Language, Sounds and Intelligent Design
- Thread starter Chu
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. And some of the things Darwin evolution claims is really funny if you avoid the part why it was imposed to us.
Natalija8
Jedi
Very interesting video, just this sticker, that apears over, when he starts to count numbers is disturbing. I thought much about, why some people can't never learn to speak out some vocals, like Ü in München, they speak out I. I come from a region in Slovenia, which is very close to Hungary, Austria and Croatia. Our dialect is mixture of many languages and people in other regions mostly don't undrstand our dialect, even less, than some foreign languages. It is a country of only 2,3 million inhabitants, having 50 dialekts in 7 main dialect groups and they are mixing themselves, and this makes Slovenščina most fragmented of all slavic languages. I understand all of them, and most of them I can speak too, although most of people never learn proper intonation of others. In my region (the smallest, it is the "head of the chick") we all know, that almost each village has it's own dialect.
Attachments
It really is, and talking a step down into the animal kingdom, look what they do, from birds to whales and dolphins. We can't even understand exactly everything they do. Some species even communicate through electrocommunication, and how does that exactly work I don't think we can begin to know, although test and make assumptions is being done.
I've recorded a bunch of hummingbirds as they feed and dance, and when you replay it, slow it down, their language (some may say it is primitive), is darn fascinating in its own right, can't even explain it.
Thus, there are some very cleaver designs within and without imo, that dear Darwin and his present day acolytes, could never successfully explain thorough their theories.
Fwiw, a good follow up to Behe, and in a slightly different direction, is Darwinian Fairytales by David Stove, if interested.
These videos are so great Chu! Thank you very much for sharing this with us. When I was at uni studying linguistics I do remember them saying that the sounds in language are arbitrary. I think the most this program went into sounds was to say that sharp things sound sharp and round things sound round, and that explains all sounds! I remember being interested in vowel harmony, but that was brushed over very quickly.
I didn't pay much attention to these non-ideas on sound that the professors were promoting. So I focused more on pragmatics and discourse, the non-verbal soundless parts of a language. I have not seen a cross language comparision of sounds anywhere until you showed us in your videos.
I am currently learning ASL (American Sign Language) and one way this langauge makes "sounds" is using facial expressions. I recently read somewhere somone speaking on ASL, they said that ASL does need to have arbitrary signs in order to be considered a language. I'll have to find the source again, but I thought that was kind of strange. I don't really understand that.
I wonder if this goes back to the idea that sounds are arbitrary?
This topic is very fascinating! I ordered the book by Margaret Mangus"Gods of the Word". I am excited to learn more about this.
I didn't pay much attention to these non-ideas on sound that the professors were promoting. So I focused more on pragmatics and discourse, the non-verbal soundless parts of a language. I have not seen a cross language comparision of sounds anywhere until you showed us in your videos.
I am currently learning ASL (American Sign Language) and one way this langauge makes "sounds" is using facial expressions. I recently read somewhere somone speaking on ASL, they said that ASL does need to have arbitrary signs in order to be considered a language. I'll have to find the source again, but I thought that was kind of strange. I don't really understand that.
I wonder if this goes back to the idea that sounds are arbitrary?
This topic is very fascinating! I ordered the book by Margaret Mangus"Gods of the Word". I am excited to learn more about this.
Ah, so there's another crazy person who studied Linguistics here, LOL! I look forward to you sharing more!
Same here. The harmonics just in vowel sounds were fascinating to me. I remember playing around with the sonogram at uni (and with images like this one), and thinking that the professors were so boring... Only talking about phonetics vs. phonology, this or that phoneme... And all of them were exclusively French speakers, so they didn't have any sounds to compare French phonemes with. But the subject still fascinated me.
That's great! Pragmatics was one of my favorites. So much richness in context. So much non-verbal communication. So please, share away if you feel like it, or if you come up with questions or connect some dots!
Cool! Well, I think you are going to like Magnus. And I still have to scan Babel for y'all.
Well, if I had to guess, I would say it's equivalent, yes. I read somewhere that all ASLs share some similarities even though they have never been in touch. You could say, "Oh, well, that's because they only have the face and the hands!". But I don't think that's it, and that maybe, just like with sounds, people may be "picking something up" from something alike the information field, which creates those similarities. Also, the idea that things in language are arbitrary is SO ingrained in linguists' minds, that I think they wouldn't even consider the opposite for the most part. It's Darwinism, after all. Random = arbitrary.
But I think that if you look around, and with some skills in ASL, you may discover interesting things yourself! I know very little about sign language, so I'd be very interested, and I'm sure others would too.Thanks for the encouraging words, mimimari. I still feel like I'm at the very beginning, but it's getting interesting! Once I cover the basics of ID and Darwin, I am thinking of making some vids on the thought/culture relationship, and on the stupidity behind the language genealogies. But for the latter, I need to read more History, which I'm really bad at!
Part 3 of this series. If anything wasn't clear or is too basic, please let me know. I'm trying to find a balance between making it for people who are not familiar with any of this, AND at least partially interesting for those of you who already know so much! So, feedback is always super welcome. And questions too.
TRANSCRIPT:
Hello, and welcome to Language with Chu. This is part three of this series and now, after having seen Darwin's theory of evolution and Behe's arguments against it, I'm going to try and add language to it, so that you can start seeing how complex language is.
So, do you remember the slides from the last video? If not, you can you can watch that one first. I'm going to reuse them but with language added, okay? And you'll see how complex it is, and how beautiful language actually is.
So, we had five arguments before. The first one was that design is a purposeful arrangement of parts and that we infer it from everything. Everything we see in nature, we say, "Okay, look at that, there's a design there," right?
Well, in language, when you look at the vocal apparatus alone, or the auditory apparatus, or the way our brain uses language and how it connects to mind, which is not even tangible... the complexity is insane! Really. Supposedly we boycotted or piggybacked on capacities that we already had for breathing and eating, etc. and started using language for communication purposes. Except, okay, so supposedly just one little mutation or a big mutation, maybe, made this smart ape want to talk, like I said in the first part.
And then, all these parts that were only designed supposedly... (I shouldn't say "designed"
) that only evolved for the purpose of eating and breathing, suddenly became the perfect mechanism with which to produce vocal sounds, with which to talk. The hands became the perfect tool for writing [and signing], etc. It's quite a stretch, if you think about it. I think it's more reasonable to think that it was designed like that from the beginning, with all its complexity.
Then we have, in language itself, the sounds, the phonemes of each language, morphemes (chunks of words that have meaning), we have phrases, and sentences. We have the entire grammar, we have the entire meaning that we convey. The fact that from a finite set of sounds, we can produce an infinite amount of words and of sentences.
