Historical Linguistics, Appunti di Linguistica

Scarica Historical Linguistics e più Appunti in PDF di Linguistica solo su Docsity! “HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS '' is parallel, but doesn’t coincide with, diachronic linguistic, which is a perspective which doesn’t take into account the historical facts, the cultural, the social facts. Historical linguistics tries to combine the diachronic model, to describe and account for linguistic facts that we have to analyse and the historical facts that determine the social circumstances in which language is used. They only partially share methods and purposes. Time is a factor, but it is not the only one, whenever we talk about historical linguistics. Underneath there is history, models to represent linguistic changes and models of human language. ORIGIN OF HUMAN LANGUAGE - We know a lot about the origin of the human language nowadays, much more than we used to know some years ago. Nowadays we have a picture about the origin which is clearer. - Knowing how language developed is crucial to understand what language is, how it develops and from what stage it started developing. We cannot fully understand what language is if we don’t know how it develops, which can be described only if we know the point of departure, which is how the human language developed in its very origins. Talking about the way the language developed is not easy and it is a difficult investigation, we have to use the scalpel to achieve the smallest details to describe them correctly. Talking about the origins of the human language is easy to mix up facts with the interpretations we give of these facts: the interpretations are referred to as ideology, in the sense that how we see something is implied by the lenses through which we see these facts, we see what belongs to the mechanism/the lens through which we see and try to explain these facts. The ideas about the origin of the human language in the past: from the beginning people tried to understand how it was possible that the human beings in general could utter sentences, could speak, express themselves in means of articulated sounds and sentences. In 1863 the French Academy In 1866, the Society of linguistics aimed to study languages, legends, traditions, customs and documents that can inform ethnographic science; any other object of study is strictly forbidden; does not accept any communication concerning either the origin of language or the creation of the universal language. There is a purpose to avoid to receive any work concerning the origins of human language, because the notions of science has to be taken into account, the way we look at science, the epistemological model is different from the epistemological model of those times and if we start talking about the origin of language today it’s because we have the epistemological and theoretical instruments to avoid fantasy or too imaginative models, but only models based on facts. We know much more about archeology, paleontology, prehistory so that we can have a real image of how language developed. What is interesting is also to have a survey of what thoughts in the past people had about the origin of language: this curiosity is peculiar to mankind. The first mention of an episode in which people tried to achieve knowledge about the origin of language is to be found in greek writer, Eruditus (484-430). In Egypt, in the 6th century BC, a Pharaoh (Psammetichus II (595-589)) was curious to see how people acquired their language. “Reasoning from this…” “The Greek says about many foolish things”: the first question to distinguish facts from ideology (in the way Eruditus presents the facts) is to assert what happened and distinguish it from the way it is told. Children might have heard the word from someone, it probably wasn’t spontaneous. This is not the only experiment on the origin of language, these experiments were repeated many times. Is there any word that makes us understand the interpretation of Eruditus: “foolish” is a trace of his attitude, he was probably rejecting it, telling funny stories, not real ones. Eruditus told many episodes that are hardly believable, it is not easy to accept this fact, even if there are many other episodes in history that we are aware of. Even the worst and most dangerous experiments are possible, not only during Nazism, Communism, but even in more democratic countries/settings: president Bill Clinton officially apologised for the Tuskegee experiment, conducted in the 50s. There are some experiments going on around the world. The experiment conducted by the Pharaoh is not unbelievable, it is possible that he really isolated 2 children just to try to achieve the result of knowing what was the first language. The children could utter the word Bechos, it shouldn’t have been much more different from their babbling, this is just an episode in which there is a lot of ideology. In this case we know this episode has been investigated in depth and it reflects the Ionian ideology, it is not as simple as one could think, it is full of the IONIAN ideology (region of Ancient Greece where a philosophy developed, where Eruditus was born and influenced). This episode was highly probable, despite the Eruditus attitude. Another important episode is closer to us in a way: it took place at the court of Frederich the 2 of Sicily (1194-1250) replicated the Pharaoh experiment in Medieval times. This formulation makes us think that he was aware of the experiment told by Eruditus, while this is not certain, we don’t know if he knew anything about the experiment told by Eruditus, even though he knew Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, he was highly educated. This episode was told by a friar Salimbene da Parma: his chronical is a mix of real facts and fancy stories, unbelievable stories. Traditionally scholars think that what is narrated by Salimbene de Adam concerning this episode is not true, cannot be believed, even if it is not hard to believe it as true if we think that the Eruditus episode really happened (Friedrich → Enlightenment). Friedrich was depicted as a hero (both positive and negative). There are several new elements in this episode, there are a couple of things that are interesting: in the environment of ancient Greece there were people that were likely to be very old (Egyptians), in this case history tends to become a myth; history can only say that these people were old, but not as old as Greeks thought they were. Eruditus was influenced by the culture of his own time. In the second episode there are crucial considerations: in the meantime there is another element: CHRISTIANITY, THE BIBLE → Hebrew, which was mentioned as a possible oldest language of the world, because probably Adam and Eve could speak Hebrew in Eden (myth); Greek or Latin, because these languages were traditionally considered the most prestigious among the oldest languages in the world, or Arabic, which is mentioned because at that time the culture of Arabs was particularly prestigious, the arabic world was spreading all over the Mediterranean Sea and the Middle East, at the most flourishing moment. There is another new point: Operchans, the tongue of their parents, to whom they had been born: it is a remark that renders this episode believable. This particular view point is taken into account: the fact that the language these children could spontaneously utter could in some way be acquired by their parents. Children could inherit their language from their parents, as a genetic and biological heritage. This is the first time that this possibility is mentioned in the history of such episodes, that they could learn a language because their parents’ language had been transmitted in some ways. It is interesting and a new François Catrou: Jesuit, historian, every religious order has its own historian, in charge to write the history of the order itself. His report is rather different from what father Jeronimo Xavier recounted. His narration is based on Niccolao Mannucci’s book, which remained unpublished until the beginning of the 20th century and it is the history of the Jesuit’s order. The topic of “articulate sounds of the language” is a common topic: children couldn’t speak any language. Hebrew was said to be the oldest/original language of the world: the Bible (in Genesis Adam and Eve name things in Hebrew), it is one of the most influential books in the world and the grounding book in the Western culture. It tells the story of Hebrew. It must be pointed out that in any religion God speaks the language of the people for which the Holy Book is written for. (The Coram coincides with God in the Muslim religion; in Islam there isn’t the problem of the language, because we don’t know what language God speaks and the prophet couldn’t read). He ordered 12 children to be confined in a castle, with 12 dumb women, so that they couldn’t help them develop a language. When a child was 12, he had to be taken to the emperor and it was supposed to be speaking Hebrew. Usually we imagine our city as cities in which monolingualism prevails (homogeneous linguistic community), but this is not the normal case: there are always people from other places gathering together. In a city of medium size, there are always people that speak several languages and the eastern countries have many languages. What language could these children speak? Arabic, Caldeans (people from Middle East): people think that the original language is the one they speak (Indian → Sanskrit, Europe → Latin). Children were found incapable of speaking in any languages or to utter any articulated sound, they used gestures to express their thoughts: these were the only means they had. Gestures replacing words. Conclusion: without any social environment, there is no language that can develop. They were uncultivated: the description is very close to the description of animals, which have to be tames, so they were shy, uncultivated. This is a quite different story from the one told by Jeronimo Xavier. The conclusion