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Chomsky on Language Evolution

11/23/2011

8 Comments

 
In a recent talk on language evolution at UCL Chomsky made some comments on studies of language evolution which seem to indicate his upcoming talk at Evolang might be quite interesting. 

The comments start at approximately 27:00 and the video is available here.

Partial transcript:

"There is a field called Evolution of language, which has a burgeoning literature, most of which in my view is total nonsense. But anyway, its growing. In fact, it isn't even about evolution of language, its almost entirely speculations about evolution of communication which is a different topic. And its kind of natural topic to look at if your caught up in another myth, a misinterpretation of evolutionary theory, which holds that changes take place only incrementally. Small change, then another small change, and finally you get complex organisms. That was believed at one time, and you can find sentences in darwin... you can quote, thats the bible. But for a long time evolutionary biologists have understood it doesn't work like that. You can have quite sudden changes that, small changes, that lead to huge phenomenal difference. In the area of communication you can mislead yourself into believing that since every organism you can think of, from bacteria to humans, has some kind of communication system, so maybe our communication system us just a slight modification of primates' or whatever you like. But its undoubtedly not true, but at least you can delude yourself into believing it. On the other hand language seems totally separate. These nothing even remotely analogous or nothing at all homologous as far as anyone knows. Theres a few things that look similar, like say songbirds are at such a distance from an evolutionary point of view that its just got to be convergent evolution to the extent that there is a similarity. And there is interesting questions you can study, but only if you take biology in the last 50 years seriously. 
If you are back to the pop darwinism that you learned in 8th grade thats no good. Anyhow, the fact that theres been no evolution in 5000 years is interesting if anyone really wants to study evolution of language. It raises a lot of questions, but I don't want to get to far from the Poverty of the Stimulus...
8 Comments
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7/28/2013 07:11:24 pm

Evolution of language is always a good thing to read since plenty of interesting things and lots of emotional stories are always associated with it! I am really grateful to you for sharing this Chomsky on language revolution! Keep sharing such quality content!

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9/30/2013 07:15:37 pm

That's very nice of you to talk about this. Not many bloggers try to discuss about this, simply because they consider it too personal or want to keep their opinion for themselves only

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9/27/2013 07:11:00 pm

Great, Many good things you have shared which important to learn, do you have latest reviews of Chomsky on language evolution.

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10/6/2013 04:26:21 pm

These nothing even remotely analogous or nothing at all homologous as far as anyone knows.

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2/13/2014 10:49:03 pm

So much so that you made me want to learn more about it. Your blog is my stepping stone, my friend. Thanks for the heads up on this subject.

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Sean link
4/19/2019 09:44:58 am

Chomsky's evolution was great to read about.

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