Language was born in the hands (2022) | Hacker News Reader

Language was born in the hands (2022)

cosmosmagazine.com

62 pointskeepamovin26 comments

Interesting anacdote, my wife is into teaching our 1 year old sign language. Many words and phrases come through much faster than they do verbally. Words for "finished" "more" "water" etc.

Really help in figuring out what she wants. And she squeals with delight when she feels understood.

Heh, adorable.

What’s a good resource on how to teach a 1-year old sign language?

In my language, there are decent books on the subject and informative and inspiring accounts on Instagram. Look for "baby signing", must be loads of English materials. We created our own extended vocabulary using English baby signing, lots of good words here: https://babysignlanguage.com/dictionary/table/

Like the GP said, helped us loads in communicating with our kid before he could talk, much to our shared delight, and, I believe, relieved a _bunch_ of potential frustration.

We used Baby Signing Time after we discovered our child was deaf at 10 months old:

https://www.signingtime.com/baby-signingtime/

You can find their videos on YouTube too, but we love supporting the organization. When we started signing, everything was unlocked - not just communication, but also creativity, personality, and delayed fine and gross motor skills.

There was a time when "grasping" something was a literal thing. Strangely enough, however, I only became aware of this when I studied Hegel and some even more obscure texts from Friedrich Engels about Darwin and the importance of the hand for human evolution.Probably his 'Dialectics of Nature'.

Yes, and the word "comprehend" has the root "prehendere" which means "grasp". You can even see the word "hend" in there I think! :)

and apprehend

in French comprendre is "to understand", and prendre is "to take"

Reminds me of the most interesting (to me) of the Huberman Lab episodes I listened to, the one with Dr Erich Jarvis, at Rockefeller, about speech, language and movement eg dance. The description doesn't do the content justice. Fully mind blowing.

So how does this explain how whales, dolphins or parrots have language despite no hands?

It's stretch to call what any of them have a "language".

I think that your statement is more of a stretch, than the idea that quite intelligent, social creatures aren't using a language that we simply don't understand.

I'd love to know what the local ravens are saying to each other; there is quite the variety of calls, and quite situational.

Corvids are able to recognize individual humans who were helpful to them (or harmful) and share that with others, it's hard to see how that can happen without language ("watch out for the weird standing monkey with the yellow feathers on top, he's likely to throw a stone at you").

The crows that live nearby are wary of me, probably because of two incidents (they saw me standing next to a crow's body, which I'd come across during a walk; and, on another walk, a branch had suddenly broken out from under another crow as I passed the tree it was in). I hear a particular call whenever I pass by them now, though I basically never see them anymore.

My ravens are still wary of me, but they always have been. Somewhat less so in the last while, since I've been putting peanuts out for them; they'll still move away when I get close, but not far, and not until I've gotten fairly close. I really want to know what one's got against my little security cameras though... I've got video of one taking one off the railing I put the peanuts on, and (I assume) the same guy has been working to knock another off the driveway gate post. https://youtu.be/y3C-Tf8FeVA

My son and his girlfriend had a great encounter with one, driving down the Dempster Highway in Yukon. It surfed the wind on the hood of their Jeep for something like 45 minutes, and hopped close enough to grab cat treats when they stopped for a bit. That's on YouTube as well.

We have known for decades now that bottlenose dolphins understand language, and I mean the regularities that distinguish it from ordinary communication because we tested them with an artificially constructed one. And I mean tested comprehension rather than production. Lot easier to write off results of the latter.

The idea then that these highly social animals have the ability to understand an artificially constructed language but don't use one naturally is highly suspect. Especially when everything we can observe indicates it. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/001002...

"Comprehension, at levels far above chance, was shown for all of the sentence forms and sentence meanings that could be generated by the lexicon and the set of syntactic rules, and included the understanding of: (a) lexically novel sentences; (b) structurally novel sentences; (c) semantically reversible sentences that expressed relationships between objects; (d) sentences in which changes in modifier position changed sentence meaning; and (e) conjoined sentences (Phoenix). Additional abilities demonstrated included a broad and immediate generalization of the lexical items to different exemplars of objects; an ability to modulate the form of response to given action words, in order to apply the action appropriately to new objects, to different object attributes, or to different object locations; an ability to carry out instructions correctly despite changes in the context or location in which a sentence was given, or in the trainer providing the instructions; an ability to distinguish between different relational concepts; an ability to respond correctly to sentences given with no objects present in the tank until 30 seconds after the instruction was given (displacement tests); and an ability to report correctly that the particular object designated in a sentence was in fact not present in the tank, although all other objects were (Akeakamai).

......

The comprehension approach used was a radical departure from the emphasis on language production in studies of the linguistic abilities of apes; the result obtained offer the first convincing evidence of the ability of animals to process both semantic and syntactic features of sentences. "

The same way it explains the unification of quantum mechanics and general relativity.

Good point about dolphins ans whales, but, if you've ever watched parrots, they have feet and a beak/tongue that can grasp and manipulate in a way that's analogous to human hands.

My layman's take is that TFA is probably wrong and that language started with song. Gestures are probably the origin of communication (see also: speakers of non-mutually-intelligible languages tend to instinctively make gestures, often created on-the-fly to mimic some intended meaning or desire), but language is different. Meaning in language is encoded in a mutually-intelligible format that is passed down memetically rather than genetically (which is why you see different "accents" in genetically-similar but geographically-separated populations in all of the aforementioned species). We instinctively recognize the resemblance between a given gesture and the object or action it's mimicking, but the meaning of language (like the connotation of particular elements of song, like note progression, which again varies between cultures) has to be acquired.

Again, speaking out of my a*. Feel free to tear apart.

That is similar to my beliefs about the origin of language too.

It doesn't attempt to. To the extent that whales/dolphins/parrots have language, it evolved independently from human language. There is no particular reason to assume it evolved along the same path.

Was this written by someone without kids? In early childhood development pointing at items is referred to as "shared thinking". If a lion is charging at you in the jungle and you point at it the shared thought is "danger! He's coming to eat us!" or general concept.

Alternatively if you're playing with your 8 month old nephew and point at the red ball, he'll grab it and give it to you. If you wait four more months and say "ball" he'll do the same thing. Both approaches work but pointing with your hands comes much, much earlier in the development process.

So should we expect that human ancestors had fragile, unfused skulls and no ability to move themselves around?

Probably, when they were very little

another perspective to the shared thinking is that if a lion is charging at you in the jungle, there very first thing isn't conceptual; it's just fear which will immediately coordinate any mammals in the group to run or prepare to fight.

I say this because I know some dogs are able to learn the ball thing too, oh and the fear thing is part of how i communicate with my dog.

“Clan of the Cavebear”? This is not a new theory.

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