Response to NYTimes article, "The Leap to Language"

[Ellen L. Contini-Morava]

I don't know how many others got irritated at that NYTimes article, but
here's a response from one of my colleagues.

Ellen

> Dear Editor,
>
> In "Early Voices:  The Leap to Language" (July 15), Nicolas Wade describes
> the Hadza and !Kung as "ancient populations."  This is misleading on two
> counts:  like all of us, these people are alive in the 21st century, and
> all humans have an equally ancient genetic heritage.  Wade then compounds
> his primitivist error by telling us that click
> sounds in the Hadza and !Kung languages "serve the same role as
> consonants."  Indeed?  They ARE consonants (and rather sophisticated ones
> at that), not some remnant of primitive, ancestral language.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Richard Handler
>
> Richard Handler
> Professor of Anthropology
> Associate Dean for Academic Programs
> College of Arts and Sciences
> University of Virginia
> P. O. Box 400133
> Charlottesville, VA 22903



On Thu, 17 Jul 2003, Harold F. Schiffman wrote:

> >From the New York Times, July 15, 2003
>
> Early Voices: The Leap to Language
>
> By NICHOLAS WADE
>
>     Bower birds are artists, leaf-cutting ants practice agriculture, crows
> use tools, chimpanzees form coalitions against rivals. The only major
> talent unique to humans is language, the ability to transmit encoded
> thoughts from the mind of one individual to another. Because of language's
> central role in human nature and sociality, its evolutionary origins have
> long been of interest to almost everyone, with the curious exception of
> linguists.
>
> As far back as 1866, the Linguistic Society of Paris famously declared
> that it wanted no more speculative articles about the origin of language.
> More recently, many linguists have avoided the subject because of the
> influence of Noam Chomsky, a founder of modern linguistics and still its
> best-known practitioner, who has been largely silent on the question.
>
> Dr. Chomsky's position has "only served to discourage interest in the
> topic among theoretical linguists," writes Dr. Frederick J. Newmeyer, last
> year's president of the Linguistic Society of America, in "Language
> Evolution," a book of essays being published this month by Oxford
> University Press in England. In defense of the linguists' tepid interest,
> there have until recently been few firm facts to go on. Experts offered
> conflicting views on whether Neanderthals could speak. Sustained attempts
> to teach apes language generated more controversy than illumination.
>
> But new research is eroding the idea that the origins of language are
> hopelessly lost in the mists of time. New clues have started to emerge
> from archaeology, genetics and human behavioral ecology, and even
> linguists have grudgingly begun to join in the discussion before other
> specialists eat their lunch. "It is important for linguists to participate
> in the conversation, if only to maintain a position in this intellectual
> niche that is of such commanding interest to the larger scientific
> public," writes Dr. Ray Jackendoff, Dr. Newmeyer's successor at the
> linguistic society, in his book "Foundations of Language."
>
> Geneticists reported in March that the earliest known split between any
> two human populations occurred between the !Kung of southern Africa and
> the Hadza of Tanzania. Since both of these very ancient populations speak
> click languages, clicks may have been used in the language of the
> ancestral human population. The clicks, made by sucking the tongue down
> from the roof of the mouth (and denoted by an exclamation point), serve
> the same role as consonants. That possible hint of the first human tongue
> may be echoed in the archaeological record. Humans whose skeletons look
> just like those of today were widespread in Africa by 100,000 years ago.
> But they still used the same set of crude stone tools as their forebears
> and their archaic human contemporaries, the Neanderthals of Europe.
>
> Then, some 50,000 years ago, some profound change took place. Settlements
> in Africa sprang to life with sophisticated tools made from stone and
> bone, art objects and signs of long distance trade. Though some
> archaeologists dispute the suddenness of the transition, Dr.  Richard
> Klein of Stanford argues that the suite of innovations reflects some
> specific neural change that occurred around that time and, because of the
> advantage it conferred, spread rapidly through the population.
>
> That genetic change, he suggests, was of such a magnitude that most likely
> it had to do with language, and was perhaps the final step in its
> evolution. If some neural change explains the appearance of fully modern
> human behavior some 50,000 years ago, "it is surely reasonable to suppose
> that the change promoted the fully modern capacity for rapidly spoken
> phonemic speech," Dr. Klein has written. Listening to Primates Apes'
>
> Signals Fall Short of Language
>
> At first glance, language seems to have appeared from nowhere, since no
> other species speaks. But other animals do communicate. Vervet monkeys
> have specific alarm calls for their principal predators, like eagles,
> leopards, snakes and baboons. Researchers have played back recordings of
> these calls when no predators were around and found that the vervets would
> scan the sky in response to the eagle call, leap into trees at the leopard
> call and look for snakes in the ground cover at the snake call.
