Home > Notes from the Underground
I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
In the unlikely event that I have regular readers, some of them might happen to recall that one of my obscure passions is the early twentieth century literary theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin:"Just as Bakhtin's work is among other things a coded critique of Soviet autocracy, so postmodernism springs in large part from the rout of modern Marxism. In the work of Baudrillard, Lyotard and others, it began as an alternative creed for disenchanted leftists. Its obsession with discourse makes sense in an age short on political action. Instead of setting fire to campuses, American students now cleanse their speech of incorrectness. If Marxism had been shamefully coy about sexuality, postmodernism makes a fetish of it. The warm, desiring, palpable body is a living rebuke to all those bloodless abstractions about the Asiatic mode of production. Instead of grand narratives that lead to the gulag, we have a plurality of mini-narratives. Since doctrinal absolutes dismember bodies, relativism is the order of the day. If castrating homosexuals is part of your culture, it would be ethnocentric of me to object. Revolution is no longer on the agenda, but sporadic subversions may stand in for it. Class politics yields to identity politics. The system cannot be overthrown, but at least it can be deconstructed....
It means that every word or utterance is refracted through a host of other, perhaps antagonistic idioms, through which alone its meaning can be grasped. It thus bears an affinity with the post-structuralist concept of textuality. There can be no unmediated truth. We come to ourselves, as many modern thinkers have claimed, through a medium which is profoundly strange to us. Language for Bakhtin is a cockpit of warring forces, as each utterance finds itself occupied from within by alien significations. Every sign glances sideways at other signs, bears the traces of them within its body, and faces simultaneously towards speaker, object, context and addressee. Like human subjects, words are constituted by their relations to otherness, and language is always porous, hybrid and open-ended. There was never a first word, and there could never be a last one. The inherent unfinishedness and unpredictability of language – the fact that I can never deduce from any two of your words what the third one is going to be – is a token of human freedom, and thus in a broad sense political. Signs are never self-identical, and always mean more than they say (a surplus that includes what they don’t say). The enemy is what Bakhtin dubs ‘monologism’, meaning the kind of meta-language which seeks to subdue this irrepressible heterogeneity. At times in his work, it is a polite word for Stalinism...
Pechey argues persuasively that Bakhtin was out to rewrite the history of modernity. Epistemology yields to aesthetics, as the abstract reason of the Enlightenment is replaced by the sensuous particularity of art. A brutally instrumental rationality makes way for a form of communicative reason. The falsely autonomous subject of the modern age is overturned by the dialogical self. In all these ways, the aesthetic in the modern age becomes the repository of lost or sidelined forms of knowledge."
Eagleton's review does an excellent task of highlighting what I found so appealing in Bakhtin; his defence of the untidy, unfinished and chaotic, that which defies order and system. Nonetheless, for all of the comparisons evinced here Bakhtin's work contains no assumption that there is nothing outside language, pertains largely to the formal and linguistic properties of the novel and lacks any metaphysical critique of meta-narratives. One can draw some parallels with Derrida, viewing differance and dialogism as being spiritually akin concepts but any such parallel is necessarily rather strained. The figure Bakhtin does remind me of isn't so much Derrida but Sartre. Both Bakhtin and Sartre were drawn in many respects to Marxism as a philosophy (albeit with Sartre far more committed to it than the man who was to die in one Stalin's gulags). In the former case, Bakhtin's work treats of the novel in materialistic terms as a product of specific cultural, historical and social forces as much as the linguistic ones Eagleton highlights. His work nonetheless treats of the ways in which these forces combine to ensure that the novel is, to purloin a phrase, condemned to be free or, to use Bakhtin's phrase, to be dialogic. Similarly, Sartre's work struggles to yoke together the heterogenous elements of existentialism and communism, of how freedom could gear itself to the social conditions it found itself in. The polyphonic novel was naturally the ideal vehicle for Sartre to manifest those ideas, utilising concepts like the cutups and multiple viewpoints that he had borrowed from Dos Passos but which also bore a distinct resemblance to Bakhtinian dialogism.Labels: Language, Literature, Theory
posted by Richard 6:54 PM
Saturday, June 16, 2007
Having been interested for a while in the ideas of Sapir and Lee Whorf, the recent research on the Piraha language, which has occasionally been characterised as providing evidence for those theories, was something I was immediately interested in. Looking into it in more detail, I don't think it actually does support Sapir to any marked intent, but as this article argues, it does challenge many current assumptions about language and consciousness:"So in the case of Piraha, the language I've worked with the longest of the 24 languages I've worked with in the Amazon, for about 30 years, Pirahã doesn't have expressions like "John's brother's house". You can say "John's house", you can say "John's brother", but if you want to say "John's brother's house", you have to say "John has a brother. This brother has a house". They have to say it in separate sentences.
