The complexity of language
Talking chatting speech bubble chat forum conversation online messaging design element.
Language is perhaps the most difficult problem in science. No one really knows how it works, and no one really knows where it came from. And we can all do it. I think it’s a bit like driving a car. We can drive a car, but we don’t really know how the machine works. One of the things that makes language unique, I think, is that we can constantly produce new sentences. There is an infinite capacity to say something different. In this speech. You’ll probably hear some suggestions that you don’t have listen again, but I hope you understand them. Animal language or animal communication, on the other hand, is mostly repetitive, automatic and emotional and does not create new meanings. The English comedian Stephen Fry once said the following line, keep the newspaper reader’s nose straight, the waiter or the friendly milk will exchange my trousers.
Origin and development of language
There is a representation of the last 7 million years of evolution since we split from the great apes. They’re right on the right end of that, a tiny bump in the last 7 million years that we evolved, it seems, about 200,000 years ago. And according to Chomsky, language appeared only about halfway through that 200 million year period. Sorry, 200,000 years. And I’ll show you that’s where it happened miracle. And to me, that doesn’t make a lot of sense, because you’ve got all these millions of years of evolution since we decided to stop being great apes. It would be insulting, I think, to Charles Darwin, although he’s not even close enough to complain. He argued that any complex organ like the tongue, like the liver or the heart or the brain must have evolved through successive, slight modifications. And if one could find an exception to this, it would destroy his theory of evolution.
Language and Evolutionary Theories
Question marks, human head shape and psychological disorders.
And if Chomsky is right, then evolutionary theory would be destroyed on Darwin’s own terms. Now, I want to try to show you that language did not arise from voice calls. It emerged from gestures, that language started from gestures. And I put one hand in my pocket so as not to show too conveniently. But I have one that I can wander into. A proof that it actually comes from the monkey brain, and that goes back about 30 or 40 million years. In terms of common ancestor. There is an area, a circuit in the monkey brain that is dedicated to performing perceptual actions, reaching out and picking things up. It is called the mirror system because this system is active whenever the monkey reaches out for something, or when it sees another animal or person reach out and make the same movement. Thus, it maps what the monkey sees to what the monkey can do. Some people have called it a monkey, see the monkey doing a circuit.
Gestural communication in primates
Now it turns out that the equivalent circuit in the brain is the language circuit, and you’ll see it on the slide there. So these language areas in the brain seem to have arisen from this mirror circuit in the monkey brain. Thus, in the course of evolution, this circuit seems to have been taken over, or at least partly used to deal with language which is now a little further along in the evolution towards ourselves. You do he could never teach a great ape to speak or approach him. Then people had the idea that maybe we can teach them to sign, to gesture. And there have been a few cases where I’ve shown some of them there, where there have been quite reasonable conversations between and monkeys using sign language or something like that, so they can ask or make simple requests and be understood. And the person can respond and make a little conversation, then it’s not a very good conversation in many ways.
Sign language and linguistic sophistication
A woman teacher communicates with a deaf child at school.
They can’t tell you what they did yesterday or gossip about each other, but they can make requests and have and make little sentences that are kind of generic the way this language is. Another famous case is this is Kanzi, who is a bonobo, and Kanzi uses a kind of iPad. I guess it’s a display of symbols. And it shows these symbols. They represent objects and actions. So he can also ask for things and have small conversations with one of his assistants there, as you will see. So this shows you,I think in great apes they come closer to language using either pointing or using a form of sign language. It’s also known now, and this has become a hot topic recently, that if you look at monkeys in the wild, they make a lot of gestures that seem much more linguistic than their voices.
Bipodism and Language Development
So they are much more flexible. They, as you can see there, some of them, you can almost recognize what they’re trying to say. The one on the top left there is quite interesting. He asks to be. Sorry, this is actually grooming. I think the one on the bottom left is asking to be pampered at this point. So April sometimes points to a body part when another animal comes and scratches it, and you can see a piece of gossip down there on the right. Now, he was also advancing. So we know that the sign language is purely gestural. It is done silently. It’s done with hand movements, of course, but it’s also done with facial gestures. This is a strong belief that language at least can be purely gestural and just as effective as speech. We now know that sign language is linguistically complex. It uses the same areas of the brain that spoken language does.
Conclusion
When we have radio, television, telephones, then you start to be able to communicate over huge distances and we go to the Internet, where you can instantly communicate with people on the other side of the world. And finally on the mobile phone, which is probably the ultimate really. It has both memory and distance and calculation. So, in a way, we have now reached the level of communication where we have almost emptied our minds into our communication systems in a way. Then we come back too. We return to the visual language. Writing is of course visual and mobile is visual. Some of you may already use gestures when communicating on mobile phones.