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Noam Chomsky: Language's Great Mysteries | Big Think | YouTubeToText
YouTube Transcript: Noam Chomsky: Language's Great Mysteries
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Core Theme
The central theme is that fundamental questions about the origin and diversity of human language, while seemingly complex, may have answers rooted in a recent, sudden emergence and a superficial diversity of a single underlying linguistic capacity.
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as in most Sciences especially the human
Sciences almost every major question is
open so for example uh I take the
question the two obvious questions one
is how come there any languages at all I
mean a second question is why are there
many these are pretty Elementary
questions but they're sensible questions
uh roughly say a 100,000 years ago which
is almost nothing in evolutionary time
the questions couldn't be raised because
there weren't any languages you know
maybe 200,000 but roughly that area so
it's a sensible question one is the
question how did languages suddenly
emerge in the uh evolutionary record and
it's pretty sudden by in in evolutionary
framework you know amount of time
involved and then how come they
proliferate it how come there isn't just
one well there's steps towards answering
that there's progress I think my own
view I should say is pretty
idiosyncratic it's not widely held but I
think we understand enough about the
fundamental computational basis of
language to see that uh to to develop a
kind of a plausible scenario for how
there might have been a reasonably
sudden emergence of the fundamental
nature of language and also of why the
apparent diversity is pretty
superficial uh so that if say a martian
was looking at humans the way we look at
uh say frogs uh the Martian might
conclude that this fundamentally one
language with minor deviations and I
think we're moving towards an
understanding of how that that might be
the case and it is pretty clear that it
has to be the case the time of
development is much too shallow for
fundamental changes to have taken place
and we know of no fundamental changes so
a child from a hund gather tribe and
Stone Age tribe and say the Amazon uh
brought to Cambridge and raised here
will you go on and become a quantum
physics physicist at MIT there's no
known differences in re relevant
cognitive capacities so there's
something fundamentally the same about
all of us and it's whatever emerged
pretty recently and we have to work out
the to show that the enormous apparent
variety is a kind of superficial
variation and also to explain how it
might have suddenly appeared in The evolutionary
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