One answer that's been given when I claim that Piraha lacks recursion, is that recursion is a tool that's made available by the brain, but it doesn't have to be used. But then that's very difficult to reconcile with the idea that it's an essential property of human language—if it doesn't have to appear in a given language then, in principle, it doesn't have to appear in any language. If it doesn't have to appear in one part of a language, it doesn't have to appear in any part of a language... If you go back to the Pirahã language, and you look at the stories that they tell, you do find recursion. You find that ideas are built inside of other ideas, and one part of the story is subordinate to another part of the story. That's not part of the grammar per se, that's part of the way that they tell their stories.
So the evidence is still being collected, the claims that I have made about Pirahã lacking recursion and the fact that Piraha is an evidence that there probably isn't a need for universal grammar. Contrary to Chomsky's proposal that universal grammar is the best way to think about where language comes from, another possibility is just that humans have different brains that are different globally from those of other species, that they have a greater general intelligence that can be exploited for all sorts of purposes in human thinking and human problem-solving... The ongoing investigation of these claims and alternatives to universal grammar, an architectonic effect of culture on grammar as whole, and the implications of this for the way that we've thought about language for the last 50 years are serious. If I am correct then the research so ably summarized in Steve Pinker's book The Language Instinct might not be the best way to think about things."
What particularly interests me about these arguments is the role they play in the overall history of ideas. In contrast to the ideas of Marx, Freud, Skinner and Foucault, which all assumed to varying degrees that environmental forces are markedly more important than what would now be termed genetic considerations, modern conceptions of rationality have increasingly spurned the idea of the blank slate and moved towards a conception that bears a marked resemblance to that of Thomas Hobbes, if we substitute the term ‘genes’ for ‘passions.’ As Edward O Wilson observed every human brain is born not as a blank tablet (a tabula rasa) waiting to be filled in by experience but as 'an exposed negative waiting to be slipped into developer fluid. I have to admit that evolutionary psychology of this kind is not something I have ever had a great deal of regard for; it tends to involve post-hoc extrapolations that are typically every bit as unfalsifiable as Freud's theories. In either case, the term 'just-so story' seems amply deserved. It tends to disregard culture as a natural and material phenomenon and one that can be described as responding to a form of natural selection. If that is being displaced in favour of a more nuanced, tempered view, the I'll certainly be happy.
posted by Richard 4:41 PM
Monday, May 01, 2006
I have to admit to being more than a little annoyed at this Guardian report on changing patterns of language usage:"59% of all written examples of the phrase in the Corpus call it a "font of knowledge or wisdom" when it should be "fount". It has become so widely used that the wrong version is now included in Oxford dictionaries alongside the right one. "We have to accept spelling is not fixed and can change over the years," said Catherine Soanes, of Oxford Dictionaries. "You only have to look back 100 years, when the word rhyme was spelled rime. But since then we adopted rhyme as the correct spelling because this is more like the Greek word from which it originally came."
She added: "Our Corpus has around 150m words from the web and the way words are written often has to do with familiarity. For instance, 35% of people say 'a shoe-in' when actually it should be 'a shoo-in'. But the original is an American phrase using a US version of the word "shoe" in the first place." According to the Corpus, another linguistic trend is the American habit of turning two words into one, such as someday, anymore and underway. "
It seems to me that in so far as many of the spellings being cited have displaced previous spellings they have become the de facto correct spelling. Changes to language have always been viewed as being part of a continual process of degredation and deformation rather than an aspect of the evolution of a living system that is part of a changing society. As Jean Aitchison put it in her Reith Lectures:"A 14th-century monk complained that the English practised strange "wlaffyng, chytering, harryng, and garryng grisbittyng" (strange stammering, chattering, snarling and grating tooth-gnashing). And the complaints continued. "Tongues, like governments, have a natural tendency to degeneration," wrote the lexicographer Samuel Johnson, in the preface to his famous Dictionary of the English Language published in 1755. Eighteenth-century worries are perhaps understandable. Around 1700, the seemingly fixed grammar of Latin aroused great admiration, at a time when English was in a fairly fluid state. Many people hoped to lay down similar firm precepts for English, and assumed that somebody, somewhere, knew what "correct" English was. Jonathan Swift wrote a famous letter to the Lord Treasurer in 1712 urging the formation of an academy to regulate language usage."
