Evolution of language - Revision history

193.16.224.14 at 17:39, 16 February 2025

2025-02-16T17:39:15Z

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	* Lenition is common and fortition, an opposite process, from weak sounds to stronger sounds, is much rarer.		* Lenition is common and fortition, an opposite process, from weak sounds to stronger sounds, is much rarer.
	* Some sloppiness in speech is universal in languages, motivated by minimization of effort, and is universally adjusted to by hearers. Communities strike a balance between ease of pronunciation and getting a message across.		* Some sloppiness in speech is universal in languages, motivated by minimization of effort, and is universally adjusted to by hearers. Communities strike a balance between ease of pronunciation and getting a message across.
			[[Category:Consciousness]]

Rob: /* Pronunciation Gets Complex */

2024-05-27T17:08:00Z

Pronunciation Gets Complex

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	== Pronunciation Gets Complex ==		== Pronunciation Gets Complex ==

			The earliest vowel and consonant systems:
			* The emergence of syllables makes the first big division of speech sounds, between vowels and consonants - almost always,each syllable has at least one vowel and it is typically flanked by consonants.
			* You can't, generally speaking, replace a vowel with a consonant or vice versa

			Vowels:
			* The range of possible spoken vowels is continuous, like the color spectrum. Each language carves up the vowel space in its own way. The most common partition is a five-vowel system, like Latin.
			* English, in its many dialect, is fairly extravagant in the vowels it uses. Standard Southern British English has fourteen different vowels: pit, pet, pat, putt, put, pot, peat, pa, bought, boot, pate, bite, quoit, pout.
			* Economy and distinctiveness are the key drivers of the evolution of vowel systems. Languages find a balance between maximum perceptual distinctiveness and minimum articulatory cost:
			** Don't have more vowels than you can realistically keep apart.
			** Make sure your vowels are different enough from each other to be usable in conveying distinctions of meaning.
			* There is a distinction between:
			** A primary type of vowel system, which exploits the more easily controlled parameters, such as fron vowels with spread lips and back vowels with rounded lips, all oral (not nasalized) and without the complication of length contrasts.
			** Secondary features, such as nasalization, length contrasts, and less common combinations of tongue and lip position.
			* The vowel systems of the earliest languages were probably simple with i, a, and u.
			* Particular vowels emerge as targets in the context of the parallel rise of other vowels concurrently emerging. Each vowel is sensitive to the presence of the others in the system, keeping as far as possible from them

			Consonants:
			* The acoustic/articulatory space of possible consonants is more complex and lumpily structured than the vowel space.
			* The same competing pressures of distinctiveness and ease of articulation play the most significant role in shaping the consonant systems of languages, with a particular emphasis on ease of articulation.
			* There are basic, elaborated, and complex consonants.
			* Basics are as follows:
			** p as in pip
			** t as in tit
			** k as is kick
			** glottal stop as in Cockney butter
			** b as in bib
			** d as in did
			** g as in gig
			** f as in faff
			** s as in sis
			** tf as in church
			** m as in mum
			** n as in nun
			** n as at the end of sing
			** l as in lull
			** r as in roar
			** w as in why
			** h as in hi
			** j as in you
			* The weakening, or lessening of articulatory distinctiveness, happens often in the histories of languages, but the reverse process is very rare, if it happens at all
			* The only way h appears in languages is through a process of weakening from other more distinctive sounds
			* Fricatives, like the sibilant s, appear as a result of lenition (literally softening). As this process continues, voiceless fricatives like f, s, can become voiced to v, z
			* Lenition is common and fortition, an opposite process, from weak sounds to stronger sounds, is much rarer.
			* Some sloppiness in speech is universal in languages, motivated by minimization of effort, and is universally adjusted to by hearers. Communities strike a balance between ease of pronunciation and getting a message across.

