The Battle of the Linguists | Pirahã Part 2
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- Опубліковано 9 тра 2024
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A sequel to: • The Tribe That Can't C...
Thanks to my patrons!!
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Sources:
Barkham, P. (2008). "The power of speech". The Guardian.
de Bot, K. (2015). A History of Applied Linguistics: From 1980 to the Present. Routledge.
Everett, D. (2005). "Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã". Current Anthropology v. 46, n. 4.
Everett, D. (2007). "Recursion and Human Thought: Why the Pirahã Don't Have Numbers". Edge.
Frank, M., Everett, D., Fedorenko, E. & Gibson, E. (2008). "Number as a cognitive technology: Evidence from Pirahã language and cognition". Cognition v. 108.
Gordon, P. (2004). "Numerical Cognition Without Words: Evidence from Amazonia". Science.
Hauser, M., Chomsky, N. & Fitch, T. (2002). "The Language Faculty: What is it, who has it, and how did it evolve?" Science 298: 1569-1579.
Hurford, J. (1995). "Nativist and Functional Explanations in Language Acquisition". Logical Issues in Language Acquisition.
Ibbotson, P. & Tomasello, M. (2016). "Evidence Rebuts Chomsky’s Theory of Language Learning". Scientific American.
Murphy, J. (1974). Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: A History of Rhetorical Theory from St. Augustine to the Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Pawley, A. (2005). In: Everett, D. "Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã". Current Anthropology v. 46, n. 4: Comments.
Piantadosi, S., Stearns, L., Everett, D. & Gibson, E. (2012). "A corpus analysis of Pirahã grammar: An investigation of recursion".
Sampson, G. (2005). The 'Language Instinct' Debate: Revised Edition. Bloomsbury Academic.
Tymoczko, T. & Henle, J. (2004). Sweet Reason: A Field Guide to Modern Logic. Springer Science & Business Media.
Valian, V. (1986). "Syntactic Categories in the Speech of Young Children". Developmental Psychology.
Whorf, B. (1936). "An American Indian Model of the Universe". Published 1950 by Institute of General Semantics.
Wells, P. (2022). "The Implications Of Everett". 3 Quarks Daily.
Wierzbicka, A. (2005). In: Everett, D. "Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã". Current Anthropology v. 46, n. 4: Comments.
enGrama Ψ. (2021). "Daniel Everett's contributions are basically nothing" - Noam Chomsky. [Video]. UA-cam. Available from: • "Daniel Everett's cont...
NOTE ABOUT CHOMSKY: No part of this video should not be taken as an endorsement of Noam Chomsky’s politics. Mr Chomsky has recently made several comments in favour of Ukraine laying down arms and allowing a Russian invasion in the Ukraine War. Both myself and my artist find these pro-imperialist comments disgusting and sinister, and stand in stark political opposition to this view.
Chapters:
00:00 - Intro
01:59 - Everett, Chomsky, and Universal Grammar
06:30 - Recursion
09:22 - Chomsky’s Response and the End of UG
11:38 - Credits
Written and created by me
Art by kvd102
Music by me.
Translations:
Leeuwe van den Heuvel - Dutch
Ümit Duran - Turkish
#chomsky #linguistics #recursion
Noam Lomsky
noam lomsky
noam lomsky
noam lomsky
Noam Lomsky
noam Lomsky
i can't count either
Hey we did it, we found the next great pirahã researcher
It's okay.
same, i dont know what a wan or tu is but i think theyve got a neat symbol
the
It's ironic how Chomsky defends UG, by citing UG.
That's a pretty recursive argument Noam.
Isn't "Recursive argument" just a fancy way of saying "Fallacy" 🤔
@@jeffersonmcgee9560 Not necessarily
"Your mom" is a fallacy, but not recursive.
@@sponge1234ify
Indeed. Hwever, what I tried to say was that all "Recursive Arguments" are "Fallacies" not that all "Fallacies" are "Recursive Arguments".
On a similar train of thought, YOUR mom
You said absolutely nothing.
ʻOiaʻiʻo
It annoys me to no end that there has been a huge debate about piraha and the language itself just has not been studied more in practice.
There are practical reasons for this, including the protection of Amazonian cultures by the Brazilian agency that regulates research and contact.
But ... Yes ... It is quite annoying considering the implications of this debate.
Imagine ... What if he IS a charlatan after all? Or, what if Everett is right and it's time to kill off Universal Grammar once and for all.
@@ems4884the fact it has only been understood enough to be conversational in by a handful of outside people, and only extensively studied by Everett and the missionary before him, combined with the accusations by the most famous linguistics expert alive would have made studying this language almost certainly a career dead end if your access to the tribe was cut off, and career suicide if you actually found something compelling enough to make chomsky feel his theory was under serious threat.
That is because most of the people arguing against Everett are ignorant about the Piraha, but that doesn't stop them from having opinions on the matter.
@@MarmaladeINFP Linguists even got together to ban Everett from being able to visit the Piraha. The outsider who can speak the language best!
In general it's an interesting subject but it also feels like an impractical area to actually study given the isolation of the people and the limited number of outsiders with firsthand familiarity with the language and culture.
Since having met Everett Pirahã's grammar has developed a new rule: "Don't recurse. Daniel is within earshot"
Danslang
I think the fact that he refers to the Pirahã without using their names might be due to the fact that their names don't appear to be a permanent thing. A quote from the man himself, for what it's worth:
Once when I arrived in Posto Novo, I went up to Kóhoibihiai and asked him to work with me, as he always did. No answer. So I asked again, "Ko Kóhoi, kapiigakagakaisogoxoihi?" (Hey Kóhoi, do you want to mark paper with me?) Still no answer. So I asked him why he wasn't talking to me. He responded, "Were you talking to me? My name is Tiáapahai. There is no Kóhoi here. Once I was called Kóhoi, but he is gone now and Tiáapahai is here."
very cool, but i suppose the names aren't even the point. literal numbers would be enough - it's just considered bad practice within anthropology to not keep track of which individuals do what within your writing, because it leads to generalisations etc, if that makes sense
@@kklein There is that, but again, how do you identify them if all you have to go by is a face while their identities are impermanent? Mistakes would be very easy to make.
Not that I'm saying his approach is flawless, it's obviously far from that; but I don't think there's any racism involved.
@@jozesveticic1919people who sissy great apps give them names. He could easily give them nicknames in his write ups and include notes about their name changes over time.
Name changes are not that wacky; many pre- modern cultures did this. Also more oral cultures tend to do this, where a person's names are in relation to their relationships with others and their social roles. Going from milk names to nicknames to a coming of age name, for example.
@@kklein
You call him a prick and racist, which I don't see how has any relevance in what should ideally be an entirely acedemic discussion of linguistics, because he strips them of individuality by not mentioning names, and then you suggest numbers? I see how that would lead to better data and understanding of how representative his findings are of the population, but that sounds way more like something a prick or racist would do than to just loosely refer to one the speakers. Maybe he just didn't consider it important specifically who he talked to for the point he was making. That may be wrong, but I think it is totally wrong to attack his character because of his potentially bad acedemic habits.
Thank you so much for actually pointing this out! I got so mad when I saw that part of the video because he clearly states their names multiple times but he also explains how they literally switch names
Pirahã's supposed lack of subordinate clauses reminds me of Toki Pona: if you want to say "I know you know I know" in Toki Pona, you have to say "mi sona e ni: sina sona e ni: mi sona", which literally translates to "I know this: you know this: I know".
Toki pona was inspired by simplicity of Pirahã.
Edited: It isn't actually.
