Loving your child's mind: Evolution of Language

Cool, cool. Yeah, so I was asking, is it okay if we keep going on the evolution of language as a topic?

Yes, of course.

Okay, cool. In which case, I've got an article we're going to read some excerpts from. I just posted a piece of text in the chat, the first paragraph of the article. Let me see what the article is titled. It's about how language evolved. So the title of this is "How Did Language Evolve?" I'll put that there too. And then do you want to read that paragraph?

Okay. Animals may not be able to form words, but they can certainly communicate. Birds use songs and calls, and other animals use a combination of sounds and movements to communicate. Primates have an advanced— go down— system of communication that includes vocalization and hand gestures and body language. But even primates stop short of what man has been able to achieve: spoken language. Our ability to form a limitless number of thoughts into spoken word is one of the things that separates us from our less evolved cousins.

Thank you. So do you have any questions or comments on that paragraph?

No.

Um, so how do you think— well, first, um, suppose, suppose we think of primate language. So first, do you know what a primate is?

Um, like an animal, or—

It's a specific kind of animal.

I think it's like a type of monkey or ape.

Brilliant, that's exactly right. Yeah, primates are related to us. You know, monkeys and apes are the most prominent categories of primates. So humans, monkeys, and apes are all primates. So that's exactly right. So yeah, it says primates can communicate, have an advanced system of communication that includes vocalization. What's the difference between vocalization and language, do you think?

Maybe vocalization is not complete words or sentences. It may mean something, but maybe not as clearly.

Mm-hmm. So have you ever watched monkeys or chimpanzees or anything like that at like the zoo or anything?

I have.

Would you say that they talk to each other or not really?

What do you mean talk? Like communicate or interact physically?

Well, that's part of my question is, yeah, what do we mean by talk? That is, do they vocalize? Would you say that they vocalize? To each other?

Most of the monkeys that I've seen at the zoo don't, or I've never heard really vocalize, but I have seen them like go with each other and like pick stuff out of their hair and like kind of wrestle with each other.

But they don't make any sounds?

Well, they make sounds. I just, or I don't, I think I've heard some of them, but usually when I see them, they're usually kind of like chilling or maybe like physically interacting.

Got it. So do you think that, um, do you think that their communication is similar to ours or different?

Um, I think it's both because we do interact physically and we do also vocalize just like them. Except we actually have our own languages and maybe that might be more civilized. Civilized?

So I agree. So just looking at this vocalization, hand gestures, and body language, certainly we have hand gestures and body language and vocalization. What do you think our language, human language, gives us in terms of communication that, say, monkeys don't have. How would you describe the kind of additional capacity in terms of communication that human language gives us?

Well, we understand each other better. We can communicate with them better. We can interact with other people better. We can have conversations like this instead of just kind of like calling out and then like kind of physical contact. Yeah. Yeah.

No, fair enough. Fair enough. So do you think that monkeys can understand each other at all? Or what kinds of things can monkeys understand? Because surely they can understand some kinds of things. I would think. What's an example of something one monkey could understand from another monkey?

Like only that species or any type?

Maybe just same species. So two monkeys in the same, um, tribe or whatever. I don't know what you call a colony of monkeys. Um, what do you think they can understand?

I don't— actually, I've seen these videos of where like they, different species of monkeys have like different signs of saying hello or danger. So with like a specific body movement. So maybe they could understand one of those, or maybe like a call. Ow.

Okay, so things like danger or something like that they can communicate. Can you think of an example of something they could not communicate?

Um, well, they could not communicate with actual languages like— or like— well, like the ones that we're using: English, Hawaiian, Spanish. It can communicate in those.

Okay, well, I've got another paragraph from this paper So this is, this is, you know, on the topic, how did language evolve? So you want to read this next paragraph for us?

Okay. In their paper, Natural Language and Natural Selection, researchers Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom theorize that a series of calls or gestures evolved over time into combinations, giving us complex communication, or language has become, has became more complicated around them. Humans, around them, humans needed a more complex system to convey information from one to information to one another. Think of it like this: early man sees a group of deer. He wants to hunt. He grunts a sound to his hunting partner that means deer are nearby. One day, a storm comes in, and the hunter notices that the thunder scares the deer away. As a result, the hunger goes— the hunter goes hungry until the storm passes.