So if that wasn't designed or downloaded from somewhere, I don't know how it could have come to exist. So you add the physical complexity to the non-physical complexity of languages and language itself...
And then you also have the richness that languages have when it comes to meaning in context, the way our culture alters (quite a bit actually, but not definitely) what we see. We'll talk about that in another series of videos. And how thought and language marry, combine together. So that is insanely complicated for it to have developed out of grunts and, like we said in the beginning, a random mutation from something that was designed to eat or to breathe, if you ask me.
That's regarding the first argument. Regarding the second one, "everybody agrees that aspects of biology appear to be designed". We saw the plane and the eagle. Again the complexity of grammars seems to have been designed by somebody. And remember that the grammarians, especially in the 1600s, put it all in writing. Basically they described the grammars, but the languages already existed. They may have given fancy terms to what declensions were, and each of the cases and things like that, but the complexity was already there.
Who created it? Why? Especially if you think about our ancestors as being primitive. It's quite difficult to explain that there is no design to begin with in languages. And on top of that, you have the complexity that not only are we the users of this... an extremely complex system, but we also do have a say in what we produce in terms of language. We do have a say, albeit small, in how we change language. So in a sense, we're kind of like the products of the design, and the designers or users or contributors to the design, if you wish, which adds another layer of complexity to the whole story.
If you look at this... this is just an example from the Indo-European family of languages. Usually they look like this [on the right] and you know there's a chronology of how they evolved. Now we're talking about specific languages, not the capacity for language. But if you look at the one on the left, this one is programming languages. And you know how many thousands of programmers need to be involved for something like this to exist, how much intelligence needs to be involved and how much design has to be involved. So why would it apply to programming languages and not human languages? [Text on screen: [And programming languages are MUCH simpler than human language!]
Again, that's another example of how, what you see in nature is indicative of design, not random... silly ideas like, they started singing and imitating sounds of animals. To get to the complexity of languages that we have today, there's got to be more than just random mutations and simple purposes, very simple “I want to reproduce"/"I want to survive”. There's got to be a lot more to language than that, I think.
Then in our brain... you may have seen these trees, or maybe you studied them at school. Usually at school most children say "Oh, what's the purpose of this? It's useless!" When you separate the subject from the predicate and blah blah blah. All these components. Well, I happened to like doing that kind of stuff, but you probably don't. But anyway, that shows you how, in the brain, you're computing a lot of information just to create a simple sentence. Explain to me how that happens in the brain, because they don't really know, biologists or linguists alike. They don't really know. These are just theories of how we compute a single sentence like the one you see on the screen.
And then, we have the problem of defining language even to begin with. Here is the most standard definition. Actually, I think I took it from the Encyclopedia Britannica. And it says: "Language a system of conventional (so, human-made) spoken manual or signed or written symbols by means of which human beings as members of a social group and participants in its culture express themselves. The functions (now we're onto functions) of language include communication, the expression of identity, imaginative expression, and emotional release".
Well, the definition doesn't even describe all that language is, but let's say this is the most complete one. In blue, we have that the means by which we express ourselves (spoken, manual, etc.) In orange is the fact that it's a cultural thing. For this definition, language is a cultural thing, even though many linguists would say: "No, it's actually all innate, culture doesn't matter much". And then you have the function: so it serves to express our identity, imaginative expression, etc. Well, the function is a lot bigger than that, I think. It's to allow us to think. It is to allow us to make new discoveries, to make Youtube videos like I'm doing now... [It serves to love or to hate, to create or destroy...]
It's soooo many things, that the function of language is not just one, but many. And if it's already difficult to come up with one function via random mutations, how do you suppose that a complex function such as a language's function would have arisen without any design being involved?
Not only that, but when you think about language, you have to add all these other factors: how do you create meaning, and with which algorithms in your head? How does thought combine to language? What is the relationship between the input (what you produce) and the output (what the other person gets)? The differences in language between a child and an adult. All these components (physical components) of language (the vocal tract, the auditory tract, the mind, the brain, the hands, etc. etc. etc... the list is long). And how it relates to the senses. Why do we use some senses, and not the sense of smell, for example? So it's all super complicated when you actually try to just simply define language. And of course, there's a difference between different languages and language itself. Why don't we all have the same kind of language? Nobody knows.
This is another way to look at the complexity of language. We saw this diagram on the Sounds and Meaning series. These are all the layers of what one single language has, and to that you have to add not only all these skills, all these components (meaning in context, phrases, sentences, words, phonemes,)... all of that for reading, for writing, for listening, and for speaking. So four different kinds of skills that involve a lot, a lot of other micro skills, if you want. And we also use language when we think, when we feel, for metaphor, when we dream, etc. And on top of that, like I said before, the same organs are used for breathing, smelling, learning, moving, etc.
So again, it's so complex that I don't think random mutations would have made it possible. But let's go back to Behe.
When he talked about irreducible complexity, and how each part... if you remove any part of a symbol simple organism, and it destroys, it stops functioning, it's irreducibly complex, meaning that each part is essential for its functioning and most likely evolved at the same time, not little by little.
Well, like I said before, the latter is just not possible for language, because if it was that simple to create language even from grunts or onomatopoeia, then why can't we even program good translators online? Why can we even program language on a computer and make it have the richness and the subtleties and the meaning and context that language has? If it's as simple as simple mutations, then go ahead and program it on a computer. And you can't! Human beings are still much, much better than computers at creating it. So there's something there that speaks of design, again.
Here's another example of how complex just in the brain language is. I won't even read you all the technical terms, but that's just one schematic way of putting it. And that's not even taking into account brain injuries, for example, where the whole area of the brain gets injured, and the person manages to replace those areas with something else. So the brain is very plastic in that sense. Or cases of hydrocephaly, where the person's brain is half its normal mass and the rest is full of fluid, and they have perfect skills, they can speak, they can write, they can do math, for example. So, obviously, it's not just in the brain, even though the brain itself is already quite complicated.
Here are some examples of how complex the auditory system is. Each of these parts... for them to have evolved separately is quite a stretch of the imagination, I think. The subtle sounds that you can hear, the effect it has even on your health, overall, it's all interconnected. If you have crystals in your ear, you suffer from vertigo. There's so many, many little details in each of these components that make up for such a network of functions, that I don't think it could have evolved separately. And language is included in this.
The same with the vocal tract. Just this tiny bone, the hyoid bone... I'm going to talk to about it on another video. It's super interesting, actually, how it helps you with speech. The micro-movements of the tongue, the teeth, the palate, the nasal cavity.... all that supposedly was originally just to eat and smell and breathe, and look at what we do with it now! We can speak 20 languages with the same vocal apparatus, if we want to. So something is fishy there, in Darwinian evolution, if you ask me.