Rob: /* Building Powerful Grammar Engines */

2024-05-19T16:11:06Z

Building Powerful Grammar Engines

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	== Building Powerful Grammar Engines ==		== Building Powerful Grammar Engines ==
			* Grammar is like your digestive system or breathin - complicated and unconscious
			* Any system with rules for combining elements has a syntax
			* Phonemes don't have meanings, but there are rules of combination of phonemes - you can't string them together in any conceivable order. Only the morphosyntactic level (combinations of words and affixes) is semantically important.
			* Having syntactic structure at two levels, one semantically compositional and the other not, is a characteristic of all languages and is called 'duality of patterning'.
			* It is functionally efficient to have these two levels of patterning. We can only consistently produce a limited inventory of separate speech sounds and our ears can only detect distinctions down to a certain level of subtlety. So if we can put these sounds into memorized sequences, and have enough memory capacity to store thousands of such sequences (ie words), that is an efficient solution for the task of expressing vast numbers of meanings, given a semantically compositional syntax.
			* The rules for combining the basic elements into strings must offer different options for plugging substrings into an overall string. Human languages are extremely productive. They have tens of thousands of meaningful elements, the words and affixes, and they combine these very freely so that in principle billions of different sentences are possible.
			* Syntax of human languages is best seen as putting 'constructions' together, sometimes side by side but more often one inside another, and sometimes even interwoven in more intricate ways.
			* The simplest constructions are single words.
			* Hierarchical embedding of constructions within each other in human languages is almost entirely motivated by semantics, ie by matters of meaning.
			* Long-distance dependencies are a unique characteristic of human languages. We are able to take in a string of words and hold some of them in working memory waiting to be resolved by later incoming bits of the sentence.

			Did humans start by singing like birds?
			* A typical simple sentence contains several noun phrases as members. Human sentences are organized with meaningful building blocks that are smaller than the whole but larger than the atomic elements, the words. These middle-sized chunks are phrases. Birdsong and whale song also have phrases or motifs.

			Packaging messages in clauses ans sentences
			* Trivial compositionality where two or more meaninful words are strung together likely preceded more complex forms
			* A clause has a main verb and between one and three arguments (usually noun phrases). Nothing else is allowed:
			** Intransitive verbs like sleep take only one argument, a subject
			** Transitive verbs like see take two arguments, a subject and a direct object
			** Ditransitive verbs like give take three arguments, a subject, a direct object, and an indirect object
			* Clauses describe events or states of affairs, involving some participants, which are typically objects including people
			* In surveying the world around us we take in a scene, perhaps analyse it, and then move on to taking in another scene. The number of tracked participants is limited to no more than four.
			* This is a 'mimimal subscene - the eyes typically flit between a very small number of location in the scene, seldom more than four. The human perceptual apparatus packages the world into small units with up to four participants and this influences language structure.
			* Grammar may have started with simple juxtasposition - Man push. Woman fall. Then we started to make the intended relation with some over coordinating conjunction, such as "and"
			* Next step is to embed one clause inside another, using a subordinating conjunction, such as that, if, or because.

			Making grammar
			* Noun and verb are the basic major word classes or syntactic categories in any language because the central function of communication is giving information about identified objects
			* In the most ordinary kind of simple sentence, the subject expression, with a noun at its core is the topic, and the predicate expression, with a verb at its core is the comment (Aristotle)
			* In modern language, the most common position for the verb in a sentence is near the end, after its subject and object - SOV. English is SVO and Welsh is VSO. There is no known case of a language changing to SOV, suggesting that it is the earliest form.
			* Content words include nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs
			* Function words are typically little words, unstressed in the stream of speech and very frequent in texts signalling relations between parts of sentences (the, a, my, your, pronouns (I me, you, she, them), various auxiliary verbs (have, is, can, will, do), coordinating conjunctions (and, or, but) and subordinating conjunctions (if, when, as, because). Preposition (of, under) are a borderline case
			* Grammaticalization is a process by which a language gets more grammatically organized:
			** A language with few or no auxiliary verbs is less grammaticalized. Auxiliary verbs are often historically traceable to main verbs, eg "have" is still used as a main verb but has also become specialized as a function word indicating recent relevant pastness, and to indicate obligation (to have to). Similarly "can" is derived from "cunnan" to know, be acquainted with
			** Prepositions are derived from nouns or verbs.
			** Definite articles are often derivedd from demonstrative pronouns
			** Subordinators like which and who are derived from question particles
			** Indefinite articles often come from the numeral for 1
			* Languages started off without functional words at all
			* Inflections/conjugations give information about the person and number of the subject of the verb and also about the time of the event. isolating languages like Mandarin have no word inflections at all. English is near the isolating end of the scale, and languages with little inflection tend to be stricter in the word order
			* In some languages, ifnlection were once isolated words that have been squashed into neighboring words. Eg -ed may come from 'did'
			* Making an adverb out of an adjective is very productive
			* We see a two stage grammaticalization process:
			** From content words to function words
			** From function words to inflections

			Civilization and grammar
			* Cooperation between people speaking diverse languages has tended to simplify grammar
			* Writing has allowed for the use of more complicated grammar, at least in quantitative terms
			* Writing uses the same constructions as spoken language, but pushes their combination further and to greater depths of embedding
			* People in everyday speech don't talk so complexy, using several sentences instead of one complex one

