Intent, and damage to the commercial value of the work are important considerations. You are currently subscribed to language as: language at listserv.linguistlist.org To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-language-4283Y at csam-lists.montclair.edu From hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu Tue Mar 11 11:34:29 2003 From: hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu (H.M. Hubey) Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2003 06:34:29 -0500 Subject: [language] [ World's Oldest Wheel Found?] Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> World's Oldest Wheel Found? By Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News March 10, 2003 - A 5,100- to 5,350-year-old wooden wheel recently was found in Slovenia buried within an ancient marsh, according to a press release issued earlier this month by the Slovenian news agency STA. The team of archaeologists who found the wheel claims it is 100 years older than the world's current tied record-holders, both said to be from Europe. "The wheel is surprisingly technologically advanced - much more so than the later models found in Switzerland and Germany," said Anton Veluscek, an archaeologist from the Archaeological Institute at the Slovenian Academy of Arts and Sciences who was a member of the team that found the wheel. Full text http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20030310/wheel.html News in Brain and Behavioural Sciences - Issue 88 - 8th March, 2003 http://human-nature.com/nibbs/issue88.html Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ ---<><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights/"Fair Use": http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html The "fair use" exemption to copyright law was created to allow things such as commentary, parody, news reporting, research and education about copyrighted works without the permission of the author. That's important so that copyright law doesn't block your freedom to express your own works -- only the ability to express other people's. Intent, and damage to the commercial value of the work are important considerations. You are currently subscribed to language as: language at listserv.linguistlist.org To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-language-4283Y at csam-lists.montclair.edu From hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu Thu Mar 20 00:37:32 2003 From: hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu (H.M. Hubey) Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2003 19:37:32 -0500 Subject: [language] [Fwd: In Click Languages, an Echo of the Tongues of the Ancients] Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> New York Times March 18 2003 In Click Languages, an Echo of the Tongues of the Ancients By NICHOLAS WADE Do some of today's languages still hold a whisper of the ancient mother tongue spoken by the first modern humans? Many linguists say language changes far too fast for that to be possible. But a new genetic study underlines the extreme antiquity of a special group of languages, raising the possibility that their distinctive feature was part of the ancestral human mother tongue. They are the click languages of southern Africa. About 30 survive, spoken by peoples like the San, traditional hunters and gatherers, and the Khwe, who include hunters and herders. Each language has a set of four or five click sounds, which are essentially double consonants made by sucking the tongue down from the roof of the mouth. Outside of Africa, the only language known to use clicks is Damin, an extinct aboriginal language in Australia that was taught only to men for initiation rites. Some of the Bantu-speaking peoples who reached southern Africa from their homeland in western Africa some 2,000 years ago have borrowed certain clicks from the Khwe, one use being to substitute for consonants in taboo words. There are reasons to assume that the click languages may be very old. One is that the click speakers themselves, particularly a group of hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari, belong to an extremely ancient genetic lineage, according to analysis of their DNA. They are called the Ju|'hoansi, with the upright bar indicating a click. ("Ju|'hoansi" is pronounced like "ju-twansi" except that the "tw" is a click sound like the "tsk, tsk" of disapproval.) All human groups are equally old, being descended from the same ancestral population. But geneticists can now place ethnic groups on a family tree of humankind. Groups at the ends of short twigs, the ones that split only recently from earlier populations, are younger, in a genealogical sense, than those at the ends of long branches. Judged by mitochondrial DNA, a genetic element passed down in the female line, the Ju|'hoansis' line of descent is so ancient that it goes back close to the very root of the human family tree. Full text http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/18/science/social/18CLIC.html News in Brain and Behavioural Sciences - Issue 89 - 15th March, 2003 http://human-nature.com/nibbs/issue89.html Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ -- Mark Hubey hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey ---<><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights/"Fair Use": http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html The "fair use" exemption to copyright law was created to allow things such as commentary, parody, news reporting, research and education about copyrighted works without the permission of the author. That's important so that copyright law doesn't block your freedom to express your own works -- only the ability to express other people's. Intent, and damage to the commercial value of the work are important considerations. You are currently subscribed to language as: language at listserv.linguistlist.org To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-language-4283Y at csam-lists.montclair.edu From hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu Thu Mar 20 14:28:38 2003 From: hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu (H.M. Hubey) Date: Thu, 20 Mar 2003 09:28:38 -0500 Subject: [language] Yahoo! Groups : evolutionary-psychology Messages : Message 23910 of 23910 Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> This is a multi-part message in MIME format. -------------- next part -------------- http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evolutionary-psychology/message/23910 -- Mark Hubey hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- ---<><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights/"Fair Use": http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html The "fair use" exemption to copyright law was created to allow things such as commentary, parody, news reporting, research and education about copyrighted works without the permission of the author. That's important so that copyright law doesn't block your freedom to express your own works -- only the ability to express other people's. Intent, and damage to the commercial value of the work are important considerations. You are currently subscribed to language as: language at listserv.linguistlist.org To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-language-4283Y at csam-lists.montclair.edu From hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu Sun Mar 23 23:12:19 2003 From: hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu (H.M. Hubey) Date: Sun, 23 Mar 2003 18:12:19 -0500 Subject: [language] [Fwd: Re: In Click Languages, an Echo of the Tongues of the Ancients [long]] Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: [evol-psych] In Click Languages, an Echo of the Tongues of the Ancients [long] Date: Sat, 22 Mar 2003 22:04:22 -0500 From: "H.M. Hubey" To: Larry Trask CC: Ian Pitchford , evolutionary-psychology at yahoogroups.com References: <52518452.3257162602 at wren.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk> Larry Trask wrote: > --On Thursday, March 20, 2003 9:26 am -0500 "H.M. Hubey" > wrote: > > [on my conclusion that all languages are equally old] > >> This is very strange. All languages cannot possibly equally old. ?Modern >> English is not mutually comprehensible with Old English (Can an average >> Englishman read and comprehend Chaucerian English?). > > > Mr Hubey is confused. The discussion is about languages that are > spoken today, and about nothing else whatever. The suggestion of the > geneticist Dr Knight is that certain languages spoken today in Africa > are "older" than certain other languages spoken today, such as > English. As I hope I have shown, this conclusion is incoherent > nonsense. Apart from those few special cases, all languages spoken > today descend in an unbroken line from the earliest beginnings of > human speech. Claiming that your language is older than mine is > rather like claiming that your line of ancestors extends further back > into the past than does mine. Every time I write anything I tremble at the thought of being forced to engage in yet one more inanity with the master of confusion and ignorance. Even the two yokels, alleged quantitative linguists, who allegedly "reviewed" one of my books in linguistics "Mathematical Foundations of Linguistics" are incapable of understanding even the simplest concepts everyone in the quantitative and mathematical scientists deals with every day of the week and at least twice on sundays. There are so many approaches to this problem and yet I fear you will never understand any of them. Here is a short list off the top of my head. 1. Logic and Sorites paradoxes 2. Fuzzy Logic 3. Probability Theory 4. Measurement Theory 5. Statistical techniques - regression, independent component analysis, principal component analysis, etc 6. Datamining and Feature Extraction 7. Analogy, Biology, etc All of these eventually wind up being related to the concept of "dissimilarity" (usually called distance, metric or distance metric). Two alleged quantitative linguists who reviewed my book, as can be seen clearly in their alleged "review'" have not yet understood this concept. I have explained this many times to many people but some never get it. I sent a short version of it to "Language" and it is archived on the LinguistList.org pages as a "review/comments" of