Did Everyone Catch What I Said?

How did Henry Drummond Explain Human Language? · Did Henry Drummond Have Any Other Hunch on Language? · Did Everyone Catch What I Said?

Here are my expressions of this truth, from both previous essays:

We must conclude that Tolkien had reached the idea of "expressing meaning by sound" from being taught English as a child, and probably already had realised the existence of non-English languages as well, from actually being taught or at least told at this stage of French (back in Bloemfontein, he may have heard Afrikaans and Sesotho).

[T]he main problem is actually, he assumes once a "Homo alalus" is anatomically equal to a Homo sapiens surely an adult "Homo alalus" would at the very least show the talent in language making of a five year old or ten year old Homo sapiens, thereby becoming a Homo sapiens.

But he had two other leads, or three, one of which is resurfacing and the other ones of which aren't so much. They are just very subsidiary to this egregious error. The problem being that the five or ten year old actual human person actually started talking by being taught that. And an adult so far "alalus" (non talking) would, by definition, not have had any such teaching.

In a more general way: the idea of expressing meaning by sound is experienced in language learning before being in any way, shape or form formulated or thought about in general. A five year old boy confronted with the fact that adults say "duck" or "water" when he says "quack" but they still quite understand him, when he says "quack", isn't concerned with the abstract proposition "can I express meaning in sound?" but with a much more humdrum proposition "how do I express this meaning in sound?"

And before a child can somewhat actively work on his vocabulary (depending extensively on the feedback from adults who have already mastered the language), he has to have some vocabulary and syntax (even if it's just two word syntax "Tommy cold" = "I (Tommy) am cold") to pragmatically understand the concept.

The critical period hypothesis states that the first few years of life is the crucial time in which an individual can acquire a first language if presented with adequate stimuli, and that first-language acquisition relies on neuroplasticity of the brain. If language input does not occur until after this time, the individual will never achieve a full command of language.

Footnoted to Lenneberg 1967, meaning: Lenneberg, E.H. (1967). Biological Foundations of Language. New York: Wiley. ISBN 978-0-89874-700-3.

I would say, this is not just a hypothesis, this is a solid fact. I have no doubt that Eric Heinz Lenneberg formulated it as a solid fact. The article on him states:

In his publication Biological Foundations of Language he advanced the hypothesis of a critical period for language development; a topic which remains controversial and the subject of debate.

The problem is, there is no source given for the opposite view or the existence of the debate. There is no presentation of what that debate looks like. I would say, calling the critical period a "hypothesis" is wishful thinking on the part of those who want to defend an evolutionary origin of language. A pdf in his memory cited as a source by the wikipedians include this passage which is not in favour of the evolutionary origin:

He went on to explore the evidence that language capacity is a specialized form of a more general cognitive capacity rather than a development of either animal vocalization or nonvocal communication.

Thank you very much. He didn't believe in animal vocalisations or non-vocal communication being the origin of human language. And this despite the fact that as far as we know, he was not a Theist. Now, the question is, could the general cognitive capacity of man, given it got biological existence, have worked on the presumed "ancestral" heritage of animal vocalisations and turned it into this specialised form? I would say no.

The problem is not just that a "man with ape language" would have not acquired Language (the human capacity) during the critical period. It's that the "inherited" vocalisations and non-vocal communication would have blocked, positively blocked, the appearance of human language.

And like Greek has Logos for both "word" and "thought" it is — hat tip to Stephan Borgehammar — very unlikely or even impossible for a human being to acquire thought without acquiring language. In other words, the phrase:

[o]nce the idea had dawned of expressing meaning by sounds,

refers to an occurrence that's impossible. The pretended "homo alalus" had never learned to express meaning by sounds, in the specifically human way, and therefore, had no means of having ideas dawn on him. Including this one.

Now, the exception some will cite is, Managua, 1980.

The conditions necessary for a language to arise occurred in 1977 when a center for special education established a scheme that was initially attended by 50 deaf children. The number of pupils at the school (in the Managua neighborhood of San Judas) then grew to 100 by 1979, the beginning of the Sandinista Revolution.

In 1980 a vocational school for deaf adolescents was opened in the Villa Libertad area of Managua. By 1983 more than 400 deaf pupils were enrolled in the two schools. Initially, the language scheme emphasized spoken Spanish and lipreading, and the use of signs by teachers was limited to fingerspelling (using simple signs to sign the alphabet).