Some people will say that it is because... "Oh, well, we came from primates (as Darwin would say), and primates have a larynx that is very high up, while in humans it descends during our childhood". But the thing is that they discovered that even some animals like the koala, and I can't remember others... the jaguar, I think... Several animals have a low larynx as well and they're incapable of language. [And some birds have a high larynx and can utter words.] So obviously that's not the main factor at all. Again, it's all very complex and very intricate and connected together.
This is another good book, if you want to read it: The Prehistory of the Mind by Stephen Mithen. He talks about the mind as being a cathedral, and he's a darwinian actually, but his idea of how the mind has compartments, and how they connect (one for social interactions, the other one for survival, for tool making etc.) is very, very interesting. It just gives you an idea of how complex just the mind part is, not even the brain, not even the vocal tract. Just the mind that allows us to speak as well. So, in short, everything is complicated!
And then just a final note: you have to separate between what is the complexity of languageS (the grammar, the phonemes, the writing, blah, blah) which is already super complex, from the complexity of language (singular), the capacity. So you have the language capacity. How did it come to exist? How did it evolve? Etc. Language evolution, which we've been talking about until now, and all the language parts as I described them, every physical part that helps us to talk [and write]. Where did all that come from, and when, and how? Gradually? I don't think so.
Number four was that it was pure imagination, basically fairy stories, how Darwin described evolution. And we're going to talk about that in a future video, but there are many funny theories of how language evolved, called bow-wow, ta-ta, pooh-pooh, etc., and I'll leave it for later. But you'll see that even at the time of Darwin, some people made fun of the simplicity of his theory.
Anyway, final point: when Behe talked about the strong evidence for design, once again we have a complexity of physical and mental traits (mind) when you're combine them together that is mind-boggling. The complexity of grammars, on top of that, of sound systems, of everything in language, of semantics, the meaning behind each word, and how one word can have like 30 meanings if you want. And that's not even talking about other languages like Chinese with ideograms, and how the same sound but with different tones could have 50 words attached to it. It's just that language is a trait of super complex organisms. So I really don't buy the whole single mutation at all.
But finally, let me tell you a fairy tale, a story. These are Darwin's words. He said: "The mental powers in some early progenitor of man must have been more highly developed than in any existing ape before even the most imperfect form of speech could have come into use". So okay, a smart progenitor, right? A smart monkey.
Second, "The attachment of specific and flexible meanings to vocalizations required only that some unusual wise ape-like animal should have thought of imitating the growl of a beast of prey... And this would have been the first step in the formation of language". So, what we have now was just a person imitating the growl of a beast. Yeah, right.
“As the voice was used more and more, the vocal organs would have been strengthened and perfected"... Yeah, just like by magic, during the person's life, during several generations, and why is it so complex if it was just that? Anyway... "Additionally, language would have reacted on the mind by enabling and encouraging it to carry on long trains of thought, which can no more be carried on without the aid of words, whether spoken or silent, than a long calculation without the use of figures or algebra. Thus began the interactive evolutionary spiral that led to modern humans."
So, basically he's saying that language helped to create long trains of thought, except, you could say the opposite, because thought doesn't need to be linear. You can be thinking about many things at the same time, while language imposes that linearity on you [Text on the screen: Because we can only produce one sound, one word at a time.] Well, of course, you could say, "But that adds to the complexity of the thought because you can organize it." It's just that nothing makes sense in here. You can reread it, pause the video and reread it, and you'll see that nothing makes sense, or at least it can't be explained by this.
And there you go, that's the end of the story. If you want to believe that that's all there is to it, you're free to do so. I don't. But I'll leave it at this for this one, and we still have a long way to go, combining biology and evolution and language, and trying to see if you're already curious about it. I look forward to your questions or comments, and please like this video. Thank you for watching!
TRANSCRIPT:
Hello, and welcome to Language with Chu. This is part three of this series and now, after having seen Darwin's theory of evolution and Behe's arguments against it, I'm going to try and add language to it, so that you can start seeing how complex language is.
So, do you remember the slides from the last video? If not, you can you can watch that one first. I'm going to reuse them but with language added, okay? And you'll see how complex it is, and how beautiful language actually is.
So, we had five arguments before. The first one was that design is a purposeful arrangement of parts and that we infer it from everything. Everything we see in nature, we say, "Okay, look at that, there's a design there," right?
Well, in language, when you look at the vocal apparatus alone, or the auditory apparatus, or the way our brain uses language and how it connects to mind, which is not even tangible... the complexity is insane! Really. Supposedly we boycotted or piggybacked on capacities that we already had for breathing and eating, etc. and started using language for communication purposes. Except, okay, so supposedly just one little mutation or a big mutation, maybe, made this smart ape want to talk, like I said in the first part.
And then, all these parts that were only designed supposedly... (I shouldn't say "designed"
) that only evolved for the purpose of eating and breathing, suddenly became the perfect mechanism with which to produce vocal sounds, with which to talk. The hands became the perfect tool for writing [and signing], etc. It's quite a stretch, if you think about it. I think it's more reasonable to think that it was designed like that from the beginning, with all its complexity.Then we have, in language itself, the sounds, the phonemes of each language, morphemes (chunks of words that have meaning), we have phrases, and sentences. We have the entire grammar, we have the entire meaning that we convey. The fact that from a finite set of sounds, we can produce an infinite amount of words and of sentences.
So if that wasn't designed or downloaded from somewhere, I don't know how it could have come to exist. So you add the physical complexity to the non-physical complexity of languages and language itself...
And then you also have the richness that languages have when it comes to meaning in context, the way our culture alters (quite a bit actually, but not definitely) what we see. We'll talk about that in another series of videos. And how thought and language marry, combine together. So that is insanely complicated for it to have developed out of grunts and, like we said in the beginning, a random mutation from something that was designed to eat or to breathe, if you ask me.
That's regarding the first argument. Regarding the second one, "everybody agrees that aspects of biology appear to be designed". We saw the plane and the eagle. Again the complexity of grammars seems to have been designed by somebody. And remember that the grammarians, especially in the 1600s, put it all in writing. Basically they described the grammars, but the languages already existed. They may have given fancy terms to what declensions were, and each of the cases and things like that, but the complexity was already there.
Who created it? Why? Especially if you think about our ancestors as being primitive. It's quite difficult to explain that there is no design to begin with in languages. And on top of that, you have the complexity that not only are we the users of this... an extremely complex system, but we also do have a say in what we produce in terms of language. We do have a say, albeit small, in how we change language. So in a sense, we're kind of like the products of the design, and the designers or users or contributors to the design, if you wish, which adds another layer of complexity to the whole story.
