Language and Species by Derek Bickerton (PDF)

Description

Language and Species presents the most detailed and well-documented scenario to date of the origins of language. Drawing on “living linguistic fossils” such as “ape talk,” the “two-word” stage of small children, and pidgin languages, and on recent discoveries in paleoanthropology, Bickerton shows how a primitive “protolanguage” could have offered Homo erectus a novel ecological niche. He goes on to demonstrate how this protolanguage could have developed into the languages we speak today.”You are drawn into [Bickerton’s] appreciation of the dominant role language plays not only in what we say, but in what we think and, therefore, what we are.”—Robert Wright, New York Times Book Review”The evolution of language is a fascinating topic, and Bickerton’s Language and Species is the best introduction we have.”—John C. Marshall, Nature

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐The review above is excellent, and I just wanted to add one point. Aside from language evolution, Bickerton makes one point that philosophers should be paying attention to. The question is how we get from sense perceptions to words, and Bertrand Russell for one got this wrong. He imagined that words map directly to sense perceptions, and got into huge philosophical trouble. The truth is apparently a bit more complex. We humans (and other beasts) have what might be called a “sensory subsystem,” which senses the outside world and hands us a “concept.” In the case of a frog, for example, the concept of “bug” produces appropriate catch-the-bug behavior. In the case of humans, the concept “bug” gets mapped onto the word for “bug” (which would be “malang” in Thai, “insecte” in French, etc.) So, in Bickerton’s view, our words map to “concepts,” which in turn map to sense perceptions.This may seem to be similar to quarreling over angels dancing on the head of a pin, but in fact it is a huge difference, and would be directly relevant to anyone who wanted (say) to make computers speak English.

⭐Bickerton is God. Completely convincing, compelling in argument, one heck of a scholar who’s easy to read.

⭐I was long without my own copy of this book; now I own one and reading it through few times I can understand what is the meaning when you own a great help for understanding how language was really about: Adam’s Tongue is also needed …

⭐this is my third time reading this book and learn something different everytime…simply amazing!

⭐For Derek Pinkerton, thinking and speakink are two points of view for the same artifact.In addition, his humor redeems my lack of knowledge of English.

⭐You only run into a few really important ideas in your life, and you tend to remember them, if not always exactly when and where they were first heard or read. Years ago, I read this book, and crashed headlong into one of these ideas.The idea was this: We use language to communicate, and it’s no doubt our most important invention. But communication isn’t what language is, it’s what language does. Language is a system of representation.Okay, what’s that mean, and what’s important about it?First off, we never get a raw, uncensored, completely undistorted, true version of reality. Never. Reality is always filtered by the ways in which we access it through our senses. Bickerton called this knowledge gained through our senses our primary representational system, or PRS. Almost every type of creature has one, and they are all different. The PRS is the combination of sensory mechanisms that lets us see, touch, hear, and feel the world around us. Dogs’ worlds are more olfactory than ours because most possess a much keener sense of smell and poor vision. Bats use echolocation to navigate. Some fish utilize electric fields to locate their prey. Birds use the magnetic field of the earth to navigate.But when humans developed language, we got a secondary representational system. We still receive all our primary information through our senses, but the SRS allowed us to make representations about the things we sensed. It made our reality symbolic; it permitted us to communicate, to create narratives, and tell stories about what we sensed of reality. Our models of reality became more complex and accurate, which made the likelihood of survival greater. Communication was important, but language taught us a new way to think. It also eventually brought a new form of consciousness, self-consciousness. By allowing us to model reality offline, so to speak, it encouraged and broadened planning and imagination.That’s not the only good idea in this book, however.Bickerton discovers parallels between childhood language acquisition, ape symbol use, protolanguage, and the way pidgins develop into creoles, to draw other startling conclusions about language and thought. He speculates on the probable origin of protolanguage, likely in Homo erectus, traces the development of grammar, and shows why syntax would have been the last vital step toward modern language, communication, and representation. The sections on grammar and syntax are sometimes tough sledding but worth it. Highest recommendation for this language classic.

⭐If you smile at me I will understand because that is something that everyone does in the same language. David Crosby from the song “Wooden Ships”What songwriter David Crosby artfully offered in his song “Wooden Ships” Bickerton broadens in his thought provoking work Langauge and Species. Namely, Bickerton suggests that human language did not evolutionary just drop in out of the blue but rather evolved from other evolutionarily pre existing hominid and primate proto language systems.And honestly, the only problem with Bickerton’s work is Noam Chomsky.At the outset of his book, Bickerton incorrectly asserts that Chomsky is the Isaac Newton of linguistics. As research progresses forward, it becomes more apparent that Chomsky is rather the Sigmund Freud of linguistics. This is because just like Freud, Chomsky was able to assert a comprehensive theory at just the right point in the development of a field that operated to at one in the same time stifle inquiry into or obfuscate the ability to discern the answers to important questions.And a big for instance of this stifling relates to the question of the origin of language…a point Chomsky has consistently opposed addressing.Another for instance is the slobbery regard Chomsky seems to have for the supposed uniqueness of human language. In this regard, hearing Chomsky describe the supposed uniqueness of human language is like hearing an elephant describe the uniqueness of its trunk. To be sure, there is a complexity to human language that seems lacking in other animal communication systems but again we can only say that the uniqueness seems lacking. Significantly, no one has succeeded in translating whale song, dolphin communication, or even bird song. It’s very speciesist to say that because we cannot understand the language that other animals use it must be inferior in complexity to ours.Indeed what we do know is that certain shared facial patterns characterize common emotional states among mammals (from the half lided sleepy look to bared teeth aggressiveness). Why then should language be so of a kind different and so of a kind unique in kind rather than merely quality.Happily, it’s Bickerton’s sensitivity to these issues and his willingness to challenge Chomskian convention that makes this book significant for his courage to 1) posit a theory of language origins and 2) suggest that at the end of the day, maybe our language isn’t really that far divorced from the pro language after all.To be sure, Bickerton’s theory at the end of the day may be wrong. Like Greespan in The First Idea, Bickerton is eager to press into service the long discredited idea of ontogeny recapitulating philogeny. And his supposed examples of the similarity between his so called “ape speak” and the language of two year olds don’t really support his supposed correspondences.However, all that is quite beside the point in a field that until only recently hasn’t even bothered to consider the question of origins or for that matter the idea that human chauvanistic views might even be wrong at all.

⭐Prima

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