Origin and Evolution of LanGUage, Words and Music.
The evolutionary function of music is language.
Music is Language
AND
Language is Music.
This is how and why we develop PERFECT PITCH
EVOLUTIONARY SCIENCE SHOWS THE ROOTS OF LANGUAGE
- Hear: WHALE Whistle
- Listen to Piraha sung speech - two boys singing about a day's events. Daniel L. (Dan) Everett
- Hear the Human SILBO Whistle Language.
- Hear Humpback Chorus
- Hear Mexican Whistle
INTERSPECIES ANIMAL LANGUAGE: Interspecies Language Evolution From Whistling to Speech. BIRDS, BEES, WHALES, DOLPHINS, GORILLA, BONOBO, LION ALL HAVE LANGUAGE. Other species that communicate with each other use clicks, whistles, song and gestures. You can imagine that the hand clapping and hooting you hear in the audience is one of the last vestiges of gestures we still have as evolution propelled us towards a species that became a group to use speech / language.
Keren Everett - "The key to learning the language is the tribe’s singing, Keren said: the way that the group can drop consonants and vowels altogether and communicate purely by variations in pitch, stress, and rhythm — what linguists call “prosody.” I was reminded of an evening in the village when I had heard someone singing a clutch of haunting notes on a rising, then falling scale. The voice repeated the pattern over and over, without variation, for more than half an hour.
[ORIGIN OF THE LULLABYE Many features of music are universal as well as apparently innate, meaning present at birth. All societies have music, all sing lullaby-like songs to their infants, and most produce tonal music, or music composed in subsets of the 12-tone chromatic scale, such as the diatonic or pentatonic scales.]
I crept up to the edge of one of the Pirahã huts and saw that it was a woman, winding raw cotton onto a spool, and intoning this extraordinary series of notes that sounded like a muted horn. A toddler played at her feet. I asked Everett about this, and he said something vague about how tribe members “sing their dreams.” But when I described the scene to Keren she grew animated and explained that this is how the Pirahã teach their children to speak. The toddler was absorbing the lesson in prosody through endless repetition—an example, one might argue, of Edward Sapir’s cultural theory of language acquisition at work. “This language uses prosody much more than any other language I know of,” Keren told me. “It’s not the kind of thing that you can write, and capture, and go back to; you have to watch, and you have to feel it. It’s like someone singing a song. You want to watch and listen and try to sing along with them. So I started doing that, and I began noticing things that I never transcribed, and things I never picked up when I listened to a tape of them, and part of it was the performance. So at that point I said, ‘Put the tape recorders and notebooks away, focus on the person, watch them.’ They give a lot of things using prosody that you never would have found otherwise. This has never been documented in any language I know.” Aspects of Pirahã that had long confounded Keren became clear, she said. “I realized, Oh! That’s what the subject-verb looks like, that’s what the pieces of the clause and the time phrase and the object and the other phrases feel like. That was the beginning of a breakthrough for me. I won’t say that I’ve broken it until I can creatively use the verbal structure—and I can’t do it yet.” Source http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/16/070416fa_fact_colapinto?currentPage=all
Scientists Report Finding a Gene for Speech
How do babies begin to acquire language?
Rhythmic patterns underlie the human language. How children learn the meanings of words. Grammer is hard wired. Letters are shaped that way for a reason. Rhythm and pitch give the meaning.
By 6 months of age, infants develop a map in the auditory cortex of the phonetic sounds in the native language their mother or caretaker speaks. Depending on the language they either will or will not develop perfect pitch.
How do babies begin to acquire language? "
Much of the information that's transmitted during speech is transmitted by pitch and timing," two of the crucial elements of music. Rhythmic patterns underlie the human language.
The Gesture - Before words you will use your hands. Baby Sign Language. The movement of your hand. The sound. Even the way we represent animals is cultural.
The value of play is found in the work of Speech, Clapping, jumping, and circle game rhymes which use the tactile pathways and help wire the brain for higher thinking and reading skills.
National Children's Folksong Repository - the value of children's oral culture - clapping hands and speech.
DRUM LANGUAGE - Absoute Time When Twi is drummed, the resulting drum language is called ayan.