the book on historical linguistics written by Kessler (2001) Stanford. The first "review" of this book (by Kessler) was totally butchered, obviously by a linguist who seems to have learned his linguistics from you or your teachers. He got everything backwards as usual. Kessler seems to be psychologist and obviously knows what chi-square tests do. It is an important remark on the state of linguistics that a psychologist has to teach them how to do science. And you never miss an opportunity to show the state of linguistics as the doyen of linguistics to the thousands of members of evol-psych. Let's look at this one at a time. 1. Sorites Paradoxes A modern of version of the Paradox of the Heap can be found in Paradoxicon (Faletta). There is a video of N frames in which the 1st frame shows a tadpole and the Nth frame shows a frog. However there is no frame i, such that the ith frame is a tadpole and the i+1 frame is a frog. This is the basic problem of family-tree linguistics. That includes spatial changes in languages in which we might find dialects 1,2,3,....N stretching accross space in which adjacent dialects are mutually intelligible but others are not. 2. Fuzzy Logic Can we fuzzify crisp logic that produces the sorites paradoxes and get some reasonable results? Can we also extend fuzzy logic to produce a kind of standard modeling language which has addition, multiplication and normalized variables? (probably yes, because I have done some of this myself). But here too the concept of normalization rears its head. What is that? Certainly I do not mean "normal probability density". 3. Probability Theory Fuzzy Logic(s) can be thought of as special kinds of Probabililty theory in which the dependence is built into the specific logic chosen. Indeed, it is more powerful than fuzzy logic. In fact, the Cox-Jaynes axioms show that with some simple assumptions it is easy to show that the reasoning has to be Bayesian reasoning. 4. Measurement Theory Here is the crux of the matter from yet another viewpoint. Originally there were only three scales: ordinal, difference and ratio (absolute). Then "nominal" was added. And nominal scale implies simply that one can make statements such as "X is Y". Now, a dog that knows how to classify food and non-food can use the nominal scale of measurement. Most historical linguists cannot explain to any other human being what measurement they use to create language families. And you head this list of linguists. Because of the example set by people like you, most linguists (even the obnoxious students) are some of the most narcissistic and ignorant students on the face of the planet. They work like a herd of sheep. They overpower by sheer numbers. The "review" of my book is riddled with inanities, useless nitpicking and even worse, total inability to even understand what is clearly written in a ~250 page book. I will take care of it one of these days, as soon as I get the rascals in my sights in some international meeting. Everyone will see how little they know. I will make sure I videotape and allow people to enjoy watching it for the next few decades. Nobody should feel free to slander and libel in public and get to enjoy it freely. The Laws of Thermodynamics go something like this; i) you cannot win ii) you cannot break even iii) you cannot quit playing iv) you have to pay to play The "no-free-lunch" axiom in economics is built-up on these concepts. Those that do not understand these will be taught to understand them. No free lunch, no free insults. 5. Statistical techniques - regression, independent component analysis, principal component analysis, etc For a good example of this see Kessler's book. I heartily recommend this book to everyone on this mailing list. The book is "Significance of Word Lists", Brett Kessler, CSLI (CEnter for Study of Language and Information), Stanford, CA. I am going to quote a f ew lines from the Preface. ----------------------- Historical linguistics has no generally accepted methodology for calculating whether the connections it documents between languages are statistically significant. This has led to strident controversies.... This polarization is particularly strong between those who accept and those who reject the technique of mass comparison, which groups languages into families by collecting lists of words for the same concept, and noting exceptional similarities......As currently practiced, the traditional comparativist method is much more reliable than mass lexical comparison. But when a rigorous statistical methodology is introduced, the most effective and reliable type of evidence turns out to be something that looks a lot like mass lexical comparison: collecting lists of words and comparing at a fairly superficial level those that name the same concept. The kind of evidence most favored by traditional comparativists turns out to be intractable or less powerful in the context of a statistical experiment. ------------------------- (Disclaimer: I (HMH) do not claim that chi-square tests are the answer and I am working on better ones. Of course, it is orders of magnitude better than what existed before.) The back cover of the book says: Brett Kessler is a postdoctoral research fellow in the psychology department of Wayne State University. ----------------------------- Everyone who reads this book will be contributing to peace on this planet and will be working towards the eradication of ignorance and pompousness parading around as science. Please read the book. You will never have to take anymore sh*t from any member of the horde of semiliterate savages. Historical linguistics will probably be split into BK (Before Kessler) and AK (After Kessler). And to make sure that this horde of illiterate savages shuts up as quickly as possibly, I am now developing a semantic metric for Swadesh-like lists so that they can be used with phonetic-phonemic distances to do all sorts of statistical analysis and so that myriad of other datamining techniques can be used on the data. Everyone who reads the book will be richly rewarded, if for no other reason than knowing that after they read the book, they will know more about historical linguistics than Larry Trask. And after they read the "review" of the book, they will see how a typical linguist always manages to always get everything backwards. 6. Datamining and Feature Extraction, (KDD) AI (artificial intelligence) went thru many stages, and this is the last stage. It is about finding patterns in data. But that is what scientists are supposed to do. Hence KDD (Knowledge Discovery and Datamining) is really about the creation of "artificial scientists"! For the past 30 years or so while the statisticians fell asleep great advances were made in data analysis by mathematicians, computer scientists and engineers. Statisticians missed everything really big time, and now they are playing catch up. Anyone who wants to see what is happening should read this book: Hastie, Tibshirani and Friedman "Elements of Statistical Learning", Springer-Verlag, 2001. Those who are interested in undergrad level, intro books can look into Han & Kamber and also the book by Hand, Mannila, and Smyth. In any case, one of the main goals of KDD is "dimension reduction". Most data is/are high-dimensional and humans cannot handle 100,000 dimensions. The goal of "feature extraction" is to capture most of the patterns in data in a few dimensions. Biologists are familiar with this idea; they call them "characters". Obviously historical linguists have represent languages in a few dimensions, and these are "lists" e.g. lists of words which are specially chosen e.g. Swadesh-like lists. Everytime we throw away data (e.g. dimension reduction, feature extraction etc) we lose precision. But so what? That is done so humans can handle it. There is no problem for a computer to hold thousands of words in its memory and do number-crunching. But humans want things neatly done and in small , bite-size pieces. The data in KDD is represented in a concise way using mathematics obviously. And these may be association rules, or in statistics, the regression coefficients, or cross-correlations etc. Or the data may be represented using the principal components or independent components etc. Everyone can see that historical linguistics has all the problems that complex data sets have. It is not surprising that geneticists (mathematicians, computer scientists) who run these programs on genetic data also try them on languages e.g. Tandy Warnow and co-authors, for example. But people like Larry Trask are giving answer to problems that they do not even understand. And not be outdone by their masters, even many linguistics students are just as obnoxious. 7. Analogical (Biological etc) Concept of "archaic" features exists in biology obviously. It would be a reasonably safe assumption that the genes we share with rats and frogs would be "archaic". And those human groups (e.g. "clusters" as argued some time back by one the members of this group), or "races" by another name, that preserve more of these genes could easily be considered more "archaic" e.g. older. I will not press this issue too far. The analysis as always is too superficial and I do not like being constantly misquoted by those who do not understand but whose narcissism and megalomania does not allow them to admit that there exist concepts on the planet that they do not understand better than everyone else. In any case, the rest of Mr. Trask's comments are not even fit to be read by linguistics students and certainly nothing anyone should be proud of thinking let alone writing in public lists. > >> That means that a speaker of any language that can comprehend the >> earlier >> version of that language that was spoken say, 1000 years ago, is able to >> converse in a language that is older than English. > > > And now Mr Hubey is introducing a new confusion. He notes that an > ancestral form of English which we call "Old English" was spoken > around a thousand years ago. And, seemingly enraptured by the name, > he tells us that Old English is "older than [modern] English". > > Think about this a moment. An earlier form of English is "older" than > a later form. Let's apply Mr Hubey's incisive reasoning to another > entity -- let's say Mr Hubey himself. Suppose Mr Hubey today is 50 > years old. That means that, 40 years ago, he was ten years old. Now, > by Mr Hubey's reasoning, the ten-year-old Mark Hubey of 40 years ago > is older than today's 50-year-old Mark Hubey. > > Even by Mr Hubey's obviously unusual standards of reasoning, this > strikes me as an extraordinary conclusion. > > > Larry Trask > COGS > University of Sussex > Brighton BN1 9QH > UK > > larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk > -- Mark Hubey hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey -- Mark Hubey hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey ---<><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights/"Fair Use": http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html The "fair use" exemption to copyright law was created to allow things such as commentary, parody, news reporting, research and education about copyrighted works without the permission of the author. That's important so that copyright law doesn't block your freedom to express your own works -- only the ability to express other people's. Intent, and damage to the commercial value of the work are important considerations. You are currently subscribed to language as: language at listserv.linguistlist.org To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-language-4283Y at csam-lists.montclair.