Then go ahead and do the next section, which is part of the same paragraph.

Okay. Over time, the same hunter also learns to recognize the warning signs for bad weather, dark skies, and increased wind. Early Man realizes when the sky darkens and the wind picks up, he needs to tell his partner, his hunting partner, to speed up the pursuit of the deer. Therefore, he comes up with a series of grunts that reference both the deer and the bad weather. That series of grunts was beginning of an evolution— it was the beginning of an evolutionary adaptation that eventually became language. As humans learn more about how best— how to best survive, they developed a need to communicate these survival methods to their pop— to their population.

Okay, thank you. So this is trying to speculate about how human beings went from kind of grunts to language. Does it make sense that there's some kind of sequence like this that leads from grunts to language?

Yes.

So how would you describe the transition they're talking about? What's the difference? Yeah, go ahead.

Maybe— well, like, what do you mean describe? Like, just kind of summarize what it says there?

Yeah, let's start with that. Let's start with that.

Okay, so basically part of a theory about the evolution of language is that early man needed somehow some way to communicate. For example, if they were hunting, they needed like some sort of signal or a warning for something dangerous, or look, there's deer over there, there's food, let's hunt. And so eventually that, or as they began to have more grunts or like pushes or different signals, they evolved into like actual speaking, or maybe like an early form of languages.

Exactly, exactly. But I guess I'm trying to think, there's this difference between the grunts. So you basically, the grunts— monkeys can grunt probably either danger around or food nearby. So monkeys could go, "Ee-ah, ee-ah," you know, and they could do that. So what do you think is the difference that they're trying to describe here? What's the difference between monkeys grunting or humans grunting on the one hand and language? What makes language different from grunting?

Well, grunting— as if I grunt right now, it would be very different from me talking. Well, that's one difference. And maybe a grunt would mean different things, like many different things. A grunt can mean that you are mad. A grunt could be in like in maybe a different language that means something else entirely.

So is language just a series of different grunts? Is that all language is?

Well, maybe it was, or in the, or back when maybe the languages were just different tones of grunts.

So, you know, you and I are hunting and there are deer nearby, and so I say, "Ooh, ooh," and that means deer nearby. And then you see thunder, and you know that the deer are going to be scared away. And so you say, "Hmm, hmm." And then we just had a— is that a conversation where I said deer nearby and you said thunder nearby and the deer are going to go away? Is that kind of how language begins?

Yeah, if you understood what all those meant, you could have a conversation there.

So it sounds like there's not a sharp line then between grunts and language. Basically, right now we're just doing this incredibly complicated set of grunting. Is that right?

Yes.

OK. Well, what's funny about that is when we listen to monkeys, it just sounds like grunts. I think we say grunt because we don't know what they're saying, right?

Yes.

Do foreign languages sound like somebody grunting, or does language sound very different from grunting?

The foreign languages that I hear sometimes are definitely, or most of the time, are definitely not grunts, but they sound very different from grunts. Maybe languages, or I don't know, I can't think of a language right now that I've ever heard that has a grunt in it. But I think that grunts Or from what I've heard, grunts and some other languages are pretty different. I don't— I've never really heard of grunts.

Right, and so I guess what I'm wondering is, um, do you think that it's possible that the monkeys, when what we hear is grunting, do you think it's possible they're having complex sentences just like somebody speaking, just like a human being speaking a different language?

I mean, it's possible. Maybe we could have the advanced tech to act, or just scientists to figure out what they're saying or understand how they speak.

And how do you think scientists figure that out, would figure out if monkeys are using language versus just grunts?

Well, they probably are already doing this, but they could research their movements and their grunts and their physical interactions and kind of just recognize if they're doing this because this is happening over and over again.

So if I understand the experiment you're suggesting, we're scientists, we're going to go to the zoo and figure out if monkeys are speaking language or not. So what we do is we observe them carefully, we listen to what they say, and then look at what they do, and then determine if there are certain patterns about what they do based on what they say. Is that accurate?

