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What Is Language? | Saylor Academy | YouTubeToText
YouTube Transcript: What Is Language?
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Core Theme
Human language is a uniquely complex system of grammar and vocabulary that distinguishes humans from animals, whose communication, while sophisticated in some cases, lacks the productivity, displacement, and grammatical understanding characteristic of human language. The origins of this complex human language are now thought to have emerged gradually, likely with the rise of Homo sapiens in Africa, rather than a sudden "big bang" event.
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to lay the groundwork for this series
what we want to establish before we look
at the natural history of language is
exactly what we mean by language and
this is how linguists study language in
particular and it's important to realize
that as easy as it is to think that
language is just a collection of words a
language is a lot more than that it's
not only the words but it's the grammar
that we use to put the words together in
order to convey and utterance and even
in order to affect the world by the
utterances that we produce so for
example you could know 5,000 words in a
foreign language you could cram them all
into your head with flashcards and still
you wouldn't be able to say things like
she might as well finish it getting in
that nuance of might as well and what
that means or you probably wouldn't know
how to say it happened to be on a
tuesday in many other languages you
wouldn't use the word for happen that's
just one way happen happens to be used
but it's things like that that our
language it's something very unique that
we can do it's easy to look at animals
in the way they communicate and think
well they can talk to and there's even
kind of a strain among some people to
resist the notion that there's something
unique that human beings do when it
comes to language and in this first
lecture I want to get across what I'm
always going to mean by this wonderful
thing called language with some examples
from the animal kingdom and why they're
not quite getting to where we are then
we're going to look at the very
beginnings of language among humans as
far as we know at this point but in
general we can start with the fact that
animals even though the communicator not
exactly using language and so for
example I love dogs and cats as much as
anybody you can kind of communicate with
them but Bertrand Russell the
philosopher once said a dog cannot
relate his autobiography however
eloquently he may bark he can't tell you
that his parents were honest though poor
and that's true there's an awful lot
that a dog simply could not
say bees are an example of how animals
can communicate to an extent and so it's
been found that in their hive Abby can
tell the other bees where honey is based
on this kind of dance it goes in the
direction where the honey is and then it
wag 'old its posterior with a certain
frequency that corresponds with how far
away the honey is and it vibrates kind
of frenetically while doing this
waggling to indicate how rich the
sources that's pretty neat and Sobeys
can actually tell each other which way
to swarm that's absolutely fabulous and
that's all they can do they can't talk
about anything they can't talk about
where anything else is they can't convey
concepts there's just this one thing
absolutely miraculous that allows them
to communicate in that one way about
that one thing so that is communication
but bees cannot chew the fat they only
do that one thing so that's one level of
communication but it's not exactly
language now apes are better than bees
at this kind of thing and there have
been all sorts of attempts to get some
sort of speech out of apes i recently
had occasion to deal with a chimpanzee
and they do seem to look at you with
almost human eyes at one point the
chimpanzee reached up with its finger
and went like this and took it down with
the same poise that we use in scratching
our nose their little human beings so
you would think well can't you talk and
the fact is that they can just
approximate what we're doing but never
get terribly impressively far it goes
way back to hope that you could make
these queer little semi people talk
Samuel peeps who was a man of affairs
and restoration England encountered a
baboon and he writes about it in his
diary which is very quotidian and
colloquial and at one point he said it's
a great baboon butt so like a man and
most things that yet I can't believe but
that it is a monster god of a man and a
she baboon I do believe it already
understands much English and I'm of the
mind it might be taught to speak or may
signs so people have tried to teach a
Tata talk and it doesn't really get too
far in 1909 there was a little
chimpanzee and it learned to say mama
and that was it then in 1916 there was
an orangutang and learned how to say
Papa and cup and that was as far as he
got then in 1940s there was a chimpanzee
that could say Papa mama cup and up up
referring to it wanting to be picked up
but it never got any more words than