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu Sun Mar 23 23:13:43 2003 From: hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu (H.M. Hubey) Date: Sun, 23 Mar 2003 18:13:43 -0500 Subject: [language] [Fwd: Re: In Click Languages, an Echo of the Tongues of the Ancients [long]] Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> -------- Original Message -------- Subject: [evol-psych] Re: In Click Languages, an Echo of the Tongues of the Ancients [long] Date: Sun, 23 Mar 2003 07:45:01 +0000 From: John Goodrum To: evolutionary-psychology at yahoogroups.com African Y Chromosome and mtDNA Divergence Provides Insight into the History of Click Languages. Alec Knight, Peter A. Underhill, Holly M. Mortensen, Lev A. Zhivotovsky, Alice A. Lin, Brenna M. Henn, Dorothy Louis, Merritt Ruhlen, and Joanna L. Mountain Current Biology, Vol. 13, 464-473, March 18, 2003. This article is available free after registering at: http://www.current-biology.com/home.isa Larry Trask wrote: (mixing posts) >>Do some of today's languages still hold a whisper of the ancient >>mother tongue spoken by the first modern humans? Many linguists say >>language changes far too fast for that to be possible. > >In fact, all respectable linguists believe this, and with good >reason. Only a few fantasizers hanging around the fringes take >seriously the idea that we can recover some of the properties of the >ancestral Mother Tongue of all humans from the properties of modern >languages. I'd guess that the extent to which a language conserves its elements correlates to some degree with its lack of contact with other languages. I imagine that even an isolated language would change drastically over time, but it might also retain some of its features much longer than a non-isolate. And if not, how would we know that? >>There are reasons to assume that the click languages may be very >>old. > >Here we go with the nonsense. Apart from a few special cases like >creoles, all human languages are equally "old", and no language is >"older" than any other. An assertion that one language is older than >another is meaningless, and it shows merely that the speaker doesn't >know what he's talking about. To use a fish analogy, I suppose sturgeon are not "older" than the cichlid species of Lake Victoria, yet they've maintained essentially the same form for 100 million years, while some of the latter have been around for only a few thousand or less. These obviously didn't pop into existence from thin air, but I think it's pretty reasonable to say the cichlid is the "younger" of the two. >Since the time of King Alfred, English has changed so drastically >that King Alfred could understand nothing of our speech, if he could >hear it, and we can't even understand the written English of his day >without learning it as a foreign language. But declaring English to >be "extinct" is hardly an appropriate response. Nor does it make a >lot of sense to declare Old English to be "extinct". If it went >extinct, then where did modern English come from? If Old English isn't extinct, don't we have to say that Homo erectus isn't either? >The authors point out that the Hadzabe and the Ju|'hoansi separated >from the rest of us very early -- fine -- and from this they conclude >that the languages of these two peoples must be exceptionally >conservative. But, by the same token, the rest of us separated from >these two groups very early, and so *our* languages ought to >be the conservative ones. The authors infer from genetic data that the Hadzabe and the Ju|'hoansi separated *from each other* very early, so that the clicks in their current languages may be conserved features. >Apparently we are meant to suppose that those ancient click speakers >trotted from Africa to Australia -- without passing through Asia, >Indonesia or New Guinea? -- and carried their clicks with them, which >is why the Lardil tribe had a click -- they had only one click -- in >their ritual language. Nonsense. Damin was invented, and Australian >languages do not have clicks, nor is there any evidence that they >ever had clicks. I couldn't find any mention of Damin, or Australia, in the original paper so this must be a contribution of Mr. Wade of the NY Times (normally a pretty good science writer, IMO). >We don't need any of these fantastic scenarios. We know that Bantu >languages have overwhelmed most of the southern half of Africa in >the last 2000 years or so, obliterating most of the earlier languages >in the process. The few surviving remnants, the click languages >under discussion here, have clicks because clicks were what we call >an "areal feature" of southern Africa before the Bantu expansion. >That is, clicks were common in the area because they had spread from >language to language by contact -- just as some of the intrusive >Bantu languages have now acquired clicks by contact. There is no >puzzle here that needs to be explained, and the authors are merely >confusing themselves with their wild interpretations. I'm not familiar with Knight, but I wouldn't usually expect wild interpretations from Underhill, Zhivotovsky and Mountain. These are well-known and respected researchers. A few paragraphs from p470: "The two independently inherited DNA segments each reveal variation that provides evidence that San and Hadzabe are among the most highly divergent of African (and therefore global) population pairs. Considered without population genetic and linguistic context, such divergence might be consistent with a number of scenarios, including separate, independent invention of clicks by ancestors of San and Hadzabe; gene replacement without language replacement; borrowing of clicks by one group from the other; or independent retention of clicks since early in human prehistory. Two lines of evidence, rarity of clicks in human languages and complexity of the shared repertoire of clicks and accompaniments, suggest that independent invention of clicks in San and Hadzabe populations is an unlikely explanation for the observed genetic pattern. With regards to complexity of click repertoires, each click language includes a particular set of clicks and accompaniments. Some languages include larger sets than others do, but these sets do overlap. The clicks integral to Hadzane largely overlap with those clicks integral to Khwe and San languages. The hypothesis of independent invention, as it applies to the languages of the Hadzabe and San, lacks linguistic support... ...[Another] a priori explanation of sharing of clicks by San and Hadzabe in the context of genetic differentiation is linguistic borrowing. Xhosa, for instance, while uncontestedly a Bantu language, incorporates some clicks borrowed from Khwe or San languages. The extensive population contact required for such click borrowing, however, leaves a genetic signature through gene flow, as has been well documented. The minimal genetic similarity between San and Hadzabe consists of sharing the NRY M2 mutation. Data herein and elsewhere strongly suggest that M2 has been introduced into click-speaking groups by non-click-speaking neighbors. In addition, gene flow leads to short, central branches for admixed populations, contrary to Ju|'hoansi and Hadzabe differentiation. Finally, distortions of the tongue required to produce click consonants inhibit borrowing of the full repertoire of clicks by adult nonnative speakers. The Nguni language, for instance, includes a click system that is far less deeply integrated and complex than the systems of Hadzabe and San languages. Deep mtDNA and NRY divergence between San and Hadzabe is contrary to expectations under a scenario of borrowing of clicks by Hadzabe from San. Current genetic and nongenetic data are inconsistent with three of four a priori explanations for sharing of clicks without genetic similarity." So why, if clicks are so rare, and if indeed these groups have been isolated from one another for so long, do they both have clicks? The authors' suggestion that they're a conserved element of what was once the same language seems to me to have some merit. ************ On the question of the minimum size of the ancestral human population, if anyone cares here are a few references: FJ Ayala, A Escalante, C O'hUigin, and J Klein Molecular Genetics of Speciation and Human Origins PNAS 1994 91: 6787-6794. http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/91/15/6787 N Takahata Allelic genealogy and human evolution Mol Biol Evol 1993 10: 2-22 http://mbe.oupjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/10/1/2 Li, W. and Sadler, L. DNA variation in humans and its implications for human evolution. Oxford Surveys in Evolutionary Biology, 1992. 