It could be argued that ni is functioning as a complementiser there, meaning a more accurate translation would be "I know that you know that I know", using the English complementiser "that". I guess the argument against recursion in toki pona is that it's not possible to embed an arbitrarily complex sentence in another, since you can only have one la particle per sentence. Maybe.
@@globalincident694 Even if it's grammatically possible to make the sentences arbitrarily complex, it's considered bad style in Toki Pona. You could say that the lack of recursion in Toki Pona is thus a choice made by the speaker, not an inherent property of the language. K Klein touches on that difference in the video.
@@Oler-yx7xj I actually just asked jan Sonja about this when I saw this video, and she said that she didn't hear about Pirahã until *after* she created toki pona
Toki Pona was where my brain first went when reading this, although Toki Pona does kinda have recursion due to the "la" particle.
I think it’s fascinating that Pirahã is the only language without recursion. You could probably write English completely without recursion, so the only benefit is brevity. The fact that almost all languages have this feature is amazing.
Recursion does allow a little bit more precision. With “I saw a man fishing” it’s stated explicitly that he was fishing when you saw him. “I saw a man; he was fishing” only explicitly conveys that you seeing him and him fishing are both things that occurred.
A man was fishing; then I saw him; then he was still fishing.
there's a lot of languages where recursion is grammatically possible, but speakers choose not to use it in complex constructions
I don't think it's actually alone. I'm fairly certain a lack of recursion is also characteristic of many Papuan languages.
That said, an excess of recursion is actually pretty hard for the human brain to handle. I believe I once read that for most people a recursion depth of around 7 levels is about the maximum they can process (without writing it down to analyse, that is).
Chomsky being unable to let go of his theory of UG makes me think of J. Eric S. Thompson, who basically held the decipherment of the Maya script back for decades because he was certain it was completely logographic. Since he was essentially the leading scholar on the matter he would heavily criticize anyone who insisted phonetic components to the glyphs and basically held back the amount we could decipher until after he died.
People really don’t want to admit that their life’s work may have been incorrect or flawed. Which, I mean, of course they don’t but it is detrimental.
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it ...
"An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of the fact that the future lies with the youth." - Max Planck
I absolutely agree with the Thompson comparison. If you're interested (though it's likely this is how you heard of it (me too)) Breaking the Maya Code, by Michael Coe is an amazing book about Maya decipherment.
didnt even know of thompson
Your comment is spotlessly pristine in its absence of content, as is every other comment I've seen thus far. I'd respond to your arguments, but there we none.
ʻOiaʻiʻo
"I'm right, therefore, you're wrong" - Chomsky, 2021
Chomsky: Every language is basically underlyingly English structure, but gets changed before it comes out of the mouth.
Literally lmao that switches stuff is stupid
Chomsky doesn't make the argument that all languages are underlyingly English structures. If you can point to anything in the minimalist program that makes it anglocentric, then I'd be interested to see it.
That’s not at all what he says
To be fair to Chomsky, he has another somewhat better response, which is that recursion doesn't have to be present in every language for it to be the fundamental thing that causes language to arise. But as Everett points out, this seems to imply that in principle, it's possible for there to be no languages with recursion (the theory doesn't rule out that every language with recursion in it could die, leaving only Piraha remaining), putting Chomsky in the unenviable position of arguing that something that doesn't need to exist in any language is fundamental to all language
yes this is completely unfalsifiable. how would you test that? it becomes impossible.
@@kklein Since when did Chomsky care about falsifiability though. First major publication was basically arguing for the spontaneous and random generation of language.
@Emmet Harrigan If you're arguing that something is biological, you are inherently making a statement that implies it should be provable through the same methods any other statement about biology should be provable. Or you should at least be able to reasonably demonstrate how unreasonably hard it would be to prove. For example, if you say "humans are naturally heterosexual", you have to concede that such a theory would be false if there was an experiment where humans are raised without any external pressure to conform to any sexuality and it proved to show some of the subjects were undeniably non-heterosexual. If Chomsky is not allowing any room for falsifiability of his theory, then his "theory" is just an ideology
That's like saying, _"it doesn't matter that I'm contradicted, because it proves that I'm right anyways"_ UG isn't a theory, it is a fallacy.
@@brasteryakintosh9418 Reminds me of Calhoun's mouse utopias.
Ngl I have a hard time not seeing Chomsky as just someone who wants his theory to be the correct one for the sake of his own ego, even though evidence seems to point at it being completely wrong.
I think of him as I do of other brilliant scientists, he had some cool ideas when he was young that completely changed everything, but then as he got older, and his brain got stuck in its ways, he lost the flexibility to get with the times and the new theories. Same happened with Einstein and quantum mechanics.
I think considering how much of Chomsky's general philosophy, as he's presented it, intersects with/build on his linguistic theory, I wouldn't say it's just about ego.
i do kinda slightly see it that way too
it's tough to see your life's work go down the drain like this, but i suppose that's just the tyranny of the half life of knowledge. i can see myself in chomsky's position letting my ego get the better of me. i do think he's still a great thinker who's produced a lot of valuable work, but it does truly seem like UG has its days counted.
the idea of UG always seemed strange to me. the way the person explained it in the (yes, sorry, I'm bad) intro to linguistics class was that the critical idea was that there was no way to account for the information getting in-given that kids are resistant to correction, and some other factors.
but all that proves is that kids aren't taught to speak by parents acting as teachers; it doesn't rule out that kids imitate and gradually reprocess as their brains develop.
I'm a lot more open to the idea that _some_ things may be biological than I was in college, but something as narrow as "pronoun drop" seems like a weird thing for biology to be coding for, to me. maybe I just don't know enough. I don't know.
It's interesting to observe how much Chomsky's humanism and wider philosophies hinge on his UG. He uses it a basis to give supposed empirical validity to concepts like human nature and moral realism. It paints it like he has more than just academic credibility hanging on his theory being correct. It also gives off vibes close to the modernist "my social philosophy is based on science" in a way that put me off from the first time I learned it...
I'll read it to make sure it's correct, because whatever opinions I come out of it with must be the truth.
yeah, his televised discussion with Foucault is very enlightening in that regard. im obviously biased, ‘cause i identify with the so-called “postmodern” philosophical school and also because i straight-up don’t like analytic philosophy, but the issues with Chomsky’s thought in general are in full display in that discussion. the main criticism against contemporary continental philosophy’s that it is deficient in praxis (which i have a bunch of opinions about), but at least it diagnoses and recognizes problems a looooooot better than analytic philosophy lol
@@McMaster1471 This sounds really interesting. I saw the debate but I don't know the first thing about philosophy.
What are some problems which Continental can diagnose but Analytical can't? And what makes Continental so astute?
@@LowestofheDead i’d answer it thusly: the thing with analytic philosophy’s that it has adopted a particular idiom, which is to say, a specific style, that has not really changed much even in the present day, that being its scientific approach to things, using formal logic and math in the service of attaining the most objective understanding. that’s where the problem lies. their “objective”, “scientific” worldview is only but one possible way of looking at the world, which is to say that it isn’t objective at all. analytic philosophy’s unwillingness to budge from its commitment to scientism means that all of the answers that it comes up with are, from the get-go, very narrow, in that they are given in response to problems that are posed in a very closed, limited milieu. on the other hand, most philosophers who are considered to be continental philosophers rarely share each other’s approaches. they may be tackling the same problems, but the way that individual thinkers pose the problems and the possible solutions they give are varied and diverse. hence why it is patently more difficult to describe the gist of continental philosophy. that is to say that one can get a more complete, holistic understanding of a problem from continental philosophy because it is tackled and posed in countless ways, in contrast to the “objectivist”, but ultimately very subjectivist, “scientific” methodological approach of the analytics. a more immediate example of this difference can be found in the respective schools’ approaches to history. the analytics tend to subscribe to the boring, reductive notion that history is linear, while the continentals do many things with it: they genealogize, reterritorialize, contextualize history. this is why the arch-continental Deleuze famously hated analytic philosophy. Deleuze’s philosophy of philosophy was essentially that it should investigate problems and create concepts in response to them, not because they are “objectively true”, but if they are interesting or beautiful. to him, using philosophy only to explore so-called “objective truths” is the misuse of philosophy, which is inherently a rebellion against the world.