that that's not language that's
communication so parental units cup
probably with something good in it and
being picked up but that was it that's
different from talking about how you saw
a strange looking piece of fish and ate
it and it made you sick or something
like that so they only went so far now
there have been times when things went a
little further and there's a large
literature about this washoe the
chimpanzee 1966 Washoe was taken when
she was about three machos taken with
you is about a year old and after about
three months she started being able to
sign and watch I was in the company of
people who really wanted to see how far
we could take in teaching these
creatures to sign because one suspects
that there's something about their vocal
apparatus that keeps them from being
able to do this but maybe they could do
it with their hands because humans of
course I've signed languages which are
very much full nuanced languages so by
the time washa was four she had a
hundred and thirty-two signs and that's
pretty darn good and she was taught open
by opening a door and then she could
mentally extend that to say taking a lid
off of something or taking a lid off of
a pot which is a kind of an advanced
cognition to think of both of those
things as opening at one point the big
dramatic moment with Washoe was there
was a pond somewhere in New York City
and a swan went by and Washoe pointed at
it and with her hands said water bird
now that's pretty darn good he knew
water and she knew bird and then she
called this thing something now even if
maybe he was saying
that that bird is in the water that's
pretty good for something that's not
supposed to be able to talk and also
that Washoe pointed this out on her own
and so nobody said there's this thing
what is it it's just that all of a
sudden she pointed and said it so Washoe
was pretty interesting and there have
been other cases of eights that learned
something kind of like language but
there are limits for example they are
inconsistent it's one thing to talk
about water bird or things like me you
out which wash I would say to indicate
let's go out the thing is that actually
generally if there are two or more words
at a time then Apes will understand most
of the time but not all they
misunderstand a lot more than even a
small child would so it seems that it
can only penetrate so far for them then
there's the issue of are they
understanding grammar or are they going
from context so for example you can say
put the sour cream in the cooler now
there it's clear that put is the action
the sour cream is the object and the
cooler is what we might call a
prepositional object as linguist but
suffice it to say that that's where the
sour cream should go so those are those
three big elements now as it happens you
can also sign cooler sour cream put and
an ape might then go put the sour cream
in the cooler some people have said well
that means that they understand grammar
they understand that one of these things
is the action one of these things is the
object and you can scramble it around
and they can still tell but really
there's a lot of context to because you
couldn't put the cooler in the sour
cream if you put the cooler on top of
the sour cream then as an ape you
couldn't get to it and you wouldn't want
that obviously if there's pudding and
sour cream and cooler then you are going
to put the cream into the cooler that's
not necessarily understanding grammar
that's just being a relatively sentient
being in the world so one wonders then
there's the imitation issue on which is
easy to lose in the literature sometimes
which is that forty percent of the time
one of the Apes that got the best of
this would
imitate a human while being signed to so
the human starts and then the ape starts
doing it with them now that's cute in a
way but it's also different from the way
we use language children apparently do
this at the rate of about five percent
of the time this would often be at the
ends of sentences but imagine telling a
child go upstairs and get your toy and
you say go up and by the time you get to
stairs the child is looking up anything
stairs and get your toy that would be a
very peculiar and probably slightly
deficient child with that there's
something wrong with that kid that is
about as good as Apes can do part of it
is imitative and that's different from
actually communicating and so it seems
that between the imitation and the fact
that they have a way of misinterpreting
and the fact that there's little
evidence that they're actually seeing
the grammar there's clearly something
different and Charles hockett was one of
the most prominent linguists in America
and a while ago he listed 13 features
that distinguish human language from for
example what bees can do and what apes
had been shown to be able to do when
Hockett wrote and among them one of them
was what's called displacement and that
is that one thing that we can do with
language although we often don't have to
think about this consciously as we can
talk about something that isn't there
it's in the past it might be in the
future it might be hypothetical and so
we can say there are giant squid 50 feet
