Language Design - Noam Chomsky / Serious Science

Linguist Noam Chomsky from University of Arizona on the syntactic principle of language, the linguistic capacity of humans, and the laws of physics behind snowflakes.

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[prepatecingles]

This is the transcript to the interview.
To look into the question of language design, it's useful to think of how human beings evolved, we don’t know a great deal about it, but we know some things, so for example, it's fairly clear from the archaeological record that the modern humans, modern Homosapiens, cognitively modern Homosapiens, developed quite recently in evolutionary time and maybe within the last roughly 100, 000 years, which is a flick of an eye.

That's when you get the enormous inquiries, increase explosion of indications of that creative activity, complex family structures, symbolism and so on; all of this develops roughly in that period. And interestingly there has been no detectable evolution of these capacities in roughly the past 50, 000 years, that's the period since our ancestors left Africa, a small number of them pretty quickly spread over the world, so all humans are pretty much identical with regard to cognitive capacity, linguistic capacity and so on; that which means that there's been essentially no detectable evolution. So there's a small window there, where something happened, and it's generally assumed by paleoanthropologists, people who study these topics, that must have been the emergence of language, because it's hard to imagine any of these basically creative activities without language, and the language does provide the mechanisms for them. So it seems as though the core of human sensibility, and creative and cognitive capacity is the development of this completely unique capacity. There's nothing analogous to it anywhere in the animal world. There are animal signaling systems, but they are completely different in design and use and just in every dimension.

So something strange happened, roughly maybe 100, 000 years ago, not very long, and language emerged in humans and the question then is, well, what kind of A system is it? On the surface, languages look very different from one another, so if somebody walks into the room and starts speaking Swahili I'm not going to understand a word, though I will recognize that it's a language, I won't understand it, but I know it's not noise, you know? As soon as you look more deeply, you find that these languages are basically molded into a pretty similar design, maybe an identical design. A large part of the language, of what we hear is just the sounds, but that's a very superficial part of language. Now, the core of languages are principles that determine actually an infinite array of possible expressions, structured expressions which have definite meanings; now all of that is well beyond what we can just observe, by say, looking at the texts and when a child is learning a language, the child doesn't learn those things there's no evidence for them, almost no evidence for them. Nobody can teach them even if we don't know what they are. These are just part of our nature.

The core principles, so called, syntactic principles that form expressions and that provide specific interpretations for them, that's apparently all just part of our nature and then there are various ways of externalizing in sound or in sign, which is about the same but that’s a kind of a superficial manifestation of their internal uniformity and it's really exciting that it almost has to be this way, if you think about the way the system developed, it apparently developed very suddenly, in evolutionary terms, which meant that there were very limited selectional pressures, so it probably was designed as a, it is a computational system; that’s the only explanation for these capacities computational systems have certain optimal characteristics; there some are more efficient than others, and there's every reason to believe that this development pre suddenly as in optimal communication system especially following laws of nature, very much the way a snowflake assumes a very complex form and not because of experience or training, but that's just because that's the way the laws of physics work, and there's every reason to believe that language is something like this is.

Now, to try to show this is no trivial matter; you have to try to show that the superficial variety of languages actually reduces the principles of the common character in which approach notions of optimal design and there has been, I think, notable progress, in that process... it is a long way to go to try to demonstrate it, but then, of course, then one wants to go beyond to try maybe, ultimately discover the neural basis for whatever this unique capacity is.

It's a very hard problem to study for humans, so we know a lot about the human visual system, because of direct experimentation with cats and monkeys, and we allow ourselves to direct experimentation, you know, sticking electrodes in the brain, and so on, with controlled experiments, but we don't do with humans, and humans have about the same visual system as cats and monkeys, so we know about the visual system.

You can’t do that for language. They’re no analogous systems. So you can’t study other animals; we're unique in this respect and invasive experiments with human beings are barred, so it's a very complex and intricate mattered to try to find clever ways of getting around the barriers to learn something about these topics and some progress is being made I think we can look forward to a period when there will be convergence of the various modes of inquiry into design of language neural basis acquisition varieties of language that's personal task for the future which in fact is directed to the core of human nature core of cognitive human nature the most intriguing question I think is the one that I have basically just mentioned, there's reason to believe that the core of human intellectual nature cognitive nature is a computational system which probably has something like the properties of a snowflake it simply had to develop this way given biological and scientific circumstances and the most intriguing question is to try to see if that's true and if it is to show that it's true.