If you look at this... this is just an example from the Indo-European family of languages. Usually they look like this [on the right] and you know there's a chronology of how they evolved. Now we're talking about specific languages, not the capacity for language. But if you look at the one on the left, this one is programming languages. And you know how many thousands of programmers need to be involved for something like this to exist, how much intelligence needs to be involved and how much design has to be involved. So why would it apply to programming languages and not human languages? [Text on screen: [And programming languages are MUCH simpler than human language!]
Again, that's another example of how, what you see in nature is indicative of design, not random... silly ideas like, they started singing and imitating sounds of animals. To get to the complexity of languages that we have today, there's got to be more than just random mutations and simple purposes, very simple “I want to reproduce"/"I want to survive”. There's got to be a lot more to language than that, I think.
Then in our brain... you may have seen these trees, or maybe you studied them at school. Usually at school most children say "Oh, what's the purpose of this? It's useless!" When you separate the subject from the predicate and blah blah blah. All these components. Well, I happened to like doing that kind of stuff, but you probably don't. But anyway, that shows you how, in the brain, you're computing a lot of information just to create a simple sentence. Explain to me how that happens in the brain, because they don't really know, biologists or linguists alike. They don't really know. These are just theories of how we compute a single sentence like the one you see on the screen.
And then, we have the problem of defining language even to begin with. Here is the most standard definition. Actually, I think I took it from the Encyclopedia Britannica. And it says: "Language a system of conventional (so, human-made) spoken manual or signed or written symbols by means of which human beings as members of a social group and participants in its culture express themselves. The functions (now we're onto functions) of language include communication, the expression of identity, imaginative expression, and emotional release".
Well, the definition doesn't even describe all that language is, but let's say this is the most complete one. In blue, we have that the means by which we express ourselves (spoken, manual, etc.) In orange is the fact that it's a cultural thing. For this definition, language is a cultural thing, even though many linguists would say: "No, it's actually all innate, culture doesn't matter much". And then you have the function: so it serves to express our identity, imaginative expression, etc. Well, the function is a lot bigger than that, I think. It's to allow us to think. It is to allow us to make new discoveries, to make Youtube videos like I'm doing now... [It serves to love or to hate, to create or destroy...]
It's soooo many things, that the function of language is not just one, but many. And if it's already difficult to come up with one function via random mutations, how do you suppose that a complex function such as a language's function would have arisen without any design being involved?
Not only that, but when you think about language, you have to add all these other factors: how do you create meaning, and with which algorithms in your head? How does thought combine to language? What is the relationship between the input (what you produce) and the output (what the other person gets)? The differences in language between a child and an adult. All these components (physical components) of language (the vocal tract, the auditory tract, the mind, the brain, the hands, etc. etc. etc... the list is long). And how it relates to the senses. Why do we use some senses, and not the sense of smell, for example? So it's all super complicated when you actually try to just simply define language. And of course, there's a difference between different languages and language itself. Why don't we all have the same kind of language? Nobody knows.
This is another way to look at the complexity of language. We saw this diagram on the Sounds and Meaning series. These are all the layers of what one single language has, and to that you have to add not only all these skills, all these components (meaning in context, phrases, sentences, words, phonemes,)... all of that for reading, for writing, for listening, and for speaking. So four different kinds of skills that involve a lot, a lot of other micro skills, if you want. And we also use language when we think, when we feel, for metaphor, when we dream, etc. And on top of that, like I said before, the same organs are used for breathing, smelling, learning, moving, etc.
So again, it's so complex that I don't think random mutations would have made it possible. But let's go back to Behe.
When he talked about irreducible complexity, and how each part... if you remove any part of a symbol simple organism, and it destroys, it stops functioning, it's irreducibly complex, meaning that each part is essential for its functioning and most likely evolved at the same time, not little by little.
Well, like I said before, the latter is just not possible for language, because if it was that simple to create language even from grunts or onomatopoeia, then why can't we even program good translators online? Why can we even program language on a computer and make it have the richness and the subtleties and the meaning and context that language has? If it's as simple as simple mutations, then go ahead and program it on a computer. And you can't! Human beings are still much, much better than computers at creating it. So there's something there that speaks of design, again.
Here's another example of how complex just in the brain language is. I won't even read you all the technical terms, but that's just one schematic way of putting it. And that's not even taking into account brain injuries, for example, where the whole area of the brain gets injured, and the person manages to replace those areas with something else. So the brain is very plastic in that sense. Or cases of hydrocephaly, where the person's brain is half its normal mass and the rest is full of fluid, and they have perfect skills, they can speak, they can write, they can do math, for example. So, obviously, it's not just in the brain, even though the brain itself is already quite complicated.
Here are some examples of how complex the auditory system is. Each of these parts... for them to have evolved separately is quite a stretch of the imagination, I think. The subtle sounds that you can hear, the effect it has even on your health, overall, it's all interconnected. If you have crystals in your ear, you suffer from vertigo. There's so many, many little details in each of these components that make up for such a network of functions, that I don't think it could have evolved separately. And language is included in this.
The same with the vocal tract. Just this tiny bone, the hyoid bone... I'm going to talk to about it on another video. It's super interesting, actually, how it helps you with speech. The micro-movements of the tongue, the teeth, the palate, the nasal cavity.... all that supposedly was originally just to eat and smell and breathe, and look at what we do with it now! We can speak 20 languages with the same vocal apparatus, if we want to. So something is fishy there, in Darwinian evolution, if you ask me.
Some people will say that it is because... "Oh, well, we came from primates (as Darwin would say), and primates have a larynx that is very high up, while in humans it descends during our childhood". But the thing is that they discovered that even some animals like the koala, and I can't remember others... the jaguar, I think... Several animals have a low larynx as well and they're incapable of language. [And some birds have a high larynx and can utter words.] So obviously that's not the main factor at all. Again, it's all very complex and very intricate and connected together.
This is another good book, if you want to read it: The Prehistory of the Mind by Stephen Mithen. He talks about the mind as being a cathedral, and he's a darwinian actually, but his idea of how the mind has compartments, and how they connect (one for social interactions, the other one for survival, for tool making etc.) is very, very interesting. It just gives you an idea of how complex just the mind part is, not even the brain, not even the vocal tract. Just the mind that allows us to speak as well. So, in short, everything is complicated!
And then just a final note: you have to separate between what is the complexity of languageS (the grammar, the phonemes, the writing, blah, blah) which is already super complex, from the complexity of language (singular), the capacity. So you have the language capacity. How did it come to exist? How did it evolve? Etc. Language evolution, which we've been talking about until now, and all the language parts as I described them, every physical part that helps us to talk [and write]. Where did all that come from, and when, and how? Gradually? I don't think so.