long and once I was walking along the
beach and I found one of the carcasses
washed up you can talk about that having
happened 10 years ago that could happen
to some eight that happens to live near
the shore but the ape couldn't
communicate that to any other eight no
animal could communicate that to another
animal something completely displaced
the other day I saw some queer colored
berries on a bush and I ate them and you
know they weren't really as bad as you
might think no matter how expressive and
communicative and Orangatang is that
just not going to come out he can only
talk about bananas get out of my way
things that are right there so that's
kind of different then there's what's
called productivity which means that you
can take the elements of language and
combine them in infinite combinations so
it's not just eat a banana wanting a banana
banana
or where's the banana it's all sorts of
things about the banana the banana
tastes good the banana is broken I'm
going to break this banana so that I can
fit it into the cooler etc this sort of
what's called productivity is a hallmark
of what we're doing this is not
something that animals are so good at
all so even the really hot shotted
chimpanzees rarely initiate conversation
you're using language you have a thought
and you say something you might be the
kind of eight that happens two key
things to itself but there would
presumably be some of them that were
just running their mouths all the time
as they do within their limits all of
that chattering that you know apes and
chimpanzees tend to do but it's very
rare for one of these quote-unquote
talking chimpanzees to look up and say
you know you know even something like
maybe there be I'd like a banana but
that's rare you have to start it out
with banana you know washoe and then
she'll tell you or would tell us you
were here but in general there's nothing
along the lines of it's a nice day
there's all evidence to suggest that the
higher primates do know that it's a nice
day bonobos will sit down and put their
arms around each other and look at the
sunset that's how close they are to us
but never has any ape said in its nice
out or something like that you have to
start it with them so basically it's a
game to them the bit about the Swan was
marvelous because really it was a
one-off surprise so there is that
difference there are eerie experiments
with parrots where you see some of the
same combinations of marvel and
limitation so for example Irene
Pepperberg is a professor of psychology
at Brandeis and she has an African Grey
parrot named Alex and since the late 70s
she's been training Alex to talk parrots
are pretty remarkable you can get that
sense of human soul in them too they
don't have the opposable thumb but they
definitely seem to have some sort of
higher consciousness in the
impressionistic sense I spent a weekend
with one of those birds once and it's
it's odd they have a gamut of emotions
they prefer one person to another for
no good reason they're just like us and
they also talk in their way and so Irene
Pepperberg has gotten amazing results
out of little Alex you can ask him what
object is green and three cornered and
there happens to be one in his play box
and he will tell you whatever Irene
Pepperberg happens to have named that
object Alex can count to six and there
are indications that he kind of knows
what that means he can ask for food
saying things like why not and he
actually wants a nut and he and he gets
it and he actually can spell a bit
because Irene Pepperberg has taught him
how to break things down into sounds and
he gets impatient and so at one point
she was showing him to researchers and
asked and she was asking him questions
about naming sounds but he wanted a nut
and so finally apparently he slit his
eyes and said why not and a tete new
that's that's pretty good you know
that's that that's really a talking bird
but the fact is alex is not like the
talking parrot in the Flintstones that
I'm imitating right now they're their
limits it's clear that really he thinks
that language is a game so sometimes you
will say something like what color is
this alex and the marvel is that he can
do this but a lot of the time he'll just
start rattling off the colors because he
doesn't really feel like it it seems
that he's only vaguely aware that
there's some sort of correspondence
between naming things like this in the
world that we live in and doing
something with it the brain kind of
stops there and also as far as answering
questions yes he can answer them but
only four out of five times right what
about the other five now if that were
human being we would assume there's
something seriously wrong and he's a
very well behaved bird too it's just
that it seems that what we've taught
alex to do is kind of a party trick it's
it's a game it's not a mode of
expression so Irene Pepperberg has done
wonderful work with Alex but it's very
hard to say that alex is really holding
conversations that alex is experiencing language
language
like us and when and what it really all
comes down to is that there are no Apes
that sign in the wild in any way
presumably they wouldn't use our signs
