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How did language evolve? · Stuff You Should Know

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Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
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Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you Should Know
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Speaker 1: from house Stuff Works dot com. Hey, welcome to the podcast.
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Speaker 1: I'm Josh Clark. With me is always this Charles W.
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Speaker 1: Chucker Bryant and uh that makes this stuff you should know?
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Speaker 1: Is your seat? Okay, Frank, the chair is letting me
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Speaker 1: down again. Yeah, he'll do that. Cher he recently fell
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Speaker 1: in with a bad crowd and I do too, from
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Speaker 1: the way he's making me said, So I'll just I'll
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Speaker 1: lean forward. He's become unreliable. Who is it that messes
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Speaker 1: with him? I don't know. Somebody who has no idea
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Speaker 1: how to sit in a chair properly. That's how you
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Speaker 1: need to get next, not just your own mic cover,
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Speaker 1: but your own chair. Yeah. I think it's a strickling
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Speaker 1: guy from tech stuff. It would be very cool as
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Speaker 1: if you had it lower down from the ceiling like
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Speaker 1: it was stored up there, and then hang like the
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Speaker 1: sort of damocles over everybody else's head while they were recording.
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Speaker 1: We'll look into that, Chuck. Have you ever heard of
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Speaker 1: a little place called the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Yeah, okay,
1:19
Speaker 1: go eggheads. UM. So M I T is like the hotbed,
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Speaker 1: the center of the linguistics field, among many other fields
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Speaker 1: I didn't know. Yeah. Um Noam Chomsky is there. UM.
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Speaker 1: And there's another guy whose name escapes me right now,
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Speaker 1: but he recently made some headlines because he, I guess,
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Speaker 1: got a grant and had his house wired with fish
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Speaker 1: I cameras in every room with really high tech audio
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Speaker 1: equipment to and from the moment his newborn son came
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Speaker 1: home to the age of five. This guy recorded ninety
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Speaker 1: thousand hours the whole five years of this kid's life. UM,
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Speaker 1: in an effort to see how language acquisition develops in children.
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Speaker 1: That's pretty cool, and this child specifically, it is very cool.
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Speaker 1: There's a really clumsily titled UM Fast Company article called
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Speaker 1: M I T. Scientists captures ninety thousand hours of video
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Speaker 1: of his son's first words Comma, grafs it, comma what
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Speaker 1: graphs it? He and then he grafts it. Yeah. The
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Speaker 1: editor was like, I'm going home, yeah exactly so UM.
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Speaker 1: But anyway, there's some video and some audio clips in
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Speaker 1: there where you can hear like this condensed like over
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Speaker 1: five years or over like a six month period. Or
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Speaker 1: something like that. That's like the kid going from like
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Speaker 1: gaga to water and you can hear it like evolve. Interesting.
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Speaker 1: Did they learn anything from that? I don't know if
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Speaker 1: they have quite yet. And plus I mean like this
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Speaker 1: is one child, but it's at the very least very
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Speaker 1: very interesting. Um. But the the idea that you can
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Speaker 1: learn something about the evolution of language and human beings
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Speaker 1: from language acquisition and children is a hotly contested idea. UM,
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Speaker 1: you wrote what I think is a very fine article. Thanks.
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Speaker 1: You did a good job with this. How did language evolve?
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Speaker 1: It was shorty you were talking about, though not how
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Speaker 1: we acquire language skills as as um kids, but as
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Speaker 1: a species. How did humans acquire language? Because we're the
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Speaker 1: only ones that can say things like this, But you
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Speaker 1: go to great lens to point out that we're not
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Speaker 1: the only ones that communicate. True, I wouldn't say great
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Speaker 1: links that sort of al It was like two or
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Speaker 1: three sentences, Sure animals communicate. Well, no, it is. It
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Speaker 1: is very true, and I think it was a good
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Speaker 1: thing to start off with because humans can often be
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Speaker 1: very um homocentric. You know, so you say birds chirp,
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Speaker 1: porpoises go right, Yeah, uh, there are community. We're the
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Speaker 1: only ones who converbialize. That's right, right, Yes, we talk words.
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Speaker 1: And we don't know exactly how this evolved for sure, because, um,
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Speaker 1: there's a problem when it comes to things like evolution.