Number four was that it was pure imagination, basically fairy stories, how Darwin described evolution. And we're going to talk about that in a future video, but there are many funny theories of how language evolved, called bow-wow, ta-ta, pooh-pooh, etc., and I'll leave it for later. But you'll see that even at the time of Darwin, some people made fun of the simplicity of his theory.
Anyway, final point: when Behe talked about the strong evidence for design, once again we have a complexity of physical and mental traits (mind) when you're combine them together that is mind-boggling. The complexity of grammars, on top of that, of sound systems, of everything in language, of semantics, the meaning behind each word, and how one word can have like 30 meanings if you want. And that's not even talking about other languages like Chinese with ideograms, and how the same sound but with different tones could have 50 words attached to it. It's just that language is a trait of super complex organisms. So I really don't buy the whole single mutation at all.
But finally, let me tell you a fairy tale, a story. These are Darwin's words. He said: "The mental powers in some early progenitor of man must have been more highly developed than in any existing ape before even the most imperfect form of speech could have come into use". So okay, a smart progenitor, right? A smart monkey.
Second, "The attachment of specific and flexible meanings to vocalizations required only that some unusual wise ape-like animal should have thought of imitating the growl of a beast of prey... And this would have been the first step in the formation of language". So, what we have now was just a person imitating the growl of a beast. Yeah, right.
“As the voice was used more and more, the vocal organs would have been strengthened and perfected"... Yeah, just like by magic, during the person's life, during several generations, and why is it so complex if it was just that? Anyway... "Additionally, language would have reacted on the mind by enabling and encouraging it to carry on long trains of thought, which can no more be carried on without the aid of words, whether spoken or silent, than a long calculation without the use of figures or algebra. Thus began the interactive evolutionary spiral that led to modern humans."
So, basically he's saying that language helped to create long trains of thought, except, you could say the opposite, because thought doesn't need to be linear. You can be thinking about many things at the same time, while language imposes that linearity on you [Text on the screen: Because we can only produce one sound, one word at a time.] Well, of course, you could say, "But that adds to the complexity of the thought because you can organize it." It's just that nothing makes sense in here. You can reread it, pause the video and reread it, and you'll see that nothing makes sense, or at least it can't be explained by this.
And there you go, that's the end of the story. If you want to believe that that's all there is to it, you're free to do so. I don't. But I'll leave it at this for this one, and we still have a long way to go, combining biology and evolution and language, and trying to see if you're already curious about it. I look forward to your questions or comments, and please like this video. Thank you for watching!
Chu, I will speak only for myself but your presentation is fantastic. Not too much one way or the other and your humour makes it flow. For rookies like myself, if you don't establish the groundwork like you are doing, then we will all flounder. It's a fascinating topic and thank you for sharing.
Thank you @Tuatha de Danaan !
Part 4 today. It's a shorty one, to share what M. Denton had to say about Language and the possibility of Intelligent Design (or at least, the ridiculousness of darwinian evolution):
TRANSCRIPT:
Hello, and welcome to language with Chu. This is part four, and it's a little bit of a bonus to recommend to you another book. It's by Michael Denton, "Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis". Michael Denton is one of the researchers who inspired Michael Behe. And he has a chapter specifically on language.
You know? It's very, very hard to find texts about intelligent design, or design in general and language in the way I'm talking about right now. There is one paper that I'll link to at the bottom, which is very good. But it's not even famous or anything. I just found it by looking and looking. So, it's all new, and I hope that we discover more together. But I just want to give you the basic questions to be thinking about.
So let's look at Michael Denton here for a second. One of the first questions he asks is, why did aspects of language develop if they weren't advantageous? Remember Darwin and his idea that it has to be advantageous for survival, for reproduction, etc. Well, he gives this funny sentence. Would you imagine a caveman using what is called "complex clauses" or "subordination": "Beware of the short beast whose front hoof Bob cracked when, having forgotten his own spear back at camp, he got in a glancing glow with the dull spear he borrowed from Jack."
Obviously, what's the purpose, what's the advantage of that for reproduction or survival? You can just say, "Hey, watch out for the beast!", or whatever. And there's also the idea of recursion in Linguistics.
[Text on screen: Example of recursion (infinite embedding): "Mary said that Patrick said that John said that Robert thought that he had forgotten the spear he had borrowed from Jack."] And mainly Chomsky was the one that said that recursion is a universal trait, that all languages have it, and that it's the same as the language of our thoughts. Therefore, it must be true. And it's somewhere biologically explainable, except we don't have any explanation for it, and not all languages use recursion as he claims.
We'll talk about that later. But anyway, that's just a funny way of asking, why would we evolve sentences like that? Why would we want to speak like that when it's not evolutionary advantageous?
Second is that all modern humans have an equal language capacity. If you take a child from, I don't know, China, when he's born, and he goes to live in Chile he'll understand and learn perfect Spanish, and viceversa. There's no genetic differences in the way we learn languages.
But given that that's the case (you're talking about the origin of language being 200,000 years ago, let's say, give or take 50 000), it would be the most striking case of parallel evolution. Meaning that if they all left from Africa, as the theory goes, (which archaeology actually is demonstrating is not really the case, but anyway, that's for another video)... then how come that people in different environments, with different living circumstances, basically develop the same capacity? Why don't we have more differences amongst groups of people and different populations in our capacity for language, even in the structure of our languages?
So, it would be an amazing case of parallel evolution, meaning that one mutation that occurred here in Asia has to have occurred here in South America, for example. It's crazy. And if it was gradual, then why is it that we've had the same capacity for hundreds of thousands of years, and it hasn't changed, it hasn't really evolved? Why aren't we using, I don't know, telepathy or something? So those are really good questions, I think.
And then the next one is that the unlikelihood of a good mutation happening, given that at the time...and Chomsky will repeat that, he'll tell you, "Oh, but it was reduced populations, it was tiny tribes, and they reproduced... never mind inbreeding, never mind the complications with mutations...All that is contrary to a good recipe for language evolution. You need to have diversity, you need to have complexity, in order for the capacity to have evolved.
And there's another really good book about entropy [Text on the screen:"Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome", by J. C. Sandford], and how good mutations are soooo, so rare in nature... I'll link to it at the bottom of this video, so you can see. Basically, it's almost impossible to get a good mutation that lasts even if, by chance, you have one, it's most likely, like 99.9 percent sure, that it won't last, it won't be transmitted from one generation to the other.
And finally, he says: "How could blind unintelligent cumulative selection the blind watch-maker have a symbolic device -the language organ-" that we mentioned before "of such complexity and sophistication that intelligent humans cannot intelligently simulate these unique abilities in a machine? I already mentioned that in the last part. If it's so simple that a blind watch-maker- a blind force with the purpose of helping species survive and reproduce did it, why can't we do it on a simple computer? Why can't we use our intelligence to reproduce it? Think about it.