Rhythm, where does it come from?
Structure exposes the evolutionary roots of language * 01 October 2005
LANGUAGE structure may reveal more about human origins than vocabulary. Traditional techniques for studying the history of languages have relied on evolutionary trees based on word-type, but the speed at which lexicons change means such techniques cannot look further back than 10,000 years.
Now Michael Dunn and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, Netherlands, have developed a new approach. They built a database of 125 structural language features, such as where verbs appear in clauses. They then used computational cladistics - a technique usually used to classify organisms based on evolutionary relationships - to analyse different languages in terms of these features and classify them into their evolutionary groups.
The team first looked at a set of 16 Austronesian languages whose histories were already well known via comparative vocabulary methods. The structural method produced the same historical connections, indicating that the technique was reliable.
They then analysed a set of 15 Papuan languages that had previously show no historical connections, and discovered structural similarities (Science, vol 309, p 2072). This suggests the new technique can reach further back than 10,000 years, says Russell Gray, an expert in language evolution at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, in an article accompanying the paper.
WHY should links exist between music and language? SEE HOW THE BRAIN WORKS
Some researchers think that the two might have a common evolutionary origin. Steven Brown, a neuroscientist at the Karolinska Institute in Huddinge, Sweden, proposes that our ancestors developed a system of communication that he calls musilanguage, in which meaning was conveyed not so much by the shapes of sounds as by their pitch. A kind of phrasing akin to the intonation of modern speech could have implied emotive nuances. In support, Brown points out that some animals make use of pitch to communicate, for example in birdsong, and in the alarm calls of the African vervet monkey. Brown argues that some remnant of this tone-based musilanguage exists in tonal languages such as the various forms of Chinese, and in the sing-song of Japanese and Scandinavian languages. Brown is in good company. Darwin, in his 1871 book The Descent of Man, speculated that language might have developed from an essentially musical means of communication.
Literacy - Origin of Words, Language Evolution
THE NEW PEDAGOGY AN
INTERDISCIPLINARY MODEL
Integrate Literacy, Music and Technology into the Classroom.
Linguistic ideology:
Chomsky: The capacity to generate unlimited meaning by placing one thought inside another is the crux of Chomsky’s theory—what he calls, quoting the early-nineteenth-century German linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt, “the infinite use of finite means.”
VERSES
Daniel L. (Dan) Everett "immediacy-of-experience principle" a living-in-the-present ethos so powerful that it has affected every aspect of the peoples lives. Committed to an existence in which only observable experience is real, the Pirah do not think, or speak, in abstractionsand thus do not use color terms, quantifiers, numbers, or myths.
VERSES
B. F. Skinner, children learn words and grammar by being praised for correct usage, much as lab animals learn to push a lever that supplies them with food. In 1959, in a demolishing review of Skinner’s book “Verbal Behavior,” Chomsky wrote that the ability of children to create grammatical sentences that they have never heard before proves that learning to speak does not depend on imitation, instruction, or rewards. As he put it in his book “Reflections on Language” (1975), “To come to know a human language would be an extraordinary intellectual achievement for a creature not specifically designed to accomplish this task.”
Chomsky hypothesized that a specific faculty for language is encoded in the human brain at birth. He described it as a “language organ,” which is equipped with an immutable set of rules—a universal grammar—that is shared by all languages, regardless of how different they appear to be. The language organ, Chomsky said, cannot be dissected in the way that a liver or a heart can, but it can be described through detailed analyses of the abstract structures underlying language. “By studying the properties of natural languages, their structure, organization, and use,” Chomsky wrote, “we may hope to gain some understanding of the specific characteristics of human intelligence. We may hope to learn something about human nature.”Everett conceived his Ph.D. dissertation at UNICAMP as a strict Chomskyan analysis of Pirahã. Dividing his time between São Paulo and the Pirahã village, where he collected data, Everett completed his thesis in 1983. Written in Portuguese and later published as a book in Brazil, “The Pirahã Language and the Theory of Syntax” was a highly technical discussion replete with Chomskyan tree diagrams. However, Everett says that he was aware that Pirahã contained many linguistic anomalies that he could not fit into Chomsky’s paradigm. “I knew I was leaving out a lot of stuff,” Everett told me. “But these gaps were unexplainable to me.”
