Yves here. While this article on the acquisition of human language, I am not sure about the proposition that only humans have syntax, as in can assemble communication units in a way that conveys more complex meanings.<\/p>\n
Consider the crow, estimated at having the intelligence of a seven or eight year old. There are many studies of crows telling each other about specific people, demonstrated by a masked experimenter catching a crow (which they really do not like), then being hectored by crows who were not party to the original offending conduct:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
So how does one crow tell another crow that a particular human visage is a bad person? Perhaps one crow sees another crow scold a particular person. But particular masks elicit consistent crow catcalls for many years after the offending behavior. It still might be very good memories plus observation by their peers. But the detail from this study suggests a more complex mechanism:<\/p>\n
To test his [Professor John Marzluff of the University of Washington\u2019s] theory, two researchers, each wearing an identical \u201cdangerous\u201d mask, trapped, banded and released 7 to 15 birds at five different sites near Seattle.<\/p>\n
To determine the impact of the capture on the crow population, over the next five years, observations were made about the birds\u2019 behaviour by people walking a designated route that included a trapping site.<\/p>\n
These observers either wore a so-called neutral mask or one of the \u201cdangerous\u201d masks worn during the initial trapping event.<\/p>\n
Within the first two weeks after trapping, an average of 26 per cent of crows encountered scolded the person wearing the dangerous mask.<\/p>\n
Scolding, says Mazluff, is a harsh alarm kaw directed repeatedly at the threatening person accompanied by agitated wing and tail flicking. It is often accompanied by mobbing, where more than one crow jointly scolds.<\/p>\n
After 1.25 years, 30.4 per cent of crows encountered by people wearing the dangerous mask scolded consistently, while that figure more than doubled to around 66 per cent almost three years after the initial trapping.<\/p>\n
Marzluff says the area over which the awareness of the threat had spread also grew significantly during the study. Significantly, during the same timeframe, there was no change in the rate of scolding towards the person wearing the neutral mask.<\/p>\n
He says their work shows the knowledge of the threat is passed on between peers and from parent to child\u2026.<\/p>\n
Marzuff says he had thought the memory of the threat would lose its potency, but instead was \u201cincreasing in strength now five years later\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey hadn\u2019t seen me for a year with the mask on and when I walked out of the office they immediately scolded me,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
In another example (I can\u2019t readily find it in the archives) a city in Canada that was bedeviled by crows decided to schedule a huge cull. They called in hunters. They expected to kill thousands, even more.<\/p>\n
They only got one. The rest of the crows immediately started flying higher than gun range.<\/p>\n
Again, how did the crows convey that information to each other, and so quickly too?<\/p>\n
The extend of corvid vocalization could support more complex messaging. From A Murder of Crows:<\/p>\n
Ravens can in fact produce an amazing variety of sounds. Not only can they hum, sing, and utter human words: they have been recorded duplicating the noise of anti-avalanche explosions, down to the \u201cThree\u2026Two\u2026 One\u201d of the human technician. These talents of mimicry reflect the general braininess of corvids \u2013 which is so high that by most standards of animal assessment, it\u2019s off the scale.<\/p>\n
By Tom Neuburger. Originally published at God\u2019s Spies<\/p>\n
While we wait for news \u2014 or not \u2014 from the Democratic convention, I offer this, part of our \u201cDawn of Everything\u201d series of discussions. Enjoy.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.nakedcapitalism.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/00-syntax-.webp\")
<\/p>\n
Adam names the animals<\/p>\n
Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker\u2019s rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins
\u2014Wallace Stevens, \u201cThe Idea of Order at Key West\u201d<\/p>\n
We\u2019re headed for prehistoric times, I\u2019m sure of it, and as a result, human prehistory has been a focus of mine for quite a few years.<\/p>\n
What were our Stone Age lives like? And who lived them? After all, \u201cwe\u201d might be just homo sapiens, maybe 200,000 years old; or \u201cwe\u201d might be broader, including our contemporary cousins, homo neanderthalensis, or even the ancient, long-lived homo erectus. Erectus had very good tools and fire perhaps. Neanderthals were much like us \u2014 we interbred \u2014 though evidence suggests, while they probably had some kind of language, we were far smarter.<\/p>\n