that Akbar drew from this experiment was that speech doesn’t arise spontaneously in children, it is only possible when people have to communicate and listen to each other. A child left alone cannot develop any language. This is the obvious conclusion, but we can understand the scientific level of each particular age: the fact that children doesn’t imply implicitly that there isn’t any faculty of language, nobody associated that people in the right environment develop a language and the fact that if there isn’t such an environment, people can't speak. They thought of a very simplistic conclusion. If there are no other people around them, then there is no language. The curiosity was huge to know what the original language was. The real problem concerned the way people tried, the methods they employed to ascertain what the original language was. Were experiments the best method? We have to separate the faculty of language, the possibility of human beings to develop a language from the fact that that specific peculiarity of mankind can develop in the right environment, among other people. This is even more correct if we think that more than 80 cases of feral children are reported, about children abandoned, left alone in isolation. Carl Linnaeus: one of the fathers of modern science, the scholar who ordered all animals and plants (taxonomy). He introduced another species of man: the homo sapiens ferus, that means savage, wild, as something in between a man and an animal. This was taken as an exaggeration: as one of the most famous anthropologist of last century, Claude Lévi- Strauss, claimed that this reported episodes, cases of wild children didn’t become feral because they are abandoned, but they were abandoned because they showed (at 1 or 2 year) signs of autism and cognitive problems and this is the reason why they were abandoned in the forest (many cases are reported in Africa) and some of them were reported to be living with monkeys and wolfs. This isn’t a modern story: the most famous feral child reported in history is Victor de l'Aveyron: we don’t know anything about his origins, who his parents were and he was discovered in the bushes, in the forest and he was “adopted” by a French physician, Jean Itard, who tried to cultivate him, to educate him for 5 years, without any results. The child was never able to speak or to use the tools of normal human communication. The physician tried to teach him how to behave and communicate, without any result. This child died when he was 40. Even closer to our days there is a case: Genie. She had a terrible life: her mother was blind, her father a tyrant who prevented her from behaving normally, she couldn’t speak, she was handcuffed and if she only uttered a sound, she was beaten, so she stopped talking. By accident, she was discovered when she was 13 years old and couldn’t speak; nowadays she lives in an hospital with people who have serious cognitive problems. There was a nurse who paid loving attention to her, but she couldn’t help her to develop a language. This is another story that tells us that people without the right environment cannot speak, not because they don’t possess the faculty of the language, but because they don’t activate it at the right time. One of the problems is that these people, instead of developing the faculty of language, develop the autism (development disorder which is characterised with difficulties in the social interaction, by repeated gestures). Parents frequently notice that their children don’t behave correctly, since during the first 3 years of life there are signs of it, but it is difficult to predict if these signs will end up being crucial or not. Today we think that autism is caused both by genetic/neurobiological and environmental reasons. The conclusion we can draw from these stories is that the right social environment and society are necessary for human beings to develop the possibility of language. CHRISTIANITY AND THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE Hebrew was considered as the original language, due to the influence of the Bible, but there are other interesting traces of influence. The fact that the original language was Hebrew remained a long standing belief and topic of debate during the middle ages in Europe. Dante Alighieri wrote De Vulgari Eloquentia about the language of the common people and there is a passage about the origin and the development of language. His knowledge was influenced by the culture of the 14th century, but he finds it reasonable that a man, rather a woman, was first to receive the power of speech and that the first word uttered in Paradise must have been El, the name of God addressed to God himself. El is a sound that reminds the name of God in Hebrew (Eloim), which is strictly connected to the Arabic Allah. There is another myth that is crucial in explaining and forging the way people used to look at language during the middle ages: the myth of the tower of Babel: people were so superb that they thought of themselves as Gods, so they wanted to build a tower getting to Heaven and they started, but at the end people could speak only one language (because God punished them), they started differentiating their languages and not understanding each other, so this is the way the different languages arose. Dante uses the story of the tower of Babel as an explanation for the diversity of languages. There were many spoken languages as activities. Dante thought that language began with Hebrew in the east, and language group reaching Europe included 3 main divisions: the northern (Germanic), the southern (Romance) and Greek (which was particularly important), then he identifies subgroups within the southern group: French, Italian, Spanish → Italian is something that includes many dialects, but in this way Dante moves from thoughts concerning the origins of the language to a sociolinguistic view of the language. Dante was probably the source for a great linguist, born in Tunis: Ifriqiya Ibn Khaldun, who wrote an important book, an encyclopedia: Muqaddimah, when he works on some hypothesis. In the 17th century there was something unexpected: Chinese played one of the roles of the original language. We must take into account the representatives of the ideological movement; the most influential was Condillac, whse vision of the human language was very simple: language was a tool, a device that mankind had at his disposal to acquire, memorize and discuss clear and distinct ideas, which was also the idea of Descartes. There is an interesting point, which is still at stake: Condillac understood the role of language as a means that could allows men to acquire, memorize and discuss clear and distinct ideas, but there is a crucial presupposition, about which somebody could object (some people rejected this idea): if you express and memorize and acquire ideas, it means that ideas exist independently and prior to language. First we have ideas and then the way of expressing them. Is it correct to claim that ideas can exist without being expressed through language? How can we claim that ideas exist independently of language that expresses them? Behind this there are centuries of philosophies discussing the point. During the Enlightenment ideas were conceived independent from the language that expressed them. It is a relevant point if we think that there had to be a connection between this claim and the fact that children could acquire a different language from the one of the parents. There is another point which is interesting: Condillac stressed that the starting point of language had to be a gesture, a sign that was in a sense self explanatory. At a certain moment these gestures, signs had to acquire a secondary meaning by convention. (The origin of language was strictly related to self explanatory signs, not to conventional signs, which acquired a conventional status only later). The history of ideas is monotonous: there are some ideas that go back and forth and always come back over time. There was a linguist, Desoussures (sometimes considered the father of modern linguistics) who started a revolution in thinking that linguistic sign was arbitrary, it had a meaning by convention. Arbitrariness was an interesting finding which was anticipated in the Enlightenment by philosophers like Condiòlaòc, who thought that language could only develop through the acquisition of the secondary meaning of signs. SELF EXPLANATORY SIGNS: beside the conventionalized status of human language, there is also the fact that the original conditions in which language could develop where not properly linguistic signs, but gestures, signs and the most recent ideas about the origin of language, based on solid ground, still claim that language could only develop out of a system of physical signs. The human language started developing through a parallel evolutionary path: a linguistic one with vocal sounds (at the very origins there were noisy sounds: growling, which acquired a conventional and meaningful status only later on) and movements (hands, face). The origin of human language developed in parallel along 2 paths: the vocal one and the physical one (gestures). With respect to this approach, there is a crucial point: we use words, but the problem is how to bridge the gap between a physical sign and its corresponding expression made up of sounds, words. If we claim that the origin of the language is in physical signs, how can we explain the fact that the end languages are only made up of sounds? When did it happen that signs became words/noises/sounds? Why? This is the point that philosophers couldn’t solve. In fact Condillac held that the elements of spoken languages must have followed the order of acquisition that was natural in sign language. (We don’t have a sign for objects). Bridging the referent and the linguistic expression was a problem, even because there was another point relevant in this case: we usually have the idea that 200 years ago thinkers and philosophers used to be less clever than nowadays