Comments by lingbot

@j7QzoW85fp:

"I fail to understand how this is a problem for the idea of a language instinct, any more than the fact that human faces differ is a problem for the idea of a human face."
I would have thought that face recognition is really a subset of pattern recognition. This pattern recognition does not necessarily equate to the 'idea of a human face'. The notion of an 'idea' as an explanatory principle for the detection of similarity between human faces is at least not necessary, or is not the only 'explanation' available. It's a useful abstraction, to be sure, but that does not make it an explanation of the activity at hand. And I would run an analogous argument for the 'idea of a grammatical rule'.

"The basis for the idea of a language instinct is that humans are unique in the biological world in recursively combining symbols into complex phrases and sentences"
I feel it's odd to be calling recursivity the necessary characteristic of a 'language instinct', if that's the term to be used. Language evolved in an environment of socially cooperative hominids to facilitate collective behaviour and survival, and its further evolution enabled new ways and means of individual and collective activity. Recursivity is the consequence of the combination of meanings with each other, which I suspect in turn evolved from the collective activity of humans conversing with each other- the collective activity of creating meanings with each other is then internalised by the individual to combine meanings within him or herself- and this is reprised in child language development. OK, this might be unique to humans, but there might be some evidence emerging that some primates can do this in the right environment- more specifically, and environment that has interacting humans. However, in any case, recursivity is held up as being the defining feature of language simply because no non-human has been demonstrated to do it, making the apriori assumption that 'language is unique to humans'- that is, if there's something about human natural language that is not found in other communicating species, it must be the defining and necessary characteristic of language. I don't think this is right at all.

This is an excellent graph. Needless to say, I don't fully understand it.

Kudos to the Economist for the recent articles on the Oz election. They have been right on the money, as are several of the posters here.

What baffles me most is the inability to get climate change legislation through. A clear majority support such a bill, and know full well the personal cost that this might entail. Yet both major parties are offering half-baked, or no, solutions. The 'direct action' being promised by one party is anything but- simply an insulting ruse to resolutely do nothing- while the other party is too obsessed with how the issue plays in the media to back the agenda. And both sides stoke xenophobia on immigration issues- a complete desertion of what it means to be Australian. The country is nothing without immigration, and has been the basis for its survival and development for more than 200 hundred years now. The utter spinelessness of both major parties is simply overwhelming.

@Flatearther: I would say that the conduct of campaigns has changed for the worse over the past 10-15 years, and there has been compulsory voting for all of that time. Maybe I'm being overly optimistic, but most Australians do have some form of involvement and interest in the question of who gets to govern the country. I'm suggesting that the quality of the campaigning and the complete cynicism of the parties is actively disengaging people from having any interest.

It's not a good time to be voting in Australia. Both major parties treating the populace like idiots, too cowardly to stand and defend a policy position, too busy using focus groups to find out what is saleable rather than good for the country– their never-ending quest to placate and pander to some mythical voter out there envisaged by both parties as narrowminded, fearful and resentful. I've had enough already. No matter who gets in, the sky is unlikely to fall in– but equally it is unlikely that Australia will be for the better from this experience. As for climate change strategy, sensible non-hysterical policies on population, ensuring stable ongoing budget positions– well, clearly all of that can wait until it's too late.

The point of similarity I see is the tension between the religious and the secular / humanist in both Greece / Rome and that of the modern day. The Greeks seemed to have some form of appreciation that they lived in both the 'rational' and 'irrational' worlds... I'm not sure whether we've got the same level of consciousness about that.

@ bruno p: to my mind the Berlin and Kay study usefully showed that the naming of colours was subject to *neurocognitive* constraints, not semantic ones. The Sapir -Whorf hypothesis does not intend to fly in the face of that reality; of course language has to operate within a neurological and cognitive framework. The point is that the constraints are very general ones, and not linguistic in nature; from that starting point, different languages develop (subtly and not so subtly) different ways of talking and thinking. And that's not taking into account issues to do with brain plasticity which directly impact on language learning and cognitive development.

@ rambling linguist: "I also do not know how this became a thread about linguistic determinism"– the discussion will inevitably be about this, because the paper attempts to relate language structure and operation and social structure and operation, with direct implication for the way in which languages have evolved, and on what basis.

