Speaking Up: The Origins of Language

[Music] you [Music] you good afternoon everyone I'm Steven spats assistant outreach librarian and on behalf of library director Joe Lucia and the staff of fall V Memorial Library I'd like to welcome you to the first event in the fourth annual annual anthropology lecture series this semester fall V library will be hosting a total of three anthropology lectures here in the first floor lounge under the thematic title the science of humanity tongues stones and bones before we begin with this afternoon's presentation by dr. Lowell Gustafson I'd like to briefly share some information on the other two on Tuesday March 10th at 1:00 p.m. dr. Richard M Leventhal director of the Penn cultural heritage center will give a talk entitled the collapse of the ancient Maya interpretation of the past and preserving the future and on Tuesday April 14th at 1:00 p.m. dr. Michael Zimmerman professor of anthropology at Penn and of biology at Villanova University will deliver a presentation entitled where did humans come from where do we go from here further information is available on posters around campus and on the library's web pages at library Villanova edu this year the Anthropology lecture series is co-sponsored by the office of academic affairs the office of mission effectiveness the College of Arts and Sciences the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and fall B Memorial Library we had folly applaud the efforts of all these entities in making this series possible and we especially appreciate the opportunity this time around to be a part of bringing these engaging presentations to you today's event features dr. Lowell Gustafson associate dean for Social Sciences and professor of political science at Villanova University a longtime member of the political science faculty dr. Gustafson's research interests include international relations theories international political economy and Latin American comparative politics and international relations he's one of the principal organizers of the Anthropology lecture series and he will be starting this year's edition off with a talk on language and humanity entitled speaking up the origins of language would you please join me in welcoming dr. Lowell Gustafson thanks Steven that's really nice I'll try to trip over these wires as many times as I possibly can on this as I go through the lecture anyway it's really nice time I'm delighted to talk with you about the topic which i think is really fun and really interesting the first of all I have to thank Chris Bar for this wonderful poster he's the one who designed this I don't know if you've seen it out in front it's really a beauty and the idea of the title of this series of lectures on anthropology the idea of science and humanity the the attempts to use various scientific approaches to studying the humanity and there are three three of the basic subfields of anthropology are linguistics archeology and physical or biological anthropology and so I guess I'm talking about one of the topics that sort of a an interesting part of the linguistics side of anthropology and then as Steven mentioned Richard Leventhal is going to be talking about archaeology the study of stones I guess in linguistics you know we talk about tongues and mother tongues and so on that's the idea of tons and that archaeology very often studies stuff that's left behind the artifacts which is are left behind and and and the the RTR theology of the ancient Maya is a fascinating field and so I think almost everybody has an interest in the Maya and you will enjoy richard Leventhal discussion of that segment of archaeology and then we're very fortunate in our University of Mike Zimmerman here in our biology department he teaches courses on biological anthropology and he has his degree and in the field from from Japan and he'll be speaking as as Steven said later on so we're trying to cover three of the basic fields of the study of humans and as I won't repeat that because that's what Steven just told you with with with Richard Leventhal and Mike Zimmermann it's it Mike and I have this is the fourth year in a row that we've put together series on anthropology and and and I think that we've put two frankly together some really interesting series over the last few years and they're primarily due to my colleague Mike Zimmerman who who is done a marvelous job and in getting lots of really first-rate people to come to Villanova and talk about these topics excuse me this is a perfect place of course to talk about linguistics about languages about link where language comes from because a library is that's where language is we are filled here with language that's surrounding us in books and articles and journals and magazines and newspapers and a million other types of documents which are just chock full of language this is the nerve center of language and in many respects making libraries the center of all university life because of this this is where we have all the language collected and so I really do appreciate that favi library has has helped organize this series on anthropology in this particular talk on on the origins of language and I particularly want to thank and Ford who's done so much for this another series as well in getting all of these types of things set up so I and all of the other co-sponsors that Stephen was mentioning just a few key points right you know they always say you ought to make a few points and then make them and then remind everyone what they were because I usually get lost within the forest for the trees and all of that sort of thing but so just to give a kind of a snapshot of where we're going we have all kinds of languages right we have we have departments and Modern Languages and classical languages and critical languages and we we've got French and German and Spanish and Italian and and Greek and Latin and Chinese and Arabic and so on and so on it's all we got we have lots of study of languages here at Villanova and very often they come along with all of the diversity and distinctions between groups of people and and hard to translate between cultures and languages that all of our different mother tongues very often tend to separate us there's the tends to be these cultural divides between english-speaking peoples and Arabic speaking peoples and and so on but the fact is that virtually all humans in fact it's it is there is there a single example of a human group that doesn't have a language we all are language speaking creatures I mean that's almost one of the central defining characteristics of what it means to be human we've got lots of different languages but we all have language and that in that sense kind of unites us as a species and and as a group and differentiates us from from other species on the other hand it's not a complete - gulf between US and other species because our language has an evolutionary past that has emerged from the communication systems of our ancestors and so we are tied in many important ways to other species in in our abilities to communicate with each other we've developed that in our own distinctive ways but but this but the fact that we have language and we have all of the biological hardware that makes language possible very much ties us to a very long evolutionary past and all kinds of fascinating ways in the same way that we have evolved from other types of critters in the past and that we share a lot in common with them each of these languages that we speak each of these different languages has an evolutionary past has a history we all know anyone who's read Beowulf and Shakespeare knows that English now ain't the same as it was a few hundred years ago we have evolved there's constant evolution of language so much so that after a while it seems like a different language we have many dialects within language we have the Romance languages to which very appropriate I guess for Valentine's Day except it has more to do with Roman stuff than romantic but Italian and French and Spanish they they heart back to Latin that's sort of the mother tongue but Latin didn't just come out of nowhere Latin seems to hit itself have evolved from indo-european languages but the end of the 18th century some people were noticing some remarkable differences some remarkable similarities between English ends or the European languages and the languages of India of Hindi and people sort of scratch their head and they started piecing these things together and realize well they probably came from a language that we spoken in the southern step the southern Russian steps maybe around 6000 years ago or so it did take a word that we always like