Transcript by: Prepa Tec IB students Gen. 2023

[Emile.gorgonZola]

i love the comment section here. 14 year olds thinking they're smarter than chomsky

[noahmcdaniel]

It's very funny to watch human beings use a capacity to express the mystery of the capacity they're using.

[alexcostetti]

one of the best intellectuals of the 20th century

[surinurkholifah]

I wish could meet him in person, not only knowing him by his books.
He's 91 years old now and it saddened me that soon he'll be another history yet I still only knew him by books.

[stevecoley]

Henry David Thoreau once said that "one does not know man until one knows the power of words". Which is why wordplay is one of Merlin the Magicians most powerful tools of magic.

[josemorgado]

If you ask a group of people to each draw a car, for example, each individual will draw a different car, but still a car. We may consider that each person used a different language to draw his/her car. Essentially, all of them had the capacity to understand the concept of "car" and the capacity to draw a car. And that seems to be the case of languages, they differ in their external aspects, but they all obey to a basic biological capacity of human beings to produce language and to express the same ideas in different ways.

[coreycox]

I look forward to the day we understand this if it is in my lifetime. Until then, and probably after, there is a poetry and beauty to us.

[shrisuryarathinam]

His intelligence is off the charts ❤️🧠

[chortovs]

consciousness wanted to be aware of itself and created language to express that.

[absideglu]

DOES NOAM CHOMSKY NET HIS OWN JERSEYS WE LOVE THE WAY HE LOOKS ! WITH RESPECT. THE DODGES.

[jjuliayubb]

He's a genius. I admire him so much

[flochartingham]

Being a playwright Shakespeare said: "All the world is a stage..." Chomsky being a cognitive linguist assumes verbal language is the major creative development and epochal event that created a sudden "growth spurt" of the human brain. This is widely attributed by paleoanthropologists to the advent of cooking which made a much wider variety of more nutritious foods easier to consume. I am sure Chomsky is aware of this conjecture, so I am wondering why he would omit it from what he is saying here.

It seems strange to me that Chomsky seems to be postulating that language "design" occurred more instantaneously rather than from rudiments of a time from before human beings were human beings.

And what of physical expression as language. To dispute what he said at 4:33 that languages "developed very suddenly meaning that there were very limited selectional  pressures." Since there is no approximate analog to the human species it is impossible to say for certain, but to me the human form of erectness and shoulders positioned over the feet seems to be optimized for one thing above all else, even adaptation to hunting and gathering: physical expression.

To hunt and stalk (stalking being as essential as gathering and hunting) humans needed to disperse and maintain silence. Being able to communicate complex commands and replies silently was the ecological edge that gave humans enough free time to consider stuff like how to do the same thing to make that burnt carcass they found left behind by the forest fire with less charred parts and less raw parts.

[evalsoftserver]

NOAM CHOMSKY IS A PHYSICICT , COMPUTER SCIENTIST, CHEMIST, NUMBER THEORIST, ALGEBRAIST , GEOMETRY TOPOLOGIST, AND A ELECTRICAL ENGINEER ROLLED UP IN ONE

[Maedelrosen]

so animals need context to use their 'language' or signalling systems, and a thing i think of as hes talking is humans are the ones that can be completely out of context in terms of environment and situation yet bring up any concept at any time with a line of words, and animals dont

[Foxxxxx]

The Holy Quran
2:31 He taught Adam all the names [of things], then He showed them to the angels and said, ‘Tell me the names of these if you truly [think you can].’
2:32 They said, ‘May You be glorified! We have knowledge only of what You have taught us. You are the All Knowing and All Wise.’
2:33 Then He said, ‘Adam, tell them the names of these.’ When he told them their names, God said, ‘Did I not tell you that I know what is hidden in the heavens and the earth, and that I know what you reveal and what you conceal?’

[Himalayansuga]

Can someone show me where the full interview of this would be?

[gskessingerable]

Genesis 11:1-9 New International Version (NIV)

The Tower of Babel

11 Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. 2 As people moved eastward, [a]they found a plain in Shinar[b] and settled there.
3 They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricksand bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone,  and tar for mortar. 4 Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens,  so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scatteredover the face of the whole earth.”
5 But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. 6 The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go downand confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”
8 So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth,  and they stopped building the city. 9 That is why it was called Babel[c]—because there the Lordconfused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

[TheAwillz]

Is he alluding to Zipfs law with his comparison to the Fibonacci sequence in snow flakes?
New to studying language would appreciate any help.

[rmiddlehouse]

Anyone know where i can find out more about central v modular?