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Spoken Language Could Tap Into "Universal Code"
sciencehabit writes: While we know a lot about language but we know relatively little about how speech developed. Most linguists agree that a combination of movement and sound like grunts and pointing probably got us started, but how we decided which sounds to use for different words remains a mystery. Now, an experimental game has shown that speakers of English might use qualities like the pitch and volume of sounds to describe concepts like size and distance when they invent new words. If true, some of our modern words may have originated from so-called iconic, rather than arbitrary, expression—a finding that would overturn a key theory of language evolution.
... from the ability and need to communicate fundamentals about where food is, where threats are and where mates are. AKA it's very positional/structural. I'm sure all language traces back to even the simplest organisms, things that we wouldn't call 'language' as we know it but are in fact communication (aka remembering and knowing where food is, mating opportunities are, etc). It makes sense because uniting and forming groups against others is a necessary strategy if one is to survive on the planet and that requires communication at some level, even if some of us arrogant humans who are being dropped off and in a sense 'born yesterday' in evolutionary history wouldn't see it like that.
a combination of movement and sound like grunts and pointing
That exactly describes how the TSA agent communicated with me, as he instructed me to walk into the ball fryer scanner in the Philadelphia airport a while back.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
The reason is if there was some sort of universal, or natural grammar/vocabulary/etc. inherent to the human animal you would expect languages to tend towards this universal. They don't. There's some small things (many words for mother start with 'm'), but after years of research Chomsky's got a tiny and ever-shrinking list of large universal things. What seems to be going on is that a big part of what we use language for is identifying group membership (ie: ebonics, in the UK you can frequently identify both someone's home county and their class from their accent, etc.), which means that almost anything goes.
This particular study is somewhat interesting, they put a bunch of college students in a room and had them make up new words for for concepts like big vs. small, and their partners were able to guess whether it was big or small at greater then 50%. It does not say how much greater. They were also able to find some commonalities in the new words vs. their opposites. Then they repeated with Mandarin-speakers in China, and got a slightly different set of commonalities.
So I suspect that non-verbal cues had a part to play, and they'll have a devil of a time proving that their vague commonalities between big vs. small were not simply a reflection of English usage.
"Most linguists agree that a combination of movement and sound like grunts and pointing probably got us started"
Presumably these linquists work at universities and are simply observing students on a sunday morning after a night out.
Article is a glorty kleed of pweb. Summary is blonty, unwerreled and in parts totally baylous.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
TFA seems to imply that they had to choose one word from eighteen, so yes, 35.6% is considerably better than chance.
We gathered in a large conference room lit with fluorescent lights. You know, the kind that always has one light in the corner flickering, and it seems to draw your whole attention. Fidgeting in chairs, a rustle of paper, forms to fill out, name and gender blah blah and it's like --- hello! --- we're broke and we're 'day labor' students just selling our blood and our souls and bodies for research for a quick buck, and we've got to move on to the next indignity! The ad on the website said 'sociological research project' so we were reasonably sure there would be no picking and prodding.
It was bizarre even for us lab rats. The organizers seemed to be conducting a game of 'charades' and broke us into groups, assigning words printed on cards like up, down, rough and stuff. We were supposed to invent new words for these things and try to communicate them to the others with a combination of vocalizations (yes they used the silly term, it sounds ridiculous when you 'vocalize' it don't you think?) and gestures and (as it turns out) giggles and nervous smiles.
This went on for a couple of hours, they kept re-forming the groups and repeating the experiment, scoring the success of our guesses as to which test word was being used... it was fun. I noted early on that the more attracted you are to the the person doing the charade, the more likely you were to guess the correct answer. I wonder if the researchers noted this and I used it as a pickup line, leaning close to this foxy lady and whispering, "Do you think they've controlled for the fact that your voice sounds so sexy when you make that low rumble in your throat that means, 'rough'?" Of course, I used her made-up word, which sounded like 'blaaaargh' Her laugh was surprised and sudden, and if they had a card that said promise it would have lit up the board. With a nod offered her my number on a card, and she wrote hers. Promise indeed.
As we passed behind the conference table between each round to be assigned new groups with one of the 'test words' I glanced at the laptop computers. It seemed they were recording the sounds we made and plotted them out in some sort of dot-language. So this is some kind of language research, I guessed, to examine the brain wiring of money-hungry research lab rats. Then a real lunch (not just donuts and coffee, what a surprise!) and the final round began.
The last round was one-to-all where each person got up in front and charaded the whole room. By now we realized there were only a few words being tested and we had gotten pretty good at guessing which one. I had taken a seat next to blaaaargh-girl and touched her knee briefly as I sat. She had smiled. Life is good. When she was called up to charade the room I muttered 'blaaargh' and she giggled.
She stood at the front of the room and took the card which indicated which 'primordial' word she was to communicate. Her eyes widened for a moment, and I'd swear her eyes darted from side to side, as if scanning for some adversary. It was a bit odd and no one else seemed to pick up on it, but it was clearly... fear? I guess she and I were so in tune at that moment I felt what ever she was feeling. I felt a sudden tingle in my spine and my heart raced. What was written on that card? She seemed to gather herself and faced the group. There was a certain helplessness in her expression, as if she was being compelled to do something. I felt a surge of protective instinct and was rising from my seat... as
She flung her arms wide, spun her head until the long straight hair swung around and for a moment, wrapped around her face. The flickering light finally gave up and the room dimmed a little. She took a long intake of breath and shouted, long and shrill,
"Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!"
The lights went out. The Universe became noise and chaos. I felt as if I was falling.
But we were not on a station platform. We were on the track ahead as the nightmare, plastic column of fetid black iridescence oozed tightly onward through its fifte
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Curiously, it assumes they both would understand the gestures. Tarzan would know Jane is pointing to herself as an entity not pointing to her shirt and him as another entity not his chest as a body part. Further assumption is that objects have names and the association is arbitrary. Of course, Tarzan story quickly proceeds to a stage where Jane and Tarzan swap stories about the day the fiend in human shape challenged one to swing across the swimming baths of the club by the rings hanging from the ceilings and cunningly looped the last ring back against the wall, leaving one with no choice to drop into the pool in full evening attire. This is where it becomes very fictional. Well, in real life does not fit into 90 minute movies. But I digress.
The point is, it is very well known imitation of natural sounds and gestures would be a more basic universal form of communication. And it is not a stretch to argue that is how the languages must have born.
Noam Chomsky further extended the concept with the insight that all human beings are born with a language instinct. "Objects have names". "Actions have names". "Order of the words (subject verb object etc) matters", "the names of objects and actions can have qualifiers" etc etc. The child has these concepts already programmed. But the actual names and actual order of the words in a sentence etc get burnt in at an early age. When children of different languages mix constantly they form language-mixtures called creoles and there one can actually observe the birth and evolution of a language. Some of the well recorded recently created creoles suggest these concepts very well.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I guess you did not read the entire article:
Of course, the study used only native English speakers, and Kita says it’s crucial to test speakers of other languages to see if the findings hold. Perlman is already taking that advice to heart. Recently, he ran a similar study among deaf children at a boarding school in rural China. He found that the deaf children and their hearing counterparts, all native Mandarin speakers, consistently used longer and louder sounds to make up words for big objects and shorter and softer to make up words for small objects. There was one difference from the English-language speakers: They used higher pitches for bigger objects and lower pitches for smaller objects. Perlman suspects the tendency may have something to do with Chinese folk performances, which use high pitch to express strength and power.
So, no, it's not necessarily something that deserves to be trumpeted as a "Universal Code", but it is nonetheless an interesting result which probably does merit further investigation.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.