around here religion it comes from a latin root which means to bind or connect and that latin word comes from the word league or lied which is an indo-european word which means to bind or connect it's the it's the word we get ligament from for example to connect ligaments and in that sense religions the history of this word ties us to the idea that it's about binding things together connecting things creating a community if you will in a way so there's a history of words and it keeps going back indo-european isn't the first language now it gets a little tough you get back to 6,000 BC or something it's a little tough to trace the evolution of languages but there's there's an argument to which the so called click languages of Africa might be the oldest existing of the human languages well I don't know if it's true or not but it's a pretty good guess since the that's where a humans it seemed to have evolved but once you start talking about this the evolution of language the evolution of the biological hardware that makes it possible to have language you start to realize that language is a complicated that's a fascinating it's an important it's a worthwhile topic problem that deserves our thinking and deserves I deserves place in the curricula and that's a little bit different I mention this because very often our curricula sort of assumes that language is not a problem we start very often at least in my educational background we have started with language already full-blown and as a given and not as a problem I'll try to explain this a little bit than some of the texts that of which which would cede language is not a problem to be solved as just sort of an assumed capability that of course we all have and there's not much more to say about it anyway so that's a decimal headed now anytime you talk about evolution you have to talk about Darwin and it's especially a good time to talk about Darwin since we're two days away from his 200th birthday party so I hope you've all put in your order for the cake up and Darwin and the other scientists many many others of course over the last century or two have not through the study of written language but through the study of all types of non written evidence have completely rewritten the histories of all kinds of different things but it's but they have transformed what it means to be human because they've changed the story of humanity if anthropology is the study of humanity it tries to write a story of humanity and all kinds of folk tales and myths and sacred texts and other types of texts also for thousands of years have given us a story of who we are and what our place in the cosmos is and what's the meaning of being human I mean this is and science has rewritten that story in the last one or two centuries and it's really challenged us now we we are struggling still with trying to integrate that it seems to me the cultural traditions that we come from with this new story of what it means to be human and what our relationship is with everything that's around us so we know we have new histories of the Sun and the stars and the earth and plants and animals and humans and language their different histories just in the last century a to then what frankly we had ever had before in recorded human history and we're trying to figure that stuff out and we've had a bunch of different responses to this problem if I guess it is a problem on 100 kind of the scientific side of the house and you've noticed even our architecture indicates there's a difference in our College of Arts and Sciences we have a building for the arts the humanities and we have a building for the sciences and there's a big gulf there's a separation in between this sort of no-man's land and there's no hallway that connects us there's a there's sort of a separation and there's a scientific worldview there seems like there's a humanities worldview and half the time we sort of like to ignore each other that's one good response to and and you get that frankly you get that sometimes from some of the folks over at Mendel that do we have to take humanities courses do we have to take one more text-based course my god how many you're going to make us take or you've got sort of a hard-edged version of this with with Dawkins and sam Harrison says not only should you ignore a lot of those texts especially at religious stuff but they're a downright danger right I mean religious text costs cause religious wars and it would just be a whole lot better if we just you know dunk the holes into the stack of these texts and and clear out most of the floors of this library would would do us all good service so you've had that approach now on the other side you've had not we don't have too many fundamentalist with us but and the the fundamentalists are equally hostile towards Darwin and science just to just get rid of that whole thing because it's all untrue and it's specious and we've got all kinds of criticisms of that and now there's two other more common responses to Sciences among the humanities and what is just to ignore them rather than to be hostile to them start our curricula when language is already fully developed and ignore everything that's happened before that or just ignore the new histories of what the cosmos means in all of this and read only the great texts or we can have the postmodern AI deconstruction of science it's just one more cultural artifice and those folks over there and men don't think they've got some special methodologies which give them a claim the truth but really it's just one more socially constructed cent of claims to power and it's time to do it to you know declare the emperor has no clothes on and so on so these are sort of common responses I think in general our College has rejected all of those and I consider all of them to be mistakes and I think we rejected them and we have for decades try to bridge the gulf between Mendel and our Center for liberal arts we found all kinds of ways to say how can we make meaningful use of of the scientific methodologies the arts religion the humanities and coming up with a story of humanity that's satisfying this filling that resonates with us that makes sense to us in fact Aaron Bower who's in our biology department has just proposed a new interdisciplinary major which actually I'm really excited about but we'll call it if it goes through it'll be called something like science faith in humanity coming and this is saying that we have to do good science the way that the scientists would do science but then use that to try to think about what do our traditions mean what what does it mean to be human these are the types of humanity style questions anyway so what do our faiths scripture tradition experience evidence and analysis tell us from a scientific and a humanities a point of view about language and its origins let me spend a few minutes on the issues of written languages and texts before I get to spoken language and other forms of communication when I was a former life when I was an undergrad and I was taking courses on history and philosophy and stuff like that I still have the books from those eras and and and we we started with the epic of gilgamesh which is a fabulous story and if you haven't read it to do that it's a wonderful coming-of-age story this is a full-blown story this is language is already well developed you know four thousand years ago when this story from Sumeria is written now what we didn't study and we could have studied for when I read that as an undergrad we studied it as a story and it's worth studying as a story we didn't we didn't ask ourselves who wrote this thing first how did writing develop we could have but we didn't or at least I didn't and in my classes we could have gone back and said the ability to write that story has a long history in that part of the world and 4000 years ago isn't far back enough you know when I was 20 years old I thought plenty far back but but you could have gone back to 9,000 years ago with the first edgings the first written ways to count or 6,000 years ago with the development of cuneiform but but writing is a problem writing is an interesting problem it's a there's a history of how we come to write so we can't just start it doesn't seem sensible to just start once it's already full-blown but that's what I did when I was an undergrad I didn't I just didn't think about where did writing itself come from we've got other in our tradition fabulous sacred texts for for us coming from from shining foot Genesis the Torah the Tanakh and all of these were a wonderful text which which asked questions which are the same questions we're asking now the cut the