Okay, so that was just a short one to give you a bit of Michael Denton's questions. And I hope you're still interested. Thank you for watching, and see you next time.
Part 4 today. It's a shorty one, to share what M. Denton had to say about Language and the possibility of Intelligent Design (or at least, the ridiculousness of darwinian evolution):
TRANSCRIPT:
Hello, and welcome to language with Chu. This is part four, and it's a little bit of a bonus to recommend to you another book. It's by Michael Denton, "Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis". Michael Denton is one of the researchers who inspired Michael Behe. And he has a chapter specifically on language.
You know? It's very, very hard to find texts about intelligent design, or design in general and language in the way I'm talking about right now. There is one paper that I'll link to at the bottom, which is very good. But it's not even famous or anything. I just found it by looking and looking. So, it's all new, and I hope that we discover more together. But I just want to give you the basic questions to be thinking about.
So let's look at Michael Denton here for a second. One of the first questions he asks is, why did aspects of language develop if they weren't advantageous? Remember Darwin and his idea that it has to be advantageous for survival, for reproduction, etc. Well, he gives this funny sentence. Would you imagine a caveman using what is called "complex clauses" or "subordination": "Beware of the short beast whose front hoof Bob cracked when, having forgotten his own spear back at camp, he got in a glancing glow with the dull spear he borrowed from Jack."
Obviously, what's the purpose, what's the advantage of that for reproduction or survival? You can just say, "Hey, watch out for the beast!", or whatever. And there's also the idea of recursion in Linguistics.
[Text on screen: Example of recursion (infinite embedding): "Mary said that Patrick said that John said that Robert thought that he had forgotten the spear he had borrowed from Jack."] And mainly Chomsky was the one that said that recursion is a universal trait, that all languages have it, and that it's the same as the language of our thoughts. Therefore, it must be true. And it's somewhere biologically explainable, except we don't have any explanation for it, and not all languages use recursion as he claims.
We'll talk about that later. But anyway, that's just a funny way of asking, why would we evolve sentences like that? Why would we want to speak like that when it's not evolutionary advantageous?
Second is that all modern humans have an equal language capacity. If you take a child from, I don't know, China, when he's born, and he goes to live in Chile he'll understand and learn perfect Spanish, and viceversa. There's no genetic differences in the way we learn languages.
But given that that's the case (you're talking about the origin of language being 200,000 years ago, let's say, give or take 50 000), it would be the most striking case of parallel evolution. Meaning that if they all left from Africa, as the theory goes, (which archaeology actually is demonstrating is not really the case, but anyway, that's for another video)... then how come that people in different environments, with different living circumstances, basically develop the same capacity? Why don't we have more differences amongst groups of people and different populations in our capacity for language, even in the structure of our languages?
So, it would be an amazing case of parallel evolution, meaning that one mutation that occurred here in Asia has to have occurred here in South America, for example. It's crazy. And if it was gradual, then why is it that we've had the same capacity for hundreds of thousands of years, and it hasn't changed, it hasn't really evolved? Why aren't we using, I don't know, telepathy or something? So those are really good questions, I think.
And then the next one is that the unlikelihood of a good mutation happening, given that at the time...and Chomsky will repeat that, he'll tell you, "Oh, but it was reduced populations, it was tiny tribes, and they reproduced... never mind inbreeding, never mind the complications with mutations...All that is contrary to a good recipe for language evolution. You need to have diversity, you need to have complexity, in order for the capacity to have evolved.
And there's another really good book about entropy [Text on the screen:"Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome", by J. C. Sandford], and how good mutations are soooo, so rare in nature... I'll link to it at the bottom of this video, so you can see. Basically, it's almost impossible to get a good mutation that lasts even if, by chance, you have one, it's most likely, like 99.9 percent sure, that it won't last, it won't be transmitted from one generation to the other.
And finally, he says: "How could blind unintelligent cumulative selection the blind watch-maker have a symbolic device -the language organ-" that we mentioned before "of such complexity and sophistication that intelligent humans cannot intelligently simulate these unique abilities in a machine? I already mentioned that in the last part. If it's so simple that a blind watch-maker- a blind force with the purpose of helping species survive and reproduce did it, why can't we do it on a simple computer? Why can't we use our intelligence to reproduce it? Think about it.
Okay, so that was just a short one to give you a bit of Michael Denton's questions. And I hope you're still interested. Thank you for watching, and see you next time.
Dave_P
Jedi Master
Thank you for this incredible job you have done @Chu . I have seen the previous videos and i found them fascinating, the content and the way you explain it shows that you really apply all the knowledge you have.
On the other hand, i do not think that language was a product of evolution for the survival of the species, definitely Darwin kicked out of goal.
Just a thought, is it likely that the language itself is a manifestation of the human being's need to communicate intangible things such as ideas, knowledge and feelings? I say this because, although the aforementioned can be expressed through writing, maybe, at least at the beginning, this method would not transmit "emotion".
At the same time, and it is just another personal speculation, could it be that the impulse to expand the language is to communicate emotions? We know that words have their meanings, but if we agree with a different "tone of voice", the spirit, feeling and emotion of the person who says it is transferred so that the other person understands it, I would say, a form of empathy.?
Eager to see this new video as soon as i have the time to give it the attention it deserves. thanks again!
On the other hand, i do not think that language was a product of evolution for the survival of the species, definitely Darwin kicked out of goal.
Just a thought, is it likely that the language itself is a manifestation of the human being's need to communicate intangible things such as ideas, knowledge and feelings? I say this because, although the aforementioned can be expressed through writing, maybe, at least at the beginning, this method would not transmit "emotion".
At the same time, and it is just another personal speculation, could it be that the impulse to expand the language is to communicate emotions? We know that words have their meanings, but if we agree with a different "tone of voice", the spirit, feeling and emotion of the person who says it is transferred so that the other person understands it, I would say, a form of empathy.?
Eager to see this new video as soon as i have the time to give it the attention it deserves. thanks again!
Thank you Dave_P!
Yeps. I thing survival and reproduction don't explain even a 10th of language, but Darwin was so heavily criticized for not mentioning it at first, that he probably felt he HAD to say something. It would have been better if he hadn't.
I think it's possible. But that maybe it also has to do with our level of consciousness and our "lesson profile" as 3D beings as a whole. Because other ways of communication, like telepathy, for example, would also serve to communicate the ideas and feelings you mention above. Yet, for whatever reason, we needed or got language, as rich but imperfect as it is. Perhaps it reflects our subjectivity in 3D, or it's a tool for us to learn something "finer", beyond words, when we are ready. And maybe it was done on purpose to create a confusion of tongues, so that truth would not be so easily accessible? I don't know.