>
> Vervets can't be said to have words for these predators because the calls
> are used only as alarms; a vervet can't use its baboon call to ask if
> anyone noticed a baboon around yesterday.  Still, their communication
> system shows that they can both utter and perceive specific sounds. Dr.
> Marc Hauser, a psychologist at Harvard who studies animal communication,
> believes that basic systems for both the perception and generation of
> sounds are present in other animals.  "That suggests those systems were
> used way before language and therefore did not evolve for language, even
> though they are used in language," he said.
>
> Language, as linguists see it, is more than input and output, the heard
> word and the spoken. It's not even dependent on speech, since its output
> can be entirely in gestures, as in American Sign Language. The essence of
> language is words and syntax, each generated by a combinatorial system in
> the brain. If there were a single sound for each word, vocabulary would be
> limited to the number of sounds, probably fewer than 1,000, that could be
> distinguished from one another. But by generating combinations of
> arbitrary sound units, a copious number of distinguishable sounds becomes
> available.  Even the average high school student has a vocabulary of
> 60,000 words.
>
> The other combinatorial system is syntax, the hierarchical ordering of
> words in a sentence to govern their meaning. Chimpanzees do not seem to
> possess either of these systems. They can learn a certain number of
> symbols, up to 400 or so, and will string them together, but rarely in a
> way that suggests any notion of syntax. This is not because of any poverty
> of thought. Their conceptual world seems to overlap to some extent with
> that of people: they can recognize other individuals in their community
> and keep track of who is dominant to whom. But they lack the system for
> encoding these thoughts in language.
>
> How then did the encoding system evolve in the human descendants of the
> common ancestor of chimps and
> people?
>
> Language Precursors
> Babbling and Pidgins Hint at First Tongue
>
> One of the first linguists to tackle this question was Dr. Derek Bickerton
> of the University of Hawaii. His specialty is the study of pidgins, which
> are simple phrase languages made up from scratch by children or adults who
> have no language in common, and of creoles, the successor languages that
> acquire inflection and syntax. Dr. Bickerton developed the idea that a
> proto-language must have preceded the full-fledged syntax of today's
> discourse. Echoes of this proto-language can be seen, he argued, in
> pidgins, in the first words of infants, in the symbols used by trained
> chimpanzees and in the syntax-free utterances of children who do not learn
> to speak at the normal age.
>
> In a series of articles, Dr. Bickerton has argued that humans may have
> been speaking proto-language, essentially the use of words without syntax,
> as long as two million years ago. Modern language developed more recently,
> he suggests, perhaps with appearance of anatomically modern humans some
> 120,000 years ago. The impetus for the evolution of language, he believes,
> occurred when human ancestors left the security of the forest and started
> foraging on the savanna. "The need to pass on information was the driving
> force," he said in an interview.
>
> Foragers would have had to report back to others what they had found. Once
> they had developed symbols that could be used free of context a general
> word for elephant, not a vervet-style alarm call of "An elephant is
> attacking!"  early people would have taken the first step toward
> proto-language. "Once you got it going, there is no way of stopping it,"
> Dr. Bickerton said. But was the first communicated symbol a word or a
> gesture? Though language and speech are sometimes thought of as the same
> thing, language is a coding system and speech just its main channel.
>
> Dr. Michael Corballis, a psychologist at the University of Auckland in New
> Zealand, believes the gesture came first, in fact as soon as our ancestors
> started to walk on two legs and freed the hands for making signs.
> Chimpanzees have at least 30 different gestures, mostly used to refer to
> other individuals.
>
> Hand gestures are still an expressive part of human communication, Dr.
> Corballis notes, so much so that people even gesticulate while on the
> telephone. He believes that spoken words did not predominate over signed
> ones until the last 100,000 years or so, when a genetic change may have
> perfected human speech and led to its becoming a separate system, not just
> a grunted accompaniment for gestures.
>
> Critics of Dr. Corballis's idea say gestures are too limited; they don't
> work in the dark, for one thing. But many concede the two systems may both
> have played some role in the emergence of language. Search for Incentives
> As Societies Grew the Glue Was Gossip Dr. Bickerton's idea that language
> must have had an evolutionary history prompted other specialists to wonder
> about the selective pressure, or evolutionary driving force, behind the
> rapid emergence of language.