answers are pretty different right but the questions are where did this stuff come from in what order did it appear I mean the Genesis is interesting it just it doesn't say that God said Let there be everything and everything popped up just the way it is there's a question about what order things come in and there's a question about when did this stuff begin and there's a tradition if you read the texts carefully you go back and you say there's a pretty good chance it began 50 769 years ago that's that's a tradition that's a reading of the text which leads us it's a careful reading of the text which says this is when that stuff began this is when the you got creative because we the question is there what are the origins when did it begin where did it come from it what order did these things arrived this matters to us we care about it I care about it now a lot of people care about a lot of people care about a few thousand years ago and that unites me with the authors of these texts we have of course as we know all kinds of fabulous textual tradition coming not only out of the ancient Hebrews but the ancient Greeks and we studied them at an Augustinian school now remember agustin sitting on the periphery of the Roman Empire is known for his great synthesis of ancient Greek and ancient Hebraic thought and within the context of the Roman Empire and so we have all of these texts and people who skip the whole life to the study of all of these textual traditions are spending their lives well and that's a good thing if you I think if a Gustin was with us now his method would would make him an avid reader of virtually all the world's textual traditions he'd be reading the ancient Maya script that Leventhal will be talking about he'd be reading the Baha gavage eita and and everything else because he when he was around he read money he was a Manichaean for ten years right many was a guy from Persia he read the Persians the Greeks the Hebrews the Romans and he was fascinating in China he rejected some stuff you know he except itself but he was he wrestled with all of it and said where can I put all of this together how can I put this stuff together and I think he'd be fascinated with the the accomplishments of the last century of so in the decipherment of the maya who in this text also tell us when the world began this is a text to carry Gua it's a it's a stealer in the end with the Time Square carry Gua it's the oreo or Villanova University that's where this that's where this thing is located and it's telling everybody exactly on what day for how a cuckoo and in the year thirteen point zero zero zero zero which is if you translate the dates for us August 13th 3114 BC that's when humanity and the fifth Maya creation began that's how old humanity is and so culture and humanity begins 50 123 years ago five six thousand years with her back that's that's an interesting correlation but in any case is it that that's that's this view you've had people who read our Christian sacred texts very carefully come up wing with similar dates Oscar came with the idea he was a famous Bishop a few hundred years ago who and and the tradition said that the world began 23 October 400 the 4004 BC Saint Agustin argued that if you read the documents carefully things start 6,000 years ago this is a number that kind of pops up and seem to be fairly common and all of them are saying if we study the written texts carefully we can make some statements and some understandings about all this stuff that which is around us as far as language goes but what are they saying well there's a tradition and our sacred texts which emphasize the importance of words and talking and writing after all we all know this famous section from the beginning of the Gospel of John in the beginning was the word the Word was God okay I don't know what that means the philosophers too can talk about how the Greeks and ideas of logos influences all of that but clearly a word of the word or words or something is really important it has something to do with with creation we got that we all know that there's these two a biblical concept creation at the beginning of Genesis and one God thunders from the heaven and the other he walks in the garden in the first he makes man and women simultaneously and the other he makes man first and then women which seems to be the story that stuck and one it's the question of order he makes plans first and then humans and then the other he makes humans first and then plants clearly the editor who put these stories together said I don't know which is true I'll just put them all in here and we'll figure it out later on which i think is a wonderful response I love that response and and and and we've puzzled over that for the last you know a few thousand years trying to figure out why are there two stories of creation but as far as language goes what's interesting here is that there's an awful lot of talking and in these stories right off the bat god says this and there was light and God says that and there was the Sun in the moon and gods you know there's a lot of talking and then the serpent comes along he's talking and Eve starts talking and they talking about very profound ethical and religious topics there's no discussion about where language comes from we just know that everybody's talking right off the bat about fully-blown topics and and really important things language itself is not a problem in these texts the texts are trying to figure out what order other stuff appears and as it plans first to humans which is it but there's not a discussion are there verbs first and nouns or is there syntax I mean this this is not the type of thing that they're there where you know God said let there be words okay it just doesn't get involved in that sort of thing and but it does it talks about the importance of words and words were there at the beginning yet at the time of creation it doesn't get till chapter five till we get any references to write it so we're reading a written text and the written text is about spoken language what God's saying things it didn't say God wrote and got tenure it says God said and there was like it's not until chapter five that we have any references to writing about Adam's line writing is not a problem it's assumed there's no question about where did writing come from who discovered it who developed it who wrote it where is it written it just says it's written it's just assumed it's not a problem language is is just there all right but it does talk about spoken language and of course our evolutionary account that I think now many have adopted although if you accept the public opinion calls apparently still the majority of Americans don't accept evolution but if you it seems as though the the non textural evidence seems pretty decisive right we have an awful long history and steps of evolution of all kinds of different things including language so if you accept that and thing for our purposes I'm going to wear did language come from how did it develop and and and how do we solve the problem of language first of all when did we start speaking yeah and we don't know so far the archaeologists haven't dug up any fossilized words though that doesn't help us the archaeological approach just doesn't solve this question so how're we ever going to figure out which is why in the 19th century the Paris Society of linguists said they will accept no papers and no presentations on this topic just don't do it because it gets us involved in endless and fruitless speculation and there's no way of making this determination and in fact that prohibition stuck there really wasn't much written on the origins of language for a long time in the last 10 years or so all of a sudden for some reason there's an explosion there's there's all kinds of books and articles on this topic now although it's been of interest for a long time in fact jean-jacques Rousseau you know when the famous French philosopher from the 18th century he wrote on the origins of language and gave his speculation which is actually not a bad set of speculation on that but but but it was put aside but in and the basic idea is now I think it's pretty well accepted that we were speaking as a species for tens of thousands of years before anybody started writing anything so it's a good thing that God spoke and didn't write because nobody was writing way back in that apparently the word was a spoken word and we when we've been speaking at least for 50 70 thousand years most likely for much longer than than that and most of the time we were speaking in relatively small groups instead of standing around the PowerPoint the podium it was maybe