One of the bigger questions is the one David Graeber and David Wengrow took on in their book The Dawn of Everything: Was it inevitable that the myriad of Stone Age cultures resolve to the single predatory mess we\u2019re now saddled with?<\/p>\n
After all, it\u2019s our predatory masters \u2014 the Kochs, the Adelsons, the Pritzgers, the Geffens, their friends \u2014 whose mandatory greed (which most of us applaud, by the way) have landed us where we are, mounting the crest of our last great ride down the hill.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s the Origin of Syntax?<\/p>\n
One set of mysteries regarding our ancient ancestors involves their language. How did it emerge? How did it grow? If the direction of modern languages is to become more simple \u2014 in English, the loss of \u201cwhom\u201d; in French the loss of \u201cne\u201d; the millions of shortenings and mergings all languages endure \u2014 how did that complication that we call syntax first come about?<\/p>\n
The most famous theory is the one by, yes, Noam Chomsky, that humans are born with a \u201cuniversal grammar\u201d mapped out in our brains, and learning our first language applies that prebuilt facility to what we hear. His argument: No child could learn, from the \u201cpoverty of the stimulus\u201d (his or her caregiver\u2019s phrases), all the complexity of any actual language.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s, of course, much mulling and arguing over this topic, especially since it\u2019s so theoretical.<\/p>\n
Something that\u2019s not theoretical though is this: a group of experiments that shows that syntax evolves, from little to quite complex, all on its own, as a natural byproduct of each generation\u2019s attempt to learn from their parents.<\/p>\n
The process is fascinating and demonstrable. The authors of this work have done computer simulations, and they\u2019ve worked with people as well. The results seem miraculous: like putting chemicals into a jar, then thirty days later, finding a butterfly.<\/p>\n
The Iterated Learning Model<\/p>\n
I\u2019ll explain the experiments here, then append a video that\u2019s more complete. (There are others. Search for Simon Kirby or Kenny Smith.) The root idea is simple. They start where Chomsky starts, with the \u201cpoverty of the stimulus,\u201d the incomplete exposure every child gets to his or her first language. Then they simulate learning.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s start with some principles:<\/p>\n
All language changes, year after year, generation to generation. The process will never stop. It\u2019s how we get from Chaucer to Shakespeare to you.<\/p>\n
Holistic language vs. compositional language: That\u2019s jargon for a language made of utterings that cannot be divided in parts (holistic), versus one made up of those that can (compositional).For example, \u201cabracadabra\u201d means \u201clet there be magic,\u201d yet no part of that word means any part of its meaning. It\u2019s entirely holistic. The whole word means the idea; it has no parts. \u201cJohn walked home,\u201d on the other hand, is compositional; it\u2019s made up of parts that each contain part of the idea. (Note that the word \u201cwalked\u201d is compositional as well: \u201cwalk\u201d plus \u201ced\u201d.)<\/p>\n
This matters for two reasons. First, the closest our monkey cousins get to a language is a set of lip smacks, grunts, calls and alerts that each have a meaning, but can\u2019t be deconstructed or assembled. If this is the ultimate source of our great gift, it\u2019s a truly holistic one. No part of a chimp hoot or groan means any part of the message. The sound is a single message.<\/p>\n
Because of this fact \u2014 the holistic nature of \u201cmonkey talk\u201d \u2014 our researchers seeded their experiment with a made-up and random language, entirely holistic. Then they taught this language to successive generations of learners \u2014 both people and in simulations \u2014 with each learner teaching the next as the language evolved.<\/p>\n
Remember, the question we\u2019re interested in is: How did syntax start? Who turned the holistic grunts of the monkeys we were, into the subtle order of our first real languages.<\/p>\n
The answer: Nobody did.<\/p>\n
The Experiments<\/p>\n
All of the experiments are pretty much alike; they just vary in tweaked parameters. Each goes like this:<\/p>\n
Step one. Create a small artificial, holistic language made up of nonsense words, where each word \u201cmeans\u201d a small drawing. In this case, each drawing has three elements: a shape, a color and a motion. Here are a few:<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.nakedcapitalism.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/00-syntax-2.webp\")
<\/p>\n
Example words and their \u201cmeanings\u201d (associated symbols)<\/p>\n