In 1988, Everett was hired by the University of Pittsburgh. By then, Chomsky’s system of rules had reached a state of complexity that even Chomsky found too baroque, and he had begun to formulate a simpler model for the principles underlying all languages. In his 1921 book, “Language,” Sapir stated that language is an acquired skill, which “varies as all creative effort varies—not as consciously, perhaps, but nonetheless as truly as do the religions, the beliefs, the customs, and the arts of different peoples.” Chomsky, however, believed that culture played little role in the study of language, and that going to far-flung places to record the arcane babel of near-extinct tongues was a pointless exercise. Chomsky’s view had prevailed. Everett began to wonder if this was an entirely good thing.
“When I went back and read the stuff Sapir wrote in the twenties, I just realized, hey, this really is a tradition that we lost,” Everett said. “People believe they’ve actually studied a language when they have given it a Chomskyan formalism. And you may have given us absolutely no insight whatsoever into that language as a separate language.”
Everett began to question the first principle of Chomskyan linguistics: that infants could not learn language if the principles of grammar had not been pre-installed in the brain. Babies are bathed in language from the moment they acquire the capacity to hear in the womb, Everett reasoned, and parents and caregivers expend great energy teaching children how to say words and assemble them into sentences—a process that lasts years. Was it really true that language, as Chomsky asserted, simply “grows like any other body organ”? Everett did not deny the existence of a biological endowment for language — humans couldn’t talk if they did not possess the requisite neurological architecture to do so. But, convinced that culture plays a far greater role than Chomsky’s theory accounted for, he decided that he needed to “take a radical reëxamination of my whole approach to the problem.”“Free from Chomskyan constraints, I was able to imagine new relationships between grammar and culture.” There is a controversial hypothesis advanced early in the last century by Benjamin Lee Whorf, a student of Sapir’s. Whorf argued that the words in our vocabulary determine how we think. Since the Pirahã do not have words for numbers above two, Gordon wrote, they have a limited ability to work with quantities greater than that. “It’s language affecting thought,” Gordon told me. His paper, “Numerical Cognition Without Words: Evidence from Amazonia,” was enthusiastically taken up by a coterie of “neo-Whorfian” linguists around the world.
Michael Tomasello, the director of the Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig, endorsed Everett’s conclusions that culture can shape core grammar. Because the Pirahã “talk about different things [than we do], different things get grammaticalized,” he wrote, adding that “universal grammar was a good try, and it really was not so implausible at the time it was proposed, but since then we have learned a lot about many different languages, and they simply do not fit one universal cookie cutter.”
Source http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/16/070416fa_fact_colapinto?currentPage=all
Expert Says He Discerns 'Hard-Wired' Grammar Rules
In 1981 the linguist Noam Chomsky, who had already proposed that language was not learned but innate, made an even bolder claim.
The grammars of all languages, he said, can be described by a set of universal rules or principles, and the differences among those grammars are due to a finite set of options that are also innate.
If grammar were bread, then flour and liquid would be the universal rules; the options -- parameters, Dr. Chomsky called them -- would be things like yeast, eggs, sugar and jalapenos, any of which yield a substantially different product when added to the universals. The theory would explain why grammars vary only within a narrow range, despite the tremendous number and diversity of languages.
While most linguists would now agree that language is innate, Dr. Chomsky's ideas about principles and parameters have remained bitterly controversial.
Even his supporters could not claim to have tested his theory with the really tough cases, the languages considered most different from those the linguists typically know well.
But in a new book, Dr. Mark C. Baker, a linguist at Rutgers University whose dissertation was supervised by Dr. Chomsky, says he has discerned the parameters for a remarkably diverse set of languages, especially
American-Indian and African tongues.
In the book, "The Atoms of Language: The Mind's Hidden Rules of Grammar" (Basic Books, 2001), Dr. Baker sets forth a hierarchy of parameters that sorts them according to their power to affect and potentially nullify one another.
Just as the periodic table of elements illustrates the discrete units of the physical world, Dr. Baker's hierarchy charts the finite set of discrete factors that create differences in grammars.