around a campfire or something like that but we tended to speak in small groups which is why I think our traditional educational system is going to be around for a long time we like not just to go up to the second floor stacks and sit by yourself and read books that's part of the educational process but it seems as though where we really learn where the magic of learning takes place is when we get together in small groups and talk we talk about the readings we talk about ourselves we talk about everything we gossip about everybody else and we talk and talk and talk and that's all we do in small groups and we absolutely love it we can't get enough of it and so this type of a venue here although this is a little formal and stodgy with the you know with the smart guy standing behind the microphone blah blah blah blah forever it would be much more normal perhaps for us to have a conversation but in any case what's normal about this and what unites us here with about the last how many hundreds of thousands of years of human history is that we'd like to get together in small groups talk and listen that's if it means anything to be human that's that seems to be what what it means and and so this is I think a perfect venue the library has organized not just the collection of written materials and and Steven have organized small groups where we get together and talk that's that but the vibrant understanding of the use of language but if we're going to talk about the origins of spoken language that's not pushing the story back far enough because the story if language is about communication and about communication in groups which it seems to be right I mean what we what we have is is not that people are talking to themselves I'm not sure who God is talking to but he uses the Royal we back then but there's always talking with each other it's so it's a social activity from the beginning and we want to communicate with others this is a profound I think biological need this is who we are we want to communicate we want to connect with with each other through communication and we have all types of pre oral pre written communication this is what we're so argued by the way in the 18th century he said language begins not with speaking certainly not with writing but with gestures our hands and this gets to the question of the origin what order do do things appear in biologically does our layerings those are very credible facile tongue developed before our hands or not if the hands that develop first and it seems as though that's the case then we start off perhaps being able to use our hands to gesture to each other and think of all the gesture here I love this picture of the outstretched hand you know and I thought of this picture as soon as Obama made that phrase in his speech at how many people would think about H listen Obama but but you remember that thing that we for though we will offer an outstretched hand to those who don't clench their fists that's a very powerful phrase why because we all know what that means we can that gesture morts across cultures and the Iranians understand that the the home of money understands that just as well as the as the civilizational home of Augustan it crosses cultures and spoken divides very nicely if I go like that you kind of have an idea of what it means and it's different from if I go like this alright so is the gestures seem to have a long history now I don't know exactly what this guy is trying to say here but he wants something from somebody I mean he's he's not just off by himself with you clearly you want to know what's going on over here and we don't know from the picture but we know that in all kinds of ways first of all I was obviously the arms pointing right at it that means we have to have shared attention this guy's communicating with somebody he wants something from somebody and he's looking right at him and just keep his mouth in mind just for a moment yeah you've got body position and expressions and and gestures there's all kinds of communication going on there and not a word being spoken except maybe some kind of noises and calls going on but that we can't hear and we all know there's there's we use gestures all the time you know whatever it is so we we're doing this constantly and we we we accentuate our language right I mean you tie my hands behind my back and it's really hard to talk you know we we do we're we also like to wander around when I talk about I'm going to trip if I do so I'm not going to but but we do this we just have to do this stuff with our hands when we talk and maybe that's a holdover but in any case this this idea that there's other species who are communicating clearly they communicated they're communicating with each other and they're finding ways of communication that have nothing to do with grammar and nouns and verbs now one of the usual evolutionary rules and and I really hesitate talking about evolution at all - in front of a fellow who teaches the course on it because I barely understand this stuff but but the I think one of the ideas that things don't just happen in big quantum leaps I mean we just said we didn't we have a common ancestor with the chimpanzee it's not like mama chimpanzee has one massive mutation and out pops a human right I mean there's a million little mutations along the way over long periods of time and somehow one sort of makes use of the other and builds on the other and over time chimpanzees and us look fairly different but but it's it's a long accumulated process and and they build there's a so there's a history of everything and a long history of everything and a history of your eyes and your ears and and and your larynx and your tongue I mean each one of these things comes out of a long process of development it's fascinating how come we got this stuff how did we get this stuff and and what comes before what so we have written language we have spoken language before that we have gestural communication before that now do we have stuff maybe before communication before intentional communication maybe other ways that I can infer something from behaviors and what I'm seeing that others aren't intending to signal to me and obviously we do this all the animals do this all the time and we know that they do animals are forever carefully observing what's going on around them the stakes are high it is what the leopard is doing meaning he's going to eat me as a gazelle or is he not going to chase me that's something inquiring minds want to know if you're a gazelle and if I'm hungry I want to know is this animal this is acting in such a way that I can sneak up on him and eat it more or is he going to be able to run away I mean you want to know this you know is this female interested in mating or is she not terribly interested in mating it's an interesting question so there's a lot of things I want to know and I'm looking and I'm trying to figure it out what are they doing I'm looking at their how they're walking or stepping what their grunts mean what their howls what their facial expressions mean and and what their body positions mean and they're not maybe trying to signal anything to me but I'm trying to read into it anyone seen a picture of Brian Westbrook did Brian dress Perkis he lines up on the line just before a play breaks out and how he's staring at everybody the other players aren't trying to signal to him what they're going to do but Westbrook is looking at every movement to try to tell her they're going to go this way or that way or what and he reads into their unintended communication man we've done this carefully for a gazillion years right and not just us but all kinds of animals comprehension before intentional communication is there that means we've got to be able to figure that stuff out now we know that animals do this anybody who's had a theater and watch the squirrels try to figure out how to get into it knows that darn thing is thinking like crazy and usually solves the problem it's very rarely you can outsmart those guys of course any of us who have seen Jurassic Park knows how smart those darn velociraptors are and oh yeah these other critters are smart or a lot of them are smart and they figure a lot of stuff out and they're watching us and they're watching each other and they're making interpretations their cognitive abilities are pretty sophisticated and then maybe you have an evolution of expressions and gestures and the movement from unintended communication and comprehension by others to intended communication think of the famous site silent bared teeth SBT how come academics loves those alphabet soup stuff but anthropologist really get off on SBT