@@McMaster1471 So if I understand this right: Analytic uses a Scientism worldview/approach - which limits both the problems they can see, AND solutions they find.
I can see a few reasons why scientific experiments can't apply to human societies:
- The scientists are humans who are also affected by society's ideas, so they can't be objective
- We can't know what's inevitable or random in world history, because we can't go back in time and change things to observe causality.
So scientists either ditch the objectivity, or pretend to have it. E.g. Chomsky "Pirahã has recursion because my theory is objective truth"
You also mentioned that Continentals are deficient in Praxis - I noticed this in that debate.
Foucault seemed to criticize political action because we could have the wrong ideas and cause a disaster like the USSR.
Chomsky argued 'We don't know absolutely if we have the right idea. But we can be close enough, and if we don't act then there could be worse disasters like not stopping the Vietnam war'.
It seems to be a false dichotomy between VS . Is there no synthesis or best-of-both-worlds?
I know nothing about linguistics at all but these videos are just so damn entertaining/fascinating and I don't know why
Most of the time it comes down to how well they're presented and how pleasant the presenters voice and cadence appears to you. I follow quite a bunch of channels where I'm not really that interested in the main topic (at least not in a way I could easily convey, that is), but where I simply enjoy the "company" of the hosts. Sometimes, they spark my interest in the topic itself (maybe because I project my sympathy for them onto the topic, not sure). For instance, I did enjoy a good cup of coffee before discovering James Hoffmann's channel, but it didn't really mattered that much for me. Now, dozens of videos later, I'm an outright coffee nerd and people I know started asking me for advice :D
@@lonestarr1490 that’s very recognizable. After buying all kind of coffee things I decided that I stick to Nescafé, to lazy to make it better. Still have some excellent coffee of 5 years old now.
Here the same. I also have this with a lot of video channels about biking infra structure. And I don’t like riding a bicycle at all, I prefer to walk.
You know something about linguistics now!
I studied for a doctorate in linguistics 35 years ago. I ended up leaving the program without earning one. There were two main reasons: my department had begun practicing an almost ideological reeducation mentality; and I read a few papers questioning whether universal grammar was indeed universally applicable. The example language I recall was Lakota. According to the authors of one such study, it seemed Lakota had basically a flat grammar while UG was designed around hierarchical grammars. It was enough to raise doubts in my mind; and given the attitude in the department, I had to flee.
Since then I have read very few papers in theoretical linguistics, but from the ones I have read, UG is hanging on for dear life.
I live for this Chomsky slander because my sociolinguistics professor absolutely hated him and his theory (and he was really convincing so I disregarded Chomsky's ideas completely), but my English professor insisted we use UG...
Some degree of analysis with UG can be useful, though mostly to adapt other languages to the inner workings of Indo-Europeans, languages that you're probably already familiar with and can easily work with
I think that many Chinese sentences resemble Pirahã, where they use full sentences where in English it would be just a clause. (Of course there's still recursion in Chinese, but I think that it's much less used than in English, so maybe it wouldn't be a stretch of imagination that there's a language that doesn't use it at all)
I am not a linguist so maybe I've misunderstood, but Chinese uses "my mother said: clean your room" kind of constructions. It also happily uses possessive on top of possessive but repeating "的 的 的” is considered bad form so they'll use also 之 as well as zero adposition to line up modifiers.
Isn't 他这个不爱狗的人来了 an example of an embedded sentence? I'm not understanding the difference except that English can't do this, you have to use a relative pronoun here... unless you can turn it into a phrase like "that dog-hating person" but in many cases this sort of construction wouldn't be idiomatic because it's too awkward.
Chinese certainly has recursion. 我看見剛才撞了你的人了扒了你媽送你的錢包. "I saw the person who just bumped into you stealing the wallet that your mother gave you." The lack of relative pronoun is not unusual as only 7% of the languages around the world uses relative pronouns to mark relative clauses (Cysouw 2011).
What's interesting about Chinese though is that it has serial verb construction, which is hard to tell whether it's recursion or parallel sentences. For example, 他拿筆出來寫信回覆媽媽說他過得很好 means "he took out a pen (to) write a letter (to) reply to mom (,) saying (that) he is doing fine." Because there is nothing to mark the relation of the verbs, it is also grammatically correct to interpret this as "he took out pen (and leave it on the table), wrote a letter (with another pen), replied to mom (by phone), and said (to dad) that he was fine."
I don’t know what you may have planned for this channel, but I would love to see more videos on linguistic theories, analyzing ideas about language and the criticisms other linguists express toward them (since it seems that linguists are very prone to beefing with each other)
@k Klein plz
Honestly, I don't really see the problem with a non-recursive language. Because if you say: "I saw a foreigner. He was fishing", then "he" relates to "the foreigner" that we already know was seen by the speaker. So in terms of meaning, it is _identical_ to "I saw a foreigner who was fishing," at least in English.
So, in some sense, pro-forms _are_ a form of recursion, even if the way they're expressed isn't recursively embedded in our speech. Which in turn should mean that the fact a non-recursive natural language can exist is entirely unsurprising, so long as it has other modes of self-reference.
"Am hungry" is an interesting one, because while it is grammatically incorrect, it will still probably only be interpreted one way, because it can't be short for "you am hungry" or "they am hungry", it can only be referring to "I am hungry". Perhaps in Future English we'll become more like the Spanish and allow I to be dropped. Anyway, good video. Like you say, a sample size of 1 isn't great for non-Pirahã people who speak the language, it would be nice to know what they think about all this.
I doubt this, because "to be" is the only verb in English that is conjugated this much.
Take "go home". Is it "I go home" or "you go home" etc? The only thing we know is that it can't be he/she/it. And it gets worse in other tenses: "went home" could refer to anyone.
The subject is dropped in commands, as it’s implied to be the person whose being addressed. In English you can say “drink water” whereas in German it has to be “trinken Sie Wasser”, “Drink you water”. Actually there are still parts of Norfolk where you’ll hear phases like “slow you down”.
@@luelou8464 minor correction: the "Sie" is only required for the formal imperative; the informal imperative (singular or plural) does not usually take a personal pronoun either; so it'd be "Trink Wasser!" or "Trinkt Wasser!"
@@MsBlulucky yeah, it would only really work for the "am" case
using a pronoun in English imperatives has been grammatical since at least the Elizabethan era, in fact, for a time in the 19th century, it was even grammatical to do it with the auxiliary "do" so a sentence like "drink water!" would be realised "do you drink water!" (cf. Riley, 1912)
My undergraduate education in linguistics has honestly taught me more about how to spot bullshit fallacious logic in science than about the actual languages people speak, lol. I study at a school where UG is basically the only theory taken seriously in the Linguistics department, and it required a great deal of personal effort to learn about theories that don’t fit within that model. I’m so glad criticism of Chomskyan linguistics has become so much more mainstream in the past decade or so.
