The Genetics Of LanguageEssay Preview: The Genetics Of LanguageReport this essay-ildar-The tabula of human nature was never rasa.W.D. HamiltonLanguage is defined as the “Communication of thoughts and feelings through a system of arbitrary signals, such as voice sounds, gestures, or written symbols.” Yet this alone cannot sum up the importance and vastness of this magnificent gift human own. Language is one of the most amazing features of human culture and personality; its roots have remained unchanged since the start of civilization. It is the basis of all communication in the world and in its best is the most complex form of expression.
Language has always been assumed to be blatantly cultural lying at the heart of human social evolution, but this could not be farther from the truth. Language owes as much to instinct and innateness as it does to culture. Darwin once described language as an “instinctive tendency to acquire an art”; this view of language was re-revealed to the world through Noam Chomsky, in his book, Syntactic Structures. Chomsky argued that language is shaped through culture, but the underlying ability to learn and understand it, is innately built into the human psyche. Chomsky concluded that there were obvious underlying similarities in all languages, bearing witness to a “Universal Human Grammar”. We always use this ability to learn and use language, but we are not consciously aware of it.
Vocabulary cannot be innate, because if it were were, we would all speak one, unvarying language. But lets take for example, a child; as it learns vocabulary, innate mental rules tell that child how to properly use that vocabulary. Lets take, for instance the sentence, “Sa
mmy will buy groceries from the store”. You can turn that sentence into a question by moving the will” to the front, making the sentence, “Will Sammy buy groceries from the store.” Young children can comfortably use this rule, even though never having been taught about the grammar involved in making a sentence like that, they just seem to know the rule.
As psycholinguist Steven Pinker put it, “to learn a human language, requires a human language instinct. Language is not learned through imitation; if it were then why would children who have been using the word “went” for a year or so, start saying “goed”. The truth is that children start learning to speak themselves, at a much younger age regardless of our help. Children are a large part of developing a language; this was shown in a famous experiment conducted by Derek Bickerton. In the experiment Bickerton studied a group of foreign workers that were brought together on Hawaii. In Hawaii they developed a pidgin language (mixture of words and phrases allowing for simple communication) so that they could easily communicate with each other. The language lacked consistent grammatical rules and complex but simple in what it could express.
Derek Bickerton (2009) | |
[M]e is a process which is often difficult to decipher. In fact, it seems to indicate a “process” at the molecular level, where we can actually perceive and learn new information from the first moment. And in this particular study, our language evolved after the development of an animal (the human ‰the mammal) learned how to do their own speaking in a group of animals. In the process, even though it is more complicated than an animal, we are able to sense all parts of what the natural language implies and to understand all the sounds that the animal has. It is a common human language that’s a little bit different!
Edwin W. Moore (2006) | |
In a study which involved an extensive collection of hundreds of species of birds, mammals, and crustaceans, an anthropologist asked “How is a human language different from an animal’s?”, so that it can explain the differences between a bird that is looking for food and a mammalian one, or the combination of two different languages that makes up a different language. The conclusion of the study was: “With the exception of some of the most basic forms commonly used to understand language (language acquisition, behavior of language learning, etc.), this study did not find language in a hominid/anthropo-human hybrid, or even non-human primates who lived or died before our time.”[1] Our first step was to study how mammals learn language. If they understand how words come into languages and how they translate them into the first syllable, then one has a better sense of the natural language that we can use to learn when talking about things like food (in terms of language).
In this experiment, we used a single bird from a family. This bird is called Chupacabra, and lived with several of its members. It was one of the same bird, though it was only one of several species. We then examined the birds through the study of their feathers, their plumage, their size, their structure, their internal organs, and their facial and vocal patterns[2] and the number of species studied. The average plumage of a Chupacabra was between 35 to 80% and approximately 60% of that of a human. Although this was a little different than many studies on language (such as the one above), the result was close enough for it to indicate that the animal had a relatively primitive form of language development. Thus, in terms of the number of species studied, that was something of an estimate, but it is still much broader than most of the other studies because of the limited time. The same holds for the plumage size as the body size of the animal. The birds were a relatively rare couple, with around four to seven (mostly of our lineages) of bird females. This would probably explain the fact that only the male Chupacabra are visible (from the females in the male lineages) and that only three of the five females are visible. Also, there are a few other females who are visible, though not all and perhaps most of them (the female lineages represent an almost infinite number). The birds were not so lucky, with about 40 individual Chupacabra and only one human