but it is it's kind of neat isn't it I mean think of how many silent bared teeth expressions there are out there in nature start with Wolves right now maybe it starts off as a purely functional thing I want to retract my lips before I bite you because I don't want to bite my lip I just want to bite you and and so I've learned that if I don't retract my teeth it can hurt so okay maybe that's just a I'm not trying to communicate anything I don't want anybody to read into it I just want to not bite my lip and maybe that's where that starts other animals are watching me because they don't like getting bit and so they want to know what behaviors are out there that could end up with me with somebody's teeth in my legs so I want that's a matter that's of interest to me so they'd learned that if that wolf retracts his lip it's time to get out of the way and you better start running that's it that's the leaf is not intentionally communicating that he's just behaving out of his own desires or needs now maybe wolves learn that hey this is interesting other animals run away from me if all I do is this how easy is that uh we had an Irish Setter just a loveliest dog in the world she wouldn't bite anything to save her soul and never did but when she got irritated that's what she did she retracted her lips she never intended to bite but she was trying to tell us you know I'm bugged when you get off of my case or something like this I ever it had a long pedigree it's that expression and we've moved them I mean it looks as though maybe wolves have learned from unintended communication to intended communication where they're trying to scare some of these pesty other animals away you've got all kinds of other silent bared teeth you've got chimpanzees remember that guy who is out stretching his hand did you notice his mouth boy his teeth out there and full view right now it didn't it maybe was it was sort of an aggressive outreach I mean this wasn't just a can we talk sort of expression this was sort of an aggressive outstretched answer I don't know if he was threatening a bite or what he was doing there but it doesn't seem as though it's always restricted to protecting the lips if you're going to bite they seem to use it to indicate submissiveness to repair disrupted social relations chimpanzees very social creatures and they always break down they're always fighting with each other the kind of unlikable critter sometime at least first of all loves to contrast the bonobos which are always you know making love and not war and the chimpanzees who are always doing nasty things to each other but they are very social and after they have this breakdown in social relations they seem to have ways of restoring those they're their tribe their kinship group their community whatever you want to call it and the silent bear teeth thing is one of the expressions which goes along with that think of our silent bared teeth expressions out becomes infinitely more complicated once we get going with our smiles but why do we do this it's fine we bear our teeth I mean why do we do that Sal it's a long history of this expression and we're signalling we're communicating all kinds of stuff to each other with that we might be expressing happiness humor joy putting others at ease it's just a social thing to smile you greet people and that's a nice thing to do sometimes it's it's showing deference other times it's showing dominance right if I did trip over the cords it's always funny it's the most common comedy shtick there is for the somebody the trip we just it's funny you bare your teeth and somebody else trips I don't know why but we do it so it so we had a history of this expression and becomes extraordinarily complicated and we signal intentionally and sometimes unintentionally I mean think of all those ghastly pictures you've taken if people you tell them to smile and then you get it in a nice smile like this I mean it's really hard to smile naturally if you're not really happy about something you know smiling on command doesn't work I mean this the expressions seem to be almost involuntary that I'm not necessarily trying to communicate anything to do it's simply one of those things I do when I feel a certain way and so we're always reading each other's expressions you know my students are telling me how fabulous my lectures are but they're sitting like this in the back of the room that tells me something right so so how do we understand what others are really saying what's between the lines well look at them that's one way to just try to figure out so and we make these interpretation all the time well in any case if we are going to communicate if we're going to comprehend what it means that others are gesturing and expressing and vocalizing in some ways then we have to have the cognitive capabilities to do that if we're going to start intentionally expressing things to others and trying to communicate with them that means I need voluntary control in all kinds of ways over my hands I need very fine hand gestures I need to be able have voluntary control perhaps into a degree over my facial gestures my auditory abilities I've got to have all of this larynx to stuff develop oh and oh and all the critters don't have this I mean you can teach Apes until you're blue in the face and they're simply not going to be able to talk the way do don't have the in the larynx which is going to permit them to do them they don't have the hardware to sit up and give a lecture and that's why you were wishing I was an eight but but but the Apes do have all kinds of ways which which they use do to communicate they make all kinds of different sounds their auditory systems are very acute if they clearly perceive and understand the sounds and actions made by others and their group and outside species they are extraordinarily communicative with species but they don't seem to have language the way that we understand language in any case this is maybe one way this is sort of a comparative approach to the the study of a pass that we can't get to ourselves because we have a pretty good idea of just how far back our common ancestor was say twelve thirteen million years ago we didn't descend from the apes but we descended from a common ancestor about that far back so if this guy can hear and we can hear you know we had a fairly good sense that our common ancestor could - if he's vocalizing and we're vocalizing maybe a little bit differently we've got an idea our common ancestor maybe can do that we try to make some comparisons and say okay this is what was going on 13 million years ago or there's a chance of this was going on at that time and then of course we still want to ask why is there so much communication going on across so many animal species and there's lots of reasons for this and whether to either be eaten or so on but we have lots of different species which are are extraordinarily social creatures we have the flocks of birds and herds of gazelles and schools of fish and human societies and and all of them have lots of communication which enables them to fly together and swim together and move together and do all kinds of things together and there's interaction going on between them as an expression of whatever it means to be in that group we certainly have a lot of these types of activities I mean to think of the million ways that we communicate with each other in social solidarity and we love to do this right anyone who's gone to a football game or a concert or or anything else knows there's all kinds of ways to sing and dance and talk and chant and speak repetitively and do all kinds of things which somehow our expressions of this social identity that what we are Aristotle a noticed way back when that we are social creatures that was hardly a brand new occurrence just a couple of thousand years ago I mean all kinds of species has been have been incredibly social for all kinds of their own reasons for a long time and it's not just primates but it certainly is primates among others but now now clearly our communication in different species is very different but a lot of it is based on this constant interest in what each other is doing for all kinds of different purposes a little closer to home than birds are there are the other primates who are forever thinking about each other and observing each other and interpreting what each other is doing there forever they know exactly what their kinship relationships are they know who knows first of all and I think he's an odd a wonderful author he's got a great book called chimpanzee politics it's one of my most favorite breeds of the last few years it's really a fun book on all of