Decoding Chomsky: Science and Revolutionary Politics
Chris Knight
Knight observes, “The revolutionary new ‘computational theory of mind’ - keystone of the ‘cognitive revolution’ - was based on the idea that the human brain is a digital computer or ‘information-processing device’.” He points out that “The new cognitive paradigm placed mind over matter, consciousness over life, theory over practice - in such a way that the fundamental premises of Marxist materialism were almost imperceptibly undermined, dissolved and eventually dismissed as no more than old-fashioned dogma. The intellectual most closely associated with this molecular process was Noam Chomsky.”
William Podmore
Excellent critique of Chomsky's flawed philosophy
Chris Knight is senior research fellow in the Department of Anthropology at University College London. This fine book does for linguist Noam Chomsky what Richard Webster (Why Freud was wrong) and Frederick Crews (Freud [Fraud]: the making of an illusion) did for Sigmund Freud, and what Richard Noll did for Carl Jung (The Jung cult).
Chomsky said linguistics was a natural science, but his method was hardly scientific. No scientist could ever say, as he did, “You can see that some ideas simply look right, and then you sort of put aside the data that refute them.”
He wrote in 1965 that “Linguistic theory is primarily concerned with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogenous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly …” This idealism is shared with neo-classical economists, who posit economic agents of perfect rationality, and it is equally unrealistic and misleading.
Chomsky argued that we did not need to study language use because “In principle one might have the cognitive structure that we call ‘knowledge of English’, fully developed, with no capacity to use this structure.” So, Chomsky believes, one might have full command of English without being able to speak a word of it - which is absurd.
Knight observes, “The revolutionary new ‘computational theory of mind’ - keystone of the ‘cognitive revolution’ - was based on the idea that the human brain is a digital computer or ‘information-processing device’.” He points out that “The new cognitive paradigm placed mind over matter, consciousness over life, theory over practice - in such a way that the fundamental premises of Marxist materialism were almost imperceptibly undermined, dissolved and eventually dismissed as no more than old-fashioned dogma. The intellectual most closely associated with this molecular process was Noam Chomsky.”
Chomsky claimed that language “would work the same if there weren’t any world” and that “there is no longer a coherent concept of body (matter, physical) …” Knight explains, “According to Chomsky’s reverse-Cartesian philosophy, matter does not exist: there is only mind.”
Knight continues, “‘Mind’, translated as ‘information’, is now apparently independent of matter. … mentalism - the idea of mind over matter - became a defining feature of the new cognitive science. With the mind-brain distinction now conceptualized as the difference between hardware and software, it was declared that the age-old philosophical mind-body problem had been solved. … That, in brief, is the standard account of the cognitive revolution - the one you will find in the textbooks.” But how could one simple - and wrong - analogy solve the mind-body problem?
Let us recall the basics of philosophy: there are two lines - materialism, the scientific thesis that mind is a product of matter, and idealism, the religious thesis that matter is a product of mind. The ‘cognitive revolution’ just uses fancy new terms to push the old idealist fallacy. Yet historian Kathleen Hayles even ludicrously claimed that ‘The central event of the 20th century is the overthrow of matter’.
Chomsky’s idealism splits mind from body and therefore theory from practice. As Knight points out, “To destroy Marxism … it was necessary to strike at this point, shattering the all-important junction between theory and practice. Chomsky’s intellectual status, perceived moral integrity and impeccable left-wing credentials made him the perfect candidate for this job.”
Chomsky also openly attacked and smeared Marxism, writing, “part of the strain of thinking that is very central to Marxism … expresses itself in the clearest form in the Leninist variety of Marxism and also in fascism, which is in many respects not a dissimilar position.”
The ‘cognitive revolution’ was actually a counter-revolution. Knight shows how the US state promoted ‘the Pentagon-funded cognitive revolution in linguistics, psychology and philosophy …’, how “the entire intellectual upheaval was driven by industrial and military imperatives bound up with the Cold War” and “how, in Chomsky’s case, state funding provided the institutional framework needed to ensure the cognitive revolution’s success. If there was a political will in operation here, no matter how unconscious, it was indisputably that of the state.”
Fifth Generation Texan
5.0 out of 5 stars A Riveting Dissection
Reviewed in the United States on 13 September 2016
I re-read anthropologist Christ Knight’s riveting dissection of Chomsky after having listened to Tom Wolfe’s hilarious but wrong-headed, take-down of same in his Kingdom of Speech. Decoding Chomsky is by far the better book, an authoritative, deeply thoughtful and very well written (if of course not nearly so zany) analysis of Chomsky’s intellectual pretentions, evasions and contradictions. The actual story is just so much richer than even Wolfe imagines. Knight’s revelatory investigation helps me understand at last why for so many decades I could never make sense of Chomsky’s various (and often contradictory) pronouncements about the evolution of language. Re-reading Knight, it occurred to me that Chomsky might have been deliberately subverting his military sponsors. But that’s just too wildly implausible to be true! Or is it? I note that after reading Knight’s book, David Wineberg (in the Amazon review above) comes to a similar conclusion. In any event, thanks and kudos to Chris Knight for shedding light on a hitherto incomprehensible tangle.
David Wineberg
5.0 out of 5 stars The Man With Two Brains
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 9 September 2016
It seems Noam Chomsky has been living a lie. He has twisted his whole being into separating his beliefs from his work. He worked for the Pentagon at MIT, while claiming nothing he produced could, would or should help them in their murderous quest. Because Noam Chomsky despises the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex. So to live within and from it, he created a new science out of whole cloth: universal, transformational and generative grammars, a wholly natural science, independent of - well, humanity. Totally divorced from everyday communication, his rules are purely scientific and abstract. As a whole, it makes no sense to anyone, unless you look at him as having two brains. This is the essence of Decoding Chomsky, a totally engrossing roller coaster ride (Chris Knight’s own term) to rationalize what Noam Chomsky has wrought.
Chomsky singlehandedly caused a cognitive revolution, inspiring linguistics departments worldwide to include new directions in their teachings and research. And psychology, biology and sociology. That no one could actually make it work did not deter Chomsky. He became strident and critical, insisting he was right and everyone else just didn’t get it. His (linguistics) books were incomprehensible - it wasn’t just me. He defended them with bluster, vitriol and personal attacks. He attacked his own supporters as needed, as well as his inspirations and mentors. He changed history at will. Every decade he posited new, bizarre theories and said they could not be tested. You just had to accept them as he stated them. There was no possible explanation other than his. Because he was Noam Chomsky, the whole world bought in.
I personally always had trouble with the linguistics side of Noam Chomsky, and I told him so. He told me not to worry - a lot of people did. I much prefer his political side, where he has opened eyes and minds to deeper meaning in current events, journalism and politics worldwide. For that, he is the most respected American in the world.
Knight spends the entire book piling on evidence that Chomsky has the unique ability to split his brain into two diametrically opposed buffers: Pentagon science and social activism, separated by a firewall. But I don’t need Knight’s bizarre physiological theory. It’s all very clear and consistent to me now. Chomsky actively misdirected and subverted the entire field of linguistics to delay its use by his military employers, and thereby remain true to himself. He screwed the Pentagon. He took their money, kept his job, and gave them nothing real to work with. The rest of us were just collateral damage. We paid the price for his personal mission. He manufactured consent by bullying. It is his own Command & Control program.
Knight has been swept up by the madness. He takes the theories seriously. He spends endless pages refuting Chomsky and displaying plausible alternate scenarios. Not once does he employ the word “fraud”. I think he is too close to it to see the nugget of truth at the center. Regardless, his book is riveting and revealing, and gives badly needed perspective to an American icon.
And by the way, Noam Chomsky read this book prior to publication, and denies none of it.