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Speaker 1: There's not a ton of evidence. A lot of times
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Speaker 1: like hard evidence. Um, I read this one guy's paper.
4:26
Speaker 1: There's a lot of papers on this. Yeah, this is
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Speaker 1: a really First of all, I want you to just
4:30
Speaker 1: be very quiet. Do you hear that off in the
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Speaker 1: business the explosion? Yes, we're standing in the midst of
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Speaker 1: a mine field. Linguistics is a mine field, and they
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Speaker 1: love like linguistics. People really love language and talking about
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Speaker 1: it like and putting down people who disagree with them.
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Speaker 1: So we should tread lightly here, we should. Um. But
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Speaker 1: one guy's paper that I read today meets some university paper.
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Speaker 1: He said that ideally, if we're going to study something
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Speaker 1: like these neurological changes that happened in the brain, we
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Speaker 1: would have, um, a large number of petrified whole brains
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Speaker 1: representing lots of species over lots of time. But we
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Speaker 1: don't have that. Unfortunately, they're big gaps. Uh. And even
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Speaker 1: even even not taking into account gaps, we don't have
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Speaker 1: fossilized brains. Yeah, the closest thing we have is a
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Speaker 1: fossilized skull, which we can analyze and be like, well,
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Speaker 1: there is kind of room for a big enough brain
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Speaker 1: maybe for language. Yeah, what's that called cranial indocasting? I
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Speaker 1: think so, Um, that's a that's a good term for it.
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Speaker 1: And people won't even know if I'm wrong. Um. What
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Speaker 1: they do have a little bit of evidence on is
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Speaker 1: that the shape of our vocal tract um wasn't until
5:53
Speaker 1: about a hundred thousand years ago, wasn't able to even
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Speaker 1: able to make um, the vocalizations of the modern speech sounds.
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Speaker 1: So it wasn't even possible, Although that doesn't necessarily mean
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Speaker 1: there wasn't language, because it just could have been a
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Speaker 1: much more primitive version of what evolved of grunts. Yeah, exactly,
6:12
Speaker 1: and I did see someone. Even though that's all this
6:15
Speaker 1: was poo pooed by most people. Uh, some people think
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Speaker 1: that spoken language of all from sign language, and that
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Speaker 1: our modern gestures are holdover from that, which I thought
6:26
Speaker 1: was interesting, but most people go, now that's not true. Um.
6:29
Speaker 1: I ran into another one. And what you're talking about, um,
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Speaker 1: for everybody listening, is called a proto language, and evidence
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Speaker 1: of a proto language supports one theory, which we'll talk
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Speaker 1: about in a minute. But um, one idea for proto
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Speaker 1: language is that we started talking using on a monopeia,
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Speaker 1: which would make snap crackling pop like the oldest words
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Speaker 1: on earth, you know. Um. But well, I guess we
6:53
Speaker 1: should probably get into it now, Like what are there
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Speaker 1: basically two competing theories for how we whire the language
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Speaker 1: as a species? Right? Yeah? And I like both of them.
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Speaker 1: I noticed at the end You're like, why can't we
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Speaker 1: all just get along as far as linguistics go? Because
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Speaker 1: I'm not a linguist, and so I'm not gonna sit
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Speaker 1: here and poople and argue um because I'm not smart enough.
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Speaker 1: I don't know enough about it. But the first Josh
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Speaker 1: is um that we adapted to survive, so we learned
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Speaker 1: how to speak. Then that's kind of the simplest way
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Speaker 1: to say it. Um. The example I gave in here
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Speaker 1: is uh. And then we'll talk about who you know,
7:33
Speaker 1: who are the leaders in this whole category that believed this?
7:38
Speaker 1: But uh took took's hunting on the range on the
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Speaker 1: plains in the Savannah, and took took um thunder scares
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Speaker 1: away the deer, so Took Took goes hungry. So then
7:50
Speaker 1: later on Took took his already maybe learned to grunt
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Speaker 1: about like the deer being being nearby to his buddy.
7:56
Speaker 1: Who's his friend? Did we name every name my friend?
