When prairie dogs speak, they seem to use nouns – hawk, human, wooden cut-out – adjectives – red, blue – and adverbs – moving quickly, slowly. They might use other parts of speech as well. Prairie dogs chitter at each other constantly, making many sounds that no humans have yet decoded.
Ever wonder about the evolutionary origin of human intelligence? The leading theory is that, over many generations, our ancestors became brilliant … in order to gossip better. It takes a lot of working memory to keep track of the plot of a good soap opera, and our ancestors’ lives were soap operas. But Carl knows that Shelly doesn’t know that Terrance and Uma are sleeping together, so …
Tool use is pretty cool. So’s a symbolic understanding of the world – who doesn’t love cave art? But gossip probably made us who we are. All those juicy stories begged for a language to be shared.
Many types of birds, such as parrots and crows, spend their lives gossiping. These busybodies also happen to be some of the smartest species (according to human metrics). Each seems to have a unique name – through speech, the birds can reference particular individuals. They clearly remember and can probably describe past events. Crows can learn about dangerous humans from their fellows.
When I walk around town, squirrels sometimes tsk angrily at me. But I’ve definitively observed only a single species using its capacity for speech to denounce all other animals. From Tom Wolfe’s The Kingdom of Speech:
There is a cardinal distinction between man and animal, a sheerly dividing line as abrupt and immovable as a cliff: namely, speech.
Without speech the human beast couldn’t have created any other artifacts, not the crudest club or the simplest hoe, not the wheel or the Atlas rocket, not dance, not music, not even hummed tunes, in fact not tunes at all, not even drumbeats, not rhythm of any kind, not even keeping time with his hands.
This claim is obviously false. Several different species do create artifacts – either speech is unnecessary for this task, or else other species of animals can speak. Or both. In any case, this claim is so easily rebutted – all you’d need is an example of chimpanzees drumming, let along cooking – that it seems a strange conclusion for Wolfe to make.
Don’t get me wrong: humans are pretty great at thinking. I’m more impressed by mathematical than emotional intelligence, which makes it easy for me to think that the average human is way brighter than the average elephant.
In all likelihood, though, humans have been pretty great at thinking for hundreds of thousands of years. The cultural evolution that produced the Atlas rocket and skyscrapers was a very sudden development. For most of the time that humans have been on the planet, our behavior probably didn’t look so different from the behavior of orcas, chimps, or parrots.
Throughout The Kingdom of Speech, Wolfe mocks the various theories about human language presented by Noam Chomsky. (I’m ignoring Wolfe’s claims about evolution, which he says can’t be tested, replicated, or used to elucidate otherwise inexplicable phenomena – in his words, “sincere, but sheer, literature.” Here and here are two of many recent experiments tracking evolution in progress.)
I often found myself nodding in agreement with Wolfe. For instance, I’d hope that a linguist making broad claims about human language would learn as many languages as possible. I think that contradictory evidence from the real world holds more weight than pretty theories. From Wolfe’s Kingdom of Speech:
In the heading of the [2007 New Yorker] article [“The Interpreter: Has a Remote Amazonian Tribe Upended Our Understanding of Language?”] was a photograph, reprinted many times since, of [Dan] Everett submerged up to his neck in the Maici River. Only his smiling face is visible. Right near him but above him is a thirty-five-or-so-year-old Piraha sitting in a canoe in his gym shorts. It became the image that distinguished Everett from Chomsky. Immersed! – up to his very neck, Everett is … immersed in the lives of a tribe of hitherto unknown na – er – indigenous peoples in the Amazon’s uncivilized northwest. No linguist could help but contrast that with everybody’s mental picture of Chomsky sitting up high, very high, in an armchair in an air-conditioned office at MIT, spic-and-span … he never looks down, only inward. He never leaves the building except to go to the airport to fly to other campuses to receive honorary degrees … more than forty at last count … and remain unmuddied by the Maici or any of the other muck of life down below.
But Chomsky being wrong doesn’t make Wolfe right.
In Why Only Us, authors Robert Berwick and Noam Chomsky make some suspicious claims. They argue that human language stems from an innate neurological process that they’ve dubbed “merge,” akin to the combination of two sets to produce a single, indivisible result. {A} merged to {B} yields {C}, where {C} contains all the elements of {A} and {B}.
This sounds pretty abstract, so an example might help. Berwick & Chomsky think that a verb and a direct object would be combined into a single “verb phrase” that is treated as a single unit by our brain. Or, even more complexly, the word “that” leading into a subordinate clause would produce a whole slew of words that is treated as a single unit by our brain. (In the preceding sentence, the phrase “that is treated as a single unit by our brain” would be one object.)
Berwick & Chomsky’s idea is that complex sentences can be built either by listing the final units in a row or using that hierarchical “merge” operation again, i.e. putting a verb phrase inside a subordinate clause, or one subordinate clause inside another. Leading eventually to the tangled, twisty syntax of Marcel Proust.
But as far as I could tell (their book has a lot of jargon, and I read it while walking laps of the YMCA track with a sleeping baby strapped to my chest, so it’s possible I missed something), they don’t discuss the difference between two ideas being placed at the same level of interpretation, such as two independent clauses joined by an “and” or “or,” versus a dependent clause adjoined to an independent clause with “but,” “which,” “that,” or what have you. I couldn’t identify a feature of their argument that suggested why some adjacent words would be processed by a human brain is this special way but others would not. I could certainly address the way this happens in English, but an evolutionary argument ought to apply to all human language, and I know so little about most others that my opinions seem unhelpful here.
Some of Berwick & Chomsky’s ideas don’t seem to hold even in English, though. For instance, they claim that:
… there is no room in this picture for any precursors to language – say a language-like system with only short sentences. There is no rationale for positing such a system: to go from seven-word sentences to the discrete infinity of human language requires emergence of the same recursive procedure as to go from zero to infinity, and there is of course no direct evidence for such “protolanguages.” Similar observations hold for language acquisition, despite appearances, a matter that we put to the side here.
But we’re very confidant that spoken language arose long before written language, and the process they describe isn’t how many humans interact with spoken language. There are definite limits to how many clauses most people can keep in mind at any one time – indeed, much of Why Only Us would sound incomprehensible if read aloud.
Is it reasonable to compare human written language with the spoken language of other animals? The former is decidedly more complex. Sure. But the language actually used by most humans, most of the time, seems much simpler.
When I write, I can strangle syntax as well as any other pedant. But when I actually talk with people, most of what I say is pretty straightforward. I get confused if somebody says something to me with too many embedded clauses, or if words intended to operate together on a “structural” level aren’t in close proximity – Berwick & Chomsky spend a while writing about the phrase “instinctively birds that fly swim,” which sounds like gibberish to me. Just say either “birds that fly instinctively can swim” or “birds that fly can swim instinctively” and you won’t get as many funny looks. Except for the fact that I don’t think this is true, in either phrasing. Syntactically, though, you’d be all set!
In any case, all you’d need to show to demonstrate a linguistically equivalent behavior in other animals would be two parrots discussing the beliefs of a third. This would be the same recursion that Berwick & Chomsky claim produces the “infinity of human language.”
Given that other social animals understand the (false) beliefs of their compatriots, I’d be shocked if they didn’t talk about it. We just haven’t learned how to listen.
Humans are great. We’ve accomplished a lot, especially in these last few thousand years (which is incredibly fast compared to evolutionary timescales). The world has changed even in the short time that I’ve been alive. But the unfounded claims in both The Kingdom of Speech and Why Only Us made me feel sad: with so much to be proud of, why should we humans also strive to distinguish ourselves with supremacist arrogance?
Frank Brown Cloud 