philosophers: it is not correct: they used lines of reasoning that are still used today (i.e. in the 18th century, there were physicians, doctors who observed, studied the gesture language of deaf-mute children, who had problems acquiring any languages. The different steps of acquisition of a language showed that these children acquired first of all signs according to the relative importance in the communication of the constituent ideas (gestures to indicate simple elements, objects and only after that they could refer to abstract notion). This was in accordance with the idea expressed by Condillac that children acquiring language started from objects and the common objects were the first to be named: there is a peripheral study by means of which philosophers could forge their ideas that could be confirmed or dismissed according to the result of the study in mute children. There was another important thinker (Scottish), James Burnett Lord Monboddo (1714-1799), a jurist and very fond of the ancient Greek language. He gave some contributions to the investigations on the origins of languages and he was one of the upholders, who claimed that language could only develop in community: there was no language meant as such until men came together in communities. We cannot speak of language if we intend a few men alone or a man in isolation: language is only in community. There is another interesting point: at the end there were facial expressions, gestures, noises/sounds (imitative sounds) that could help a man to express something, they could be understood, but they were not language. Monboddo assumed that sounds used by men were already at disposal: there was a group of sounds and men seemed to pick up some of them. Sounds were at disposal of men to communicate, because man is naturally predisposed to imitate noises/verses of birds and animals in general and this is one of the steps that bring men to work on an independent language on their own. Men gradually built an onomatopoeic repertoire (way of representing the phenomenon by means of which the sound of the word is representative of some characteristic features or sounds of the referent). Monboddo made a clear distinction between behaviours based on condition reflexes and those implying an understanding of the relationship between means and them: he was aware of the fact that there is a part of the language that is under mental control and another part that is instinctual. Whenever we speak of language according to his ideas, the definition of language must be clear: since language is not instinctive, language must be the result of habit and in the end habit refers to the idea of something that is based on convention. (Enlightenment: REASON: language couldn't’ be instinctual.) Nowadays our idea of language is different: it cannot be only something under the control of reason, the result of habit: it is multifaceted). It is interesting that Monboddo stressed particularly some aspects that pointed to the fact that language couldn’t be instinctive. This conclusion opens up another issue: if the acquisition is the result of habit, how can people acquire it? Instinctively, in an age in which reason is not completely developed. “The origins of species” by Charles Darwin (1859) is one of the turning points in the history of human thought. It was preceded by some viewpoints that in a way prepared this perspective. Giovan Battista Vico: the relevance of his thought wasn’t immediately acknowledged, only recently he became world famous. The starting point of his philosophy is almost opposite to Descartes’, because he didn’t accept a rationalistic approach to philosophy. Vico’s proposal on the origin of language is quite different from precedence one: he thought that for the first human beings were poets in the original sense of the word: “poet” comes from Ancient Greek: poietes “the one that creates” (poiein). First human beings were creatures who used to create, to represent reality through metaphors. The process of language generation, according to Vico’s perspective, relied on the imagination of people, universal thought, and they derived their representation through iconism, the iconic nature of human representation. This is interesting, because still today there is an important stream of linguists that think that human language is an iconic system. Iconicity is one of the constitutive features of language. (Iconic: Greek → eikon 'image': an iconic system is a system that represents reality; in this case, language is representative of reality, a representation of reality by means of linguistic signs). This is one of the proposals made by Vico: through metaphors, first speakers tried to represent the world around them. Language and thought emerge both ontogenetically (relative to all individuals) and phylogenetically (belonging to the human species), by virtue of an imagination that is polycorporeal, through senses/representation of reality. According to Vico’s theory the human history could be divided into 3 phases: 1- hieroglyphic age: (prelinguistic/mute age): during which human beings communicated to each other by means of gestures/signs, not through signs; 2- heroic age: the age of metaphors, of the primordial languages by human beings, in which reality was represented by means of metaphors, vivid language, images. 3- analytical reasoning and propositional speech: reason overcomes/prevails and people normally speak the language we know. This is a way to explain the way languages developed in history. This perspective on language is based on the assumption that language was not invented/discovered spontaneously. There is a dichotomy between 2 perspectives: the one whose main claim was that language is an invention, created by men, the other one (less common) says that language wasn’t invented by men, but it slowly developed out of non vocal sounds, gestures, prelinguistic/non-systematic sounds which acquired a meaning on convention. Another relevant figure in the history of thoughts that precedes Darwin is Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) wrote about the origin of language in the 18th century: it was a book that provoked reactions and was at the center of vivid and hot discussions → Abhandlung ueber den Ursprung der Sprache (1772) → Treatise on the origin of language. In this essay he made some interesting claims: first of all he doesn’t accept the viewpoint that language was an invention; he he’s rather on the line of reasoning of Descarted. Second relevant point was that the idea that non vocal forms of communication preceded the oral language was also unacceptable. In a way language is not an invention: his claim is that whenever we speak of language we have to intend language as we intend it today (his own times), an already elaborated language, a complex one, not one made up of non vocal sounds or some sort of noises: language is language, already formed.We cannot imagine a transition from some indistinct vocal sounds to a well-formed language: his reason is that because we cannot account 1853-1854: it was based on completely different grounds from those of Darwin’s book: Darwin sailed across the 7 seas, investigating personally different environments, whereas Gobineau was based on other books. We can understand the presence of the ethnographic science: it is almost provocative, because they are meant to be against the ideas held by the societe d’anthropologie. The origin of language was an issue about which 2 societies made opposite claims: one in favour of the new evolutionary viewpoint, the other was more traditional. The creation of the societe de linguistique was in the end to compete against the anthropology one, which represented an attempt at preventing France to be up to date form the scientific viewpoint, because they tried to reject new ideas about the origin of language. It is interesting that Broca sent many letters to Darwin about this theory. Broca was also a neurologist, so his interest in language slowly shifted from the origin of language in general to the narrower center of interest: language as a specific characteristic of the species. Broca was rather prone to see it and he started developing a view point according to which language was rather a specific property of the speaker and this is the reason why he investigated problems at uttering sentences. This is the reason why he could discover the area devoted to some characteristics of the human language related to strange phenomena that couldn’t be explained at that time related to aphasia. Instead of classifying people according to their own languages, move to a specific analysis of the language and he started favouring physical-anthropometric methods, measurements. He started gathering information about the human body, measuring the skull and other criteria. There is a shift from the origin of the language to a more specific and narrower vision of language as a phenomenon that is involved in measurements of some human features. Broca never accepted Darwin’s theory, he was rather a follower of Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck (1744-1829): he tried to explain the variation of species as a gradual mutation by the scent of modification: one can explain the fact that many different species exist. Darwin’s viewpoint was that differentiation takes place because there is a natural selection: it is not a gradual modification. This is the method by means of which different species come to be. Species can disappear, because they don’t survive because of natural selection, they are not equipped to survive in some environments, in specific circumstances. The ideas by Darwin were well received in Italy and Germany and they were well accepted by the first indoeuropeanists (the first to propose Indo European as a language family was Sir William Jones, a lawyer interested in Oriental languages, in 1786 he gave a speech at the Asian Society in which he, for the first time proposed that sanskrit, latin, greek, german languages belonged to the same family, languages