the Pinilla political maneuvering that's going on with a group of chimpanzees and the struggle for power any political scientist gets excited about this right and and where everybody stands in the in the pecking order by the way if anyone's hoping for equality in the animal world I haven't found a whole lot of it boy that they love social hierarchies and these primate groups but in any case they're they want to know where do we stand what's my relationship to this who owes me one who needs two to help me in this alliance how are we going to knock off that top male if we can possibly do it I mean it's full of palace intrigue it's really a very entertaining book if you want to do it but what you've got going among these critters here is a very close non language based thought process going on and it's about social relations within the group and they are tirelessly interested in what each other is doing and then they always get into fights about it but then they somehow seem to work out a deal and they're talking to each other it seems like they're chattering away all the time the baboons have at least 22 different calls the vervet monkeys they're famous for having specific calls for different predators right and so if you see an eagle you make one call and if you see a snake you make another one and if you see one of the big cats you make another one and everybody else responds appropriately if you hear the call that means eagle you look up in the sky you better look up in the sky or he's going to eat you or the same thing for the snakes you look down for the big cats you look around are they running around in the trees and they're ready to get you so there's a communication now is it committed now is it intentional communication and it does maybe it's not right because it doesn't seem as though the bird sit around at night around the campfire and say you know I thought I saw an eagle today and it did it just turned out to be a flock of sparrows oh you know I I'm sorry I didn't mean to cause an alarm well we don't seem to have the use of those calls in the absence of the thing that they see it seems to be almost an involuntary response just like if I see if I see one of those big cats my heart race starts my heart starts racing right not because I think I think I would like to communicate to others I'm a little nervous here but because it's just this automatic response it seems as though their vocalization is like that they don't talk in the absence of the thing that they see and others I'm just going to speculate about this and and so it seems almost as if it's unintentional but it is communication and it seems to have served the the vervet monkey fairly well they stay out of more trouble than they would get into if they if they didn't have this a have this ability one things they don't have and and are these calls words well what's a word is the word this association that we make cognitively between the sound and it's an arbitrary association between a sound and a thing or an action or whatever it is and this is for the philosophers to tell us what a word is and I don't know what it is but but it's this what we would commonly think of as a word this sound that the vervet monkeys made for Eagle if it's not symbolic if they can't make the sound in the absence of seeing the thing the help it's some kind of a vocalization and has meaning but maybe there's a difference maybe maybe we want to be able to intentionally think about a word and use it manipulated in the absence of the presence of the thing before we call it a word or I don't know what it is but there seems to be some kind of a difference and is there language in the absence of syntax if in the absence of grammar if you can't combine sounds in words in in ways that have some new meanings can use be said to have language and well it seems as though that's what we want in language before we're going to call it that and I used a bad analogy here is it unintentional communication like a baby crying it might be that the further this might be a little bit like the wolf smile I mean do babies intend to communicate when they are newborns and they cry or is it just what they do when they're hungry but later on they learn pretty quickly and long before they have language that if they cry in a certain way they'll get their diaper change and if they cry in another way they'll get some food and that they cry in another way they get picked up can they start to learn how to intentionally communicate and do we have sort of an evolution of communica tori abilities that each one of us has has gone through so it might be that the early stages are not intentional communication but they may be the later stages of pre verbal crying is very intentional but on this matter of grammar it doesn't seem as though the other primates first as is vocalizing as they often are and as thoughtful as they are about social relations it doesn't seem as though they have grammar we can teach chimpanzees about 125 signs which they can locate visibly that they can't pronounce it they don't have the same pronunciation that we do but they can learn about this many signs the standard repertoire of words for each of us is around 60,000 words and if you're really a smart guy you have more than that and if you're like me you have about 15,000 but they do it but but we have lots more words but they have 125 is not bad but it doesn't seem as though they ever really get the idea that they can reorder those words to create some new meanings right that you know it makes a difference about if I hit him or if he hit me and and and that's that reorganization of work is a little tricky the capuchin monkeys can have an order in which they make their sounds but it doesn't seem as though they alternate and revise that that order very much so there's not there seems to be a difference in the grammatical the syntax and tactical abilities between our language and the abilities of communication systems with others having said that where does our grammatical ability come from it's a fabulous cognitive accomplishment and maybe we do have some precursors of that in the navigation that a lot of animals will use if they're trying to get from point A to point D some animals just keep on going whatever happens as their there's a crab in Cuba maybe you've seen that or one which forever it lives with most of its life out in the woods but then goes down to the shores to me well Cubans have just built a big highway in front of along the the shoreline and the poor crabs still go traipsing in the same way they've always gone across this road and there's slaughter right these cars just drive over them and there's a gazillion killed every year they haven't figured out a new way to do it right I don't know exactly Hollywood it's not easy to walk if you're a crab the miles but very case to just do the same thing they haven't said we want to get to point D but you know what an alternative route might be a whole lot better but there are it seems as though a lot of animals who do come up with alternative routes I'm not just going to go straight from A to D I'm going to take a detour from B to C and make it in another route which means that I'm able to alternate some of my decisions consciously and voluntarily I can have a thought process as as an animal which permits me to have voluntary manipulation of some of my actions you've got this in other ways of lots of thought going on without speech now my students like to make this argument that I can have eight plus thoughts and C minus language and it doesn't matter and then that's true in my case but I don't let it go by in my students so we like to connect thought and speech but clearly there's a lot of thinking and a lot of analyzing and a lot of alternative options being thought about within a lot of the animal kingdom without their having grammatical abilities and without them having words for the most part that we would accept um what else and in the absence of this ability to talk and but in the presence of their ability to think as we've said the chimpanzees are able to know all kinds of things about their social group and they think about it all the time and and but we have had this transition from just thinking about these things to talking about them and exactly when and how did this transition happen I mean we know that we were we have this common ancestor with the chimpanzee imposed bonobos about eight million years ago with the gorillas and the orangutans maybe 13 million years ago and then all kinds of other critters behind here we've got lots of communication going on among all kinds of species long before we get to language we