Hmm, yes, I think! Although it can also be exploited by psychopaths. And in that case, some of it is language, and some of it is non-verbal communication. We know so little about how it all works that it's mind-boggling. After all, we use language all the time, so we SHOULD know more about it. But it's a bit like breathing, I guess. The more we use something, the more we take it for granted and don't really take the time to explore it.
And thank you for watching and commenting! It helps to think about things further.
Part 5. I recorded it a while ago, so I didn't think of wearing a Christmas hat. But I hope these crazy mainstream theories make you chuckle a bit if you happen to watch during the holidays. 
TRANSCRIPT:
Hello and welcome to language with Chu. I hope you've watched the previous parts of the series. This one is just to give you a little bit more detail about Darwin and the time he was writing at. And also to share with you some of the funny theories of language evolution in case you don't know them. So we'll go through it quickly, but it's just for fun.
But let's be serious for a minute and let me remind you that Darwin wrote first "The Origin of the Species", where he started talking about random mutations and evolution, etc. in 1861. And he kind of left a thread dangling, which is, what about man? He explained animal species and plants, but he kind of left the human being alone because he didn't have an explanation at the time. And people like Müller (Friederich Max Müller) started making fun of him for many things, including that. But then...
So there comes 10 years later the response from Darwin, in 1871, with "The Descent of Man". And he explains what I told you on part one of the series. But basically, for Darwin evolution of language was parallel to the evolution of mind and of man, and it was thanks to language that man was able to have more complex thoughts. And it was language and words that made a complex thought possible, because language is linear, so it allows us to organize our thoughts, etc. But you could argue that thought is MORE complex than speech then, because we can think without that linearity, we can dream without that linearity, necessarily. Never mind. At that time, that's what they thought.
Also, given the context, this was not too strange, but now we know how ridiculous it is. When the Europeans were conquering left and right, and "meeting" with other cultures, they got to interact with their languages too. And for them, they were savage languages, and everything that wasn't like European languages was too primitive.
For example, if a language had too complex a morphology (that means that their words were much more complex than European ones) that was because they didn't have enough abstract thought, they didn't know how to organize their thoughts in their heads, etc. So they needed more chunks of words, right? Except that nowadays we know the complexity of those words, and you realize how ridiculous that claim is.
If they had no morphology, like isolating languages (languages that have, like Chinese, one character per meaning or word, almost) then those people were primitive as well. They didn't have the capacity to make beautiful French sentences or something. And it was also thought that they didn't have any abstract terms, that all they knew how to talk about was "Me love you", and "Me eat bison", or whatever. That, of course, was the ignorance of the time, the imperialistic motives of the time. Now we know that that's not correct.
But Darwin did say that language was an instinctive tendency to speak, not an instinct per se, but an instinct to learn, to learn anything. Well, okay, that still prevails today, that we have an instinct to learn. Why not? I think culture also plays a role, but obviously, we do have an instinct to learn. That's not rocket science. But okay, let's give him credit for that.
On the other hand came this Max Müller, and he was making fun of Darwin all the time. He said, "There's no way you're going to find the link between an ape, a primate, and a human being. Their difference is just too big." I agree. He added that humans are different because they have an inner faculty for abstraction, which animals don't have. Not so much for speech, speech comes afterwards for Müller.
But on the other hand..., they were... Supposedly they were enemies, or Müller really, really made fun of Darwin. On the other hand, he thought the same thing about the "primitive" languages. And he also thought that language had started from emotional cries that we shared with animals, and only then had rational language appeared with rationality for humans, etc. So, really, he stayed within the ideology of the times. The only thing he dared to do was criticize Darwin for jumping from primates to human beings.
BUT, thanks to Müller (and I think all of them he invented, or if not, most of them) we have some funny theories of evolution of language.
The first one is the "bow-wow" theory. And it says that speech arose from people imitating sounds that things make. So, mooo, baaahhh, etc. Very logical for when you think about the subjunctive in language, sure! Then, the "poo-poo" theory. It was automatic responses to pain, to fear, to surprise, to other emotions. So laughing became a word, gasping became a word... Don't ask me how, but that's how, if you follow Darwin's logic, that's what would have happened.
Then you have the "ding-dong" theory, according to which speech reflects some mystical resonance or harmony connected with things in the world. Well, I wouldn't make too much fun of this one, because of what we talked about in the Sounds and Meaning series. There may be some truth to that, that speech is a reflection of something else in nature, in the universe, etc., and that we are connected to it somehow. Obviously it's not because of that you should call a bell "dingdong" or whatever, but the idea in itself may not be so bad. That's not Darwinian, though. Darwin was super materialistic, and so are all the academics that followed him up to this date.
Number four is the "yo-he-ho" theory, and it was rhythmic chants and grunts to coordinate physical actions when people worked together. So, I always think of the dwarves in Snow White, and how they sang together when working. "Ay-ho, ay-ho...", etc. So, yeah, that's supposedly how, again, a complex grammar and things like the dative case would have come about.
Number five: the "ta-ta" theory. Language came from gestures (and many linguists today still believe that it came from gestures). So, in the same way that you say "ta-ta!" to say goodbye, all languages started like that, Sure! And then finally, the "la-la" theory: when they were a little more advanced, human beings wanted to use it not just for reproduction, but they wanted language to play, to love, for poetic reasons, etc. So language evolved from singing and being poetic, etc.
I hope you see that none of these really make sense, and that from what we've seen up until now, it just can't be so simple. And that we have to keep exploring and finding out where the theory doesn't hold water, and what other possibilities there may be.
I summarized all of this up to this point by saying that I really believe that there is a design. Who the designer is (or the designers), how it came about, how it all works... I still don't know, and I think many of you may be wondering the same. And we need to keep exploring this, because if you look at any linguistic text, you won't find this. And if you look at many other disciplines, you won't find it.
Archaeology, biology, psychology... there's always a mystery. And language is one of the main mysteries of science. I'm biased, maybe, but I think it is the origin of language and who we are, and how we came to be the complex human beings that we are, why we are so different from animals, etc. And these scientists are not even looking at the complexity, from the tiniest flagellum, like Behe said, to the most complex part of language.
In language, we explored sounds before, and I barely touched on the basic principles. And you see already how complex the sound system is. That to me is almost like the equivalent of the bacterial flagellum. And as I told you before, it's not mainstream linguistics or common knowledge, even. So let's keep exploring, and let's see if we find out more in the next videos.
Thanks for watching, thank you for liking the video and subscribing to my channel. See you next time!
