The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Pronouns
vectors.substack.com
vectors.substack.com
It gets even a larger swath when considering polysynthetic and fusional languages.
You can use pronouns in Japanese to clarify the subject or object of a verb, but it's not nearly as common to do as in English. For instance: when addressing somebody politely, you would typically refer to them either by name (with an appropriate honorific) if you know it, or a suitable title (like sensei for a teacher, or okyakusan for a customer). There are situations where you would instead use a second-person pronoun like anata, including as a fall-back if you don't know how else to address a stranger, but it's not at all the default choice as it is in English.
Another way this crops up is through the use of so-called "benefactive" constructions. For instance, hon wo kashite kureta could be translated as "[he/she/you] lent me a book", and hon wo kashite ageta means "I lent [him/her/you] a book". The difference has nothing to do with pronouns; it's that you use a different auxiliary verb when describing something that was done for the benefit of the speaker, or for the benefit of someone else.
Similarly, Japanese has a variety of honorific language which, in polite/formal situations, is used to speak respectfully about others and humbly about oneself (or one's "in-group", such as family members or coworkers). So the choice of wording can convey who you're talking about, without needing to explicitly use pronouns.
Sum, es, est, summus, estis, sunt
I am, you are, he/she/it is, we are, you (all) are, they areAlso I have read that case (and conjugation?) may have come from particles like classifiers being absorbed into words (weird to think how that would work before written language, but whatever). In which case case and conjugation might literally reflect actual proouns.
There is also another possibility: the linguist doing the reconstruction was invested in the theory and cherry-picked the data.
E.g. the list of first-person singular pronouns contains these entries:
Austronesian: ’a(ŋ)kƏn
Afro-Asiatic: anāku
which are so simlar that I decided to verify and check Wikipedia, which has slightly different reconstructions
Austronesian: i-aku https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Austronesian_language#Pr...
Afro-Asiatic: (ʔ)ân-/(ʔ)în- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Afroasiatic_language#Pro...
and suddenly one of the examples supporting the theory ends up contradicting it, while the other still has "n", but is otherwise far removed from the reconstruction presented in the article.
I don't think the reconstructions on Wikipedia are necessarily more correct, but they do demonstrate that there is significant leeway when it comes to the inclusion or exclusion of specific consonants. And if you have a dozen options to choose from, it's quite easy to turn random noise into a strong signal.
He places also the appearance of self-awareness and fully human behavior 12000 years ago, but self-awareness exists in other animals and many human behaviors date from long before (tools: 2.5 Myr, fire: 400-1000 kyr, art: 30kyr)
I also read the article about the snake cult of consciousness that read more like an elaborated numerology than a scientific hypothesis
But the similarity of pronouns across the world is still a very interesting subject to research. Johanna Nichols has done a lot of work in that area.
Any biologists or anthropologists care to chime in on whether that's obviously wrong or not? The author's self-described background is engineering so I find some of his more outlandish claims about human development suspect.
how does women being self aware and agriculture come together?
1. Are there primitive societies of hunter-gatherer that are not self aware, as in they don't pass neurological test that measure this?
2. From a evolutionary perspective what is the advantage of this sexual dimorphism and given that this advantage exists why did this advantage disappear afterwards and become present in both sexes. Are there any other traits where woman are shown to have larger divergence. I thought men where the "weak" sex in this regard.
3. If consciousness is recent then how do you explain conscious trails and self awareness in lower primates, is this also a case of convergent evolution?
Unless it includes the word “quantum”, in which case take it with a truckload of salt, preferably intravenously.
The problem I have with that is everything started to change when the glaciers started melting. Civilization surely extended to areas that we now call the continental shelf. Sea levels gradually rose several hundred feet, washing away an awful lot of everything. It's hard to say what was where and diffused because there isn't there any more.
I love it, as a fan of Julian Jaynes, I’m definitely adding it in.
They ("pronouns") are simply too vulnerable to misunderstanding in software.
Typically why I love the effects of postmodernism in 'soft' sciences.