Science and Language

When human language went critical.

Some of our grad students hadn’t heard of Alex, the African Grey Parrot.   It certainly seems that he used language in ways that went above and beyond the kind of rote memorization that you expect for a parrot.  Here are a few videos:

And here are some papers, all involving Irene Pepperberg as an/the  author:

Alex is cognitively amazing, but not a normal parrot:  Alex was a highly educated parrot, with 30 years of schooling.  It makes one think about the distinction between language as an individual accomplishment and language as a social phenomenon.

If you imagine boosting Alex’s abilities a little bit, you might have a species (the Enhanced Parrot, or Parrot+) that would be fully linguistically competent when trained by humans, but would have no language in the wild.   Now, I wonder if, somewhere between parrots and humans, there could be a species that is capable of learning language, but not quite capable of passing it on to the next generation.  In other words, individually capable, but not capable of forming a society that passes language down across generations.

And, speculating a bit further, could humans have gone through this stage some time in our evolution?  A stage where a few talented individuals (and their friends) could painstakingly develop some sort of linguistic system, but somehow not quite enough would get passed on.  Each generation would start with a few scraps, invent some language, and then it would get lost again.

It would be like a nuclear bomb before the pieces of uranium are pushed together.  A word would be invented and it would be passed around little social groups, but after passing through a few people, it would get lost.  On average, each user of a word would have taught it to less than one student.  Society (such as it would be) would be a continual fizzle of inventions and forgettings.

How could that happen?   Well, it is hard to imagine with modern humans, to whom words stick like glue, but imagine a dispersed society.  Suppose we had lived in isolated nuclear family groups, and suppose human children left the family at puberty.  Every family might have its own language, and it might be a poor, pidgin of a language.  The children go out, but the people they meet speak different pidgens, so the next generation might not have a language that was any more sophisticated.   Perhaps.

It is a little more plausible if — instead of modern humans — you imagine ancestors to whom wordplay and language were difficult.  Suppose a pun was like an algebra problem and a metaphor was like calculus.  Suppose erudition meant “able to use three syllable sentences.”  In that case, with a dispersed society, it is much easier to imagine language fizzling out, generation after generation.  Like a dispersed nuclear bomb, slightly below criticality where most neutrons escape from the uranium before causing another nucleus to fission.

Following this line of speculation, how did language start?   Given a society in a state of linguistic fizzle, all it takes is a better social network.  Words need to be passed on to more than one student.  This could happen if the population became denser so there were more opportunities to exchange words with other people.  Or, if people lived longer, giving each person more opportunities to pass their words on to the next generation.  Or, if there were more reasons for the next “family” to learn your words and vice versa.  At that point, criticality is passed, and each invented word spreads.   If each person teaches a word to two students, the usage of each word grows exponentially from generation to generation.  Words become virtually immortal, because they spread faster than their users die.

Like the bomb, when language goes critical, the change would be rapid, and it would drive changes in the human lifestyle.  Complex languages might appear within a century.

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