THE MEANING OF MIND - Thomas Szasz
Preface
The word "mind" names one of our most important, but most confused and confusing, ideas. The Latin mens means not only mind but also intention and will, a signification still present in our use of the word "mind" as a verb. Because we attribute intention only to intelligent, sentient beings, minding implies agency. My aim in this book is to present a systematic exploration and exposition of the thesis that minding is the ability to pay attention and adapt to one's environment by using language to communicate with others and oneself. * Specifically, I suggest that viewing "the mind" as a potentially infinite variety of self-conversations** is the key that unlocks many of the mysteries we associate with this concept. Animals communicate with other members of their species. But only human beings talk to themselves and recognize that that is what they are doing. The concept of mind-as the attribution of moral agency to some persons but not others-plays a crucial role in moral philosophy.
*By language, I here mean spoken or written words in the case of hearing and sighted persons, speech and Braille in the case of blind persons, and sign language in the case of deaf persons. * * Webster's lists more than five hundred entries for terms with the prefix "self"-beginning with self-abandonment and ending with self-willed-but "self-conversation" is not among them. Conversation between two persons is called a "dialogue," and the monopolizing of a conversation by a single person is called a "monologue." Hence, the proper Latin word for self-conversation is "autologue."
Infants and demented old persons cannot communicate by lan-guage and are therefore typically excluded from the category of moral agents. In the past, persons able to communicate by language-for example, slaves and women-were also denied the status of moral agents; today, many children and mental patients-similarly endowed-are denied that status. The point is that attributing or refusing to attribute moral agency to the Other is a matter of both fact and tactic-a decision that depends not only on the Other's abilities, but also on our attitude toward him. recognized as a moral agent, an individual must be able and willing to function as a responsible member of society, and society must be willing to ascribe that capacity and status to him. The dependence of moral agency on mindedness renders the judgment of mindlessness of paramount legal and social significance. Two common tactics-ignored by classic and modern moral philosophers alike-deserve special mention in this connection. One is treating a person as incompetent when in fact he is not (thus harming him under the guise of helping him); the other is treating a person as a victim when in fact he is an active agent (excusing him of responsibility for his self-victimization and blaming his self-injury on innocent third parties).
Although mind is a moral and psychological concept, it is now regularly addressed by biologists, linguists, mathematicians, neuroscientists, philosophers, and physicists as well. Most of these authors ignore the actual uses of the term "mind." Instead, they treat the mind as if it were the brain, or a function of the brain, and define their task as offering observations and speculations about the workings of that organ. * To properly evaluate the merits of these studies we must not lose sight of the fact that the word "mind" is a part of our everyday vocabulary and that we use it most often, with the most far-reaching practical consequences, in ordi-nary discourse, law, and psychiatry.
*Equally unhelpfully, linguists use constructs and terms such as "artificial intelligence," "mental grammar," and "universal grammar" to explain the workings of the mind.
just want to take a moment to echo the sentiment that this is one of your most thoroughly researched and polished videos ever, bravo
Thank you lesbian donut for sponsoring this channel
I got to read 'lesbian donut' today because of you
thank you for all your great videos! you've become one of my favourite channels as of late. i was waiting for this one for a while
I cannot comprehend how “culture has an impact on language” was ever a controversial statement. It is absolutely the obvious conclusion, just by logic
I guess the field of linguistics wanted to give language a bigger meaning than it actually has (starting with whorf-saphir bs)
It's more the claim that "Culture can prevent the use of a grammatical feature that's really fundamental in thousands of languages... And also affects whether you count or have colours"
@@LowestofheDead yet again, the counterpoint of that is not that the concept of counting or colors isn’t there, but that it isn’t represented in speech/language. UG is ridiculous
Culture has some obvious impact on language such as unique vocabularies, loanwords, polite register, etc. But whether it can impact basic grammar is not obvious. If linguists had not documented all those unusual languages unimaginable to Westerners, UG might very well had been taken as a fact.
On a scale of very to extremely, how pleased with yourself were you when you came up with that final "paradigm" line?
I am just here to express my full love for these videos. These videos are so fun and so entertaining, thank you for making these!
Great video! I myself am a great fan of Tomasello's work, glad to see him mentioned here! The Pirahã never cease to be an interesting topic of discussion and as a Brazilian particularly I would love to see more study done on their language and culture, and how they relate to their ancestors.
To be fair the premise that we have a language faculty and that we're limited to our human biological constraints aren't necessarily bad premises. Those premises don't need recursion to be correct. Does anybody know if there are other models for universal grammar being researched/theorized?
I do not believe anyone is necessary going against the premise of being limited by being human, but the idea of a 'universal grammar' where the brain has preset, innate, biological rules underling all languages is... likely wrong. Every time you think of a universal aspect between all languages, then there is going to be a language without it. Speech is universal? What about Sign language. I suppose the only universal aspect is that languages communicates information... which is so general that I don't believe there are going to be any rules to communication (apart from the fact that something is communicated, and something takes the communication).
If I really had to make a theory on how humans pick up language, then I would likely center it around association. Humans are extremely good at pattern recognition, so we learn that 'green' and 'happy' and 'impossible' all have similar rules. If we were to find another word, then we would place it under these same rules, making an 'adjective'. The idea of an innate 'adjective' switch just seems so artificial. Additionally, there is no biological basis for any switches whatsoever, or any recursion in the human brain.
What interests me the most is cats/dogs using buttons to talk, which has become more popular recently
And they tend to develop a grammar and their own word order different to their owner's use too
Not sure if they have recursion. But people have noticed that a pet's grammar has become more complex as they learn more words, and that language effects their cognition too. Just having any language changes how your brain works
@@kimarna people should study how color vocabulary expansion changes how precise people get about the EXACT shade they want to communicate.
I had an interesting convo once about the shade of red I wanted and friends who couldn't understand why it was so important for me to get a new crimson one, why couldn't I use the scarlet or cherry-red ones.
"They're all the same bright red."
And I had to make a color swatch of all three next to each other for them to understand that they're all drastically different reds.
You know this video reminded me of something I read about while studying language development in psychology. It’s kind of unrelated to this argument (it’s more to do with human necessity for language and not about the structure since this was psychology) I suppose but I think it might be something interesting that you can make a video on. So there is an innate need for humans to communicate such that deaf children of hearing parents who are essentially not native signers actually come up home sign systems which are actually kinda complex and have their own syntax and stuff. Super cool stuff- it’s basically babies making up a sort of whole language. This brings me to something that gave me goosebumps. There are few systematically observed cases of the birth of a language and in the 1970’s in the first school for the deaf in Nicaragua, all these home signers met each other, influenced each others signing and made it more finessed and complex. As the next generation learned it as a naive language, it became even more systematic and grammatically complex. This is what led to the birth of Lengua de Signos Nicaraguense (Nicaraguan Sign Language).
The book I was studying from gave these as the sources:
Kocab, A., Senghas, A., & Snedeker, J. (2016). The emergence of temporal language in Nicaraguan Sign Language. Cognition, 156, 147-163.
Morford, J.P., & Kegl, J.A. (2000). Gestural precursors to linguistic concepts: How input shapes the form of language. In D. McNeill (Ed.), Language and gesture. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Senghas, A., & Coppola, M. (2001). Children creating language: How Nicaraguan Sign Language acquired a spatial grammar. Psychological Science, 12, 323-328.
Senghas, A., Kita, S., & Özyürek, A. (2004). Children creating core properties of language: Evidence from an emerging sign language in Nicaragua. Science, 305, 1779-1782.
This was super interesting, thank you for the video!