7:58
Speaker 1: Oh more Morty. Yeah, so he's already learned how to
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Speaker 1: tell Morty that deer nearby, so shut up, right, because
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Speaker 1: Morty talks incessantly. Uh So, now all of a sudden,
8:12
Speaker 1: he learns that thunder and bad weather might scare deer away,
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Speaker 1: so he goes hungry. So he learns now, I've got
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Speaker 1: to learn like what bad weather looks like coming in
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Speaker 1: and how to tell Morty, hey, pick up the paste, dude,
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Speaker 1: because bad weather is coming and we don't want to
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Speaker 1: go hungry again. So that was just one of the
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Speaker 1: stepping stones in evolving speech, right, And it is kind
8:34
Speaker 1: of like, um, the the idea behind it is that
8:38
Speaker 1: the speech evolved out of the combinations of these things,
8:42
Speaker 1: like you're saying, yeah, so you put them together and
8:44
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, huh that makes a lot of sense.
8:46
Speaker 1: I'm able to describe some larger portion of the world
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Speaker 1: around us. Yeah, And that's got more complex. The language
8:54
Speaker 1: had to like as they learn more things, right, like
8:56
Speaker 1: we settled down and sure culture would have had like
8:59
Speaker 1: a you jimpact on something like that. Yeah, and keeping
9:02
Speaker 1: children alive apparently, like once we settled in villages, A
9:05
Speaker 1: lot of people think that language really took a leap
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Speaker 1: forward because we had to, you know, keep the species
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Speaker 1: alive by protecting the kids. Um. I guess also the
9:16
Speaker 1: idea that you could warn somebody about something, right that
9:21
Speaker 1: isn't necessarily just something you could point at and be like,
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Speaker 1: you know, let's get out of here through gesture, something
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Speaker 1: maybe further away, something that you couldn't see right then,
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Speaker 1: that would that would lead directly to um to a
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Speaker 1: trait that was that led to survival, which is the
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Speaker 1: whole basis of natural selection, which means that people who
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Speaker 1: could do that would be able to go reproduce, and
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Speaker 1: that trait would survive and be passed along. And I
9:48
Speaker 1: imagine reproduction and all needed its own language as well, right,
9:52
Speaker 1: you know, I'm like, hey, mama, although in Quest for
9:56
Speaker 1: Fire it pretty much just happened, didn't I haven't seen
9:59
Speaker 1: that so long. I think that was the first movie
10:02
Speaker 1: I ever saw in showtime and Yeah, there wasn't a
10:04
Speaker 1: lot of words going on. It was like, you know,
10:07
Speaker 1: the ladies are down by the river bending over, filling
10:10
Speaker 1: up water buckets and or you know, water pods and
10:14
Speaker 1: man comes along and just you know, takes care of business. Yeah?
10:19
Speaker 1: Is that? Is that an ancient phrase? Takes care of business?
10:22
Speaker 1: TCB YEA. So I remember Quest for Fire and another movie. Um,
10:29
Speaker 1: we're out on showtime at about the same time a
10:31
Speaker 1: movie is called Caveman and it started Ringo Star. Is
10:35
Speaker 1: that his picture that is in this article? Yeah, don't
10:37
Speaker 1: you like my caption? Yeah? That's I couldn't. I couldn't
10:40
Speaker 1: tell just by looking at it, but um yeah, the caption,
10:43
Speaker 1: I think is what gave it away. These were the
10:44
Speaker 1: old days where I would like the highlight of my
10:46
Speaker 1: week was writing really clever picture captain star articles. I
10:50
Speaker 1: would go home and say, look at this one, Emily,
10:52
Speaker 1: it's pretty good. Someone might get this joke. So there's
10:54
Speaker 1: a production still of from Caveman of Ringo Star standing
10:58
Speaker 1: there and the caption is this cave by Caveman gets
11:01
Speaker 1: by with a little help from his friends, beautiful Matty
11:04
Speaker 1: guest producer Mattie. Yeah, so that's adaptation theory that basically