8:111-134. JG News in Brain and Behavioural Sciences - Issue 90 - 22nd March, 2003 http://human-nature.com/nibbs/issue90.html Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ -- Mark Hubey hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey ---<><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights/"Fair Use": http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html The "fair use" exemption to copyright law was created to allow things such as commentary, parody, news reporting, research and education about copyrighted works without the permission of the author. That's important so that copyright law doesn't block your freedom to express your own works -- only the ability to express other people's. Intent, and damage to the commercial value of the work are important considerations. You are currently subscribed to language as: language at listserv.linguistlist.org To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-language-4283Y at csam-lists.montclair.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu Mon Mar 24 21:04:46 2003 From: hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu (H.M. Hubey) Date: Mon, 24 Mar 2003 16:04:46 -0500 Subject: [language] [Fwd: Re:Question on dates for human language and writing] Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Jeff McKee" wrote: > However, Phillip Tobias demonstrated that _Homo habilis_ had the > neural requirements for language -- i.e. their brains had > well-developed Broca's area (the speech area, also developed in > australopithecines) AND Wernicke's area (the association area used in > human-like communication, NOT found to be devloped in australopithecines). Recent brain imaging studies have shown that while Broca's and Wernicke's areas are necessary for language processing, they are by no means sufficient. Their presence in developed form would NOT imply the presence of full-fledged language. > Given the variety of vocal communications used by other animals, > including the baboons I observe at my fossil sites in South Africa, > communication and language must be thought of along a continuum. The > dividing point depends on one's definition of language. Not a continuum in the formal, mathematical sense, but certainly a discrete scale. I take the presence of Deacon's symbolic symbol system as a sufficient condition (the dividing point) for full-fledged language (1997). I suspect this must have been preceded by a relatively complex communication system based on concatenation of indexical signs and using simple syntax, a proto-language. > I'd bet my bottom dollar that early Homo, and certainly Homo erectus, > crossed the divide from communication to language with some syntax. My speculation is a little more detailed than Jeff's. I suspect that proto-langauage and language co-evolved with an increase in brain size. I would put the beginnings of the memetic revolution (Blackmore 1999) at the time of the transition from australopithecines to Homo habilis (or early Homo erectus) approximately 1.8 million years ago. This would include the advent of proto-language, as well as the manufacture and use of stone tools. During this time brain capacity increased from about 350-400 cc to about 600 cc. (The increase of brain size from ~600 cc to ~1000 cc during the reign of Homo erectus occurred proportionately with a corresponding increase in body size.) I would put the arrival of full language at about a half-million years ago during the transition between Homo erectus (~1000 cc) and the larger brained species (Homo heidelbergensis, Homo neanderthalensis, archaic Homo sapians, ~1250 cc). Brains are hugely expensive, using an order of magnitude more energy than their weight or volume would justify. This expense must be evolutionally justified by some genetic or memetic fitness benefit, in this case language. This scenario leaves us with an obvious question. If language appeared about a half-million years back, why the introduction of symbolic culture only no more than 100,000 years ago or so (in Africa, rather than 40,000 years ago in Europe with the Cro-Magnon (McBrearty and Brooks 2000)). Some modern hunter-gatherer cultures offer an answer. Though their cultures are symbolically quite complex with rich kinship systems, myths, and technology, they would leave almost nothing of this in the archeological record. I suspect that rich symbolic cultures date back about a half-million year or so. Stan Blackmore, S. 1999. The Meme Machine. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Deacon, T. W. 1997. The Symbolic Species. New York: Norton. McBrearty, S., and A. S. Brooks. 2000. The revolution that wasn't:a new interpretation of the origin of modern human behavior. Journal of Human Evolution 39:453-563. -- Stan Franklin Dunavant University Professor Computer Science phone 901-678-3142 Univ of Memphis fax 901-678-2480 Memphis, TN 38152 franklin at memphis.edu USA www.cs.memphis.edu/~franklin News in Brain and Behavioural Sciences - Issue 90 - 22nd March, 2003 http://human-nature.com/nibbs/issue90.html ---<><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights/"Fair Use": http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html The "fair use" exemption to copyright law was created to allow things such as commentary, parody, news reporting, research and education about copyrighted works without the permission of the author. That's important so that copyright law doesn't block your freedom to express your own works -- only the ability to express other people's. Intent, and damage to the commercial value of the work are important considerations. You are currently subscribed to language as: language at listserv.linguistlist.org To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-language-4283Y at csam-lists.montclair.edu From hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu Sat Mar 8 10:03:30 2003 From: hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu (H.M. Hubey) Date: Sat, 8 Mar 2003 05:03:30 -0500 Subject: [language] [Fwd:"Savage Girls and Wild Boys" by Michael Newton] Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> "Savage Girls and Wild Boys" by Michael Newton Kids raised by wolves? It happens, says an English academic. But the mute and bizarre children in these outlandish histories don't grow up to be Tarzan. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Laura Miller Feb. 12, 2003 | If you visit the Capitoline Museums in Rome, you'll find them pretty quiet except for the little cluster of people gathered around the statue of Rome's mythological founders, the twins Romulus and Remus. What attracts the visitors isn't patriotism or historical interest, though, but the hypnotic weirdness of the 2,500-year-old bronze sculpture: It depicts a standing she-wolf with two human infants sitting under her belly, nursing from her dangling teats. Romulus and Remus are two of the most famous legendary examples of feral children, the subject of Michael Newton's new book, "Savage Girls and Wild Boys." There are plenty more of them, too, from Rudyard Kipling's Mowgli ("The Jungle Books") to Tarzan. This is one of humanity's favorite fables, a tale of cross-species benevolence touched by fate. In stories, the abandoned child raised by wolves or bears or apes tends to come from exceptional, if not downright noble, stock, and in the wilderness he acquires the honest, pure, courageous spirit so lacking in his decadently civilized brothers. When he rejoins his own kind, it's usually to run a nation or take some other position of authority where his virtues can be admired by all. That's a far cry from the fate of most real-life feral children. Yes, they do exist -- at least Newton thinks so, and his judgment seems sound enough -- even if their stories are clouded by mystery and doubt. The author opens his book with a contemporary example: Ivan, a Russian 4-year-old who in 1996 fled his mother's home for the streets, where he took up with a pack of stray dogs, trading scavenged and begged food for the animals' protection, companionship and bodily warmth during the long winter nights. The police had a hell of a time capturing him, since the dogs turned out to be far more committed to his safety than his own flesh and blood had been. Full text http://www.salon.com/books/review/2003/02/12/wild_boys/index_np.html BBC Radio Four The Material World http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/thematerialworld.shtml Thursday 27 February 2003 Ivan Mishukov (Found 1998) The moscow boy who chose to live with a pack of wild dogs. Reproduced with permission of Moscoop Picture Library, Moscow. Wild Children This week's Book of the week on Radio 4 is "Savage Girls and Wild Children" by Michael Newton - a history of the feral child. The feral child in myth and legend goes back to Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome. One of the the first documented cases was Victor, the wild boy of Averyon. He was a child captured in 1800 in France. He was the first to be "scientifically" studied to be seen if he could be made "human" and develop language. What does the study of feral children tell science and how do they influence scientific thinking? The famous case of "Genie" found in a Los Angeles home abused and isolated by her father she became "the forbidden experiment" of the 20th century. Linguists and psychologists cared for her and worked with her to try and understand how her development and language had been affected. Did she confirm or deny - Chomsky's idea that children are pre-programmed to acquire language? Modern day cases in Russia might be turning up some interesting evidence about the window of opportunity for acquiring language. Feral children are still being found - how have they been treated by science and in turn, how have they influenced the science itself and what it can tell us about what it means to be human? Quentin speaks to Michael Newton, Part time lecturer at UCL and author of "Savage Girls and Wild Children" and to Dr James Law, Professor of Language and Communication studies at City University, London. Animal Coat Pattern Formation Animal coat pattern formation is one of those things that turns out to be a lot less random that you would imagine. In fact, mathematical models and equations are able to predict how they form. Alan Turing initially came up with the idea that mathematical equations related to chemicals in the bodies of animal that related to coat pattern. Although this turns out to be not quite true, it was certainly very close. In actual fact it seems that there is a genetic component