Off the Bat

Human Language Revisited · Elves and Adam · Back to Picq · Off the Bat

Picq is in fact very honest on the reasons speaking for human speech being a divine gift, even if he does not mention this possibility.

Double articulation? "Rat" and (Fr) "Chat" (in Engl. obviously "Cat") differ arbitrarily by exchanging precisely one phoneme, hey presto, they are two very different words. He misses a bit on taking only conjugation with endings as example on how "monemes" (ones says morphemes in English) add up to changes in meaning. It is equally true for contraposition of words in phrases and sentences, "I eat" is as much second articulation as Spanish "com-o" (and more than spoekn version of French, unless you add subject pronouns). Recursivity, adding loops on loops in structural elaboration of a sentence, and its use, allowing great precision, is equally admitted as a purely human quality.

One problem : his interviewer Cécile Lestienne and he seemed to agree there was some kind of referential function in some very few observed instances : a parrot could pronounce forty nouns and say "no" when offered an object belonging to another one. Green monkeys have three different alarm cries. So the parrot can distinguish a carrot from a grain, the monkeys in flock can distinguish panthers, eagles, pythons.

I would not agree that these things are really referential function, while they involve recognition of objects, they are never talking about them, they always have a practical purpose : obtaining a treat or a fun game of looking at things in the case of the parrot, saying "no thanks", also the parrot, and imposing on the flock three different strategies for dealing with danger, for fleeing from danger. With a snake and a bird of prey, you don't flee to the same directions.

So, the two examples of referential function are in fact no examples of it at all.

Now, apart from this feeble attempt of pushing referential function on animals, confer Ghislaine Dehaene saying it appaers as a primary drive in human babies, Picq is very open on human speech being really and truly unique.

Now, what was his straw, the one he clung to? Comparing elephants' trunks. With Stephen Pinker, he says that we think language very marvellous because we are equipped with it, elephants arguably would think the trunk as marvellous - if they had human speech to speak about it! - but we still don't conclude, I am paraphrasing Picq's reasoning, that one day two hyraces had a little one with a trunk and the trunk then spread by survival of the fittest, all through their population, until a hyrax population had become a proto-proboscidean one.

We creationists admit that one mutation can't lead to a trunk. We still don't believe Proboscideans descended from Hyracoideans. Neither gradually, nor suddenly. We believe Proboscideans were created separately from Hyracoideans on day VI. And we believe God created Adam separately from both later on on day VI, and had the exhausting but probably still pleasureable work of giving them different names. And showing the good sense of not seeking a bride among either, so God created Eve even later on than that.

This "makes economy of" (excuse the Gallicism) both sudden one mutation radical change and slow and gradual change. I have never quite believed the latter, when I was an evolutionist age 6, I believed Crossopterygian coelacanths one day mutated fins to amphibian legs. Which brings me to age 12, From Nothing to Nature (not yet appeared under that title in English at the time, that title is for an edition later than Swedish translation) that gradual evolution from fins to legs is impossible.

Back to language. In fact, the elephant neither marvels at human speech or own trunk. Man, with speech, marvels at both. A bit like Tolkien's elves in Cuivienen marvelled at the stars.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris XI
St Denis of Paris
St Abraham
9.X.2019

Lutetiae Parisiorum natalis sanctorum Martyrum Dionysii Areopagitae Episcopi, Rustici Presbyteri, et Eleutherii Diaconi. Ex his Dionysius, ab Apostolo Paulo baptizatus, primus Atheniensium Episcopus ordinatus est; deinde Romam venit, atque inde a beato Clemente, Romano Pontifice, in Gallias praedicandi gratia directus est, et ad praefatam urbem devenit; ibique, cum per aliquot annos commissum sibi opus fideliter prosecutus esset, tandem, a Praefecto Fescennino, post gravissima tormentorum genera, una cum Sociis, gladio animadversus, martyrium complevit.

Eodem die memoria sancti Abrahae, Patriarchae et omnium credentium Patris.