	== Pronunciation Gets Complex ==		== Pronunciation Gets Complex ==

Rob: /* Coining Words */

2024-05-19T09:16:07Z

Coining Words

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 * There may have been some naturally occurring 'synaesthetic' connections between objects and some of their properties were exploited:
 ** a tendency for words describing small size, weakness, lightness, thinness to use a high front vowel such as [i] in bee
 == Building Powerful Grammar Engines ==
 == Pronunciation Gets Complex ==

Rob: /* Coining Words */

2024-05-19T09:01:38Z

Coining Words

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 * All cultures have music and probably music and language share some common processing but also have their own dedicated mechanisms
 == Coining Words ==
 == Building Powerful Grammar Engines ==
 == Pronunciation Gets Complex ==

Rob at 10:44, 18 May 2024

2024-05-18T10:44:01Z

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 * While animals can have some sense of object permanence, remembering an object that has just disappeared into the grass, humans can remember events for much longer, and they also remember a far wider class of events, not just involving food. This reflects humans' generally greater curiosity about the world, no directly related to survival or reproduction.
 * When we look at something, we are using two different brain mechanisms:
-** [[Dorsal stream]] - Attend to a location in space and
+** [[Dorsal stream]] - "where pathway" Attend to a location in space and
-** [[Ventral stream]] - Register the properties coming from it
+** [[Ventral stream]] - "what pathway" Register the properties coming from it
 == We Began to Speak, and to Hear Differently ==
 == Coining Words ==

Rob at 06:45, 18 May 2024

2024-05-18T06:45:59Z

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 ** Mental entities - concepts that are constructed somehow in the brain and are the links between language and the world.
 ** Worldly objects and relations - such as dogs and clouds and eating and 'being higher than'.
-* Only humans have words that they can attach to concepts
+* Only humans have words that they can attach to concepts.
 == We Began to Speak, and to Hear Differently ==

Rob at 06:28, 18 May 2024

2024-05-18T06:28:22Z

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	== Concepts Before Language ==		== Concepts Before Language ==

			Meaning is no mystery:
			* Most of the time, we try to say what we mean. And our hearers try to work out what we mean from the stream of sounds that hit their eardrums.
			* When a person detects a clash of meanings in an anomalous sentence like 'He buttered his toast with shoe-leather.', there is a so-called N400 effect, a pattern of electrical activity in the brain, which may help with understanding how the brain stores and processes meanings (neurosemantics).
			* The things in the world that we talk about are our common point of reference when we communicate (shared truth).
			* The relationship between words and things (ie meaning) is indirect, mediated by concepts in the heads of language users:
			** Linguistic entities - such as words and sentences
			** Mental entities - concepts that are constructed somehow in the brain and are the links between language and the world.
			** Worldly objects and relations - such as dogs and clouds and eating and 'being higher than'.
			* Only humans have words that they can attach to concepts

	== We Began to Speak, and to Hear Differently ==		== We Began to Speak, and to Hear Differently ==

Rob at 20:34, 17 May 2024

2024-05-17T20:34:33Z

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	* We assume that semantically compositional language was preceded by a 'protolanguage' stage, with meaningful words but with no grammatical organization.		* We assume that semantically compositional language was preceded by a 'protolanguage' stage, with meaningful words but with no grammatical organization.
	* While in simulations, compositional syntax emerges gradually in stages, real people have a disposition to impose order on chaos, and over successive generations, order emerges.		* While in simulations, compositional syntax emerges gradually in stages, real people have a disposition to impose order on chaos, and over successive generations, order emerges.