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Speaker 1: we figured out that we could survive better and more
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Speaker 1: robustly by talking to one another, and language evolved in
11:17
Speaker 1: fits and starts through there. Right. Yeah. And who who's
11:19
Speaker 1: gradually I should say gradually? Yes? Um? And that's Stephen Pinker,
11:23
Speaker 1: who's a great dude. Yeah. Pinker and Bloom in their
11:26
Speaker 1: paper Natural Language and Natural Selection. Uh. I mean there
11:30
Speaker 1: are a lot of people who agree with them and
11:31
Speaker 1: have written quote unquote the book on this since then,
11:35
Speaker 1: or several books. It's very dense subject. Makes my mind
11:41
Speaker 1: melt a little bit. Um, and Pinker and Bloom basically say, uh,
11:47
Speaker 1: this is the case. It makes sense. This is just
11:52
Speaker 1: standard Darwinian natural selection. What's the problem. I don't have
11:57
Speaker 1: a problem with it. Why doesn't everybody just get on board? Uh? Well,
12:02
Speaker 1: because there's another competing theory, and there are all sorts
12:04
Speaker 1: of sub theories, but these are the two big big daddies. Um,
12:08
Speaker 1: and this is no nom Chomsky and um. Evolutionary biologists
12:12
Speaker 1: Stephen Jay Gould, and they think that it was a
12:16
Speaker 1: spandrel or an axaptation. So you know what a spandrel
12:21
Speaker 1: is well in biology or for real in architecture. But
12:26
Speaker 1: please explain. Okay, Well, Stephen J. Gould um coined the
12:30
Speaker 1: term spandrel, as you point out in the article. Um,
12:33
Speaker 1: and it's just perfect actually in this application, because the spandrel,
12:37
Speaker 1: architecturally speaking, is um this triangular area that inevitably is
12:42
Speaker 1: created when you put two arched domes next to another
12:46
Speaker 1: at right angles, and it looks like if you're looking
12:49
Speaker 1: at it looks like purposeful design, like ornamentation. But it's
12:53
Speaker 1: actually a byproduct you can't get around. And that's what
12:57
Speaker 1: a spandrel is. As far as Gould is concerned, the
13:00
Speaker 1: product of another evolutionary process right and language supposedly was
13:07
Speaker 1: as far as gold and chomp scare concern just kind
13:10
Speaker 1: of came about as the result of other stuff, specifically toolmaking. Yeah,
13:15
Speaker 1: Darwin calls it pre adaptation and later became acceptation. And
13:19
Speaker 1: which one do you like more, pre adaptation or acceptation?
13:22
Speaker 1: Acceptation is a little hard to say, so I'm gonna
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Speaker 1: go predation. It sounds so like important for us, you know. Um.
13:31
Speaker 1: But a quick example of that, and this is the
13:33
Speaker 1: one most often cited, is that, uh, there's a theory
13:36
Speaker 1: out there that bird feathers were originally meant to keep birds, warm,
13:39
Speaker 1: and flying came about after that as a spandrel makes sense.
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Speaker 1: Well's the problem exactly. So you said that our brains
13:51
Speaker 1: adapted to where we could they got larger, to where
13:54
Speaker 1: we could make tools, and things in language came about
13:58
Speaker 1: because of the result of that. And this isn't just
14:00
Speaker 1: kind of I mean, it's not like they're like, well,
14:02
Speaker 1: we can run, so we can talk. Um. There's specific
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Speaker 1: areas of the brain that are associated with both toolmaking
14:10
Speaker 1: and tool use and language. UM. And there's actually two.
14:16
Speaker 1: There's um Broker's area and there's more. Nikki's area and
14:20
Speaker 1: Broker's area was named after a French neurosurgeon named Paul Broca,
14:25
Speaker 1: and in eighteen sixty one he um described the patient
14:29
Speaker 1: named Tan. Tan wasn't the guy's real name. No one
14:32
Speaker 1: knew his real name. Um. He was the only thing,
14:36
Speaker 1: the only syllable he could pronounce that he could form
14:40
Speaker 1: was Tan. So they're like, well, that's your name, pal Um.
14:43
Speaker 1: And after he died, Brokea opened up his skull and
14:46
Speaker 1: looked at his brain and found a huge lesion on
14:49
Speaker 1: the area now named broke A's area, and that's come
14:53
Speaker 1: to be associated with speech production. The weird thing about
14:56
Speaker 1: Tan is he could understand spoken language. If you're Tan,
15:00
Speaker 1: you look um, you look kind of Tan. I think
15:03
Speaker 1: maybe you should stay out of the sun. He could
15:05
Speaker 1: notice stay out of the sun. He wasn't There wasn't
15:08
Speaker 1: anything wrong with him other than he could not produce speech. Well,
15:12
Speaker 1: I bet he was really ticked off with his name.