to this pattern formation, which drives, as Turing puts it, Morphogenesis. The organism also involves the laws of physics and chemistry in its response as well. Quentin speaks to the Professor Ian Stewart from the Institute of Mathematics at Warwick University and to Professor Philip Maini, head of the Centre for Mathematical Biology at Oxford University who is taking Turing's work and adding to it to create complex mathematical models of how animals form their patterned coats. Listen to the programme http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/rams/materialworld.ram Savage Girls and Wild Boys Michael Newton Hardcover - 192 pages (18 February, 2002) Faber and Faber; ISBN: 0571201393 AMAZON - US http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/031230093X/darwinanddarwini AMAZON - UK http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0571201393/humannaturecom/ Editorial Reviews >From Publishers Weekly As a child, literature professor Michael Newton (University College, London) was captivated by Tarzan movies and Kipling's The Jungle Book. It's only fitting, then, that his first book, Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children, would investigate the history of children raised by (among others) wolves, monkeys and wild dogs. If these children help us understand "our continuing relationship with the savage image of ourselves" they also serve as a useful mirror of society's ills. As Newton argues, the medical treatments, therapeutic interventions, and general media hoopla following the discoveries of these children sharply reveal the intellectual and political fixations of their particular historical milieu from Victor, the "Wild Child of Aveyron," in 1800, onward. As interesting as such stories are in themselves, however, Newton's real strength lies in his ability to recognize how these children, seemingly helpless yet astonishingly self-contained, inevitably awaken our rescue fantasies and parental longings. Newton is a consummate storyteller, and this richly detailed study will work just as well outside of academe as within it. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. Reviews Amazon.co.uk Review Stories of abandoned children and those children supposedly raised by animals have long fascinated us, as the legend of Romulus and Remus makes clear. More recent stories also capture the imagination. The Wild Boy of Aveyron, caught running naked in woods in provincial France in 1800, has been the subject of biography and fiction and the attempt by the physician Jean Itard to educate the boy formed the basis for a memorable film by Truffaut. The appearance of Kaspar Hauser in the streets of early 19th-century Nuremberg, after a mysterious 16-year imprisonment in a dark and tiny cellar, evoked fantastic tales of a lost prince and rightful heir cruelly shut away. He too was the subject of a film--a visionary and visually inventive masterpiece by the German director Werner Herzog. Michael Newton's Savage Girls and Wild Boys: a History of Feral Children tells these stories and many more like them--wolf-children in 1920s India, a Russian boy living on the streets of Moscow and scavenging with a pack of wild dogs, a boy brought up by monkeys in Uganda. Much more than just a frisson-inducing account of the weird and the bizarre, Savage Girls and Wild Boys is an ambitious exploration of what these stories (and our fascination with them) tell us about the shifting boundary between nature and civilisation.--Nick Rennison Synopsis This is an account of feral children - those brought up with no human contact, sometimes raised by wild animals, unable to speak or perform many of the functions we consider human. The cases discussed include those of Kamala and Amala, twin girls reputed to have been brought up by wolves in India in the 1920s; Genie, a girl kept in a single room in New York; a boy raised in a hen house in Northern Ireland; and a boy found among wild dogs in Moscow. The book examines their lives and the experiences of those who "rescued" them, looked after them, educated them or abused them. News in Brain and Behavioural Sciences - Issue 87 - 1st March, 2003 http://human-nature.com/nibbs/issue87.html Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ ---<><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights/"Fair Use": http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html The "fair use" exemption to copyright law was created to allow things such as commentary, parody, news reporting, research and education about copyrighted works without the permission of the author. That's important so that copyright law doesn't block your freedom to express your own works -- only the ability to express other people's. Intent, and damage to the commercial value of the work are important considerations. You are currently subscribed to language as: language at listserv.linguistlist.org To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-language-4283Y at csam-lists.montclair.edu From hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu Tue Mar 11 11:34:29 2003 From: hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu (H.M. Hubey) Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2003 06:34:29 -0500 Subject: [language] [ World's Oldest Wheel Found?] Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> World's Oldest Wheel Found? By Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News March 10, 2003 - A 5,100- to 5,350-year-old wooden wheel recently was found in Slovenia buried within an ancient marsh, according to a press release issued earlier this month by the Slovenian news agency STA. The team of archaeologists who found the wheel claims it is 100 years older than the world's current tied record-holders, both said to be from Europe. "The wheel is surprisingly technologically advanced - much more so than the later models found in Switzerland and Germany," said Anton Veluscek, an archaeologist from the Archaeological Institute at the Slovenian Academy of Arts and Sciences who was a member of the team that found the wheel. Full text http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20030310/wheel.html News in Brain and Behavioural Sciences - Issue 88 - 8th March, 2003 http://human-nature.com/nibbs/issue88.html Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ ---<><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights/"Fair Use": http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html The "fair use" exemption to copyright law was created to allow things such as commentary, parody, news reporting, research and education about copyrighted works without the permission of the author. That's important so that copyright law doesn't block your freedom to express your own works -- only the ability to express other people's. Intent, and damage to the commercial value of the work are important considerations. You are currently subscribed to language as: language at listserv.linguistlist.org To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-language-4283Y at csam-lists.montclair.edu From hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu Thu Mar 20 00:37:32 2003 From: hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu (H.M. Hubey) Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2003 19:37:32 -0500 Subject: [language] [Fwd: In Click Languages, an Echo of the Tongues of the Ancients] Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> New York Times March 18 2003 In Click Languages, an Echo of the Tongues of the Ancients By NICHOLAS WADE Do some of today's languages still hold a whisper of the ancient mother tongue spoken by the first modern humans? Many linguists say language changes far too fast for that to be possible. But a new genetic study underlines the extreme antiquity of a special group of languages, raising the possibility that their distinctive feature was part of the ancestral human mother tongue. They are the click languages of southern Africa. About 30 survive, spoken by peoples like the San, traditional hunters and gatherers, and the Khwe, who include hunters and herders. Each language has a set of four or five click sounds, which are essentially double consonants made by sucking the tongue down from the roof of the mouth. Outside of Africa, the only language known to use clicks is Damin, an extinct aboriginal language in Australia that was taught only to men for initiation rites. Some of the Bantu-speaking peoples who reached southern Africa from their homeland in western Africa some 2,000 years ago have borrowed certain clicks from the Khwe, one use being to substitute for consonants in taboo words. There are reasons to assume that the click languages may be very old. One is that the click speakers themselves, particularly a group of hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari, belong to an extremely ancient genetic lineage, according to analysis of their DNA. They are called the Ju|'hoansi, with the upright bar indicating a click. ("Ju|'hoansi" is pronounced like "ju-twansi" except that the "tw" is a click sound like the "tsk, tsk" of disapproval.) All human groups are equally old, being descended from the same ancestral population. But geneticists can now place ethnic groups on a family tree of humankind. Groups at the ends of short twigs, the ones that split only recently from earlier populations, are younger, in a genealogical sense, than those at the ends of long branches. Judged by mitochondrial DNA, a genetic element passed down in the female line, the Ju|'hoansis' line of descent is so ancient that it goes back close to the very root of the human family tree. Full text http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/18/science/social/18CLIC.html News in Brain and Behavioural Sciences - Issue 89 - 15th March, 2003 http://human-nature.com/nibbs/issue89.html Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ -- Mark Hubey hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey ---<><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights/"Fair Use": http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html The "fair use" exemption to copyright law was created to allow things such as commentary, parody, news reporting, research and education about copyrighted works without the permission of the