			== How Trusted Talk Started ==

			* All animals communicate in some way, but here we're talking about behavior that influences the behavior of others, where they respond as if recognizing a communicative intention on the part of the sender of the signal.
			* Animals have ritualized behavior, like the teeth-baring of dogs or birds' courtship behavior.
			* Dyadic communication is when animals do stuff to each other, while triadic communication is communication about something, and triadic communication in animals shows the evolutionary seeds of reference in language.
			* Whenever we talk to each other, we intend to do something to our hearer.
			* What human language added to animal communication was huge potential for joint engagement of speaker and hearer with situations beyond themselves
			* In the lineage of humans, and apes generally, there has been a progressive shift toward more learned behavor. Instinct never goes away completely, of course, as learning is always guided by some instinctive bases.
			* Children learn ritual behavior, such as raising their arms when they want their mother to pick them up.
			* In the evolution of the human capacity for language, there was a transition from purely innate instinctive communication to learned conventions over which the communicators have a high degree of voluntary control.
			* Spontaneous smiles and deliberate smiles are initiated by different parts of the brain.
			* Mutual communicators need to be able to maintain joint attention to whatever is being communicated about for at least as long as the communication lasts - there seems to be a co-evolutionary spiral between an increasing capacity for joint attention and increasing communicative success with language.
			* In the history of languages, there is a trend for frequently made inferences to become conventionalized.
			* Language signals are cheap to emit, though fairly costly to learn.
			* Humans are simultaneously in cooperation and competition with other members of their social group. We walk a delicate tightrop maintaining trustful reciprocal cooperative relationships, while also making sure we are not taken advantage of and get our fair share of resources.

			One for all, and all for one

			* The basis of human language is a disposition to communicate cooperatively.
			* Humans are conspicuously altruistic.
			* Tit for tat - Help those who have helped you, and anyone you meet for the first time, and don't help a person who declined to help you in the past. It is successful because of its built-in memory of past collaborators and non-collaborators.``
			* Reciprocal altruism in a group requires certain advanced cognitive traits including memory for past good and bad deeds, some way of recognizing members of your own group, and mechanisms for detecting and punishing cheaters who take the benefits of group membership without paying their dues by occasional altruism.
			* As the expressive power of language evolved, so did its potential strength in forming social groups reaching beyond the bounds of close kin and humans have ruthlessly outcompeted other species with less cohesive group action.

			== Concepts Before Language ==

			== We Began to Speak, and to Hear Differently ==

			== Coining Words ==

			== Building Powerful Grammar Engines ==

			== Pronunciation Gets Complex ==

Rob at 20:11, 17 May 2024

2024-05-17T20:11:51Z

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	== Nature, Nurture, and Language ==		== Nature, Nurture, and Language ==

			* The 'FOXP2' gene is implicated in language
			* Humans constructed for themselves a "symbolic niche" and language-fixating genes went to fixation in the human population
			* Language has undergone a process of "grammaticalization", which makes it more complex
			* Social centripetal forces make languages, and people in the group try to conform to the language norms of the group and to show "competence" in using the language
			* Humans, uniquely are able to introspect about their own behavior, to talk about talk, and to think about thinking.
			* The language of a community is inevitably fuzzy at the edges, because nobody conforms 100% to the norms. But a core of normas, for any language, does exist, and individual speakers tacitly know them. 'Tacit knowledge' is an acceptable description of what is in speakers' heads, making them behave in regular conforming ways.

			Instinct and Learning
			* Some behavior is clearly instinctive and some is obviously learned.
			* Instinctive behavior ranges from simple to relatively complex
			* Emotions, such as fear and anger are themselves instinctive
			* Learning is acquiring different behaviors in response to events in the environment, plasticity.
			* First-language learning is reasonably called 'involuntary' (or instinctive), and adult attempts to learn new languages, 'voluntary'.
			* There are involuntary drives that put one in a state ready for learning. Babies instinctively coo and babble, children have an instinct to follow eye gaze and pointing and a 'mind-reading' instinctive understanding of the goals of others (theory of mind?).
			* No learning is bias-free and any bias affecting learning is itself instinctive. Children are disposed to attend selectively to objects and we have an instinctive bias to seek sense in what people say to us and a bias toward learning complex grammar.
			* Humans have evolved to be the most plastic species.
			* A behavior not at first automatic can be learned in a deliberate way and practised until it becomes 'second nature'. Then it is reasonable to talk of a learned instinct - something learned becomes instinctual.
			* We can consciously learn to suppress or inhibit instinctive behavior as in processes of socialization.
			* Social learning is based on copying the behavior of others while non-social learning is solo trial and error.
			* Good solutions to practical tasks can be discovered by non-social learning, and then spread socially.
			* Evolving systems need innovation, inventions of new social behaviors that others can then replicate. Such inventions need not be conscious.
			* With a disposition to imitate, one can socially learn behaviors that have no obvious practical benefit. This instinct to imitate, not necessarily with any insight into meaning, is the driver for children learning language. They gain social reinforcement for playing the community's language games.

			Iterated learning:
			* We assume that semantically compositional language was preceded by a 'protolanguage' stage, with meaningful words but with no grammatical organization.
			* While in simulations, compositional syntax emerges gradually in stages, real people have a disposition to impose order on chaos, and over successive generations, order emerges.