that derived from one single language that disappeared. He proposed a genealogical relationship between languages where they look like each other because they derive from one language. August Schleicher (1821-1868) in Germany, the first great indoeuropeanist, accepted in 1848 Darwin’sproposal about language, because the thought that human beings derived from lower beings. He was a botanist, who studied plants, flowers: language was a living organism, so language as a natural organism with a life of its own: birth, growth, maturity and decline. There is an interesting fact: in 1863 Schleicher’s paper on “Darwin’s theory and linguistics” which was translated into French and the preface of this translation was written by Michelle Breal, a famous linguist, the elected and permanent secretary of the societe de linguistique de Paris. This is another break in the history of the difficult relationship between the 2 societies and the fact that in the end they converged into a common position. The fight between the 2 societies in a way came to its end. The consequence was that another society was founded: la societe de philology in 18609, because the founder of the societe de linguistique couldn’t accept the fact that Darwin’s ideas were at least worth considering, left the old society to found a new one against Darwin’s position. At this point language was seen as a perfect, complete fact. It was again a subject of the scientific enquiries and the ban had no reason to exist any longer, because this ban couldn’t be taken seriously: language was a subject that was worth investigating again. Darwin was a biologist and looking at the various differences between the various species he came to revolutionary conclusions: species are the product of a natural selection and man in the end is a particularly refined development of apes. The origin of language is explicitly dealt with in Darwin’s book: chapter 7 is devoted to the “diversities of instincts and other mental qualities of animals within the same class”: he discovered that biological species were subject to mutation. It was crucially against the traditional aristotelian ideas (immutability of forms and structures of nature/history of species: the different species existed from the origin, it was inconceivable to think that species could change so that species could die out and another could develop out of another one). There is a scholar whose figure close to Darwin: Alfred Russell Wallace (1823-1913) → he was developing a theory very similar to the one proposed by Darwin and it is proved that Darwin was in contact with him and influenced by his ideas. Wallace thought that the higher human faculties (and language is one of them) had no material origin, he couldn’t think of language as a product, a result of an evolution. Another famous scholar of that time, Friedrich Max Mueller (1823-1900), who was rather superficial as a scholar, in fact he never wrote anything that is nowadays considered as a milestone; he was a strong opponent to Darwin. He agreed with him that brutes have certain common endowments with men (idea that men could develop out of some brutes), but language could only be considered a distinctive human attribute. Language is a barrier between men and brutes. (Language: Rubicon, border of Roman Empire, Julius Caesar was banned from Rome but crossed it and went back). There is a gap between animals and humans that couldn’t be bridged: there was no chance for animals to produce something that could develop to perfect language. What is interesting is that among his bizarre ideas that Chinese and English could have a common ancestor, Darwin was interested in these ideas. He started to realize that even languages can share common ancestry. The basic idea that Darwin could grasp was that he accepted the idea that through modification in languages there is an evolution, so languages can also develop as human beings, living creatures do. He could already imagine the biological species descending from a common ancestor. There is a passage in a letter he wrote in 1837, shortly before setting off in his voyage around the world (trying to investigate different living creatures in their own environment, gathering a large amount of data that allowed him to formulate the idea of the evolution of species) to his sister Caroline: he wrote about John Frederick Herschel (1792- 1871) and his ideas of chronology of the Old Testament being wrong, (Herschel was an astronomer that proposed a correction of the Gregorian calendar), he proposed a new chronology of the history of mankind, but his proposal was never accepted for some technical reasons: revising the chronology of the history of men implied to revise the chronology of the Old and New Testament. He was in contact with Charles Darwin and it is interesting because he wrote to Darwin that he didn’t believe the chronology of the Old and New Testament were correct, but his solution was wrong. The crucial idea in Darwin’s letter is the spreading and the division/separation of different languages is crucial to identify the different ages. At that time there were people who thought that the chronology from the appearance of man on Earth and those days only lasted 6000 years, which is almost impossible. The separation of languages of the world was seen as an evidence in order to achieve a more detailed knowledge of the chronology of mankind. There is also an interesting parallel between language and geology: geology was one of the fields of investigation in which the idea of uniformitarianism was firstly conjectured. He was in contact with Charles Lyell (1797- 1875) (tried to bridge the gap between our knowledge and the reality, excluding God’s interventions in the history of Earth): in a letter he wrote that to use fragments of languages employed every day as evidence to their history. Lyell wrote a section about the similarity between geological, biological and linguistic change: this is very interesting, because this metaphor had to be retaken much later, there are other scholars who believed that there was no parallel between language and geology, but this is an idea that was constant in the view of Darwin’s theory about the origin of languages. There is another passage in which Darwin expresses some ideas about Muller’s essay and he wrote to Asa Gray (1810-1888), a botanist, that he was negative about his ideas on language. The fact that he hints at the truth of the Tower of Babel, so he prefered to explain the presence on Earth of different languages giving credits to the theory of the Tower of Babel instead of looking for a rational and logical explanation. In 1871 Darwin wrote another book, in 2 volumes, in which he tried to formulate in a more complete and rigorous way what he had already expressed in his “Origin of species”: “The descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex”. The crucial point was to show what was difficult to accept by other people, the ones who thought that the Bible was a reliable source and the purpose was to show that there was no fundamental difference between men and the higher mammals in their mental faculties. He brought together a huge number of empirical data concerning the behaviours of non human primates and of other vertebrates in order to claim that there was no difference, he presented his biological perspective and his evolutionary interpretation, but it was not well received at the time. This the central figures in the history of linguistic thought of the 20th century and he is responsible for one revolution: language is one characteristic of all human beings and language faculty belongs to the biological endowment all human beings have. Human beings possess a language acquisition device, by means of which we acquire a language. 1957 → Chomsky published “Syntactic structures'': the generative grammar model was proposed, a rudimental model at that time, nowadays it is much more refined and abstract. This is the model that prevailed in the second half of the 20th century and in a way he pushed away all the other perspectives, since one of the features of this model is innativism (biological endowment). The interesting thing is that according to Chomsky’s perspective language belongs to our genetic endowment, and since biologists, scholars deepened the knowledge of our biological endowment, it was during those investigations that the so called FOXP2 was introduced (is the acronym of Forkhead box protein P2, which is a protein, which are macromolecules composed of 1 or more long chains of amino acid residue; this protein, in human beings, is encoded by the FOXP2 gene and is part of Forkhead box family of transcription factors, proteins that regulate gene expressions by binding to DNA. FoxP2 can be found in the brain, lungs, digestive tract: FOXP2 is responsible for the transcription of language, related to the linguistic factors in humans. Investigating the biological endowment of humans, the point mutation in the FOXP2 coding sequence, a transcription factor was identified as contributing to an inheritartive speech language disorder: it is clear it is related to the human language, so it is interesting that this perspective could bring to our attention the fact that language is not only a cultural fact, but it has very strict relations with our genetics. One of the consequences of this is that scholars possess good evidence of the evolutionary, developmental and real time role of FOXP2 in vocal learners, especially in humans and in songbirds. Another fact that is highly interesting is that some derived variants of FOXP2 have also been found in neanderthal man. (Homo sapiens and neanderthal man shared a variant of FOXP2; the neanderthal man was able to produce an abstract thought). Survey of the historical perspective on the most relevant thought about the origin of language: - experimental part of history → several cases of linguistic deprivation were experimented - Enlightenment + 19-20th century → contribute differently to the issue This is the historical frame