Thank you to rambling linguist for getting the discussion rolling, and to Rick for responding... good to know that the authors are keeping track of informed reaction to their work. I haven't got much to add, although the notion of what counts as 'complexity' in language is a really interesting topic. The authors have looked at morphological complexity, so therefore complexity in a relatively circumscribed aspect of language. My point here is that there are other kinds of complexity in language- the sound system (phonology); constituent ordering in the grammar; cohesion, reference, evaluation / sentiment, simple and 'complex' conceptual structures in clausal and discourse semantics. Many other aspects too, I'm sure. The challenge here is: what dimensions in language, and at what level are they (from phonology up to discourse), are there in which complexity can be studied, and how do we judge whether a given aspect of language displays complexity or not? Does complexity refer to the overall configuration of a linguistic system, and / or the ways in which the system responds to surrounding linguistic and social change? What are the relationships between one kind of complexity and another? (relevant for this discussion: the relationship between morphological systems and constituent ordering). How does this complexity relate to the social environment in which language occurs, and what role does complexity play in the adaptation of language to a variety of often variable social situations and practices?

Good on Portugal for doing this. The approach is not novel- it's been tried with similar results in other jurisdictions- but as a demonstration of the effects of a policy, it works because the results are set against the background of a country that is often regarded as a 'basket case' (just to be clear: I don't regard Portugal as a basket case- it's just a common perception out there)

It makes me wonder whether we can approach the 'legal' drug alcohol as a health related issue when the police get involved. So if the police determine that drunkenness played an important role in an assault or car crash, for instance, then they get sent to an 'alcohol court' to commit to examining their own alcohol usage and doing something about it, as well as answering any criminal charges arising from the incident itself.

Surely a better way of evaluating the situation is to look at greenhouse gas tonnage per capita and how that has changed for each country in the period?

Yes I also agree that agricultural contributions also need to be looked at, as I suspect that their contribution is tied to intensive farming practices and industrial methods of food production. This area needs a thorough rethink for a whole host of reasons.

Yes the ex-Soviet bloc can claim a greenhouse gas fall because of the collapse of industries in their countries over the past 10-20 years. But a greenhouse gas reduction is a greenhouse gas reduction, no matter what the reason.

actually most of them speak some form of Indo-European... so can't they just all understand each other?? ;-)

yes, we can answer 'what is love?' but can anything through Google answer The KLF's question from 1990 or so: 'What Time Is Love'? Somebody started this whole pop song thing, now who was it? Who's going to stop it? Not me, sorry.

Of all the lobby groups out there, the anti-vaccination groups have got to be the most irrational and unreasonable around. I remember my sister, a paediatrician, having to calmly explain the risk-benefit profiles of various vaccines to such people (that is, giving as accurate an assessment of both the size and nature of *adverse effects* as well as benefits), only to have it drowned out in a tirade of false dogma about unnaturalness which never lets its adherents think for themselves. Their views are never falsifiable- they know that herd immunity from others who have been vaccinated will protect them and their children, but anyway claim that not vaccinating their children has not left them at increased risk. They like to think they are enlightened and progressive and in a sense anti-establishment, but they are not, because you can only be these things if you think, which these people rarely do.

Although I am at a distance from the action, it seems that Obama and McCain were the best possible presidential choices out of the multitude of people that put up their hand- I personally prefer Obama by a long shot, but if McCain got up, that choice would have been none too shabby either because he would have been happy to confront GOP positions on many things. I agree that McCain should have played more to his natural strength of being a GOP renegade– it would have made the contest much closer and given him a real fighting chance. But maybe the Republicans were always going to lose... and then would we have blamed McCain for not sticking to the party line? Probably.

Are biodiversity and climate change different issues? I wouldn't have thought so. Biodiversity is at least in part responsible for creating some of the complex systems that regulate and interact with weather and climate on several fronts. That's why it's more important to preserve the Amazon basin, for instance, than to replace it with the equivalent stand of one species of tree.Are climate change and economic issues different? Again, I wouldn't have thought so. We all know what's predicted for human habitation with increases in global temperature and their consequences. All proposed climate change policies are intimately connected with the economic underpinnings of our daily and communal life.So if biodiversity and climate change are closely connected, and climate change and economic life are closely connected, then...

@Fabio CI might be beside the point. That is probably because it's not really clear what point you are making. Unfortunately all I can see in this king tide of bald assertion is something about wishing to protect / defend an 'unbroken' and 'proud' Western cultural heritage. If that is the point you are making, then I suggest that one motif in the history of European thought and culture is openness to non-European culture through longstanding contact, and incorporation of that into 'new' European ways of doing things, whether this be during Ottoman days, contact with the Far East, later European empires that extended into Asia and the Americas (leaving aside the political legacy of those empires), and recent immigration to and within Europe. It is that openness– by no means ever-present, and often subjected to attack, but still there– that is one of the real strengths of European and Western society and culture. To my mind, the development of Europe has never been hermetically sealed against outside influence, and is for the better for having not been so.I might still be beside your point. If so, then make your point clear by constructing an argument.