Since Swift and Johnson sought to fix language so as to perserve it (in much the same way raspberries are conserved by being turned into jam), advocates of such views have always had to contend with the fact that languages do not remain static; many of the words Swift denounced as abuses are now established parts of the language that grammatical conservatives would fight to the death to preserve. In this case in particular, the sense of 'straight-laced' / 'strait-laced' or 'free rein' / 'free reign' seems so clearly equivalent that it's rather difficult to see why the changes should be seen as impairing the original meaning.Labels: Language
posted by Richard 2:05 PM
Thursday, August 25, 2005
An interesting piece that challenges Chomskyan ideas of transformative grammar:"The Piraha are intelligent, highly skilled hunters and fishers who speak a language remarkable for the complexity of its verb and sound systems. Yet, the Piraha language and culture has several features that not known to exist in any other in the world and lacks features that have been assumed to be found in all human groups. The language does not have color words or grammatical devices for putting phrases inside other phrases. They do not have fiction or creation myths, and they have a lack of numbers and counting. Despite 200 years of contact, they have steadfastly refused to learn Portuguese or any other outside language. The unifying feature behind all of these characteristics is a cultural restriction against talking about things that extend beyond personal experience. This restriction counters claims of linguists, such as Noam Chomsky, that grammar is genetically driven system with universal features. "
I suspect that this certainly challenges many of the evolutionary psychology accounts of language, though I'm a little less persauded that it reinforces the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The most that can probably be said is that it shows marked cultural and social variations manifested in language, rather than that the language necessarily formed a basis for those cultural concepts. As ever with Sapir-Whorf, it remains rather difficult to tell whether language or culture came first.Labels: Language
posted by Richard 1:34 PM
Tuesday, June 21, 2005
The BBC had an interesting article today, arguing that the possessive apostrophe should be removed from the language:"Linguist Kate Burridge says punctuation could do with being cut down and the rules of language reviewed. The normal apostrophe is useful but not the possessive, she says. Its supporters say it avoids ambiguity in meaning, (like sisters' books / sister's books), but Burridge thinks context makes it redundant. The hyphen is also surplus to requirements in many cases, she says, because even the editors of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary admitted they're not sure of its proper usage."
On the whole, I take an extremely suspicious view of the notion that language is an entity that should be regulated, either to reform it or to preserve it. The possessive apostrophe is a clear grammatical aberration (naturally so since it is a French introduction into the language, presumably one of many attempts to 'improve' English) that should simply be allowed to wither away. In practice, the possessive apostrophe is already fading from the language, no longer appearing in many contexts (i.e. names and places).Labels: Language
posted by Richard 6:07 PM
Sunday, September 26, 2004
An amusing little piece on grammatical prescriptivism:"Never again must we argue about whether singular they is an aberration or a useful and much-needed dialectal "innovation", legitimized by a centuries-long history. Never again will we discuss the logic of the prohibition against splitting infinitives, asking whether "to go boldly" sounds stupid, or whether traditions in translating Biblical Greek and Latin should have any sway over modern usage... The Original English Movement seeks to resolve this conflict and end this struggle by fully embracing the notion that English should not change--not now, not in the future, not even in the past. "
The example that tends to irritate me most is the apostrophe in 'it's.' Left to its own devices (i.e. without 'assistance' from grammatical conservatives), this grammatical aberration would have been ironed out of the language long ago, so that an apostrophe would be consistently included, with the context making the distinction between the possessive and the contraction of 'it is' perfectly clear.Labels: Language
posted by Richard 3:13 PM
Wednesday, April 07, 2004
I've long been interested in aspects of the Sapir-Lee Whorf hypothesis, which states that the structure of language has the capability to determine habits of thought. This piece seems to give the idea some validity:"All the major color terms but one were exactly like those in English, and in the one area of difference, they differed in exactly the same way." (They grouped green and blue to form what Kay and Berlin called "grue.") That two such profoundly unrelated languages should name colors alike seemed to point to some universal linguistic pattern... Hunter-gatherers need fewer color words because color data rarely provide much crucially distinguishing information about a natural object or scene. Industrial societies get a bigger informational payoff from color words... Several languages lack subjective terms analogous to "left" and "right," using instead absolute directions, akin to "north" and "south."