Basically, Everett has made a case study with the conclusion "needs further research". A classic. In my opinion, this entire discussion is very interesting to hear about, but scientifically moot. Criticism of Everett would hold a lot more weight if there was any other study to point to. Everett is the only source of knowledge on Piraha that is able make himself understood to the world of linguistics, no matter how unreliable he might be. The only way to make any real headway is for more linguists to learn Piraha. Unless there are native speakers of Piraha willing to learn another language, or even to become linguists.
As for UG, I'm gonna have to be horrifically prescriptivist: I prefer when fields of knowledge have a model that isn't impervious to data.
Thank you for this video, this was very enlightening!
I studied German philology (with a focus on literature) and was confronted with Chomskian linguistics only a bit (I did at least do one seminar on it), but I always had the feeling that this was on the one hand super interesting, but on the other hand it seemed to me like a Scholasticism that was incredibly demanding to learn but it could be the case that it is not true at all (and I had the feeling that I would have had to spend many years of my life on this theory to really have a substantial grasp on it). History of science is full of such Scholastic models which are seen as true by a considerable number of experts at a given time, but which fall flat after their hype is over.
What bothered me for example was that the models I was confronted with did treat German as a language were Pro-Drop is not allowed (because it is not allowed in the Standard German we are all taught at school), while Pro-Drop is in fact common in colloquial German. I'm sure there will be more refined study on this, but I always had my doubts if these rigid models are well suited for the complex interplays between normative and real language (while the Chomskians from my impression claim to be only about 'real language' and dismiss these interplays)
Also the recursion thing makes UG already watered down to unimpressiveness, doesn't it? (My Chomskian professor defnitely adhered to a less watered down version of UG). If Everett is the only one in linguistic discourse who knows Pirahã himself, it seems quite pointless to me to make important arguments hinge on this language.
Are the people in groups being studied referred to by their names often in these types of linguistic studies and descriptions? (~5:55). I don't really read them myself but in the stuff closer to my field that I do read names are basically never mentioned. It's always "one (or more) study participant had this happen" with them never being named, but when that happens we wouldn't assume the researchers have a bias against COVID vaccine recipients or whoever it is they're studying.
BTW, you showed for a glance Anna Wierzbicka, who is also anti-chomskian per se. The video about her Natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) would be really appreciated.
As a programmer that loves and adores recursion in that setting, i very much didnt expect to see it here, i ❤recursion
Read about Chomsky's hiearchy and specially about Context-Free Grammars. You'd be surprised with the overlap between CS and Linguistics.
Just remember to not overflow your stacks lol
IIRC, there's also been some corpus analyses of Kayardild showing that it only has (attested) one level of recursion.
my guess about the Piraha perception of numbers and quantity is that its perhaps that their culture views is in an analog way.
they perhaps don't need words for precise numbers.
when Waze tells you to turn right, does it say turn right or does it say make a 90* turn?
That "and paradigms... shift." made me sharp-inhale - excellent videos!
A thought experiment, with only the knowledge that is presented in this video: a language which marks possession verbally (“brother’s friend” > “brother has friend”) and expresses subordinate clauses with reduplication of the head (...has friend friend has sister) would look identical to Pirahã here, but could totally be described recursively.
So does the argument just hinge on whether subordinate clauses are grammatically distinguished from sentences? Is the supposed One Universal Characteristic of human language not even the ability to chain related concepts, but just that it treats nested phrases _differently?_
I just ironically watched the last video on this and got recommended the new video I'm quite glad lmao
Thank you for covering this I'm gonna get more FB linguistics memes now xx
Need to make this into a playlist.
This raises the question of how language acquisition happens so quickly.
*finally*, the chomsky roast :)
Lack of recursion reminds me of applicative and concatenative (programming) languages. Concatenative languages express composition with juxtaposition, while applicative languages express it through recursion. Recursion in a concatenative language creates “quoting”, which is analogous to quoting in natural languages.
I wonder what only reading/writing in nonrecursive sentences for a long time would do for your thinking. Could be a nice form of constrained writing - particularly non-recursive rewritings of books with famously hyper-recursive run-on on sentences (Henry James, Proust etc.) would be an interesting project.
I'm so glad for the final point: Universal Grammar is a paradigm. It allows linguists to know what kind of research would be useful and what insights that research makes about human language. It has provided shape for many advancements in linguistics over the last few decades but, as somebody in the field of linguistics, I have no reason to believe it is literally true.
(Also, Chomsky has been pretty anti-science for a long while with dubious opinions on what constitutes data.)
Interesting video! I have to know where you got the "56% monolingual" stat from though - I've been trying to find precise data for ages and can't find anything citable. Stats just seem to appear out of thing air!
77.3% of statistics are made up
Necessarily any universal of language will be so boring and obvious that people wouldn't find them interesting. Like "all languages have nouns" or "all languages are composed of semantic units" are true, but that's really just describing what a language is. Because it's universal we can't even imagine an alternative.
Also, great video 👍 I need more obscure unusual languages content
Pirahã has the recursion switch flipped off 🙃
Good video. I agree about how eurocentrism doesn't necessarily mean the whole work is bad, but I think we have a duty to examine how the eurocentrism impacts the quality of the research as uncharitably as possible. If there is anything noneurocentric left, then we can hold onto it. So like you say, given that Everett is the only linguist familiar with the language, it would be wise to have some corroboration from other speakers before taking his word for it.
Second, I'll say that I'm not a Popperian and so don't care for the "falsifiability" principle. Scientific models are improved or replaced when new data no longer fits the paradigm, but I don't think it requires making testable predictions in order to come to that conclusion.
This is more philosophy of science stuff than a defense of UG, which evidently does not meet either view of scientific viability!
How can a scientific theory be said to describe the world without being testable?
@@sirknight4981 well, testing isn't the only source of data. Data can come from many different places, including history. A good theory has to account for all available data, but it doesn't have to be testable. Of course, if new data doesn't fit, then the model has to be updated.
I wonder why nobody studies the drastic change in grammar in written Chinese after 1919 in the context of UG. The culture changed drastically, and the language followed it. Not the other way around. I am not saying language does not change culture. It should be very interesting to see whether the import of Chinese characters into Japanese, and the change of the written form of a language changes the culture and the language. We have two examples here: Korean and Vietnamese.
Not all languages are European languages.
For anyone interested in this topic, I highly recommend Everett's book, "Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes." It's honestly one of the most fascinating books I've ever read. It changed the way that I think about basically all cultural norms, and this goes beyond just types of politeness: the idea that we sleep at night for a set amount of time, sexual norms, acknowledgement of the supernatural, what is literally possible to say.
The book essentially tells the story of how Everett went into the Amazon rainforest as a *Maverick linguist missionary* to convert the Pirahã people to Christianity, but over time learned that, not only was he was completely out of his depth, but his whole approach was imperialist and ultimately completely lost his faith in God.
The writing style is really interesting because he sort of shifts perspective back and forth between when he encountered the Pirahã and the Amazon for the first time and his perspective now in the modern day, with vastly more experience and open-mindedness. Personally I didn't find his writing racist or particularly prickly; far from it, he seemed to be encouraging the reader to question every assumption of their society. He draws explicit attention to the complexity and contradictions of race, esp in a place as ethnically and culturally diverse as the Amazon. But hey, that was just my experience; totally valid to have a different opinion.
Great vid! Thank you!
Everett's experiences and findings have parallells with work of Nobel Prize winner for Literature Elias Canetti. He grew up in more than one language. In fact he learned German under pressure by his mother in a very short time. Especially in his main work Crowds and Power (original in German 'Masse und Macht') he did two crucial notes on languages which can be easely overlooked:
-'Commands are older than speech'
-'Every complete unknown language is a kind of (acoustic) mask; as soon one learns it, it becomes a face, understandable and soon familiar'
These two observations seem so obvious but the consequences are more important when you think about it seriously. Canetti did it and gave them brilliant contexts and applications in his work.