That these parameters can be organized in a logical and systematic way, Dr. Baker says, suggests that there may be some deeper theory underlying them, and that the hierarchy may even guide language acquisition in children.
The hierarchy is not the same as a family tree, which illustrates the historical relations among languages -- for example, Italian, French, Spanish and their mother tongue, Latin. Nor does it have anything to do with the way words vary from language to language. Instead, Dr. Baker analyzes grammar -- the set of principles that describe the order in which words and phrases are strung together, tenses added and questions formed. Dr. Baker, like Dr. Chomsky, believes these instructions are hard-wired into humans' brains.
His most spectacular discovery is that the grammars of English and Mohawk, which appear radically different, are distinguished by just a single powerful parameter whose position at the top of the hierarchy creates an enormous effect.
Mohawk is a polysynthetic language: its verbs may be long and complicated, made up of many different parts. It can express in one word what English must express in many words. For example, "Washakotya'tawitsherahetkvhta'se' " means, " He made the thing that one puts on one's body ugly for her" -- meaning, he uglified her dress.
In that statement, "hetkv" is the root of the verb "to be ugly." Many of the other bits are prefixes that specify the pronouns of the subject and object. Every verb includes "each of the main participants in the event described by the verb," Dr. Baker writes. In all, Mohawk has 58 prefixes, one for each possible combination of subject, object and indirect object.
Dr. Baker says the polysynthesis parameter is the most fundamental difference that languages can have, and it cleaves off Mohawk and a few other languages -- for example, Mayali, spoken in northern Australia -- from all others. That two such far-flung languages operate in the same way is more evidence for the idea that languages do not simply evolve in a gradual or unconstrained fashion, Dr. Baker says.
At the next junction in the hierarchy, two parameters are at work: "optional polysynthesis" (in which polysynthetic prefixes are possible, but not required) and "head directionality," which dictates whether modifiers and other new words are added before or after existing phrases. In English, new words are at the front. For example, to make a prepositional phrase "with her sister," the preposition goes before the noun. In Lakota, a Sioux language, the reverse is true. The English sentence "I will put the book on the table" reads like this in Lakota: "I table the on book the put will."
Japanese, Turkish and Greenlandic are other languages that opt for new words at the end of phrases, while Khmer and Welsh have the same setting as English.
In all, Dr. Baker and others have identified about 14 parameters, and he believes that there may be 16 more.
Dr. Baker's work is by no means universally accepted. Dr. Robert Van Valin, a professor of linguistics at the State University of New York at Buffalo, says the findings rest on a questionable assumption: that there is a universal grammar.
"What they're doing in that whole program is taking English-like structures and putting the words or parts of words of other languages in those structures and then discovering that they're just like English," he said.
Dr. Karin E. Michelson, an associate professor of linguistics at SUNY Buffalo, who also disagrees with the Chomskyan approach, said after reviewing Dr. Baker's Mohawk work that some of the sentences he selected seemed artificial.
Dr. Baker acknowledged that some of the longer words in his study were "carefully engineered," but he said the parameter still held up using more common examples of Mohawk. He said using only examples from real discourse restricted the kind of analysis that linguists could do.
"It would be like constraining a physicist to learn about gravity without ever building a vacuum tube," Dr. Baker said.
Other linguists, however, say they are excited by Dr. Baker's work. "He's a very influential linguist, and my guess is that this will provide insights and will spawn research for the next few years," said Dr. Stephen Crain, a professor of linguistics at the University of Maryland.
If Dr. Baker's theory is correct, a further question is how the parameters of grammar are set as a child learns language. Does a child in an English-speaking environment start at the top of the hierarchy, somehow
grasp that polysynthesis is not at work, and then move on to the next level in the hierarchy?
Dr. Baker also wonders why, if the brain is hard-wired for grammar, it leaves the parameter settings unspecified. Why aren't they hard-wired, too?
Humans are assumed to have language in the first place because it allows them to communicate useful information to others. But perhaps, Dr. Baker speculates, language is also a tool of cryptography -- a way of concealing information from competitors. In that case, he went on, "the parameters would be the scrambling procedures."