author. That's important so that copyright law doesn't block your freedom to express your own works -- only the ability to express other people's. Intent, and damage to the commercial value of the work are important considerations. You are currently subscribed to language as: language at listserv.linguistlist.org To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-language-4283Y at csam-lists.montclair.edu From hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu Thu Mar 20 14:28:38 2003 From: hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu (H.M. Hubey) Date: Thu, 20 Mar 2003 09:28:38 -0500 Subject: [language] Yahoo! Groups : evolutionary-psychology Messages : Message 23910 of 23910 Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> This is a multi-part message in MIME format. -------------- next part -------------- http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evolutionary-psychology/message/23910 -- Mark Hubey hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- ---<><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights/"Fair Use": http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html The "fair use" exemption to copyright law was created to allow things such as commentary, parody, news reporting, research and education about copyrighted works without the permission of the author. That's important so that copyright law doesn't block your freedom to express your own works -- only the ability to express other people's. Intent, and damage to the commercial value of the work are important considerations. You are currently subscribed to language as: language at listserv.linguistlist.org To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-language-4283Y at csam-lists.montclair.edu From hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu Sun Mar 23 23:12:19 2003 From: hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu (H.M. Hubey) Date: Sun, 23 Mar 2003 18:12:19 -0500 Subject: [language] [Fwd: Re: In Click Languages, an Echo of the Tongues of the Ancients [long]] Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: [evol-psych] In Click Languages, an Echo of the Tongues of the Ancients [long] Date: Sat, 22 Mar 2003 22:04:22 -0500 From: "H.M. Hubey" To: Larry Trask CC: Ian Pitchford , evolutionary-psychology at yahoogroups.com References: <52518452.3257162602 at wren.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk> Larry Trask wrote: > --On Thursday, March 20, 2003 9:26 am -0500 "H.M. Hubey" > wrote: > > [on my conclusion that all languages are equally old] > >> This is very strange. All languages cannot possibly equally old. ?Modern >> English is not mutually comprehensible with Old English (Can an average >> Englishman read and comprehend Chaucerian English?). > > > Mr Hubey is confused. The discussion is about languages that are > spoken today, and about nothing else whatever. The suggestion of the > geneticist Dr Knight is that certain languages spoken today in Africa > are "older" than certain other languages spoken today, such as > English. As I hope I have shown, this conclusion is incoherent > nonsense. Apart from those few special cases, all languages spoken > today descend in an unbroken line from the earliest beginnings of > human speech. Claiming that your language is older than mine is > rather like claiming that your line of ancestors extends further back > into the past than does mine. Every time I write anything I tremble at the thought of being forced to engage in yet one more inanity with the master of confusion and ignorance. Even the two yokels, alleged quantitative linguists, who allegedly "reviewed" one of my books in linguistics "Mathematical Foundations of Linguistics" are incapable of understanding even the simplest concepts everyone in the quantitative and mathematical scientists deals with every day of the week and at least twice on sundays. There are so many approaches to this problem and yet I fear you will never understand any of them. Here is a short list off the top of my head. 1. Logic and Sorites paradoxes 2. Fuzzy Logic 3. Probability Theory 4. Measurement Theory 5. Statistical techniques - regression, independent component analysis, principal component analysis, etc 6. Datamining and Feature Extraction 7. Analogy, Biology, etc All of these eventually wind up being related to the concept of "dissimilarity" (usually called distance, metric or distance metric). Two alleged quantitative linguists who reviewed my book, as can be seen clearly in their alleged "review'" have not yet understood this concept. I have explained this many times to many people but some never get it. I sent a short version of it to "Language" and it is archived on the LinguistList.org pages as a "review/comments" of the book on historical linguistics written by Kessler (2001) Stanford. The first "review" of this book (by Kessler) was totally butchered, obviously by a linguist who seems to have learned his linguistics from you or your teachers. He got everything backwards as usual. Kessler seems to be psychologist and obviously knows what chi-square tests do. It is an important remark on the state of linguistics that a psychologist has to teach them how to do science. And you never miss an opportunity to show the state of linguistics as the doyen of linguistics to the thousands of members of evol-psych. Let's look at this one at a time. 1. Sorites Paradoxes A modern of version of the Paradox of the Heap can be found in Paradoxicon (Faletta). There is a video of N frames in which the 1st frame shows a tadpole and the Nth frame shows a frog. However there is no frame i, such that the ith frame is a tadpole and the i+1 frame is a frog. This is the basic problem of family-tree linguistics. That includes spatial changes in languages in which we might find dialects 1,2,3,....N stretching accross space in which adjacent dialects are mutually intelligible but others are not. 2. Fuzzy Logic Can we fuzzify crisp logic that produces the sorites paradoxes and get some reasonable results? Can we also extend fuzzy logic to produce a kind of standard modeling language which has addition, multiplication and normalized variables? (probably yes, because I have done some of this myself). But here too the concept of normalization rears its head. What is that? Certainly I do not mean "normal probability density". 3. Probability Theory Fuzzy Logic(s) can be thought of as special kinds of Probabililty theory in which the dependence is built into the specific logic chosen. Indeed, it is more powerful than fuzzy logic. In fact, the Cox-Jaynes axioms show that with some simple assumptions it is easy to show that the reasoning has to be Bayesian reasoning. 4. Measurement Theory Here is the crux of the matter from yet another viewpoint. Originally there were only three scales: ordinal, difference and ratio (absolute). Then "nominal" was added. And nominal scale implies simply that one can make statements such as "X is Y". Now, a dog that knows how to classify food and non-food can use the nominal scale of measurement. Most historical linguists cannot explain to any other human being what measurement they use to create language families. And you head this list of linguists. Because of the example set by people like you, most linguists (even the obnoxious students) are some of the most narcissistic and ignorant students on the face of the planet. They work like a herd of sheep. They overpower by sheer numbers. The "review" of my book is riddled with inanities, useless nitpicking and even worse, total inability to even understand what is clearly written in a ~250 page book. I will take care of it one of these days, as soon as I get the rascals in my sights in some international meeting. Everyone will see how little they know. I will make sure I videotape and allow people to enjoy watching it for the next few decades. Nobody should feel free to slander and libel in public and get to enjoy it freely. The Laws of Thermodynamics go something like this; i) you cannot win ii) you cannot break even iii) you cannot quit playing iv) you have to pay to play The "no-free-lunch" axiom in economics is built-up on these concepts. Those that do not understand these will be taught to understand them. No free lunch, no free insults. 5. Statistical techniques - regression, independent component analysis, principal component analysis, etc For a good example of this see Kessler's book. I heartily recommend this book to everyone on this mailing list. The book is "Significance of Word Lists", Brett Kessler, CSLI (CEnter for Study of Language and Information), Stanford, CA. I am going to quote a f ew lines from the Preface. ----------------------- Historical linguistics has no generally accepted methodology for calculating whether the connections it documents between languages are statistically significant. This has led to strident controversies.... This polarization is particularly strong between those who accept and those who reject the technique of mass comparison, which groups languages into families by collecting lists of words for the same concept, and noting exceptional similarities......As currently practiced, the traditional comparativist method is much more reliable than mass lexical comparison. But when a rigorous statistical methodology is introduced, the most effective and reliable type of evidence turns out to be something that looks a lot like mass lexical comparison: collecting lists of words and comparing at a fairly superficial level those that name the same concept. The kind of evidence most favored by traditional comparativists turns out to be intractable or less powerful in the context of a statistical experiment. ------------------------- (Disclaimer: I (HMH) do not claim that chi-square tests are the answer and I am working on better ones. Of course, it is orders of magnitude better than what existed before.) The back cover of the book says: Brett Kessler is a postdoctoral research fellow in the psychology department of Wayne State University. ----------------------------- Everyone who reads this book will be contributing to peace on this planet and will be working towards the eradication of ignorance and pompousness parading around as science. Please read the book. You will never have to take anymore sh*t from any member of the horde of semiliterate savages. Historical linguistics will probably be split into BK (Before Kessler) and AK (After Kessler). And to make sure that this horde of illiterate savages shuts up as quickly as possibly, I am now developing a semantic metric for Swadesh-like lists so that they can be used with phonetic-phonemic distances to do all sorts of statistical analysis and so that myriad of other datamining techniques can be used on the data. Everyone who reads the book will be richly rewarded, if for no other reason than knowing that after they read the book, they will know more about historical linguistics than Larry Trask. And after they read the "review" of the book, they will see how a typical linguist always manages to always get everything backwards. 