but they don't have any of their own if
this was something that was natural then
presumably they do it parrots are not
running around talking to each other in
the wild they don't communicate with
each other on any level higher than any
other bird screaming and yelling and
beaking and all the things that they do
so we can get them to do this but
clearly we're kind of pushing their
limits and really a lot of them clearly
would rather not that's not their nature
and it clearly is ours so there's
something very different and to pull the
camera back thinking about what the bees
do thinking about if we can get beyond
the understandable sentiment what our
dogs and cats cannot do what even these
almost human beings with in some cases
DNA 98.5 percent of ours cannot do what
Alex the parrot cannot do and we see
that what we're doing is light years
beyond what even the best of them can do
that is what we mean by language and
that's what every human being for the
most part does and does very well
despite the fact that language is very
complicated so it's often been wondered
when did human language arise of this
kind there's grunting and then there's
many people would say there was a kind
of half language but when did this thing
that I'm doing now start and it's often
been thought that um Homo sapiens is
defined partly by this ability to use
complex language that this is actually
more central to what being human is then
we might think it was it's been thought
that probably crow Mannion men spoke and
many would say that Neanderthals could
just grunt and for a while there was a
an interesting theory that got a certain
amount of attention and justifiably by
phillip lieberman who is in the
cognitive and linguistic science
department at brown and lieberman had
the idea that human larynx
sit lower in our throat than in animals
and this allows our oral cavity like
from the side to be longer and that
that's what allows us to speak in a
sophisticated way in terms of sound
production and making a wide range of
vowels and consonants and what made him
say that was because apes have higher
alliances just like dogs do just like
tiny children do and they can't talk yet
and Neanderthal larynxes can be shown to
have been higher and so it seems that
the larynx came down and allowed us to
be able to make this kind of
sophisticated sound and even at the
expense of danger if you think about it
if you have a dog never does a dog start
choking on its food and on dogs are
messy impulsive little creatures
knocking vases over and stuff but one
thing they don't do no matter how happy
they are so they wolf that food up
there's no such thing as having to bang
your dog on the back and give it the
Heimlich maneuver they don't do that
because the larynx is up so the food
slides past the lyrics with us the
reason that's a dangerous because our
allowances lower we swallow the food it
might go down the right pipe wrong pipe
and we could die and apparently it's it
could be said that the reason that
happened was because it allows us to
speak which would assist us and thriving
as a species but the fact is that the
lieberman hypothesis it's one of those
things that's so pleasant you want that
to be true I'm not sure it is based on
evidence that has come up since and one
of the most difficult things is that the
larynx only lowers starting in puberty
and no infants can't talk but certainly
eight-year-old boys can so that suggests
that the larynx couldn't be the whole
story and then there's some other things
it's not absolutely sure that the
Neanderthals larynx is worth at low
that's the kind of thing that you really
only get certain suggestions of in a
skeleton as opposed to a corpse and
there are other things that suggest that
maybe that idea might not be as
promising as was once thought but you
find it often in the literature and it
is interesting but nowadays there are
other ideas as to when language might have
have
started and where a lot of it begins is
with the fact that it's pretty generally
agreed now that Homo sapiens probably
began about a hundred and fifty thousand
years ago which is not that long if you
think about not millions just 150,000
and many have said that there's a kind
of a big bang just 50,000 years ago if
you follow up on the subject you'll find
this again and again but 50,000 years
ago suddenly there is the kind of art
that suggest some sort of conceptual
sophistication and all sorts of
developments that you find that suggests
that there was some sort of leap from
quote-unquote caveman to what we are
today and so it's often been thought
that during that big bang that must have
been when human being started speaking
and that's been a rather prevalent
theory particularly over about the past
15 years and it's it's seductive um when
homo as opposed to Homo sapiens but the
genus Homo emerges about 2 million years
ago after that 500,000 years ago human
brains were already as big as ours and
yet there was none of this big bang and
then a hundred thousand years ago in the
end of those brains were actually bigger
with it acknowledged that the
correlation between brain size and brain
power is approximate but there are
