Re: No easy answers in evolution of human language

Glen M. Sizemore wrote:
<jijo.mathew.303@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:c3e21a4c-61f9-4ead-a67d-6f2f1ba185b7@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
The evolution of human speech was far more complex than is implied by
some recent attempts to link it to a specific gene, says Robert
Berwick, professor of computational linguistics at MIT.

http://mozhi.org/mozhi%20news/163.htm
[....]

Post:Ultimately, the important thing is to understand that language is, at bottom, something that takes place inside the human mind and is independent of any particular sound, sight or motion. The same internal mental construction could be expressed through verbal speech, through writing or through sign language without changing its basic nature, Berwick says. "It's not about this external thing you hear," he says. "It's about the representation inside your head."

GS: Nonsense.




Agreed. It's amazing how many people believe that written language is merely a record of spoken language. Transcription of a few minutes of recorded speech should be enough to disabuse them of this notion. Not to mention a brief reflection on their difficulties in learning how to write. I can't number the times a student has told me, "I know what I want to say, but I don't know how to say it." But for some reason these considerations don't occur to Berwick and his like.

Moreover, if the different expressions of that "internal mental constructions" were in fact the same, we would have no trouble reading a play script, for example. Yet most people have a hell of a time reading a script. Even professional actors must work through a script to figure out how to play it, ie, how to speak the speech so that it corresponds to some "internal mental construct."

Besides, I suspect Berwick is monolingual. One of the persistent testimonies of multilingual people is that when they switch languages internally, ie, when they "think in the other language", they don't think the same thoughts. Those supposedly identical thoughts "feel different." IOW, these people claim that "particular sound[s]" do control their language, internally as well as externally. A behaviourist perspective accounts for that quite nicely IMO: the contingencies that control the expression, (ie, the syntax, the selection of words, the intonation, etc) are simply different in different languages. Of course.

PS: I'm multilingual myself.

HTH

--
wolf k.
.

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