Since each \u201cmeaning\u201d (symbolic drawing) has a color, a shape and a motion, and since there are three colors (blue, red, black), three shapes (circle, square, triangle), and three motions (straight, wavy, looping), there are 27 ideas (symbols) in the language and thus 27 words. Again, the words are randomly assigned.<\/p>\n
Following this pattern, a 27-word language might look like this:<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.nakedcapitalism.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/00-syntax-3.webp\")
<\/p>\n
A 27-word language where each word refers to a colored shape-with-motion. \u201cWimaku\u201d means \u201cblack square with straight motion,\u201d etc.<\/p>\n
Step two. Teach the first \u201cagent\u201d (A1, the first learner) the whole language.<\/p>\n
Step three. Let A1 teach A2, the second learner, just half of the language.<\/p>\n
Step four. Test A2 on the whole language. She is shown all of the \u201cmeanings\u201d (the symbols) and has to try to guess the names of the ones she doesn\u2019t know.<\/p>\n
Step five. Let A2 teach A3, the third learner in the chain, a random half of her language, filtering out duplicated words, words with two \u201cmeanings\u201d (two associated symbols).<\/p>\n
Step six. Test A3, as before, on the whole language. Show him all of the symbols and ask him to guess the names he hasn\u2019t yet learned.<\/p>\n
Step seven. Repeat the above as often as you like.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.nakedcapitalism.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/00-syntax-4.webp\")
<\/p>\n
From Steven Mithen, The Language Puzzle<\/p>\n
The researchers did this with people and by computer simulation. The beauty of a simulation is that you can iterate the process endlessly if you like (the number of generations from Sumerian writing to now is about 200). You can also vary parameters like population size (how many teachers and learners in each generation), as well as the bottleneck size (does each generation teach half the language, a third of it, or three-fourths?).<\/p>\n
The Results<\/p>\n
The results were astounding. The bottleneck \u2014 each student\u2019s incomplete learning \u2014 always creates, over time, a compositional, syntactical language. As Steven Mithen put it in Chapter 8 of his book The Language Puzzle, the work that put me onto this idea:<\/p>\n
Although rules [of a language] gradually change over time, just as the meaning and pronunciation of words change, each generation learns the rules used by the previous generation from whom they are learning language. As an English speaker, I learned to put adjectives before nouns from my parents, and they did the same from their parents and so forth back in time. That raises a question central to the language puzzle: how did the rules originate? Were they invented by a clever hominin in the early Stone Age, who has left a very long legacy because their rules have been copied and accidentally modified by every generation of language learners that followed? No, of course not. But what is the alternative?<\/p>\n
The answer was discovered during the 1990s: syntax spontaneously emerges from the generation-to-generation language-learning process itself. This surprising and linguistically revolutionary finding was discovered by a new sub-discipline of linguistics that is known as computational evolutionary linguistics. This constructs computer simulation models for how language evolves by using artificial languages and virtual people.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s what that looks like in a lab with people. Look again at the \u201clanguage\u201d above, the 27 words. At this stage, the words are holistic \u2014 \u201cminiki\u201d means \u201cblue square straight\u201d and \u201cwige\u201d means \u201cred triangle wavy.\u201d No part of a word means part of the associated symbol.<\/p>\n
After just ten generations, this is what the language evolved into:<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.nakedcapitalism.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/00-syntax-5.webp\")
<\/p>\n
The hyphens were added to this slide for informational purposes; they weren\u2019t part of the actual words. Anything starting with \u201cn\u201d is black in color; \u201cere\u201d in the middle is starting to mean a square; anything ending in \u201cplo\u201d has a wavy motion.<\/p>\n
Ten generations more and this would be smoother. Again, the order, the syntax, its compositional nature, emerges from the process itself, from the iterative act of one generation learning, then teaching, and the next group doing its best to fill in the blanks.<\/p>\n
For a video describing these experiments, see below. I\u2019ve cued it to start in the middle, at the point of interest.<\/p>\n
I\u2019d be wrong to say there aren\u2019t those who disagree, but this is lab work, not theory, and repeatable, both with SimCity scenarios and actual people.<\/p>\n
For me, it answers a question I\u2019ve had almost forever: What first gave languages order? The answer: Speech itself.<\/p>\n
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