@acubraThe ancient Greeks fought each other. A lot. And about the usual things: territory and resources. And they weren't all democrats either- in fact, most of them weren't. @Fabio CPlato wasn't hugely keen on this democracy thing either– read The Republic. Then construct your argument.

VK1961 wrote:Would you not agree with that assessment? Would you, that is, grant that "Western civilisation is built on a **revised/reconsidered/revisited** tradition that started with the Greeks and Romans"?Put that way, yes I would agree. What I was trying to get across is that yes, the Greeks / Romans did develop the traditions of rationality and humanism that Western culture values today. But I would argue that it was not the same kind of rationality, and was located in quite a different cultural context. A few examples. Greek science in the classical period, although looking for natural causation and explanation of natural phenomena in their own terms, was reluctant to engage in experimentation, instead relying on reasoning and argumentation to get at answers; in the case of medicine, dissection was avoided or done with much reluctance, and 'rational' medical practice often intertwined with superstition, intuition and magic (actually, not so different to today). The work of the Greek tragedians, now regarded as classics of Western drama and theatre, was intimately connected with religious festivals and practice, with which nowadays we don't usually associate drama (except perhaps the Christmas nativity?). In the case of legal oratory in Athens, the rules of evidence were quite different, greater weighting was given to hearsay than is now, there was little codification of law and, as far as I can recall, no formal mechanism to refer to legal precedent. The success of a case with a jury really depended a lot on the speaker's persuasive ability and his (not her, of course) pleasing rhetorical aesthetics. I wouldn't dispute that modern Western culture draws a lot on Greek and Roman heritage; but, as you say, it is 'reconsidered' in a new context and merged with other strands of thought such as empiricism, after significant parts of that heritage were hung onto by the monasteries during the mediaeval period. That reconsideration, I think, necessarily forced the traditions of rationality and humanism to be regarded and practised in quite a different way to how they were during Greek and Roman days. I'm not sure I'm adding much to what I've said before, but, for those reasons, I was trying to say that classics also taught me that there were no simple relationships between the past and the present, and that assumptions about our languages and cultures, and where they come from, ought to be closely considered.

A note to Philip O'Carroll... on my browser the marks do appear to be a rough breathing and acute respectively, so therefore correct (unless there are following Greek words in the same sentence, in which case the acute should be a grave accent by convention... oh, we could go on, of course). Maybe the Economist should have a serious rethink of its Greek typeface policy right now to avoid such confusion?

As someone who has studied Greek at doctoral level, study of ancient world languages, apart from the linguistic benefits, is also great training in learning to evaluate evidence, whether complete or fragmentary, and then build carefully considered argument based on that evidence always keeping in mind what you can and cannot claim from that evidence. I don't think those skills are going out of fashion or demand any time soon.My own experience in classics taught me something fundamental as well, and quite early on. A popular conception is that Western civilisation is built on a continuous tradition that started with the Greeks and Romans. Classical study teaches you that it's a lot more complicated than that. Some aspects teach you that there are some generally recurring patterns– why peoples engage in war, the rise, conduct and fall of imperial regimes, the effects of a trade economy, how people build knowledge, the role of art and aesthetics in society, the social stratification of communities and the division of labour, for instance. But there are also differences that take you by surprise– the way they conducted scientific and philosophical enquiry and medicine, what they thought of as 'democracy', to what extent they relied on the written word (rather less than one would expect) and their conduct of legal and political life. Furthermore, you are made aware that the different nature of the languages– compared to English, for example– has resulted in different ways of thinking and interacting in ancient societies. Thus you are trained pretty well in examining and questioning assumptions about the kind of world we live in and where we want to take it.In Australia and New Zealand there continues to be teaching in ancient history and classical studies which is holding up pretty well, but rather less teaching of Latin, with only a very few schools teaching Greek to matriculation level (and I do know of at least one teaching Sanskrit at secondary level!). My hope is that the ancient history / classical studies subjects go on to strongly encourage language learning, and not just hope that their students are going to be just satisfied with the ancient world accessed only through translation. There's no substitute for understanding ancient culture in the languages that created and mediated it.