I’m reading Jared Diamonds The 3rd Chimpanzee right now
Diamond mentions that without language, which may have spawned from the need to for males to collaborate while hunting large animals, knowledge passed down from generation to generation would be limited. He also mentions that without language, any protohuman would have difficulty thinking out how to devise tools. Is language needed to innovate?
How was language created then? The first people had to create some language without knowing language to begin with… so they innovated without language… right?
I have an interest in anthropology, but it’s just starting to grow. I ordered Archaeology & Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins by Colin Renfrew, but I haven’t got around to reading it just yet. I do have a good interest in the runic alphabets and have been teaching myself how to write in Anglo-Saxon runes. Other than that I read what gets posted on a Germanics forum I’m on.
That being said if you believe that we think in language, then language would be necessary to innovate, but I’m using language in broad way.
Necessary for innovation? Probably not. As was mentioned above, somebody had to invent language.
Does it foster innovation? Surely.
The thing about language is, it’s nearly universal for all primates, and probably all mammals, depending on how you define it. A cat/dog can learn it’s name. Some can learn simple patters. Mating calls, and defensive growls. Wolfs have a pretty complex language, and actually each have their own signature they put on the end of their howls.
What is more important is vowel sounds. So far, it is the only thing known that could explain the innovation of the sapiens compared to the other hominids… at least in my mind. Neanderthal and earlier homo’s had a very high adam’s apple in their throat, which would make vowel sounds nearly impossible.
It is the abilty to mix these together, mixed with a large and efficient brain, and imagination (abstract thought, for making tools) that really gives us a head up on the competition.
Oh god. Surely nobody invented language. And it is necessary to innovation that passes down as knowledge.
Without language one cannot even think. It’s the mind’s Operating System. Its importance impossible to overestimate.
As for where it came from, the real question is how come that only humans are biologically equipped to speak. If you have the gear, language will evolve naturally in time.
Anthropology is a fascinating subject to me, as it helps to explain just who and what we are.
I suspect language evolved to enhance group cohesion. Chimpanzees and bonobos already use what could be called extremely crude language. One of the most basic uses for communication is to call attention to something. The more sophisticated the communication mechanism, the more distinctions can be made between different things.
It seems clear to me that human language has its origins in onomatopoeia. This makes a lot of sense, after all – if your communication medium is auditory, then the easiest way to identify things is through the sounds they make (if they make any). As the vocal apparatuses of our ancestors became more sophisticated, more things could be identified based on sound.
However, I’d disagree that “fully-developed” human language is needed to innovate. Other animals engage in behaviors that could be seen as very basic forms of innovation. Among chimpanzees (and perhaps also bonobos), there are even different “cultures” of tool use and development.
That depends on how you define “think”, of course. Per my own definition, plenty of animals (perhaps all of them, on some level) think without language. I imagine people don’t always think in terms of language, either.
Language is used, first and foremost, in communicating to others, like we’re doing right now. One doesn’t need to “communicate to oneself” nearly as much. The only time I think that’s done is in working out problems that are seen as (especially) difficult.
In the absence of thought time ends but observation exists. At this point the thinker is the thought. To communicate in language one must first create a thinker. Which means the thinker becomes separate from thought, a division. Thought now becomes time. Innovation can now exist in time.
Some Notes from The Third Chimpanzee–Jared Diamond
No other large animal is native to all the continents or breeds in all habitats
Suppose it turned out that 99.9% of Chimp DNA was identical to human genes, would it change the way we approach or treat them?
Humans belong to the same order as apes (Primates) and the same superfamily (Hominoidea) but belong to different families called Hominidae and Pongidae
Of the 1271 amino acids, only five are different between chimps and humans
Big game hunting was what induced protohuman males to cooperate with each other. Whereas these males would normally view each other as competition for mates, such cooperation may have been the basis to the development of language and the reciprocity of sharing.
Females, knowing the value of such male-to-male cooperation, molded their signs of monthly ovulation in order to not make corporation between males smoother.
It was only in the Arctic that big-game hunting becomes the dominant source of food
The Neanderthals’ brain size was actually 10% larger than ours
My goal is to blog all my notes here for the next year
Have you tried evernote to take all your notes in. Slick system
no, but that looks awesome!
We use our language as a memory device by “communicating” with our future selves.
(I’m not sure, but I think that’s a bit different than the “inner dialogue” that sometimes we have.)
Antropolgy at Liberty University, this produced a good laugh http://deimos3.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Browse/liberty-public.2918560542?i=1102298613
by language you mean, for example, English? surely not, unless you are limiting your notion of “thinking” to verbal narration of your reasoning patterns, as otherwise this is demonstrably false.
pointlessly obvious demonstration, just in case anyone doubts this: noting the sun’s presence overhead slightly to the west of your house lets you reason out that it is afternoon without you having to internally utter the words “the sun is overhead, but west of my house, and i know it rises in the east and sets in the west, and i know when it is directly overhead it is noon, and i know that during the day it traces out a straight path across the sky, so therefore it must be afternoon now”.
In such a simple instance that is surely the case, but I was referring to more complex cases. Especially when it comes to rather long chains of reasoning I myself find that language always spings up in my head. So if language is not strictly necessary for logic proper, I find it to be absolutely indispensable for any higher order logical reasoning.
right, because humans have a limited short-term memory, they need some way to communicate the previous state of their thoughts to their future self. they can do this through natural language such as English, or some other communication device such as pictorial representational systems.
what i hoped to underscore is that individual acts of reasoning, leaps of logic, and so on do not require words. as others have mentioned, though, words are useful for communication with your future self, and most people seem to be in that habit as a carryover from their use of words to communicate with others.
Perhaps that is it. Yet I still believe that without language one cannot really think at a ‘satisfactory’ level, even if he could use symbols or pictures to enhance his short-term memory.
For example, someone born deaf will never have the mental prowess of a normal person, even if he could write and read perfectly well. Something just isn’t there.