Language Design - Noam Chomsky / Serious Science

to look into the question of language design it's useful to think of how human beings evolved we don't know a great deal about it but we know some things so for example it's fairly clear from the archaeological record that modern humans modern Homo sapiens cognitively modern Homo sapiens developed quite recently in evolutionary time and maybe within the last roughly hundred thousand years which is a flick of an eye that's when you get the enormous increase explosion of indications of the creative activity complex family structures symbolism and so on all of this develops roughly in that period and interestingly there has been no detectable evolution of these capacities in roughly the past 50,000 years that's the period since our ancestors left Africa a small number of them and pretty quickly spread over the world so all humans are pretty much identical with regard the cognitive capacity linguistic capacity and so on which means that there's been essentially no detectable evolution so there's a small window there where something happened and it's generally assumed by paleoanthropologist people who study these topics that must have been the emergence of language because it's hard to imagine any of these basically creative activities without language and that language does provide the mechanisms for them so it seems as though the core of human sensibility and a creative and cognitive capacity is the development of this completely unique capacity there's nothing analogous to it anywhere in the animal world there are animal signaling systems but they're completely different in design and use in just about every dimension so something strange happened roughly maybe a hundred thousand years ago not very long and language emerged in humans and the question then is well what kind of a system is it on the surface languages look very different from one another so if somebody walks into the room and starts speaking Swahili I'm not going to understand a word though I will recognize that it's a language I won't understand it but I know it's not noise no as soon as you look more deeply you find that these languages are basically mold into a pretty similar design may be an identical design the large parts of the length of what we hear is just the sounds but that's a very superficial part of language the core of language is principles that determine actually an infinite array of possible expressions structured expressions which have definite meanings now all of that is well beyond what we can just observe but I say looking at the texts and when a child is learning a language the child doesn't learn those things there's no evidence for them almost no evidence for them nobody can teach them we don't know what they are these are just part of our nature the core principle so-called syntactic principles that form expressions and that provide specific interpretations for them that's apparently just all part of our nature and then there are various ways of externalizing it in sound or in sign which is about the same but it but that's a kind of a superficial manifestation of an internal uniformity and the really exciting and it almost has to be this way if you think about the way the system developed it very suddenly in evolutionary terms which meant that there were very limited selection Alisha's so it probably was designed as a computational as it is a computational system so many explanation for this array of capacities computational systems have certain optimal characteristics that some are more efficient than others and there's every reason to believe that this developed pretty suddenly as an optimal communication system essentially following laws of nature very much the way a snowflake assumes a very complex form and not because of experience or training but just because that's the way the laws of physics work and there's every reason to believe that language is something like this now to try to show it is a trivial matter you have to try to show that the superficial variety of languages actually reduces to principles of a common character which approach notions of optimal design and there has been I think no notable progress in that process is a long way to go to try to demonstrate it for but then of course then one wants to go beyond tried maybe ultimately to discover the neural basis for whatever this unique capacity is and it's a very hard problem the study for humans so we know a lot about the human visual system because of direct experimentation with cats and monkeys we allow ourselves to do direct experimentation you know sticking electrodes into the brain and so on controlled experiments but we don't do it with humans and humans have about the same visual system as cats and monkeys so we know about the human visual system you can't do that for language there are no analogous systems so you can stand watch you studying other animals we're unique in this respect and invasive experiments with human beings are of course barred so it's a very complex and intricate matter to try to find clever ways of getting around the barriers to learn something about these topics and some progress is being made I think we can look forward to a period when there will be convergence of various modes of inquiry into design of language neuro basis acquisition of our possible varieties of language and so on that's crucial task for the future which in fact is directed to the core of human nature the core of cognitive of human nature the most intriguing question I think is the one that I have basically just mentioned there's reason to believe that the core of human intellectual nature cognitive nature is a computational system which probably has something like the properties of a snowflake it simply had to develop this way given biological and physical law and special circumstances and the most intriguing question is to try to see if that's true but if it is to show that it's true you

Channel: Serious Science

Views: 138,238

Keywords: science, lecture, Serious Science, Noam Chomsky (Author), Linguistics (Field Of Study), Language (Philosophical Subject)

Id: MLk47AMBdTA

Length: 8min 27sec (507 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 17 2014