15:15
Speaker 1: Then I can say his Tan. They're like, we'll just
15:17
Speaker 1: call you Tan, And he said he was probably like Nor, Yeah,
15:20
Speaker 1: it's ignacious anything but Tan. Yeah. I mean, I I
15:24
Speaker 1: imagine the guy probably was like, you know, half mad
15:27
Speaker 1: by the time he died, just out of frustration. Well,
15:30
Speaker 1: stroke patients. You know, my grandfather had a stroke and
15:33
Speaker 1: tried to speak in his head. He was saying words,
15:36
Speaker 1: but it would come out as gobbledygook and he would
15:37
Speaker 1: get really frustrated. It was very sad. So now that
15:40
Speaker 1: was your grandfather. So what it sounds like your grandfather
15:43
Speaker 1: UM had a problem with was his were Nikki's Area. Yeah,
15:47
Speaker 1: and that was named after a German neuro surgeon who
15:50
Speaker 1: found that UM his patients who could speak but they
15:56
Speaker 1: weren't making any sense, had lesions on the area now
15:59
Speaker 1: known it is were Nicky's Area. So if you put
16:01
Speaker 1: the two together, broke his area which is involved in
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Speaker 1: speech production, and we're Nikki's area, which is involved with
16:07
Speaker 1: UM speech comprehension, language comprehension. You have normally talking people
16:13
Speaker 1: like us. Yes, and we first saw we're Nikki's area.
16:18
Speaker 1: I think it was Ricky, we're Nikki the guy, we're
16:22
Speaker 1: Nikki's area, and broke his area. UM, and the temporal, parietal,
16:27
Speaker 1: and UH occipital lobes of the brain physically connected for
16:31
Speaker 1: the first time in Homo habilis or habilis. So wait,
16:36
Speaker 1: what was it? What's that called where you examine sculls
16:38
Speaker 1: to see if there was probably some brain there. UM.
16:41
Speaker 1: I believe that it's called cranial indocasting. Nice, I think so.
16:46
Speaker 1: So they think that UM that this This would make
16:49
Speaker 1: a lot of sense if Homo habilis UM was the
16:51
Speaker 1: first one to talk, because they also often associate Homo
16:56
Speaker 1: habilis is the first one to use tools. Right, this
16:59
Speaker 1: is this isn't question I found recently it's to come
17:03
Speaker 1: under question that possibly UM the oldest tools, the older
17:07
Speaker 1: one tools which are like UM scrapers, hammers, UM I
17:12
Speaker 1: think brain crushers, right, basically just stone tools that are
17:16
Speaker 1: used to like skin meat off a bone. They're like
17:19
Speaker 1: two point three million years old. They think that they
17:22
Speaker 1: might be slightly older than Homo habilists. Then the other
17:25
Speaker 1: problem with linking language and humans and Homo habilis is
17:29
Speaker 1: we're not we're not sure we're on habiliss same tree.
17:34
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, But nonetheless, Homo habilist does have the cute
17:39
Speaker 1: nickname a handyman. I've never heard that because he was
17:42
Speaker 1: supposedly the first tool users, and that makes sense. Yeah,
17:45
Speaker 1: it's better than Bob the Builder, but there's still that
17:48
Speaker 1: that link right there between tool use and um language, right,
17:54
Speaker 1: which they think is makes him in her much more
17:58
Speaker 1: advanced than the Australia Eopithecus who came before homoobilist. So um,
18:05
Speaker 1: the whole reason why this is important is because they're
18:08
Speaker 1: trying to nail down where language first came about. And
18:13
Speaker 1: if you subscribe to Gold and Chomsky, it just all
18:16
Speaker 1: of a sudden it was there and people were talking
18:18
Speaker 1: to each other. Yeah, it was like one one mutation
18:21
Speaker 1: happened and then all of a sudden people were able
18:23
Speaker 1: to speak and they were like, oh man, I've been
18:26
Speaker 1: wanting to get some stuff off my chest for generations. Um,
18:30
Speaker 1: if you listen to Pinker and Bloom or you know what,
18:33
Speaker 1: I feel bad for Bloom. If you listen to Bloom
18:35
Speaker 1: and Pinker, Um, I mean we know about that, don't we. Uh.