6. Datamining and Feature Extraction, (KDD) AI (artificial intelligence) went thru many stages, and this is the last stage. It is about finding patterns in data. But that is what scientists are supposed to do. Hence KDD (Knowledge Discovery and Datamining) is really about the creation of "artificial scientists"! For the past 30 years or so while the statisticians fell asleep great advances were made in data analysis by mathematicians, computer scientists and engineers. Statisticians missed everything really big time, and now they are playing catch up. Anyone who wants to see what is happening should read this book: Hastie, Tibshirani and Friedman "Elements of Statistical Learning", Springer-Verlag, 2001. Those who are interested in undergrad level, intro books can look into Han & Kamber and also the book by Hand, Mannila, and Smyth. In any case, one of the main goals of KDD is "dimension reduction". Most data is/are high-dimensional and humans cannot handle 100,000 dimensions. The goal of "feature extraction" is to capture most of the patterns in data in a few dimensions. Biologists are familiar with this idea; they call them "characters". Obviously historical linguists have represent languages in a few dimensions, and these are "lists" e.g. lists of words which are specially chosen e.g. Swadesh-like lists. Everytime we throw away data (e.g. dimension reduction, feature extraction etc) we lose precision. But so what? That is done so humans can handle it. There is no problem for a computer to hold thousands of words in its memory and do number-crunching. But humans want things neatly done and in small , bite-size pieces. The data in KDD is represented in a concise way using mathematics obviously. And these may be association rules, or in statistics, the regression coefficients, or cross-correlations etc. Or the data may be represented using the principal components or independent components etc. Everyone can see that historical linguistics has all the problems that complex data sets have. It is not surprising that geneticists (mathematicians, computer scientists) who run these programs on genetic data also try them on languages e.g. Tandy Warnow and co-authors, for example. But people like Larry Trask are giving answer to problems that they do not even understand. And not be outdone by their masters, even many linguistics students are just as obnoxious. 7. Analogical (Biological etc) Concept of "archaic" features exists in biology obviously. It would be a reasonably safe assumption that the genes we share with rats and frogs would be "archaic". And those human groups (e.g. "clusters" as argued some time back by one the members of this group), or "races" by another name, that preserve more of these genes could easily be considered more "archaic" e.g. older. I will not press this issue too far. The analysis as always is too superficial and I do not like being constantly misquoted by those who do not understand but whose narcissism and megalomania does not allow them to admit that there exist concepts on the planet that they do not understand better than everyone else. In any case, the rest of Mr. Trask's comments are not even fit to be read by linguistics students and certainly nothing anyone should be proud of thinking let alone writing in public lists. > >> That means that a speaker of any language that can comprehend the >> earlier >> version of that language that was spoken say, 1000 years ago, is able to >> converse in a language that is older than English. > > > And now Mr Hubey is introducing a new confusion. He notes that an > ancestral form of English which we call "Old English" was spoken > around a thousand years ago. And, seemingly enraptured by the name, > he tells us that Old English is "older than [modern] English". > > Think about this a moment. An earlier form of English is "older" than > a later form. Let's apply Mr Hubey's incisive reasoning to another > entity -- let's say Mr Hubey himself. Suppose Mr Hubey today is 50 > years old. That means that, 40 years ago, he was ten years old. Now, > by Mr Hubey's reasoning, the ten-year-old Mark Hubey of 40 years ago > is older than today's 50-year-old Mark Hubey. > > Even by Mr Hubey's obviously unusual standards of reasoning, this > strikes me as an extraordinary conclusion. > > > Larry Trask > COGS > University of Sussex > Brighton BN1 9QH > UK > > larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk > -- Mark Hubey hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey -- Mark Hubey hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey ---<><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights/"Fair Use": http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html The "fair use" exemption to copyright law was created to allow things such as commentary, parody, news reporting, research and education about copyrighted works without the permission of the author. That's important so that copyright law doesn't block your freedom to express your own works -- only the ability to express other people's. Intent, and damage to the commercial value of the work are important considerations. You are currently subscribed to language as: language at listserv.linguistlist.org To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-language-4283Y at csam-lists.montclair.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu Sun Mar 23 23:13:43 2003 From: hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu (H.M. Hubey) Date: Sun, 23 Mar 2003 18:13:43 -0500 Subject: [language] [Fwd: Re: In Click Languages, an Echo of the Tongues of the Ancients [long]] Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> -------- Original Message -------- Subject: [evol-psych] Re: In Click Languages, an Echo of the Tongues of the Ancients [long] Date: Sun, 23 Mar 2003 07:45:01 +0000 From: John Goodrum To: evolutionary-psychology at yahoogroups.com African Y Chromosome and mtDNA Divergence Provides Insight into the History of Click Languages. Alec Knight, Peter A. Underhill, Holly M. Mortensen, Lev A. Zhivotovsky, Alice A. Lin, Brenna M. Henn, Dorothy Louis, Merritt Ruhlen, and Joanna L. Mountain Current Biology, Vol. 13, 464-473, March 18, 2003. This article is available free after registering at: http://www.current-biology.com/home.isa Larry Trask wrote: (mixing posts) >>Do some of today's languages still hold a whisper of the ancient >>mother tongue spoken by the first modern humans? Many linguists say >>language changes far too fast for that to be possible. > >In fact, all respectable linguists believe this, and with good >reason. Only a few fantasizers hanging around the fringes take >seriously the idea that we can recover some of the properties of the >ancestral Mother Tongue of all humans from the properties of modern >languages. I'd guess that the extent to which a language conserves its elements correlates to some degree with its lack of contact with other languages. I imagine that even an isolated language would change drastically over time, but it might also retain some of its features much longer than a non-isolate. And if not, how would we know that? >>There are reasons to assume that the click languages may be very >>old. > >Here we go with the nonsense. Apart from a few special cases like >creoles, all human languages are equally "old", and no language is >"older" than any other. An assertion that one language is older than >another is meaningless, and it shows merely that the speaker doesn't >know what he's talking about. To use a fish analogy, I suppose sturgeon are not "older" than the cichlid species of Lake Victoria, yet they've maintained essentially the same form for 100 million years, while some of the latter have been around for only a few thousand or less. These obviously didn't pop into existence from thin air, but I think it's pretty reasonable to say the cichlid is the "younger" of the two. >Since the time of King Alfred, English has changed so drastically >that King Alfred could understand nothing of our speech, if he could >hear it, and we can't even understand the written English of his day >without learning it as a foreign language. But declaring English to >be "extinct" is hardly an appropriate response. Nor does it make a >lot of sense to declare Old English to be "extinct". If it went >extinct, then where did modern English come from? If Old English isn't extinct, don't we have to say that Homo erectus isn't either? >The authors point out that the Hadzabe and the Ju|'hoansi separated >from the rest of us very early -- fine -- and from this they conclude >that the languages of these two peoples must be exceptionally >conservative. But, by the same token, the rest of us separated from >these two groups very early, and so *our* languages ought to >be the conservative ones. The authors infer from genetic data that the Hadzabe and the Ju|'hoansi separated *from each other* very early, so that the clicks in their current languages may be conserved features. >Apparently we are meant to suppose that those ancient click speakers >trotted from Africa to Australia -- without passing through Asia, >Indonesia or New Guinea? -- and carried their clicks with them, which >is why the Lardil tribe had a click -- they had only one click -- in >their ritual language. Nonsense. Damin was invented, and Australian >languages do not have clicks, nor is there any evidence that they >ever had clicks. I couldn't find any mention of Damin, or Australia, in the original paper so this must be a contribution of Mr. Wade of the NY Times (normally a pretty good science writer, IMO). >We don't need any of these fantastic scenarios. We know that Bantu >languages have overwhelmed most of the southern half of Africa in >the last 2000 years or so, obliterating most of the earlier languages >in the process. The few surviving remnants, the click languages >under discussion here, have clicks because clicks were what we call >an "areal feature" of southern Africa before the Bantu expansion. >That is, clicks were common in the area because they had spread from >language to language by contact -- just as some of the intrusive >Bantu languages have now acquired clicks by contact. There is no >puzzle here that needs to be explained, and the authors are merely >confusing themselves with their wild interpretations. I'm not familiar with Knight, but I wouldn't usually expect wild interpretations from Underhill, Zhivotovsky and Mountain. These are well-known and respected researchers. A few paragraphs from p470: "The two independently inherited DNA segments each reveal variation that provides evidence that San and Hadzabe are among the most highly divergent of African (and therefore global) population pairs. Considered without population genetic and linguistic context, such divergence might be consistent with a number of scenarios, including separate, independent invention of clicks by ancestors of San and Hadzabe; gene replacement without language replacement; borrowing of clicks by one group from the other; or independent retention of clicks since early in human prehistory. Two lines of evidence, rarity of clicks in human languages and complexity of the shared repertoire of clicks and accompaniments, suggest that independent invention of clicks in San and Hadzabe populations is an unlikely explanation for the observed genetic pattern. With regards to complexity of click repertoires, each click language includes a particular set of clicks and accompaniments. Some languages include larger sets than others do, but these sets do overlap. The clicks integral to Hadzane largely overlap with those clicks integral to Khwe and San languages. The hypothesis of independent invention, as it applies to the languages of the Hadzabe and San, lacks linguistic support... ...[Another] a priori explanation of sharing of clicks by San and Hadzabe in the context of genetic differentiation is linguistic borrowing. Xhosa, for instance, while uncontestedly a Bantu language, incorporates some clicks borrowed from Khwe or San languages. The extensive population contact required for such click borrowing, however, leaves a genetic signature through gene flow, as has been well documented. The minimal genetic similarity between San and Hadzabe consists of sharing the NRY M2 mutation. Data herein and elsewhere strongly suggest that M2 has been introduced into click-speaking groups by non-click-speaking neighbors. In addition, gene flow leads to short, central branches for admixed populations, contrary to Ju|'hoansi and Hadzabe differentiation. Finally, distortions of the tongue required to produce click consonants inhibit borrowing of the full repertoire of clicks by adult nonnative speakers. The Nguni language, for instance, includes a click system that is far less deeply integrated and complex than the systems of Hadzabe and San languages. Deep mtDNA and NRY divergence between San and Hadzabe is contrary to expectations under a scenario of borrowing of clicks by Hadzabe from San. Current genetic and nongenetic data are inconsistent with three of four a priori explanations for sharing of clicks without genetic similarity." So why, if clicks are so rare, and if indeed these groups have been isolated from one another for so long, do they both have clicks? The authors' suggestion that they're a conserved element of what was once the same language seems to me to have some merit. ************ On the question of the minimum size of the ancestral human population, if anyone cares here are a few references: FJ Ayala, A Escalante, C O'hUigin, and J Klein Molecular Genetics of Speciation and Human Origins PNAS 1994 91: 6787-6794. http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/91/15/6787 N Takahata Allelic genealogy and human evolution Mol Biol Evol 1993 10: 2-22 http://mbe.oupjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/10/1/2 Li, W. and Sadler, L. DNA variation in humans and its implications for human evolution. Oxford Surveys in Evolutionary Biology, 1992. 8:111-134. JG News in Brain and Behavioural Sciences - Issue 90 - 22nd March, 2003 http://human-nature.com/nibbs/issue90.html Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ -- Mark Hubey hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey ---<><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights/"Fair Use": http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html The "fair use" exemption to copyright law was created to allow things such as commentary, parody, news reporting, research and education about copyrighted works without the permission of the author. That's important so that copyright law doesn't block your freedom to express your own works -- only the ability to express other people's. Intent, and damage to the commercial value of the work are important considerations. You are currently subscribed to language as: language at listserv.linguistlist.org To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-language-4283Y at csam-lists.montclair.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu Mon Mar 24 21:04:46 2003 From: hubeyh at mail.montclair.edu (H.M. Hubey) Date: Mon, 24 Mar 2003 16:04:46 -0500 Subject: [language] [Fwd: Re:Question on dates for human language and writing] Message-ID: <><><><><><><><><><><><>--This is the Language List--<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Jeff McKee" wrote: > However, Phillip Tobias demonstrated that _Homo habilis_ had the > neural requirements for language -- i.e. their brains had > well-developed Broca's area (the speech area, also developed in > australopithecines) AND Wernicke's area (the association area used in > human-like communication, NOT found to be devloped in australopithecines). Recent brain imaging studies have shown that while Broca's and Wernicke's areas are necessary for language processing, they are by no means sufficient. Their presence in developed form would NOT imply the presence of full-fledged language. > Given the variety of vocal communications used by other animals, > including the baboons I observe at my fossil sites in South Africa, > communication and language must be thought of along a continuum. The > dividing point depends on one's definition of language. Not a continuum in the formal, mathematical sense, but certainly a discrete scale. I take the presence of Deacon's symbolic symbol system as a sufficient condition (the dividing point) for full-fledged language (1997). I suspect this must have been preceded by a relatively complex communication system based on concatenation of indexical signs and using simple syntax, a proto-language. > I'd bet my bottom dollar that early Homo, and certainly Homo erectus, > crossed the divide from communication to language with some syntax. My speculation is a little more detailed than Jeff's. I suspect that proto-langauage and language co-evolved with an increase in brain size. I would put the beginnings of the memetic revolution (Blackmore 1999) at the time of the transition from australopithecines to Homo habilis (or early Homo erectus) approximately 1.8 million years ago. This would include the advent of proto-language, as well as the manufacture and use of stone tools. During this time brain capacity increased from about 350-400 cc to about 600 cc. (The increase of brain size from ~600 cc to ~1000 cc during the reign of Homo erectus occurred proportionately with a corresponding increase in body size.) I would put the arrival of full language at about a half-million years ago during the transition between Homo erectus (~1000 cc) and the larger brained species (Homo heidelbergensis, Homo neanderthalensis, archaic Homo sapians, ~1250 cc). Brains are hugely expensive, using an order of magnitude more energy than their weight or volume would justify. This expense must be evolutionally justified by some genetic or memetic fitness benefit, in this case language. This scenario leaves us with an obvious question. If language appeared about a half-million years back, why the introduction of symbolic culture only no more than 100,000 years ago or so (in Africa, rather than 40,000 years ago in Europe with the Cro-Magnon (McBrearty and Brooks 2000)). Some modern hunter-gatherer cultures offer an answer. Though their cultures are symbolically quite complex with rich kinship systems, myths, and technology, they would leave almost nothing of this in the archeological record. I suspect that rich symbolic cultures date back about a half-million year or so. Stan Blackmore, S. 1999. The Meme Machine. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Deacon, T. W. 1997. The Symbolic Species. New York: Norton. McBrearty, S., and A. S. Brooks. 2000. The revolution that wasn't:a new interpretation of the origin of modern human behavior. Journal of Human Evolution 39:453-563. -- Stan Franklin Dunavant University Professor Computer Science phone 901-678-3142 Univ of Memphis fax 901-678-2480 Memphis, TN 38152 franklin at memphis.edu USA www.cs.memphis.edu/~franklin News in Brain and Behavioural Sciences - Issue 90 - 22nd March, 2003 http://human-nature.com/nibbs/issue90.html ---<><><><><><><><><><><><>----Language----<><><><><><><><><><><><><> Copyrights/"Fair Use": http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html The "fair use" exemption to copyright law was created to allow things such as commentary, parody, news reporting, research and education about copyrighted works without the permission of the author. That's important so that copyright law doesn't block your freedom to express your own works -- only the ability to express other people's. Intent, and damage to the commercial value of the work are important considerations. You are currently subscribed to language as: language at listserv.linguistlist.org To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-language-4283Y at csam-lists.montclair.edu