of this issue. There are current perspectives that require a more sophisticated approach, that have to focus on some specific points: one of the issues was “is the origin of the human language a factor related to an invention or is it the result of imitation?”: this is the cultural side of the story, one point that is still debated. The second point that is as interesting as the cultural one is the natural/biological one, related to the physiology of our body. It depends on the physiology of the vocal apparatus. (Common hill myna - merlo indiano: it is clear that this myna possesses something that allows it to utter human sounds. We know that parrots can reproduce sounds, but this myna is more impressive. The human language was only possible when people got a particular physical situation and developed some particular feature in the throat, phonetic apparatus that allowed human beings to utter perceptible sounds. Reproducing some sounds is not a sufficient condition: you have to associate sounds to meaning, otherwise we don’t communicate: physical and semantic/abstract part. Even animals in principle can reproduce under specific conditions human sounds, but one could hardly claim that this myna speaks: it simply replicates sound. The crucial point is that we don’t exactly know the moment and under which conditions this reproduced sounds became something meaningful. The interaction between a speaker and an interlocutor became language, not simple reproduction of sounds. We know that the human language involves several mechanisms: there is a component that involves the social behaviour of primates, the communication among animals, in particular some animals (mammals, but not only since we know FOXP2 is shared by songbirds, so songbirds can provide us with relevant information), we know the development of language in children is essential to understand language in general, the diversity of languages on Earth was a crucial point that changed perspectives, a learning theory about how human beings learn to learn, acquire new notions. There are also the anatomical and genetic correlates of language competence: humans cannot speak if they don’t possess the vocal apparatus that enables them to speak. Another factor to be taken is the theoretical approaches to cultural evolution: we understand how language could develop since scholars discovered the significance of the FOXP2 and they are trying to provide a unified theory about the origin of language, but how it developed from animal communication remains one of the most challenging questions . What was crucial in determining the line of reason was Chomsky’s idea about language as a species property, biologically isolated and instinctively acquired among humans. This idea leads to the question: how language could have orizon from Darwinian evolution. It is difficult to combine these 2 perspectives. According to linguistics that thinks that language is innative, naturally belongs to the biological endowment of humans, children have an innate expectation of universal grammar (the idea that the core of any language is universal grammar made of a few simple principles around which there is only one core grammar, independently of their differences. How can a child acquire a language given the poverty of the stimulus? This is another crucial point. - speculative/bookish approach - field work (autoptically: to look/see something with one’s own eyes) Both perspectives (language as created or came to be abruptly) are not completely wrong, but we have to point out to some caveats: there are 2 things that have to be taken into consideration: one the one hand there is something with a symbolic content,a cultural result, but on the other hand language is something physical, biological, physically produced, so there are 2 perspectives. Language is frequently associated with communication, something that serves as a tool to communicate and one of the crucial points is to combine the long trajectory that goes from the homo habilis to the homo sapiens sapiens, the one who started speaking with a fully developed language. One of the crucial approaches is to be able to combine the development of human language as a symbolic and cultural factor with the development that brings the homo habilis to the stage of the homo sapiens sapiens. Language evolved together with social organisation and especially with ?? structures. One of the most accurate attempts at describing the development that brings to language as we intend it nowadays is the explanation of language beyond communication, language is something that relates to communication but it is not to be understood as unique to communication. On the one hand we have to look at aspects of the evolution of the communication of Homininae and on the other hand the way language develops in its full complexity. We think that the origin of language is to be settled in the stage of Homininae (it is a term proposed in 1948 and it is the one that replaced the old word, Hominid, the old definition for the group consisting of all modern and extinct Great Apes. Nowadays anthropologist, paleontologists speak of Hominini, that includes the extant genera Homo (Humans), Pan (Chimpanzees, bonobos, with the exclusion of gorillas, which are a different branch for some genetic reasons - postures, gestures). If we take a look at language from this perspective we have to pay attention in particular to 2 things, difficult to solve: who was the first who used a fully complex language? Probably the homo sapiens sapiens. When? We have to take into account the physiology of the speaker, who could utter sentences, sounds, meaningful words because they were provided with an apparatus that enabled them to speak. The second aspect concerns not the phonetic apparatus of men, but what a language is. There are several degrees of linguistic complexity: whenever we use the word “language”, we always refer to a fully developed language; language is something by means of which we can express ourselves, every thought/feeling/idea, but one of the crucial features of the human language is the metalinguistic function of language (Jakobson): human language is the only linguistic code that has as its content the language itself, there isn’t any other linguistic code among animals that can do it. Whenever we speak of human language we refer to the human language in its full complexity. There is another crucial feature: recursion → ricorsività: it is the application of rules to the result of the same rule applied immediately before (dente dent-ist-a dentist-ic-o: derivational rule, to the first result we can apply the same rule to get to a new result). These two features are exclusive to the human language. productive. Coordinated with respiration: dividing into closes/Sentences is related to respiration. 3°: 1. coordinating phonetics and articulation is a natural process of our body, but there are some brain diseases that prevent this from happening. 2. doubly compositional system: significance and signifiee, + productivity. 2. / The language we speak is the combination of these points, but the crucial characteristic of human language is recursion, but the question that paleontologist, anthropologists ask is “what was the initial state in which speech emergence happened? How was it possible?” These are part of the pull and push approach (2010), proposed by Jean-Luc Schwartz. The model is divided into function and substance: it is based on evolutionary theory and presupposes a preliminary state, process of generating genetic variants, a process of selection, a process of reproduction. In this context this approach emphases the content of the selection process (which are the best variants) and the question (of the pull) is “what is the function of the language?”: it was a secondary specification retained by the evolutionary selection process. (We tend to think that language has a primary function) According to this perspective language is a secondary result, it could be considered as a by-product of a process of selection. In the end language itself could be the result of the process of exaptation. This perspective is under discussion, but would be a sort of revolution, because language would be something that developed in the secondary moment. It would be an interesting finding of the human beings to realize that they could use something that was designed for something else in order to communicate. The pull approach pulls away language from a major functional objective, which remains to be determined, that is: if language is a secondary development, what was the primary purpose of language? The push approach focuses on the preliminary state. The main properties should be determined as much as possible. In this case the question is: “what existed before language?” The pull approach tries to determine the secondary function of language; the push approach tries to determine what existed before language; what kind of non-human pre-language might have provided the prerequisites of language. The push approach is set on language’s continuity with the function rather than on the discontinuity. Language in this respect is not seen as something that developed out of the blue, but it is something that refined in a way preexisting conditions. This model is usually represented as a computer model, in which there is a hardware and a software component: a function and the substance that play some role in the way it functions. One of the crucial methods was to use the so called FOXP2 and it was individuated as the relevant factor because there was a British family in 1990 that showed several problems not only whenever they had to speak but even when they had to do some gestures and some facial movements. In a famous paper wrote by Gopnik, the result of this investigation was not only this family had morphosyntactic problems affecting all the members, but they also showed some difficulties with mastication, so they had problems with their mandible (buccofacial dyspraxia: bad action). It was evident