18:40
Speaker 1: If you listen to Bloom and Pinker, then it took,
18:42
Speaker 1: you know, a very long time for language to evolve,
18:45
Speaker 1: and gradually by putting combinations together. The thing is Ghoul
18:50
Speaker 1: before he died said you know what, there's not nearly
18:53
Speaker 1: enough time for language to evolve. And what's more, if
18:59
Speaker 1: there was some sort of gradual evolution of language, then
19:02
Speaker 1: chimps should show some sort of propensity towards language. They do,
19:09
Speaker 1: but apparently not in any way that any linguist who's
19:13
Speaker 1: saying would it would call actual language the beginnings of language. Um,
19:18
Speaker 1: it's communication, but not actual language, right, like you mentioned
19:21
Speaker 1: at the beginning of the article. Sure, but um, Bloom
19:24
Speaker 1: and Pinker point out, So chimps and humans diverged about
19:30
Speaker 1: six million years ago. That's three hundred thousand generations for
19:33
Speaker 1: language to evolve. That's plenty of time, they say, and
19:37
Speaker 1: Gould from beyond the Grace says, no, it's not as
19:41
Speaker 1: he did. Okay, Uh, well you know what Pinker actually
19:45
Speaker 1: said about that in his defense was look at the
19:48
Speaker 1: high racks h y r a X. It is um
19:52
Speaker 1: because people say, well, we see in the DNA the
19:54
Speaker 1: high Racks shares the DNA with the African elephant. And
19:59
Speaker 1: if you look at a higher because it looks like
20:00
Speaker 1: a large rat, oh, it looks nothing like an elephant.
20:04
Speaker 1: So he's like, just because you share all that DNA
20:06
Speaker 1: doesn't mean that you're gonna evolve the exact same way. Yeah,
20:11
Speaker 1: so that makes sense. Yeah, and some people pose and
20:15
Speaker 1: I sort of agree that they're not mutually exclusive. You
20:18
Speaker 1: don't have to have one without the other. Uh. It
20:21
Speaker 1: may have been acceptation, and then from that point it
20:25
Speaker 1: may have very much been a matter of natural selection
20:28
Speaker 1: because the better you were communicating, the better you were surviving.
20:33
Speaker 1: I like that idea too. Um. I don't think that though,
20:36
Speaker 1: if you put Stephen Pinker in um Chomsky in the
20:40
Speaker 1: same room that they would be like, you know this,
20:43
Speaker 1: this all this works together. I think like they're tracing
20:47
Speaker 1: it back to the origin point, the moment where it
20:49
Speaker 1: began either as a either it began to evolve or
20:53
Speaker 1: just appeared as a result of a incredibly sophisticated machine
20:57
Speaker 1: that just started performing another function as a result of
21:00
Speaker 1: its sophistication. And it's all kind of conjecture anyway, But
21:04
Speaker 1: there's still I mean, there's still support. There's support for
21:06
Speaker 1: different ones like UM, like brain plasticity, neural plasticity. The
21:11
Speaker 1: fact that our our brains can be restructured and reorganized
21:15
Speaker 1: supports the idea that language evolved gradually, right, and they
21:18
Speaker 1: just started to build and building building, Possibly that's how
21:20
Speaker 1: our brains became larger, right, chicken and the egg thing.