The implication seems to be that language can exercise a determining influence in such cases as differing ways in which languages describe space. Conversely, the similar conceptual structures underpinning most languages would point to a limitation of this effect, presumably due to similar cognitive processing of the environment or to an innate transformative grammar of the kind postulated by Chomsky. That said, I am rather struck by the absence of any reference to linguistic change in the face of social change; I would have thought that should describe the 'grue' word formation rather well.
posted by Richard 11:45 AM
Tuesday, April 06, 2004
Camille Paglia has published a new piece in Arion, on the theme of the increased importance of the image to Western culture:"Young people today are flooded with disconnected images but lack a sympathetic instrument to analyze them as well as a historical frame of reference in which to situate them... The visual environment for the young, in short, has become confused, fragmented, and unstable. ... the style of cultural analysis currently prevalent in universities is, in my view, counterproductive in its anti-media bias and intrusive social agenda. It teaches students suspicion and paranoia and, with its abstract European terminology, does not offer an authentic anthropology of the North American media environment in which they came to consciousness. Post-structuralism and postmodernism do not understand magic or mystique, which are intrinsic to art and imagination. It is no coincidence that since postmodernist terminology seeped into the art world in the 1980s, the fine arts have receded as a major cultural force. "
It's an interesting thesis, namely that the increased importance of the visual imagination has led to an increased dimunition of the reasoning faculty, something that works through language rather than any visual medium. The particular interest for me is that I have always been most at home with language rather than with music or the visual arts; it took me years before I could appreciate music without lyrics. As always with Paglia, the problem lies with her inconsistency. Her magnum opus, Sexual Personae, suffered considerably from this, in that it suggested two opposed tendencies as dominating Western culture but presented a shifting picture of how each tendency should be considered. Paglia seemed unable to suggest which of the two should be allowed to surmount the other, and seemed equally unable to define any dialectical relation between the two. Accordingly, her tone was alternately moralistic and anarchic. Something of the same problem applies here.
The particular problem is that if Paglia's thesis is correct, then her proposed remedy of 'imagology' (a unified study of art, history and criticism) seems to run the risk of being collaboration rather than resistance (if the only course of action is to dwell on study of the visual imagination, then it may well be that post-structuralism and postmodernism were wise to be suspicious of magic and mystique). Contrast Paglia's argument to that of Neal Stephenson in his essay In the Beginning was the Command Line. Stephenson has a similar argument to Paglia in many respects:"The word, in the end, is the only system of encoding thoughts--the only medium--that is not fungible, that refuses to dissolve in the devouring torrent of electronic media... A huge, rich, nuclear-tipped culture that propagates its core values through media steepage seems like a bad idea. There is an obvious risk of running astray here. Words are the only immutable medium we have, which is why they are the vehicle of choice for extremely important concepts."
Stephenson is wary of relying on the visual imagination; he sees it as offering mediated experiences and sees mediated experiences as being unreliable in comparison to the written word. By contrast, Paglia veers between proposing a course of education that simply adapts to this changed world and denouncing it, most obviously with the unintentionally ironic conclusion to her suggested visual studies:"But it is only language that can make sense of the radical extremes in human history, from the ecstatic spirituality of Byzantine icons to the gruesome barbarism of Aztec ritual slaughter. It is language that fleshes out our skeletal outline of images and ideas. In a media age where books are no longer the primary medium for information storage and exchange, language must be reclaimed from the hucksters and the pedants and imaginatively reinforced. To save literature, educators must take command of the pre-rational world of images. The only antidote to the magic of images is the magic of words."