are connected in profound ways in all kinds of ways we are much more connected than we are separated from a lot of what's gone on with with our ancestors but there does seem to be a change we don't quite accept that these other animals they have their communication but they don't have language now that doesn't mean that they're inferior there's lots of things that we don't have that they do but this seems to be something that we have and they don't and so we're interested in that it distinguishes us now when when did we that the critters who look like us start talking if that's so important to being human when did we become human when did we start talking and of course the the chimpanzees on a timeline they're down here somewhere eight million years ago is down here this is only maybe four five million years ago this is us here this is us Homo sapiens this is we've been around if you put a t-shirt on one of these critters from a hundred thousand years ago and put him on the New York subway nobody would think about it and they would look pretty much like you a URI you put a t-shirt on this guy here and he's going to attract attention he doesn't look like us he's got a brain about a quarter of our size he's really hairy he's smaller and maybe three four feet high I mean but these are our ancestors these are all of the intermediate steps so we're not quite sure who's who in all regards between our last common ancestor of the chimpanzees we didn't evolve from the chimpanzee we had a common ancestor and all of these guys they're all extinct were the only ones between us and and and the chimpanzee who are still around all of these guys are gone and so it's it's it is a little hard to figure out so when did they start speaking they're not here to tell us and and they're all gone so so how can we figure this thing out and the bottom line is we can't nobody quite knows but every but how can we go about saying something more interesting than that first of all we needed the hardware and this is where I'm going to have to depend on the doctor Zimmerman when he gets to his discussion about where we came from he teaches his course on human evolution and what were the steps and when did these steps take place which permitted us to get the all of the hardware and think of how much had to happen to enable us to hear the sounds to produce the sounds to interpret the sounds to comprehend all of these sounds I mean it's a phenomenal set a cadre of abilities that has to develop and it doesn't happen all at once and it's not like the chimpanzees were saying wouldn't it be nice to go to a lecture and I think I'll develop those abilities that will enable me to do that all of these things happen in sort of unintended sequences over a long period of time and somehow it adds up to where where we are now and one thing is maybe we have to have a change and the placement location of our of our larynx which maybe went along with becoming bipedal walking straight up right you started swinging around in trees we start walking around why did we start doing that that's a pretty interesting question that seat maybe has changed the location of the vocal vocal tract not so that we could speak but so that we could breathe and eat in certain ways but that change had adventure then we had to have this tongue to manipulate food not to speak originally but then it becomes more subtle so that we can start voluntarily controlling the sounds all of this has a fabulous entrer Chinon cognitive science and they are far better capable of talking about what has to go on in the brain to permit this to happen which which is no easy matter I really should stop quickly and but let me just take a few more minutes before I do so the brain has developed in all kinds of ways it used to be the people look for one part of the brain that's the part of the brain where language goes on well and so we've had the broken Warnecke and others we were saying with this is this is the language part we had a rate of mutation and we had this thing in the brain and that we were able to comprehend stuff well it seems now that we've got all kinds of parts of the brain being used in in deciphering auditory comments and and intentionally making meaningful vocalizations and so there's not just one part of the brain there's an incredibly complex relationship between the two of them it does seem as though there are some folks we still talk in terms of a big bang that enabled us to start speaking Noam Chomsky talks about universal grammar in ways that make some people think that that he argued for a massive genetic change that that gave us the ability to have for this grammatical part of the brain not that we all have the same grammars but that we all do have grammars since there it seems as though we have a long series of all kinds of of tinkering with mutation that that permits language like any other biological system to have been evolved through birth through natural selection I really want to stop through some questions so I'm going to just breeze through a lot of the rest of this stuff I'll skip this boy I do want to just emphasize this why did we start speaking and that's a good question is it - is it based on technology where we trying to teach people how to make stone tools or something like this whatever it seems though imitation is better for that just show how buddies show somebody how to do it and then say do it like that it's much too hard to have a manual explaining every step along the way it doesn't seem persuasive plus it seems as though that we developed the tools and maybe long before we developed language I don't know but in any case and it's it I think it's it's fairly convincing that language isn't primarily for the sake of instruction of teaching people how to make stuff indie stuff that can be done through imitation and demonstration it's not primarily to coordinate hunting right you have to shut up while you're hot you have to be quiet you don't have to sit there chattering about them you just point and you know you do this when you go here it's it's it seems more persuasive than our intelligence evolve primarily as a means for dealing with each other ours is primarily a social intelligence in languages one product in one part of that intelligence we develop our brain and we develop our communicative abilities because we are so incredibly social we just love the thing and we love to chatter about it we gossip about each other all the time can you believe what he said when I said this and can be leave me that expression we just love this kind of conversation we can't get enough of talking about each other because we are fascinated by the group interactions that seems to be who we are and that seems to be primarily what's motivated our incredible language abilities and so the the and our language abilities I have have to enabled us to do social grooming a lot better than the baboons do right it's fun to go to the zoo and see them picking lice out of each other's hair and you really have a bond with someone if they let you do that but it can only be a one-on-one type of bonding that goes on you can only have a pretty small group we can have a pretty large group here because here we are with social grooming chattering about all kinds of things and we have this sense of interaction and a much larger group than it would be that's just a one on one [Music] grooming like the Barbarossa it permits language permits for us to have a larger and more complex society as we also develop a larger and more complex a brain it permits us to have all kinds of very sophisticated courtship rituals which were fascinated by and making alliances and having chimpanzee politics and American politics and maybe they're not that much different and and we have all of this social communication going on all the time enabled by our incredible cognitive abilities I'm going to skip that all kinds of different languages but and it's without the language we could have never developed these larger societies of 50 and 150 people of of multi kinship groups of villages of multi city groups called nations and now perhaps the globalization well that's enough rattle down for a probably longer than I should have so I'm just going to give up here at this point because there's too much more to talk about but anyway I just told you that the human experience is listening and talking and all you've had the chance to do is very politely listen which is not a very human thing to do so I really need to give somebody else a chance to talk and make a comment or question about language but I can't let you leave yet this is still more things to be said so what what's your