that the problem wasn’t simply related to speaking, but it was a more general problem concerning the capacity to use the face in the part that is involved when they had to speak or eat. It was relatively easy to draw the conclusion that this was a general problem, related to the fact that they had a deficit involving the FOXP2 (factor that transcribes the linguistic information). It confirmed the fact that this FOXP2, providing that these genes were also present in songbirds, that this gene was responsible for/had an influence in sound learning and production. Probably it is not the only gene responsible for the production for grammar and production of sounds, but this is an interesting fact (there is an effort to search other genes responsible for human language). In a way this is the hardware. What is the prerequisite for cognitive function (software) is a rich topic, because cognitive environment and all the facts that have to do with brain and cognition should have played a crucial part in the emergence of language, either because is provided the minimal condition and thus in a way they establish the premises for language, or because they constitute the constraints around which language is built, they put some constraints on shaping the language: mankind, human beings developed a language according to their own cognitive capacities and functions. If we could discover a distance civilization, it would be interesting for many reasons, such as the fact that we could be in the position to compare our languages with a non human language, provided that we can imagine there are grown ups with whom we can have an intercourse, communicate, discuss, talk to; in that case we would be in the condition to try and see no what grounds and according to what principle their language(s) is/are structured. We have our language based on our own capacities, abilities and mental structures, but what are the conditions, the prerequisite in order to speak according to this software/our cognitive function? One that is able to speak, has to be able to hear. The human auditory system is very sophisticated, but it is not the most sophisticated among all the animals on earth. There are many animals that have different and more sophisticated auditory apparatus. In this case all the evidence suggests that continuity is the rule rather than the exception; it means that whenever language started developing, the creatures who were developing the language were able to hear. The second point is another crucial factor that is losing ground in recent years: one must produce sounds with the vocal tract. There are some problems, because in this case we know, we have evidence from different world’s languages that a vocal tract is not necessary: there are sounds that are not produced in the vocal tract. The oldest document for languages in general comes from China/Near East: it is a written document that goes back to the 4th millennium B.C. Another famous document is an inscription from a city in Serbia (Vincia) that goes back to the 7th millennium; the most famous place in which the oldest written documentation has been found is in Turkey, in Gobekli Tepe: the inscription there goes back to the 11th millennium B.C, but we cannot read them. The problem is that since we cannot read those inscriptions, we don’t know anything about the language and the language in which sounds without the vocal tract occur in language that have very recent documentation, if any, we don’t know the origin of those sounds. It means that we don’t know if these sounds produced without any vocal tract are residual (they are what is preserved, so they are an element of continuity) or if they are an innovation (they could be in principle). It is difficult to decide, but the thing is that those sounds occur in languages for example in the African continent and it is difficult to evaluate them from an historical viewpoint. This second condition is under discussion. There are other features that have to be taken into account when dealing with the origin of language from the viewpoint of the push model (software). Speech and language presuppose the solving of complex problems related to the matching/superposition of actions and perceptions in order to understand other people’s actions: this point is the consequence of one crucial discovery of recent times: mirror neurons (discovered by Rizzolati), their discovery is one of the most important discoveries of the last 50 years in psychology. It was crucial in understanding the way people communicate, not only as far as human beings are concerned, but also some primates. This is a crucial discovery because this is what brings communication to an abstract and symbolic level, that is one of the crucial properties of a fully developed language. The vast majority of languages of the world have 3 point vowels, which form a triangle, within which all the other vowels are situated (vocalic triangle: i, a, u). i = high anterior unrounded vowel a = low anterior / central unrounded vowel u = high posterior rounded vowel As a matter of fact the structure of these 3 sounds corresponds to maximal contrast within an acoustic perceptual space. Especially after a post structural period, during the 50s, there were several attempts in order to ascertain whether it was possible to find languages with 2 vowel phonological systems, but there is only 1 language in which apparently one could use a phonological system with only 2 vowels. This maximal contrast within this acoustic perceptual space is a description of all the acoustic possibilities of this vocal tract as a function of the movements of 3 elements: tongue, mandible, lips (ee have to add to that the amplitude of their projection (protrusion of lips: if a sound is rounded, it presupposes the protrusion of lips). Independently of these findings, obtained by means of anthropological, biological and physiological researches, were also predicted by the parameter proposed in 1960 by Gunnar Fant. There is another relevant distinction: anteriority, posteriority → inside the vocal tract there is the constriction controlled by the movements of the blade or back of the tongue, that divides the vocal tracts into 2 parts: anterior and posterior, but this division corresponds not necessarily to an anatomic division, it is a simple subdivision of the vocal tract. There is no anatomic implication. Checking the inventories of the phonological systems of the majority of the world languages, we know that phonological systems privilege anteriority over posteriority: the anterior part of the oral-pharangeal cavity is more utilized than the posterior part. We don’t know if there are some physiological reasons for it. Since scholars had noticed that human beings share many of these characteristics with other mammals and that the features of the vocal tract and the articulatory model didn’t significantly change overtime, one of the most important results achieved in these researches is that it is not in the geometry of the vocal tract, not in the displacement and disposition of different body organs that scholars must look for the causes of the speech and language evolution or in the fact that great apes lack of speech, even if they share organs, but rather in the control of the vocal tract. There are some consequences that should be observed, for instance a small pharynx if compared to the oral cavity is not a handicap for producing the vowels of the world’s languages. Another tradition claims that turned out to be incorrect is: neanderthals didn’t produce the maximal contrast among vowels was not for the reason claimed by some scholars that they were unable to do that because of the lack of the larynx descent, because anatomically speaking, there is no reason to refer to any larynx descent during evolution, because there was no larynx descent (it was do to the verticalization). Current work about the origin of language is focusing on the periferal, sensorial constraints that regulate speech production and all the control capacity, since it seems to be much more relevant than the presence of the hyoid bone or the larynx descent. So if the control of the vocal tract articulation is so crucial, what do we know about that? One of the crucial results is that so far the areas concerning speech production and suction, mastication, deglutition (activities connected to it) were impermeable to the speech production, but in fact they are not. Speech production disorders are frequently associated with problems with suction, mastication and deglutition. Nowadays it is a commonly shared knowledge that the speech production and other activities involving the same elements (tongue, lips, teeth), must be connected. It is more than likely that the process during which the human beings develop capacities, abilities to suck, masticate and deglutate were concomitant factors to the development of language. One of the observations usually made is that at birth liquid food is ingested to the suction, swallowing reflex, regulated by the brain. The anatomical structure of newborns with the orizontalized velum, a cranialized larynx and glottis in contact with the nasal phase is helpful for the development of capacity of controlling the vocal tract. A model concentrating on speech production can only account for speech production, so it is rather limited. A model that explains which humans started sucking, masticating, swallowing and at the same explains also speech actions, actions of the same body organs involved in speech production is more general, explains two processes intimately connected. One can put forward the hypothesis that during the course of phylogeny and ontogeny speech was acquired phylogenetically and is acquired ontogenetically by a process of specialization of mastication and deglutition actions, but more importantly, also by processes of reorganization of their control. This is the most recent and convincing model to explain 2 processes that apparently are very different and without relation, but in reality strictly