>
> In the mere six million years since chimps and humans shared a common
> ancestor, this highly complex faculty has suddenly emerged in the hominid
> line alone, along with all the brain circuits necessary to map an
> extremely rapid stream of sound into meaning, meaning into words and
> syntax, and intended sentence into expressed utterance. It is easy to see
> in a general way that each genetic innovation, whether in understanding or
> in expressing language, might create such an advantage for its owners as
> to spread rapidly through a small population.
>
> "No one will take any notice of the guy who says `Gu-gu-gu'; the one with
> the quick tongue will get the mates," Dr. Bickerton said. But what
> initiated this self-sustaining process? Besides Dr. Bickerton's suggestion
> of the transition to a foraging lifestyle, another idea is that of social
> grooming, which has been carefully worked out by Dr. Robin Dunbar, an
> evolutionary psychologist at the University of Liverpool in England.
>
> Dr. Dunbar notes that social animals like monkeys spend an inordinate
> amount of time grooming one another. The purpose is not just to remove
> fleas but also to cement social relationships. But as the size of a group
> increases, there is not time for an individual to groom everyone. Language
> evolved, Dr. Dunbar believes, as a better way of gluing a larger community
> together.
>
> Some 63 percent of human conversation, according to his measurements, is
> indeed devoted to matters of social interaction, largely gossip, not to
> the exchange of technical information, Dr. Bickerton's proposed incentive
> for language. Dr. Steven Pinker of the Massachusetts Institute of
> Technology, one of the first linguists to acknowledge that language may be
> subject to natural selection, disputes Dr. Dunbar's emphasis on social
> bonding; a fixed set of greetings would suffice, in his view.
>
> Dr. Pinker said it was just as likely that language drove sociality: it
> was because people could exchange information that it became more
> worthwhile to hang out together. "Three key features of the distinctively
> human lifestyle know-how, sociality and language co-evolved, each
> constituting a selection pressure for the others," Dr. Pinker writes in
> "Language Evolution," the new book of essays.
>
> But sociality, from Dr. Dunbar's perspective, helps explain another
> feature of language: its extreme corruptibility. To convey information, a
> stable system might seem most efficient, and surely not beyond nature's
> ability to devise. But dialects change from one village to another, and
> languages shift each generation. The reason, Dr. Dunbar suggests, is that
> language also operates as a badge to differentiate the in group from
> outsiders; thus the Gileadites could pick out and slaughter any Ephraimite
> asked to say "shibboleth" because, so the writer of Judges reports, "He
> said sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right."
>
> Language in the Genome
> >From Family Failing First Gene Emerges
>
> A new approach to the evolution of language seems to have been opened with
> studies of a three-generation London family known as KE. Of its 29 members
> old enough to be tested, 14 have a distinctive difficulty with
> communication. They have trouble pronouncing words properly, speaking
> grammatically and making certain fine movements of the lips and tongue.
> Asked to repeat a nonsense phrase like "pataca pataca pataca," they trip
> over each component as if there were three different words.
>
> Some linguists have argued that the KE family's disorder has nothing
> specific to do with language and is some problem that affects the whole
> brain. But the I.Q. scores of affected and unaffected members overlap,
> suggesting the language systems are specifically at fault. Other linguists
> have said the problem is just to do with control of speech. But affected
> members have problems writing as well as speaking. The pattern of
> inheritance suggested that a single defective gene was at work, even
> though it seemed strange that a single gene could have such a broad
> effect. Two years ago, Dr.  Simon Fisher and Prof. Tony Monaco,
> geneticists at the University of Oxford in England, discovered the
> specific gene that is changed in the KE family. Called FOXP2, its role is
> to switch on other genes, explaining at once how it may have a range of
> effects. FOXP2 is active in specific regions of the brain during fetal
> development.
>
> The gene's importance in human evolution was underlined by Dr. Svante
> Paabo and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary
> Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. In a study last year they reported that
> FOXP2 is highly conserved in evolution in other words, that the precise
> sequence of units in FOXP2's protein product is so important that any
> change is likely to lead to its owner's death. In the 70 million years
> since people and mice shared a common ancestor, there have been just three
> changes in the FOXP2 protein's 715 units, Dr. Paabo reported. But two of
> those changes occurred in the last six million years, the time since
> humans and chimps parted company, suggesting that changes in FOXP2 have
> played some important role in human evolution.
