First Day o' Classes
Jan. 18th, 2006 10:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadydaveDear George Yule,
When I grow up, I want to write insane textbooks just like you.
"There are no dusty cassette tape fragments among the ancient bones, for example, to tell us how language was back in the early stages."
"The sounds of a person involved in physical effort could be the source of our language, especially when that physical effort involved several people and had to be coordinated. So, a group of early humans might develop a set of grunts, groans and swear words which they used when lifting and carrying bits of trees or lifeless mammoths."
"As a simple experiment, try to communicate, using only gesture, the following message to another member of your species: My uncle is invisible. Be prepared for a certain amount of misunderstanding."
"In terms of linguistic structure, the human may have first developed the naming ability, producing a specific noise (e.g. bEEr) for a specific object. The crucial additional step which was then accomplished was to bring another specific noise (e.g. gOOd) into combination with the first to build a complex message (bEEr gOOd). Several thousand years of evolution later, humans have honed this message building capacity to the point where, on Saturdays, watching a football game, they can drink a sustaining beverage and proclaim This beer is good. Other primates cannot do this."
When I grow up, I want to write insane textbooks just like you.
"There are no dusty cassette tape fragments among the ancient bones, for example, to tell us how language was back in the early stages."
"The sounds of a person involved in physical effort could be the source of our language, especially when that physical effort involved several people and had to be coordinated. So, a group of early humans might develop a set of grunts, groans and swear words which they used when lifting and carrying bits of trees or lifeless mammoths."
"As a simple experiment, try to communicate, using only gesture, the following message to another member of your species: My uncle is invisible. Be prepared for a certain amount of misunderstanding."
"In terms of linguistic structure, the human may have first developed the naming ability, producing a specific noise (e.g. bEEr) for a specific object. The crucial additional step which was then accomplished was to bring another specific noise (e.g. gOOd) into combination with the first to build a complex message (bEEr gOOd). Several thousand years of evolution later, humans have honed this message building capacity to the point where, on Saturdays, watching a football game, they can drink a sustaining beverage and proclaim This beer is good. Other primates cannot do this."