In change of perspectives, which speakers or writers tend to do, every word/symbol can be a facade. And a command can be very subtle by e.g. a simple gesture, it all depends on the context/situation.
Fascinating
Could you do a video on lexical distance? Is it any useful?
This is such a good video.
As a philosophy student, I can say you have done amazing work and that more people should see this video.
Been following your channel for quite a bit now and this gotta be my favorite video of yours thus far, and also probably the one with the biggest potential to influence.
There's a video of some other researchers giving evidence for recursion in Pirahã
Mb the rules may be relaxed by allowing demonstratives or other things as expressive as recursion to be sufficient. This reminds me of different formal systems achieving turing-completenes by different means, like backward jumps in turing machine-like systems, or Y (fixed point) combinator in combinatory and lambda calculus.
i love love love chomsky slander. thank you
You're not the only one. 😅
This is a really excellently made video
What truly shows the quality of a researcher is their reaction to contradicting evidence, Noam is a perfect demonstration of this principle.
Who could've imagined someone with terrible politics is also terrible in another field.
Yesssssss amazing
Definitely worth the extra week of waiting, fantastic analysis!
The greatest sequel we’ve all been waiting bit
The problem with Everett tho is that he is THE only major researcher and nonnative speaker of Pirahã, so all we have is his word. Say all you want about Chomsky, but when my teacher at a conference asked Everett a question about whether the lack of recursion is actual or merely a style of narration, he mumbled something about buying his book and refused to answer her. Moreover, what few other researchers there are of Pirahã have found some evidence of recursion, it just isnt as common as in other tongues.
Most folk like Everett since he seemingly challenges the status quo, even tho everyone just has to 'take his word for it' and 'buy his book'. Folk bashing Chomsky dont know the full the story here.
I like how you spelled reëmphasize with the ë in the subtitles, very nice
Dramatic Linguists: EVERY LANGUAGE HAS RECURSION!!
Pirahã: Hold my [ɺ͡ɺ̼]...
I study the field of computer science more, and I barely have the basic understanding in linguistics, but seeing the mention of recursion, I think UG is reliant on it.
You can have sentences within sentences that use sentences to build more sentences, and computer science was able to prove that a system that has no ability to loop, can loop using recursion. If you'd like to look into it, the famous Y-Combinator (or Fixed-Point if you want to be general) in Lambda Calculus is that thing to look into.
fellow functional programming fan. have to get a program working in prolog by the end of the week and I am not enjoying myself. (not functional, but relevant to linguistics and analytical philosophy)
@@elliotts5574 Prolog took me ages to wrap my head around. The way it works differs to much from more conventional programming languages, it's much closer to mathematical formula (proofs and so on) than any other's I've used.
@@Programmdude yeah it was crazy- I’ve had to do propositional calc before for theory courses and the first time I saw a prolog code example I genuinely thought it was something explaining what the code would be doing. was very surprised to learn that first order logic is just the syntax of prolog, let alone that Turing completeness is feasible via that. I understand it mathematically, but it’s still difficult to visualize or process intuitively.
Amazing video
I haven't finished the video just yet, but I just wanna say as a native Indonesian that your Indonesian pronunciation is quite spot on!
have enjoyed
Very informative video!
How do you feel about Esparanto as a language? do you agree with their ideas for an easy language? Im interested to hear your opinions.
They kinda make use of the fact that most of the world today speaks some european language
Zamenhoff doesn't get enough credit for getting _so many_ people to speak his language. Even if his language design was sub-par.
Also it's true that an IAL like Esperanto has conflicting goals (e.g. "Easy as possible to learn" and "can express as much as possible"). But people act like this makes it impossible to create an IAL, when you could just do a trade-off that's good enough.
Esparanto wants to be "the language of the world", yet features almost exlusively european phonemes and vocabulary. Don't get me wrong, it's fun and interesting, but for its original intent it's painstakingly eurocentric. It's only easy to learn when you're already speaking an indo-european language.
@@LowestofheDead Probably because Zamenhof wanted a cultural movement - humanist, pacifist, all that - based on it. You can have a language without culture but can you have a living language without culture? I doubt it.
Thinking about that "Pro-Drop parameter" in English. Also thinking about whether these two sentences are acceptable.
Probably not in formal English, but, say, a text?
Yaaaay! Finally
Tgis video makes me want to study linguistics, which i will be doing
I once thought something like UG would be the concept of connecting things with their attributes. In the languages I know, there's always the subject - verb connection and noun - adjective. It seems to me from the video and the wikipedia page that the Piraha also has some sort of subject - verb connection. Talking of the “construction of our brains”, it is like the connection between senses and the things we sense through them, or neurons and the signal on them. (I know it might sound weird.) But also - would it be possible to express (or even have) thoughts without connecting previously known concepts? Without having first to state what you are talking or thinking about (thing) and what are you saying about it (attribute)?
Anyway, your videos are really good, always interesting, enjoyable and with a good amount of humor!
Fascinating asf. Presented so well
UG seemed cool during the switches phase. The pro drop switch was interesting. But defining languages as recursive says so little. Its basically useless, it seems
Will have to read more
Chomsky just butthurt he has to change his theory again
Ah yes. This old debate. We are left with the question "if not universal grammar, whence language?". . .
I suspect the next paradigm that answers that question will come from the decoding of nonhuman languages and "languages", which is real research being done with higher primates, cestacians and cephalopods.
Chomsky’s theory is so incredibly vague
😭 your content is so good, cannot thank you enough
Everett's claim (he calls it the Immediacy of Experience Principle") is that a handful of (10-20) linguistic features of Piraha that he calls "startling" and "very surprising" and "inexplicable" all point to a single explanation: in Piraha communication is restricted to the immediate experience of the interlocutors. But a language consists of hundreds of features, not just 10 or 20. It is implied that but for these 10-20 features, the other hundreds of features of Piraha point away from this Immediacy of Experience Principle. But Everett doesn't address this. Further, Everett also explains that other than the "no recursion" claim, each of these features individually is not unique to Piraha and can be found in dozens of languages. Maybe the combination of these 10-20 features is unique to Piraha, but other languages have other sets of 10--20 quirky features, some of which overlap with Piraha. For example, the nearby Munduruku language - which is part of the Tupi family - also exhibits limited numeracy. But other Tupi languages have numbers; and Munduruku has recursion. In fact, it is entirely possible that the absence of numeracy in Munduruku and Piraha is what linguists call an areal influence feature. Grammatical features tend to cluster geographically in adjacent languages despite clear evidence of "genetic" unrelatedness. This comes about through cross-linguistic interaction activities like trading with a neighboring speech community, occasionally intermarrying, or abandoning one's community to go live with a neighboring people. But Everett claims persistent monolingualism of Piraha speakers is part of the IEP claim; but how can he explain the hundreds of features of Piraha that do not support the IEP thesis when Piraha is compared to neighboring but "genetically" unrelated Amazonian languages if persistent monolingualism is part of Everett's story about how Piraha got to be so exceptional? Despite the handful of features Everett claims are exceptional to Pirahã and therefore support his IEP thesis, the language otherwise exhibits dozens of features that Everett doesn't draw our attention to (and whose presence in fact may undermine or contradict his IEP claim) that are just like features in many other Amazonian languages and that may in fact be the result of areal influence. In other words, why should we infer a radical generalization about Pirahã culture like IEP just because a very limited set of features point toward that conclusion, when the rest of the language looks a lot like neighboring, unrelated languages, pointing to the opposite conclusion?
To be fair, Everett claims that Pirahã has NO numbers or color terms, while Munduruku only has a few number words.