things to be seen and yet there was no
development this Big Bang only happened
50,000 years ago there's a wonderful
quote about this by Derek bickerton who
has done a lot of very interesting work
on language evolution and he notices
that there are remains of humans found
in caves in zoo kudi on china and it
starts at five hundred thousand years
ago and goes to 200,000 years ago and
there's no development and so the way he
describes it is they SAT 4.3 million
years in the drafty smoky caves of zoo
coochie on cooking bats over smoldering
embers and waiting for the caves to fill
up with their own garbage and that is
what they did and there was certainly a
kind of nobility about that but still
that's not the Big Bang they give no
evidence of being as sharp
and self-destructive as we are and so
many people have thought well there must
be this mutation that happened on 50,000
years ago now you're going to keep
reading that I'm sure because 50,000
sits well in the memory and at this
point they're people who have their
careers hinging on this 50,000 i think
that the evidence for that is falling
apart it's not that the idea is wrong
but it's just that it's a little less
dramatic a lot of evidence suggests that
humans were sophisticated in the sense
that we were long before 50,000 years
ago and to give a sense it is not just
idle dates remember 150,000 years ago
that's when the species arose so that's
our benchmark and then here we are so
it's been said that the Big Bang is
about here but really there's evidence
that it goes much further back as we
discover more and more evidence of early
man they're all sorts of evidence that
this sophistication that we're talking
about probably happened very gradually
starting two million years ago before
there was a homo sapiens and gradually
came up to this now there are a lot of
people that like gradualism the idea of
it being step by step by step by step by
step I think that from what I've seen
the evidence is that there was a certain
acceleration at a certain point Homo
sapiens is special but it was possibly a
good 80,000 maybe 90,000 maybe a hundred
thousand years ago the findings
particularly in southern Africa is
showing that there were sophisticated
pieces of art for example long before
50,000 years ago the bit about 50,000
years ago has always surprised me
actually because if you just do a little
bit of rooting around in the field of
human evolution you find that it's
generally supposed that humans reached
Australia and New Guinea 70,000 years
ago at this point now I would say at
least and so there was always this idea
that there was this big bang that went
on in Europe and perhaps the northern
reaches of Africa and the Middle East
and that then there was all of this
sophistication but then on the other
hand all the people involved any
reputable social scientist would say
that all he
now are the exact same species same
genetic specifications except for small
flutter at the edges and that is what
people genuinely believe but if the Big
Bang happened way over in Europe and its
environs then what was going on with all
those people down in New Guinea and
Australia and all the people in southern
Asia and other places that humans are
documented to have gotten by then and
the answer until then for many people is
just diffusion and diffusion is often a
kind of a weasel word in many fields and
social science including in this one
linguistics how would it have diffused
and diffusion also seems too often
indicate dilution how would this perfect
equal degree of sophistication have
gotten all over the world it never
seemed to quite make sense if the Big
Bang was further back then were on
better ground because then we can have
the Big Bang happening in Africa where
it's now certain that our species arose
then once the species started radiating
out of Africa everybody had that same
kit of sophistication to deal with and
so it works better um there is a
wonderful new book which is called the
real Eve modern man's journey out of
Africa which is one of the books on this
topic which is more readable than many
with many of the books on this you start
to get bogged down and you know jeans
with names and plateaus of Iran this one
actually keeps you going for the most
part and it's cutting-edge I highly
recommend it the title the real Eve is
unfortunate because that and the cover
make it look like it's about something
very different but it's a nice one and
in any case it seems that human language
most likely emerged in Africa and
probably with the emergence of Homo
sapiens possibly earlier species of Homo
and there is support for this in that
there is a gene called the Fox p2 gene
and it seems to trace back a hundred
thousand years which is pretty nice and
it's long before that 50,000 year mark
that the Big Bang people specify as
being the birth of language now as it
happens there is a certain amount of
evidence that we are genetically specified
specified
to speak in this way and it's a very
controversial theory it's even somewhat
repulsive too many and as such I have to
introduce it to you and so that will be
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