Update: I've noticed a few other blogs criticising Paglia on a number of grounds. The most obvious is the dated nature of her argument, rehashing Mcluhanite theories at a time when the Internet has arguably restored text to primacy over images. Certainly, the Internet is in many ways a good analogue for the Victorian telegraphy system and by virtue of being initially conceived for military applications evolved through a completely different route to technologies such as television and DVD.
posted by Richard 4:22 PM
Tuesday, September 30, 2003
Reading Lakoff's open letter on metaphor in politics, I'm more than a little puzzled. Clearly, watering down the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis does little to improve it:"The State-as-Person metaphor highlights the ways in which states act as units, and hides the internal structure of the state. Class structure is hidden by this metaphor, as is ethnic composition, religious rivalry, political parties, the ecology, the influence of the military and of corporations (especially multinational corporations). Consider national interest. It is in a person's interest to be healthy and strong. The State-as-Person metaphor translates this into a national interest of economic health and military strength."
Such metaphors are indeed a common feature of conservative discourse and there are no objections to the analysis on that score. But all metaphors tends to disperse their signification as much as they reveal it; that, as Paul De Man observed, is the nature of the beast. In which case, the point surely remains that such conceptions need to be critiqued in terms of politics (as it is rhetoric we are speaking of) rather than linguistics.
posted by Richard 10:01 PM
Tuesday, September 16, 2003
As sentence scrambling has become a popular pursuit, I thought I'd keep in with the in-crowd by posting this:"Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, olny taht the frist and lsat ltteres are at the rghit pcleas. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by ilstef, but the wrod as a wlohe."
Looking at this, it's interesting that grammar and structure, the elements of language Chomsky and Pinker would suggest as most intuitive are what allow us to read the sentence normally. Here's a summation of the research behind this;"Two researchers from California show that people find spoken sentences intelligible -- even if every part of the sentence is played backwards. Moreover, people can learn to perceived time-reversed word-fragments as intelligible words. The secret is that even though each individual part of the sentence is played backwards, the structure of the sentence is preserved. Listeners get the meaning not only from the words, but the overall modulation of the sentence."
Continuing with language related matters, I seem to have fallen into the habit of noting occasional stories relating to the Sapir-Lee Whorf hypothesis;"Speakers of different languages used different gestures to depict the same event... This appeared to reflect the way the structure of their languages expressed that event. For example, when describing a scene where Sylvester swings on a rope, the English speakers used gestures showing an arc. The Japanese and Turkish speakers tended to use straight gestures showing the motion but not the arc. Dr Kita suggests this is because Japanese and Turkish have no verb that corresponds to the English intransitive verb 'to swing'. "Labels: Language
posted by Richard 9:21 PM
Monday, July 07, 2003
This must qualify as one of the most irritating pieces I've read in a long while; concerning a computer algorithm that can examine an anonymous text and determine, with accuracy rates of better than 80 percent, whether the author is male or female:"The single biggest difference is that women are far more likely than men to use personal pronouns-''I'', ''you'', ''she'', ''myself'', or ''yourself'' and the like. Men, in contrast, are more likely to use determiners-''a,'' ''the,'' ''that,'' and ''these''-as well as cardinal numbers and quantifiers like ''more'' or ''some.'' As one of the papers published by Koppel's group notes, men are also more likely to use ''post-head noun modification with an of phrase''-phrases like ''garden of roses.''"
As it acknowledges, the only thing that is novel here is the predictive capability, but quite why the author feels this to be controversial when feminist academics have been documenting gender distinctions in written and spoken language for decades. Much of the framing of the piece implies that such differences must be innate, reading like an evolutionary psychology paper discussing the results of PET scans. That may be the case, but there's nothing in this research that couldn't be attributable to differences emerging from socialisation; it is entirely correct to observe that social performance is an equally valid explanation, as is the notion that greater pronoun use may be indicative of a greater attempt to write about people and to forge intimate connections with readers.Labels: Language
posted by Richard 10:43 AM
Monday, June 23, 2003
Having had this site pointed out to me, I was rather struck by this phrase;"For instance, both Chinese and Anglo-American culture regard time as a continuum, but when referring to the past and the future in terms of "back" and "ahead," they adopt different starting points. A traditional Chinese stands facing the past, perceiving what just happened as ahead of him and what is yet to come as behind him. A native English speaker, however, assumes the opposite viewpoint."