job thanks little for a marvelous talk I just couple of quick points number one did you talk about bird feeder thing and we have a curt figure in her backyard which is a flat plate have a battle underneath it it will be apples to squirrels it's up on a pole when I'm really nasty I spray the pole with silicone but one thing I notice about the birds is and we'll sit down and shout out any meal with me we do they land on that bird feeder take a look around okay refers descended from dinosaurs this is pretty pretty clearly a behavior pattern that goes back 100 million years and that's again comprehension without compassion and the other neophyte fossilized words the good news is okay human paleoanthropologists study the anatomy in this area in in fossils and they come up with estimates of what the anatomy of the song that's the good news the bad news is another agree on one to say yeah the Neanderthals can speak I was an eloquent speaker so one of the frustration of paleoanthropology is trying to link that structures that we have a bony structure that we have with what the soft tissue origin and what the functionality yep I'm sure by me I hear that like talking around ball I would like that by doing yeah it's a really interesting thing everything I mean and is individual human development that all related to the species evolutionary development I don't know what a real evolutionary biologist would say about that but you sometimes you get that little feeling when the interesting things about communication from scientists if you look at my history of Europe before there was any long-distance travel of language people live over the hills spoken every language is another traveler in America and they develop sign language so they can communicate when you go to the Art Museum and you look at the edges the arm of people war you'll see singles those are actually two sig mostly the simple things communicate so this is something going on with you I'm still no confused as to why line which has to be solely human and I think our that can be kind of a humorless lies from how we commune language I studied Verdun in a minute and it has a vocal repertoire probably hundreds if not thousands in different songs and I can begin to tell you what 10% of those mean but I think that our idea will languages is definitely turning our idea right to say that there isn't language another species thank you I think it's true early enough yeah well I like the idea of saying there's an awful lot of overlap and an awful lot of similarities and I think so on yeah and you've got some birds which seem to be able to alternate their their calls it seems as though some dolphins have names for each other and that whales will will be able to communicate intentionally vocally over great distances so yeah you're the the dividing line is is really a Venn diagram more than any kind of a gulf so yeah I would be happy to hear an argument for for the language of birds or other species I hope that you - speaking of birds and if you get up very early in the morning and you listen you'll hear one bird talking and then all the sudden every other bird seems to be talking to each other yeah now I don't know whether those are words or not but I don't speak it but it seems like the first bird saying listen guys here's the plan for today you guys go out with the seeds you guys go out and do this but it seems like there's a one leader type road and then all the other birds seem to then communicate with each other and I don't know if it's all that certainly it depends on the species that you have I mean there are very social birds where you have communal groups and you'll have definite down hierarchy like adult birds that are breeding units and that you know that they read a goal they don't read and they definitely have assignment in pants in a way but it's nothing as like like big social insects where you have pet systems it's not as very good line well and you mentioned mimicry which right so it strikes me is really important because this this ability to imitate others is really about learning and once you're talking about learning sounds that means it's not just instinctual whatever instinctual means and they're you're starting to talk about more sophisticated cognitive intentional control over and cultures the idea of having if you can learn sounds then then you can have different cultural groups within species and I mean I think it's it's a given among chimpanzees there are clearly different cultures that are learning to use different things and it might be that in yes yeah so in that sense you have cat bird cultures like that Beth you know um I can't remember studies but there have been at least there were these two of these little chimpanzee island groups of that had released into their isolated groups chips that work in taught sign language and there was at least one report of mothers teaching babies born in this melancholy the sign language and at least one of these studies is reporting that there are shifting grammatical positions if you say so exactly as they are a deaf now that they are adapting it to communicate in the chimpanzee community I don't think we know yet I think we just you know our understanding of chickens and language is really admissible potential two different kinds of study one is boost interaction as a human and a chimpanzee booking dual language and the other is distant observation of Washington as a speaker annually in the wild where you dope and where you're depending on whether you're smart enough to pick up the sound so when you talk about human gesture okay even I do do art for many gestures like laughs would that mean different things are there society then makes the gesture part of the language yes and means that are closer to forever with we're requiring a syntax but we the baby is communicating well I love your symbols long before our communicates and the sentence and the Chomsky's main contribution toward our concern studying language is that there is a progression as to how baby human baby learn to communicate informatica sentences and progression may or may not have the human great brain you know heart but you could expect that difference in the way the house okay and I like that idea of gestures of adding and it's an element of the word or of the phrase and when Richard Leventhal comes here one of the fun things about the Maya language is that it's a combination of logographs of picture words and of syllables that and again the the difficulty of interpreting languages when Bishop de Landa went to the Maya he asked them for their alphabet and the guy was not Maya was not quite sure what he meant but he said give me what it a is the guy did his best to be good and said now tell me what B is what tell me would see is and he wrote down an alphabet which we have it's in our library in Bishop jolanda's relations of the Yucatan cards and they had syllables it's a Slavic language and so the guy was giving him syllables as best as he could rather you had no idea what a letter would would mean and then the words are correct when they're written our combinations of the logographs with a prefix or a suffix which would then indicate what that word would really mean the same logograph could have very different meanings given what symbol what syllables were attached to the beginning or the end of it and I like that same idea with gestures because clearly words mean very different things depending on the expressions and the gestures that go along with them you can't understand the one without the other yeah - and Mike and April specialties you take you type inyou extreme and form the indo-european languages very generic which leads to Mary Acadian a Semitic language and if so choosing both of the up grievious language in simple as logographs and some but it had an empire our key about which is symbol you used if you use of the Samara Graham King even though yours government make it tight syllables around them you were talking about the great kitchen if you use the Acadian cook cake you were told me that's a any little pissed Potter on so the way the language was written the king was now layer much more hierarchically like say without changing the grammar at all well I think I'm going to interpret the movement as voting with your feet and I think that maybe we've come to it to an end thank you very much this is nice you

Channel: villanovauniversity

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Keywords: origins of language, anthropology, villanova

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Length: 79min 20sec (4760 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 19 2009