Yes.

And then how— what kind of patterns? So certainly if one monkey says "danger" and the other monkeys right away run away, then they've communicated. So we've got that piece. What would count as language? How would we— so we've just spent 6 months at the zoo. We go every day, we watch monkeys 8 hours a day. We've got thick notebooks full of annotations of monkey said this, monkey did that. How do we know if language is happening or not?

You could probably see it or hear it, or see that maybe if it was just a small twitch, if you are very observant, if maybe they just moved a little and then all them— all their monkeys understand.

So it's a matter of how much action follows how much, um, communication. Is that it? If a little bit of communication leads to a lot of action that's evidence of language?

Um, I mean, it could be because maybe we have— or for example, in English, there, there are definitely, um, there are probably short words that mean a lot of things or short sentences that mean a lot of things.

So jumping around, how about, say, with dolphins or whales? How do we know if dolphins and whales are talking to each other or not?

Well, like, you could also, like, research them together and see if they interact with each other, call to each other, actually communicate with each other, because they are two different species. They evolved separate. They might have come from, like, like, or they might have come from the same family, but they have branch into different species.

Oh, and really, I get it. What I meant was dolphins communicate with dolphins and whales communicate with whales.

Okay.

But do you think dolphins communicate with other dolphins?

Definitely.

So how about— are there— do all animals communicate the same? Do you think frogs communicate with other frogs in much the same way that dolphins communicate with other dolphins?

Well, they don't do it the same. I think that they do it in their own way. Like, for example, like you said, a frog croaks to find a mate. I don't know, I don't know specifically what dolphins do to find a mate, but they click in the water. They click in the water and they can, and it's kind of like the, um, how the bats communicate or sea, because they can hear each other underwater.

And do you think that there are any animals that have language that is as sophisticated as human language?

Um, what does sophisticated mean? Just some language?

Complicated, as can communicate as many different things.

Um, not that I know of. There could be aliens out there that maybe have the same complicated languages as us, but for now on on Earth? I don't think so.

How would we measure it? How would we— how can you tell? Again, we're scientists, we go and watch the monkeys every day for 6 months. How do we know if monkey language is even close to as complicated as human language?

Um, well, first of all, maybe you could keep track of how much they communicate, because if there's a lot to tell them, they may have more to interact or more to say or more to communicate.

So if the more hours they talk, then the more complicated their communication is?

Possibly. It could be about something simple, but they have a lot to say about it.

Do you think that people that talk more are saying more complicated things than people that talk less?

Um, I mean, it could be possible. Even though maybe the people who talk more might be just talking about simple things, but it's more complicated than the people who barely— or who talk less because they don't really talk.

Okay. How would you compare different— how do you know if one human being is talking about more complicated things than another? How do you determine that with humans?

Well, you could understand You could try and understand the language. You could try and understand what they're saying specifically. And then you could research it. And if it's kind of simple, or you can probably tell if it's simple or complicated.

Got it. Got it.

And if I was—

go ahead.

Okay, but I was just gonna say, maybe this might be like, maybe if I was a 5-year-old and someone was talking about like, algebra, and I was like, what's algebra? So I went and Googled it and found out that it's kind of complicated.

Got it, got it. Um, and I forget, how old are you these days?

I am 9.

That's what I thought, you turned 10 in August, right?

Yes.

Okay, great. Um, do you find talking about the evolution of language interesting?

Yes.

Okay, I think it's pretty interesting. I think language and communication are really interesting. Yeah, and so eventually we'll get back to Spanish and Portuguese and Hawaiian and all of that, but I think language is pretty interesting. So anything else for today?

Um, no, but could you repeat the sentence you just said because I couldn't hear you, you cut off first.

Yeah, I just said at some point we'll go back to studying, looking at Spanish and Portuguese and Hawaiian. You know, examples of languages. But I think it's nice to think about languages in general for a while first. Sound right?

Yeah.

Okay, have a wonderful Sunday. We'll see you next week. Bye-bye.

Okay, thank you.

Bye.