The scheme achieved little success, with most pupils failing to grasp the concept of Spanish words. The children subsequently remained linguistically disconnected from their teachers, but the schoolyard, the street, and the school bus provided fertile ground for them to communicate with one another. By combining gestures and elements of their home-sign systems, a pidgin-like form and a creole-like language rapidly emerged — they were creating their language.

The problem is, citing this as an exception is only possible if the Nicaraguan Sign Language they created was the very first language they had. Well ... yes and no. It was the first standardised language they had, and they standardised it as adolescents, but each had come from a home where brave parents had done efforts to communicate with them, with signs, seeing they couldn't hear.

Imagine that homeschoolers of parents who taught their children only conlangs, one set of parents speaking Quenya with their children, one Dothraki, one Klingon, one Lìʼfya leNaʼvi, one Mangani language (you'd be better off trying to teach it to a child than to an actual great ape, despite the hypothesis in the Tarzan book series), one Kiliki. Each of the couples having two children, no language had an advantage of numerical superiority later on. The children were taken away from the parents and handed over to a school where the teachers were deaf and only understood sign language. These children would develop a pidgin or even a creole to communicate verbally with each other. It would be the first language they had in common, but it would still not be the first language each child had. Neither was the Nicaraguan Sign Language.

Now, I left out part of the quotation. Just to show my parallel is not pure speculation, here is what happened before 1977:

Before the 1970s, a deaf community largely socializing with and amongst each other was not present in Nicaragua.[2] Deaf people were generally isolated from one another and mostly used simple home sign systems and gesture (mímicas) to communicate with their families and friends, though there were several cases of idioglossia among deaf siblings.[3]

Polich, Laura (2005). The Emergence of the Deaf Community in Nicaragua: "With Sign Language You Can Learn So Much". Gallaudet University Press. doi:10.2307/j.ctv2rcnfjw.
Meir, Irit; Sandler, Wendy; Padden, Carol; Aronoff, Mark (2010). "Emerging Sign Languages" (PDF). In Marschark, Marc; Spencer, Patricia Elizabeth (eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Deaf Studies, Language, and Education. Vol. 2. New York: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195390032.013.0018. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2023-12-19. Retrieved 2024-05-05.

Here is a fuller quote from the latter:

Homesign is a basic communication system created within a family with one or few deaf members. The obvious difference between such a system, which may be conventionalized for the solitary child who creates it, and sign language is the number of people for whom manual-visual language is primary. In homesign, it is one, while in either a village or a deaf community sign language it is many, and this difference leads to structural differences in the two kinds of language. However, the distinction is not categorical but gradient. Homesign systems can emerge in a family with more than one deaf child. In such cases, the community numbers several individuals.

Aha ... yes, in 1980, the adolescents who came together were already tolerably fluent in a sign language, except that sign language was one created ad hoc within a family. It's pretty much the equivalent of a new auxlang between children raised in Quenya, Klingon and the other conlangs in my fictional hypothesis.

This is not a valid refutation of the Critical Period fact.

But there is one more. Human anatomy, from Homo erectus (if we politely "concede" the chronology as a convention) to us, is very well adapted for communication in human language. It has all the traits needed. An ear that is not too thick to pick up consonants. Chimpanzees, Australopitheci, Paranthropi, all have ears that, through thickness, can only hear very low frequencies, and therefore basically growls. A hyoid that doesn't carry any air bags providing distortion. The hyoids of chimps and one found of an Australopithecus did hold air bags and do provide distortion. Impossible to hear "what vowel" is pronounced. A brain that has (presumably) Wernicke's and (certainly) Broca's area. The FOXP2 gene in its human expression (the Neanderthal version is some loci different, but clearly human rather than chimp). None of these things are necessary for the vocalisations of beasts. All of them are necessary for human speech. And no skeletal remains that's sufficiently complete leaves us in any doubt on which side these things fall on, and they all fall on one side or the other, unless the skeleton is too incomplete to check. These things would not be useful without language, and language would not be possible without them. They are too many to be due to just one or two mutations.

I would say, I have not tried to make a case for irreducible complexity. I have succeeded.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
St. Severine of Noricum
8.I.2026

Apud Noricos sancti Severini Abbatis, qui apud eam gentem Evangelium propagavit, et Noricorum dictus est Apostolus. Ejus corpus ad Lucullanum prope Neapolim, in Campania, divinitus delatum, inde postea ad monasterium sancti Severini translatum est.