Given that the handful of features seem to be unique, it's fair to call attention to them and try to explain their presence
@@LowestofheDead I guess. But as I understand, Everett did document terms for one, a few and many. Numbers tend to be generated (and abandoned) pragmatically, so their presence or absence tell us more about the size and material economy of the speech community than they do about language in general (no one would find it remarkable that Pirahã doesn’t have a word for “million” for example). There is a North American language called Washo where the word for 9 is “nayn”. No one remembers what the original pre-European contact word was or if there ever was a word. But it is fair to assume they had a word (and didn’t just skip from 8 to 10 although that would be interesting). Some linguists speculate the original word might have been “two fours plus one” or “ten less one” either of which was a mouthful to say in Washo. But whether it entered as slang or because it was shorter to say, long, long ago Washo speakers decided their language needed the word “nayn” and moved on. And that’s the point: universal grammar presupposes an architecture for supporting quantification speech; the extent to which speakers build on that architecture is not a linguistic question but an anthropological one. Universal grammar doesn’t require that all languages actually have robust quantification constructs (all languages lacked the word ‘pi’ until Greeks decided their language needed a word for that number).
The claim of not having colors is bit more dubious: analogy to the color of objects known to the speech community is how Pirahã express color as I understand from Everett. This is far more unremarkable in my opinion than the “no numbers” claim. Consider: 1. Someone had to be the first English speaker to say “the color of an orange” for that color to enter our language (before the importation of oranges into England, English speakers had to say “red-yellow” or “yellow-red”). 2. Many languages derive the word for red from the word for blood. 3. The English word for blue and the Latin word for yellow both come from the same PIE word that meant “a bright light” (meaning it is possible that PIE speakers had no color term for either blue or yellow but referred to both as “bright”). The point is, if human eyes can perceive colors, the universal grammar faculty will endow a speaker of any language with the ability to describe the perception of the color, even if the speaker had to use a lot of words or make an appeal to analogy or metaphor to convey the description. Pragmatically if there is value to the speech community to reduce such ad hoc analogical descriptions to a set of lexical items as referents that can be reused quickly and easily, they will do so. This is how many new words have always entered the lexicon of all languages (as how the word orange entered English). Again, this does not tell us much about linguistics at all (and certainly doesn’t undermine the project of universal grammar) but rather tells us more about the anthropological circumstances of the speech community and what their communication needs are.
@@zacharyferreira2469 Thank you so much for writing this, this is really interesting information.
I suppose this still leaves UG with the unfalsifiability problem. Still, isn't it pretty compelling that recursion seems to be in the grammar of 7000 languages except one?
I can't really see why everyone is suggesting we abandon it as a cognitive paradigm. Especially when Everett admits that Pirahã semantically use recursion.
@@LowestofheDead I am very skeptical of Pirahã being the only language without syntactical recursion. Either Everett is right and there is no recursion mechanism or Everett is wrong and we can attribute his error to simply not understanding the language fully (which is not a criticism of Everett; native American languages historically have been very challenging for linguists; mistakes can be made). I am inclined to assume Everett is simply wrong. Without even knowing a word of Pirahã, consider the path dependency paradox. For this I assume that (a) grammatical features are emergent (today’s Romance perfect aspect is emerging from yesterday’s verb “to have” + verbal past participle for example),
(b) emergence is path dependent (you can get to feature b from feature a, but you cannot get directly from feature a to feature c without passing through a stage of feature b),
(c) all indigenous languages spoken in South America (including Pirahã) are emergent, path dependent descendants from one or more mother languages spoken by migrants who crossed from Siberia to the Americas between 14k to 30k years before present (For simplicity’s sake let’s assume these ancient proto-Americans all spoke one language, although this point is not critical).
So proto-Americans either spoke a language that allowed for syntactic recursion (and in the course of the last 14k years or so proto-Pirahã lost recursion as a syntactic feature) or the ancestral language of all South American languages lacked recursion, but then all speakers acquired recursion except for the group that spoke proto-Pirahã who maintained a “pure” recursion-free language.
Realistically, proto-Pirahã losing recursion is slightly more realistic than the other 2,500 American languages acquiring it. But either way, there is no way to explain how a recursion-less language can acquire recursion or a how a language can lose recursion, since there is no precedent for either in the history of human languages. Syntactical mechanisms for making recursive expressions emerge and change over time, but there is no example we have ever found of a language going from no-recursion to yes-recursion or vice versa. And yet Everett’s claim about Pirahã lacking recursion today depends on such a path not only being possible but actually having happened, if my assumptions are correct. There is a “leap of faith” fallacy buried in there: Everett implicitly asks us to take on faith that such an unprecedented cline of grammatical evolution is real simply because he cannot find evidence of recursion in his field data.
Two very worthy reads on the emergence path for recursive syntax might look like diachronically: chapters 5 and 6 of The Genesis of Grammar (2007) by Bernd Heine and Tania Kuteva and Chapters 4 and 5 of The Genesis of Syntactic Complexity by Talmy Givón. Everett comes across as ridiculously naive, simplistic and hyperbolic after reading Givón and Heine/Kuteva.
@@zacharyferreira2469 I would love to read more of what you have to say on this topic and other linguistic matters
It's the firs time i heard UG pronounced just with the letter. "you geezz" is what I'm hearing. Now, i understand why linguists prefer the extended form xd
genuine question: why couldnt we analyze pirahã grammar as having recursion? in a sentence like "i watched the foreigner, he was fishing", why can't we treat "the foreigner, he was fishing" as a noun phrase with the embedded clause "he was fishing"?
"I watched the foreigner,he was fishing." "He" ,noun phrase referring to the foreigner;"was fishing" ,verb phrase. Indirect recursion.
Is there a comprehensive summary of Chomsky's ideas available anywhere? It seems to me that learning linguistics on your own is quite hard
Just noticed the diaeresis in the captions at 9:22 for the word "reëmphasise". Neat.
And then it turns out that the recursion parameter was off the whole time, much like how the 'make sense' is off and the 'eurocentric' parameter is on for UG.
7:10 for anyone math inclined out there, fun fact:
that second equation actually has no real solutions, only imaginary/complex ones
Can you do a video on low saxon?
I'm not sure how far it could be helpful, but could language evolution studies on animals like Arik Kershenbaum's works (a very cool guy, I had the honour to have a drink with him) help to find the biological basis of language? I would also love to go into this scientific field (when I finally manage my organising stuff"""^^)
PS: I'm not sure whether I already said the same under one of your videos. I always forget if I told something specific to specific persons """"^^
What an interesting video.
I believe we should give everette a benefit of doubt because staying with piraha made him quit his religion. They provided him with a perspective which fundamentally changed his way of thinking.
3:46 i assume you meant to write the adjectives there were being used attributively, not predicatively - or am i missing something?
i'm stupid I meant "(AND predicatively)". valian notes both usages.
Can we all just take a moment to appreciate that there's a theory specifically about the complexity of human language -- and it's called "Ug"?
It's the OG Ug.
Here's my ultimate universal grammar: all languages have words
disprove that!
But what's a word?
@@STABBATICAL Yes.
Whistle and click languages
@@keento8911 whistle languages are just other languages transposed to whistles afaik, at least with one natives in the regular version can even have a good guess at what's being said with the whistles.
by click languages i assume you mean stuff like xhosa, in which clicks are just a normal consonant to my knowledge.
I have a competing universal grammar: All languages are languages, except in the case where they are not.
my headcanon is that all language started as onomatopoeia and then developed everything else along the way
The language might have had recursion at some point and slowly dropped it over time. Are there related languages nearby that use recursion?