>
> Sampling the DNA of people around the world, Dr. Paabo found signs of what
> geneticists call a selective sweep, meaning that the changed version of
> FOXP2 had spread through the human population, presumably because of some
> enormous advantage it conferred. That advantage may have been the
> perfection of speech and language, from a barely comprehensible form like
> that spoken by the affected KE family members to the rapid articulation of
> ordinary discourse. It seems to have taken place about 100,000 years ago,
> Dr. Paabo wrote, before modern humans spread out of Africa, and is
> "compatible with a model in which the expansion of modern humans was
> driven by the appearance of a more proficient spoken language."
>
> FOXP2 gives geneticists what seems to be a powerful entry point into the
> genetic and neural basis for language. By working out what other genes it
> interacts with, and the neural systems that these genes control,
> researchers hope to map much of the circuitry involved in language
> systems.
>
> Ending the Silence: Linguists Return to Ideas of Origins
>
> The crescendo of work by other specialists on language evolution has at
> last provoked linguists' attention, including that of Dr. Chomsky. Having
> posited in the early 1970's that the ability to learn the rules of grammar
> is innate, a proposition fiercely contested by other linguists, Dr.
> Chomsky might be expected to have shown keen interest in how that
> innateness evolved. But he has said very little on the subject, a silence
> that others have interpreted as disdain. As Dr. Jackendoff, the president
> of the Linguistic Society of America, writes: "Opponents of Universal
> Grammar argue that there couldn't be such a thing as Universal Grammar
> because there is no evolutionary route to arrive at it. Chomsky, in reply,
> has tended to deny the value of evolutionary argumentation."
>
> But Dr. Chomsky has recently taken a keen interest in the work by Dr.
> Hauser and his colleague Dr. W. Tecumseh Fitch on communication in
> animals. Last year the three wrote an article in Science putting forward a
> set of propositions about the way that language evolved. Based on
> experimental work by Dr. Hauser and Dr. Fitch, they argue that sound
> perception and production can be seen in other animals, though they may
> have been tweaked a little in hominids. A central element in language is
> what linguists call recursion, the mind's ability to bud one phrase off
> another into the syntax of an elaborate sentence. Though recursion is not
> seen in animals, it could have developed, the authors say, from some other
> brain system, like the one animals use for navigation.
>
> Constructing a sentence, and going from A to Z through a series of
> landmarks, could involve a similar series of neural computations. If by
> some mutation a spare navigation module developed in the brain, it would
> have been free to take on other functions, like the generation of syntax.
> "If that piece got integrated with the rest of the cognitive machinery,
> you are done, you get music, morality, language,"  Dr. Hauser said. The
> researchers contend that many components of the language faculty exist in
> other animals and evolved for other reasons, and that it was only in
> humans that they all were linked.  This idea suggests that animals may
> have more to teach about language than many researchers believe, but it
> also sounds like a criticism of evolutionary psychologists like Dr. Pinker
> and Dr. Dunbar, who seek to explain language as a faculty forced into
> being by specifics of the human lifestyle.
>
> Dr. Chomsky rejects the notion that he has discouraged study of the
> evolution of language, saying his views on the subject have been widely
> misinterpreted. "I have never expressed the slightest objection to work on
> the evolution of language," he said in an e-mail message. He outlined his
> views briefly in lectures 25 years ago but left the subject hanging, he
> said, because not enough was understood. He still believes that it is easy
> to make up all sorts of situations to explain the evolution of language
> but hard to determine which ones, if any, make sense.
>
> But because of the importance he attaches to the subject, he returned to
> it recently in the article with Dr. Hauser and Dr. Fitch. By combining
> work on speech perception and speech production with a study of the
> recursive procedure that links them, "the speculations can be turned into
> a substantive research program," Dr. Chomsky said. Others see Dr.
> Chomsky's long silence on evolution as more consequential than he does.
> "The fact is that Chomsky has had, and continues to have, an outsize
> influence in linguistics," Dr. Pinker said in an e-mail message. Calling
> Dr. Chomsky both "undeniably, a brilliant thinker" and "a brilliant
> debating tactician, who can twist anything to his advantage," Dr. Pinker
> noted that Dr. Chomsky "has rabid devotees, who hang on his every
> footnote, and sworn enemies, who say black whenever he says white."
>
> "That doesn't leave much space," Dr. Pinker went on, "for linguists who
> accept some of his ideas (language as a mental, combinatorial, complex,
> partly innate system) but not others, like his hostility to evolution or
> any other explanation of language in terms of its function." Biologists
> and linguists have long inhabited different worlds, with linguists taking
> little interest in evolution, the guiding theory of all biology. But the
> faculty for language, along with the evidence of how it evolved, is
> written somewhere in the now decoded human genome, waiting for biologists
> and linguists to identify the genetic program that generates words and
> syntax.
>
>
>
>
>
>