close to one another. Speech production is a byproduct of the process by which children and humans acquired the mastication and deglutition processes. The issue includes the fact that the different sounds uttered in a speech production are characterized by their compositionality: there is a vocalic triangle that is almost universal. Even among consonants there are sounds which are more frequent than others, such as k or t, a sound like bh (bilabial trill) is not frequent. If we look at the structure of syllables, we see that there are some structures that are more frequent than others, i.e. syllables that possess the structure CV (consonant + vowel) are common among the world’s languages, are one of the more frequent. Syllables like VCC are relatively rare. A useful model has to explain this fact, account for such phenomena, and the major theoretical proposal so far is a model proposed at the end of the 90s and is called the model “Frame then Content”; this sequence of words refers to the sequence of the processes that should explain the way speech actions take place. First of all there is a frame, then there is the content. It was proposed by MacNeilage and Devis (1998). This theoretical model attributes cicles of mandibular oscillation (the mandible osselates) and this oscillation of the mandible plays a fundamental role in the first stages of language, both in phylogeny and in ontogeny. During the first months of life, the child tries to explore and starts babbling: it is a crucial exploration. Around the 6th or 7th month old, they start the so called babbling phase, they start coordinating the source of their voice: it is an attempt at adjusting all the vocal variation they can produce, they seem to explore their vocal tract to produce sounds. They try to coordinate the cyclical movement of the mandible and by means of this they modulate the sound. Real observations make it possible that they start spreading the vocal space and alternate sounds, but the basic vowel is “a”. When they close lips, the tongue is pushed forward and with the lips in high position they also produce other vowels. In a way closing the lips, lowering or putting the tongue in a high position, they produce preconsonantal sounds. The tube by which the air goes through is restricted, so they start producing syllables, start combining sounds (vowels and consonants) and they can also produce other protosyllables (bdabda). CV is one of the most frequent structure, but in this case there are 2 consonants, a bilabial and a dental plosives and this is not very common, so in the history of the majority of the world’s languages, clusters like this at the beginning of the word is not very common, but it seems to be ontogenetically common. This is interesting because there are many African languages belonging to different linguistic families in which there are a nasal appendix at the beginning of the word; from theoretical viewpoints, phonologists have always had troubles with this particular sound, because they are thought to be unnatural, but if we compare them with this consonantal plaster, in the end they are not unnatural. This is one of the points where we see a little discrepancy between theory and practice: we see that newborns utter sounds like theory is based on kinship. Some ideas were proposed by linguist Derek Bickerton and the evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, whose theory is called “social brain hypothesis” is interesting because it correlates the brain size to the group size in primates and the predictive correlations to fossil hominins. The crucial point of this hypothesis is that the social group of hominins was large according to the big size of the brain: there is a correlation between the brain and the quantity of people gathering together in a group: the bigger the brain, the bigger the community. In a group there are always social implications, organization. From the linguistic perspective, this model is based on Bickerton’s theory, which is based on studies of communities of creoles (language of children whose parent first language was a pidgin) and pidgins (varieties that emerge in situations of masters and slaves for instance, it was a variety with an incomplete grammar and the social environment is a dominant group over another group of people). This vision of the relationship between pidgin and creole is what Bickerton suggested, which is nowaday generally accepted. This proposal also has evolutionary implications; the interesting thing is that creole rapidly stabilised, became a fully developed language. The problem is how to explain/account for the rapidly rapid transition from a proto- language (which has 2 meanings: usually it refers to a reconstructed language from which other languages developed, not historically attested - protoindoeuropean , fully developed language / the stage that precedes a fully developed language),to a fully developed language (we refer to a language in which the complex syntax not only shows a fixed word order, but more importantly a core morphology - phenomenon of agreement subject-verb, subject-adjective, phenomenon of depency). This model has 3 stages: 1- Signifying revolution: this is a stage in which hominins, presumably homines sapientes were capable of using words and therefore to classify things. This stage is a stage in which there is a cultural development, the possibility of sharing mates, which is one of the crucial features of this stage. (language evolves with social evolution) It means that we have a stage of biological evolution accompanied by a stage of cultural evolution; in general there is the tendency to juxtapose these two aspects, but in this case they are accompanied by each other. In this period there is the production of stone tools. The linguistic stage is represented by a sentence like “Ig meat”, an example built to illustrate that particular stage: in this case we wouldn’t call it a sentence, it could possibly correspond to different sentences, i.e. IG (I’m) eating meat, IG is hunting something to eat, IG is being eaten. It is open to several different interpretations, the content/meaning is not clear, transparent. In this stage we have a protolanguage in the sense of a language that precedes the stage of a fully developed language. There is a proto-kinship in the sense that there is a mates sharing and kinship is recognized. We have words and symbolic communication. According to Dumbar’s social brain hypothesis, this stage is also the stage of grooming (technical term taken from ethology - looking for insects, fleas that are hiding in the hair), which is another phenomenon that gave way to speech or gestures and some forms of language would emerge. Grooming among monkeys is a way of establishing a friendly relation between 2 monkeys; in a way it is a precondition for having a language development. 2- Syntactic revolution: this is the stage that derives from stage 1. It is characterized by a rudimentary language (proto language from the first stage became a rudimentary language). The proto kinship of the first stage became a rudimentary kinship. Language develops a juxtaposition; us vs. them and therefore an us vs. them even in kinship; there are exchanges and one of the social consequences of this is that incest started being avoid. Usually this stage is represented from an anthropological viewpoint by the so-called Homo heidelbergensis (sapiens) (Heidelberg in Baden-Württemberg, 600.000 to 100.000 years B.C.). This stage is linguistically represented by examples such as “Ig eat meat”: we have a form that is a complete sentence. Men have the ability to formulate sentences (without morphology) and therefore they were supposed to be able to recognise mother’s brothers/sisters (kinship terminology is very complex and refined: there are languages in which there are different terms for maternal and paternal relatives): groups that stayed together counted no more than 100-120 people and sharing of mates in this case could have as a consequence exogamy (possibility of having marriage outside the group in which a person lives). Exogamy seems to be one of the necessary components of this stage. The related increase in brain size suggests a level of intentionality: many activities were voluntarily performed and intentionality was a relevant feature of this stage. There was also a degree of communication enabling the transmission of knowledge about relevant factors, such as resources (water, hunt), population and kinship over geographical distances: this is a huge quantity of pieces of information that are relevant in an organized lifestyle. 