Not especially surprising, given the traditional importance of ancestors in Chinese culture, but what is interesting here is how it reminded me of this:"I find it gratuitous to assume that a Hopi who knows only the Hopi language and the cultural ideas of his own society has the same notions, often supposed to be intuitions, of time and space that we have, and that are generally assumed to be universal. In particular, he has no general notion or intuition of time as a smooth flowing continuum in which everything in the universe proceeds at an equal rate, out of a future, through a present, into a past; or, in which, to reverse the picture, the observer is being carried in the stream of duration continuously away from a past and into a future. "Lee Whorf, Language, Thought and Reality.
Another topic that leaves me reminded somewhat of the Sapir/Lee Whorf hypothesis then, though the Chinese conception is precisely what one would expect of a collectivist society characterised by long-term orientation. As before, I'd suggest that the discovery of language formation by a group of deaf children in Nicaragua should have ended these debates. Given that the discovery made it abundantly clear that a genetic basis for language formation exists, it seemed fairly clear that the notion of the signifier is logically prior to the sign. The other problem is that the Lee Whorf hypothesis has little explanation of language change. The entire basis of socio-linguistics is the observation of language change in response to social change; it doesn't easily work in reverse.
That said, there is some evidence for the weaker aspects of the linguistics relativism hypothesis, though if language and thought could be described as having some form of interactive relationship, proving the nature of that relationship is fraught at best. One final point is that the connection between Chomsky's transformative grammar and Fodor's Mentalese (i.e. both advance an innate inner propositional representation language as opposed to natural language and have correspondingly been advanced by the evolutionary psychologist Pinker against the Lee Whorf hypothesis) seems imprecise, especially given Fodor's antipathy to the kind of evolutionary psychology perspective advanced by Pinker.
posted by Richard 6:32 PM
Wednesday, May 07, 2003
Interesting NY Times article, arguing that since Asian languages have each character correspond to a syllable of sound, and in Chinese, at least, a basic unit of meaning (called a morpheme), they lack the abstract character of Western languages which inhibits the development of analytical thought. This is a very recent development of a very old chestnut, which went by the name of the Sapir Lee Whorf hypothesis, and which held that the mental categories by which people perceive the world are determined by their language."Alfred H. Bloom... argued that the lack of a subjunctive tense in Chinese made it extremely difficult for native speakers to explore "counterfactual" conceits... When Mr. Bloom tested Chinese and American students on a series of counterfactuals, he found that the Chinese students were typically unable to distinguish between events that really happened and false hypotheticals. The implication, Mr. Bloom argued, is that Chinese is more concrete than English, and, as a consequence, Chinese speakers have more trouble with abstract thought than Americans. "
There are certainly some interesting empirical differences between the speaking of Chinese and English; the use of intonation to distinguish otherwise identical words requires use of both brain hemispheres, whereas English speakers only use the left side of the brain. However, the problem with the Sapir Lee Whorf hypothesis is that it does rather tend to beg the question of how long the chicken and the egg intend to discuss their respective origins (that is, it is rarely clear to what extent language molds perception and to what extent perception may mold language. Determining the nature of any interactive loop in this respect is a fraught proceeding at best). In this context, it is hardly novel to observe that notion of rationality (as opposed to heurictic thought) is a Western concept. For example, some psychological research a few years back came to these conclusions;"Easterners, the researchers find, appear to think more "holistically," paying greater attention to context and relationship, relying more on experience-based knowledge than abstract logic and showing more tolerance for contradiction. Westerners are more "analytic" in their thinking, tending to detach objects from their context, to avoid contradictions and to rely more heavily on formal logic. "
As such, while I am rather reluctant to side with Pinker, I think it's fairly clear that language need not be identified as a sole causal factor. Of course, the discovery of language formation by the deaf children in Nicaragua (they had formed a complex grammatical sign language without any external assistance or stimulus) should have ended these debates; given that the discovery made it abundantly clear that a genetic basis for language formation exists, it should be reasonably clear how we choose between chicken and egg.
posted by Richard 10:04 PM