TRANSCRIPT:
Hello and welcome to language with Chu. I hope you've watched the previous parts of the series. This one is just to give you a little bit more detail about Darwin and the time he was writing at. And also to share with you some of the funny theories of language evolution in case you don't know them. So we'll go through it quickly, but it's just for fun.
But let's be serious for a minute and let me remind you that Darwin wrote first "The Origin of the Species", where he started talking about random mutations and evolution, etc. in 1861. And he kind of left a thread dangling, which is, what about man? He explained animal species and plants, but he kind of left the human being alone because he didn't have an explanation at the time. And people like Müller (Friederich Max Müller) started making fun of him for many things, including that. But then...
So there comes 10 years later the response from Darwin, in 1871, with "The Descent of Man". And he explains what I told you on part one of the series. But basically, for Darwin evolution of language was parallel to the evolution of mind and of man, and it was thanks to language that man was able to have more complex thoughts. And it was language and words that made a complex thought possible, because language is linear, so it allows us to organize our thoughts, etc. But you could argue that thought is MORE complex than speech then, because we can think without that linearity, we can dream without that linearity, necessarily. Never mind. At that time, that's what they thought.
Also, given the context, this was not too strange, but now we know how ridiculous it is. When the Europeans were conquering left and right, and "meeting" with other cultures, they got to interact with their languages too. And for them, they were savage languages, and everything that wasn't like European languages was too primitive.
For example, if a language had too complex a morphology (that means that their words were much more complex than European ones) that was because they didn't have enough abstract thought, they didn't know how to organize their thoughts in their heads, etc. So they needed more chunks of words, right? Except that nowadays we know the complexity of those words, and you realize how ridiculous that claim is.
If they had no morphology, like isolating languages (languages that have, like Chinese, one character per meaning or word, almost) then those people were primitive as well. They didn't have the capacity to make beautiful French sentences or something. And it was also thought that they didn't have any abstract terms, that all they knew how to talk about was "Me love you", and "Me eat bison", or whatever. That, of course, was the ignorance of the time, the imperialistic motives of the time. Now we know that that's not correct.
But Darwin did say that language was an instinctive tendency to speak, not an instinct per se, but an instinct to learn, to learn anything. Well, okay, that still prevails today, that we have an instinct to learn. Why not? I think culture also plays a role, but obviously, we do have an instinct to learn. That's not rocket science. But okay, let's give him credit for that.
On the other hand came this Max Müller, and he was making fun of Darwin all the time. He said, "There's no way you're going to find the link between an ape, a primate, and a human being. Their difference is just too big." I agree. He added that humans are different because they have an inner faculty for abstraction, which animals don't have. Not so much for speech, speech comes afterwards for Müller.
But on the other hand..., they were... Supposedly they were enemies, or Müller really, really made fun of Darwin. On the other hand, he thought the same thing about the "primitive" languages. And he also thought that language had started from emotional cries that we shared with animals, and only then had rational language appeared with rationality for humans, etc. So, really, he stayed within the ideology of the times. The only thing he dared to do was criticize Darwin for jumping from primates to human beings.
BUT, thanks to Müller (and I think all of them he invented, or if not, most of them) we have some funny theories of evolution of language.
The first one is the "bow-wow" theory. And it says that speech arose from people imitating sounds that things make. So, mooo, baaahhh, etc. Very logical for when you think about the subjunctive in language, sure! Then, the "poo-poo" theory. It was automatic responses to pain, to fear, to surprise, to other emotions. So laughing became a word, gasping became a word... Don't ask me how, but that's how, if you follow Darwin's logic, that's what would have happened.
Then you have the "ding-dong" theory, according to which speech reflects some mystical resonance or harmony connected with things in the world. Well, I wouldn't make too much fun of this one, because of what we talked about in the Sounds and Meaning series. There may be some truth to that, that speech is a reflection of something else in nature, in the universe, etc., and that we are connected to it somehow. Obviously it's not because of that you should call a bell "dingdong" or whatever, but the idea in itself may not be so bad. That's not Darwinian, though. Darwin was super materialistic, and so are all the academics that followed him up to this date.
Number four is the "yo-he-ho" theory, and it was rhythmic chants and grunts to coordinate physical actions when people worked together. So, I always think of the dwarves in Snow White, and how they sang together when working. "Ay-ho, ay-ho...", etc. So, yeah, that's supposedly how, again, a complex grammar and things like the dative case would have come about.
Number five: the "ta-ta" theory. Language came from gestures (and many linguists today still believe that it came from gestures). So, in the same way that you say "ta-ta!" to say goodbye, all languages started like that, Sure! And then finally, the "la-la" theory: when they were a little more advanced, human beings wanted to use it not just for reproduction, but they wanted language to play, to love, for poetic reasons, etc. So language evolved from singing and being poetic, etc.
I hope you see that none of these really make sense, and that from what we've seen up until now, it just can't be so simple. And that we have to keep exploring and finding out where the theory doesn't hold water, and what other possibilities there may be.
I summarized all of this up to this point by saying that I really believe that there is a design. Who the designer is (or the designers), how it came about, how it all works... I still don't know, and I think many of you may be wondering the same. And we need to keep exploring this, because if you look at any linguistic text, you won't find this. And if you look at many other disciplines, you won't find it.
Archaeology, biology, psychology... there's always a mystery. And language is one of the main mysteries of science. I'm biased, maybe, but I think it is the origin of language and who we are, and how we came to be the complex human beings that we are, why we are so different from animals, etc. And these scientists are not even looking at the complexity, from the tiniest flagellum, like Behe said, to the most complex part of language.
In language, we explored sounds before, and I barely touched on the basic principles. And you see already how complex the sound system is. That to me is almost like the equivalent of the bacterial flagellum. And as I told you before, it's not mainstream linguistics or common knowledge, even. So let's keep exploring, and let's see if we find out more in the next videos.
Thanks for watching, thank you for liking the video and subscribing to my channel. See you next time!
What an increasingly fascinating and intriguing topic Chu. It seems the more I learn, on what you're imparting, the more I want to know. It's like a great detective novel, a real page-turner, where you can't stop reading because as the story unfolds, more of the mystery is revealed. Yet, unlike a novel, where there is a conclusion, it seems this language mystery becomes even more mysterious and intriguing the more this subject is delved into.
So I guess one could say that truth, which is what we're really searching for here, is stranger than the fictions of all the evolution-based msm theories on the origins of language.
And, imo, there is much more to be teased out of this whole subject.
Which makes it all the more fascinating and intriguing. I'm hooked
Great job sister Chu
So I guess one could say that truth, which is what we're really searching for here, is stranger than the fictions of all the evolution-based msm theories on the origins of language.
And, imo, there is much more to be teased out of this whole subject.
Which makes it all the more fascinating and intriguing. I'm hooked
Great job sister Chu