3- Symbolic revolution: both in language and in symbol behaviours in general. (Symbol: something that is used in place of something else, with a particular value/meaning, it is one of the highest levels of human activity). The sentence associated with this stage is “Ig eats meat”: in the end there is morphology, agreement, so it means that this is the stage of a fully developed syntax, meaning that there must be manifestations of art, of religion, of music. In this stage there is a complete movement within the families, gender roles assigned: a fully structured society. CONCLUSION: language became complex because of the evolution of narrative: storytelling became central, the possibility of communicating legends, myths and everything that was relevant from a cultural point of view. Language was designed to express all of this. Far reaching hypothesis, exclusively based on cultural and anthropological context, where the relevant elements are labelled as “narrative”, one of the crucial functions of the language. Another relevant point is the fact that such perspective presupposes in a way the acceptance of the premises of the so called “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis” [Edward Sapir (1884-1939), linguist in anthropology, investigating languages of the American Natives - Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897- 1941)] (hypothesis: linguistic relativity - word chosen because of the relativity theory proposed for the first time in 1905 by Einstein (1879-1955) - as a consequence of everything being relative, Whorf proposed that the structure of different languages shapes the way their speakers perceive and conceptualize the world. Usually we describe the language as it is, the world is independent from our view of the world itself, se simply describe it by means of the human language; according to Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and the linguistic relativity, things function the other way around: there is no objective world out there to be described, but the structure of different languages describe the world differently, because what is perceived and conceptualized strictly depends on the language we use. There is a debate still going, but usually this theory is rejected by the community of linguists, however it is still alive because there are some things in it that are appealing and the traditional way of thinking of languages as independent from the world they describe and represent is not completely satisfactory). If we accept this theory, then narratives create the world they describe at the same time they describe it. The point of departure is that it is consider that there are languages that are very rich and there are society that are fully/highly developed; the point that he was not sure about was the fact that even societies that at the time weren’t considered fully developed, the so called “primitive societies” used highly complex languages; the question that Burner asked himself was “How is it possible to have a highly structured language and a poorly structured society?”. This question brought him to develop his own theory: narrative is the crucial point, it is a function of all languages. “Narrative” is the label under which several (spiritual) manifestations are concerned: religion, mythology, decoration, symbolism… some of these imply the use of a full language. → Case illustrated by Barnard Language spoken in Northern Cape, South Africa, |Xam, |: dental non pneumonic sound: this sound is uttered without breathing, The case study is taken from the |Xam language. It was spoken until the dawn of the 20th century: at the beginning of the 20th century it died out. This language is no longer used, there are no native speakers. In the 19th century the |Xam numbered a few thousands individuals scattered and living in small communities in a vast territory: this seems to be one of the preconditions that led to the extinction of the language. We don’t know how many speakers there once were, but we know that there are no native speakers now. This language is very rich and is very complex, as many of the languages spoken in the area. This language has verbal prefixes and suffixes and at least 14 different ways to make a plural, referring to the fact that usually the sub saharan/african languages have the so called nominal classes (7 singular + 7 plural) (ex. swahili: ki-tabu vi-tabu → libro/i) (opposed to the additive morphological - book/book-s). (libro, pg 58). Wilhelm Heinrich Immanuel Bleek (1827-1875) was a german linguist, interested in ancient biblical Hebrew and African languages; spent a lot of time there to collect materials. with other aspects of symbolic culture → Definition of culture accepted by anthropologists: culture is a shared system of symbols, so “symbolic culture” is a redundant definition. Arbitrary signs and the emergence of language He quoted Bickerton’s remarks about the inquiry into the origin of language, which is not just a general question. For linguists the crucial question is not only how and when language emerges in humans and not in other species, but why this system (different grammars) of the human language took the form that it did. One of the issues discussed by Chomsky in his first contributions was the fact that in principle you can have an infinite number of grammars, but in fact we only have a limited number of grammars. But why? This used to be a crucial question. In recent years this question lost its relevance and nowadays the practitioners of formal grammar think that this question has to be formulated in a milder way. Buchat investigates 2 properties of languages from which many other properties derive: the Saussurean way of interpreting signs and the type-recursion. Under the hypothesis that these are the key properties for the emergence of language (the ability of forming signs and no other linguistic property derives from it, there are some crucial questions): PAG 408 → go back to biology. His answer is: “Since we are looking at a cognitive phenomenon, we must take into consideration properties of the human brain that differ from those of the brains of closely related primates, because this is an indication that those properties appeared after the split from our common ancestor and may therefore account for the language capacity of humans.” We are able to answer because these answers provide us a picture that came into being after the humans split from their common ancestor. This is the biological foundation of the language. The difference is in the way some human neuronal systems function. “Representation” is used as an "activated mental state" without any implication of intentionality. - what Buchard says is that the concept of representation goes back to the metalinguistic function: ability of representing something - There is an internal system with no connection with the external world and this is at the origin of the capability of people to create images. He put forward the hypothesis that language is a sort of neurological side effect. Since we are looking at a cognitive phenomenon, we must take into consideration features, properties, characteristics of the human brain that differ from those of closely related primates, so that we can establish a moment in which, after the split from our common ancestors we have 2 branches: humans developing the ability of speaking and primates closely related to man but who couldn’t learn how to speak, didn’t develop the faculty of language. They are able to activate a mental state without an implication of intentionality. There are 2 relevant notions: - emulation: fact that some non human species can copy a model’s choice of object, it is a phenomenon by means of which non human simply reply actions; - imitation: human reproduce the perceived motor action of a model Apes replicate what is immediately perceptible; human neuronal systems are activated in absentia, without any perception: the difference is that humans don’t have to see or to hear an action for these neurons to react. if a monkey sees a man jumping, it could emulate the jumping man, but it won’t do it by itself; a man can jump imitating an action he had seen in the past. This is what brought scientists to conceptualize it as OBS (Offline Brain System): you simply have an internal system functioning even when there is no relation with the external world, it can reproduce reactions to the world even when there is no perception of the world, because language functions this way. The offline activation of certain systems of neurons endows humans with a novel representational capacity. An individual can recall and imitate a representation, but not a reaction (the activation of a neuronal system by an immediate input). For purely mental constructions (with no sensory input/Stimulus) is found in many activities of the human brain, so it means that humans developed this capacity over time. This capacity of adaptation, often called Human-Specific Adaptive Suite across many domains and involves qualitatively huge differences from species that are closely related to us: it means that even if apes are close to us from a genetic point of view and we share some common ancestors, humans developed in a way that differs from the Great Apes. There are some human specific cognitive traits: 1. Language: signs and syntactic combinations 2. Imitation 3. Advanced Theory of Mind 4. Detachment from immediate situation, episodic memory (of noncurrent scenes and events) There are also neurological traits: 5. Large brain 6. ApoE4 (apolipoprotein E4, provides better synaptic interactions) and other alleles with effects on language 7. Plasticity of the brain for several functions 8. Offline Brain Systems (“offline” activations, inhibiting input or output) There are other factors: Human-specific physiological trait: 9. Bipedalism: great achievement that is crucial Human-specific behavioral trait: 10. Long dependency during infancy These traits differentiate humans and non humans. The results of this are: Mind of theory and language. There are at least 3 levels of analysis involved in this: functional behavioral, neurological, and genetics. Bouchard’s hypothesis is that the neurological innovation that brought about the OBSs constitutes the underlying factor that triggered the accumulation of functional changes between human and nonhuman minds, and that this arose in an evolutionary manner in human biology, so what distinguishes us from nonhuman primates is that we have this offline brain capacity. p. 415 how can some sounds acquire the status of meaningful elements and how can they become part of the grammar. The conditions that enable some sounds to combine together and become words: if we didn’t possess a particular phonetic apparatus, we couldn’t speak at all. There is the misunderstanding that the biological side is the only side that counts, but it is not so. How grammar developed is not interesting, because the point of transition from a non meaningful to a meaningful stage is what is crucial to understand the birth of language. When syntax developed, grammar was already there. p. 441 Many scholars have tried to detect the origin of language investigating in languages such as creole and pidgins → they differ crucially. They don’t preserve traits of the protolanguage, they are languages. ex nihilo: from nothing, there are bases that influence the way they develop. We can’t imagine a protolanguage from pidgin and creole.