21:24
Speaker 1: But people also say, like, if large brain equals things
21:27
Speaker 1: like speech, then why don't like whales and things like
21:30
Speaker 1: that with much larger brains and things like speech. That's
21:33
Speaker 1: another great argument too, uh. And then mirror neurons UM
21:37
Speaker 1: kind of lends support to the idea that it's just
21:40
Speaker 1: it's just a spandrel of brain function because toolmaking and
21:45
Speaker 1: UM and speech both used the same areas, right, and
21:50
Speaker 1: then both um and then toolmaking lights up when you
21:54
Speaker 1: watch somebody use tools, and when you're using tools yourself
21:57
Speaker 1: in the broker's area. Interesting, yeah, or friend, samir neurons
22:01
Speaker 1: they're back. Have you got anything else? There's a lot
22:05
Speaker 1: of scrippling over there. Oh yeah. So one of Chomsky's
22:10
Speaker 1: big points is that, uh, that grammar or the language
22:15
Speaker 1: is innate, which makes it biological not cultural. Okay, UM
22:21
Speaker 1: is universal grammar, which is that like if he always
22:24
Speaker 1: says that if if a Martian anthropologist came down and
22:27
Speaker 1: studied all human languages, that they would he would reasonably
22:31
Speaker 1: conclude that all of that information is based on an
22:36
Speaker 1: internal structure rather than culture. Basically, um and the the
22:41
Speaker 1: key to universal grammar supposedly is recursion, which is like
22:45
Speaker 1: me saying, like, I'm gonna go to the store, the
22:47
Speaker 1: one down the street, you know, the one that has
22:49
Speaker 1: the really good hot dogs. I'll be back in a
22:51
Speaker 1: little bit. It's taking um. It's adding phrases within phrases.
22:56
Speaker 1: There's no other um. There's no other community cation in
23:00
Speaker 1: any animal species that would include this, which makes that human.
23:04
Speaker 1: And supposedly all human languages contain recursion. Except there's a
23:08
Speaker 1: challenger now called Paraha. It's Amazonian. There's like five people
23:14
Speaker 1: who speak it, really, five hundred and one, including the
23:17
Speaker 1: one um M I T trained linguist who studied it
23:23
Speaker 1: for thirty years, is the only one who knows it
23:26
Speaker 1: who's now saying this thing. They don't have recursion, so
23:30
Speaker 1: universal grammars wrong. Therefore Chomsky's whole thing is wrong. There's
23:34
Speaker 1: a pretty cool article on Chronicle of Higher Education that's
23:38
Speaker 1: worth reading called Angry Words. You know that's a big
23:43
Speaker 1: deal right now, is disappearing languages. And I don't think
23:46
Speaker 1: I think these people are As far as I got
23:48
Speaker 1: from the article, they seem like they are fine. There's
23:52
Speaker 1: not that many of them, but they're not being encroached
23:54
Speaker 1: upon any further. I think they're protected. Interesting. They're just
23:57
Speaker 1: kind of living out there their existence and doing their thing. Actually, no,
24:01
Speaker 1: I'm Chomsky is in the bushes behind them with the blowgun.
24:06
Speaker 1: Well that's that's all I got. That's good stuff. This
24:09
Speaker 1: could have been like ten hours long. Yeah. Easy for
24:11
Speaker 1: linguists out there, they're like, oh, what a broad overview.
24:14
Speaker 1: That's exactly what this is like. Um, if you want
24:18
Speaker 1: to learn more and you want to see this picture
24:20
Speaker 1: of ringo start just as a caveman, you should read
24:22
Speaker 1: the article written by one Charles W. Bryant called how
24:25
Speaker 1: did Language Evolve? Uh? Type that into the search bar
24:29
Speaker 1: at how stuff works dot com and it will bring
24:32
Speaker 1: it up. Uh. And I said search bar. So it's
24:34
Speaker 1: time for listening, mate, Josh, I'm gonna call this we
24:40
Speaker 1: saved another life apparently again, Hey guys and Jerry, I
24:46
Speaker 1: thought I would We'll say hey Matt. Since Matt's here today,
24:49
Speaker 1: I thought it would tell you a little about how
24:50
Speaker 1: your podcast has quite literally saved and changed my life.
24:54
Speaker 1: I'm seventeen and living a small town of Galesburg, Illinois,
24:58
Speaker 1: but consider myself a citizen of the world. Uh. From
25:01
Speaker 1: when I was six months young ten years after Ghostbusters,
25:07
Speaker 1: my family exactly, My family and I have traveled back
25:10
Speaker 1: and forth from Illinois to Barcelona, Spain, every two years.
25:14
Speaker 1: This last time back in the US, I fell in
25:16
Speaker 1: love with your podcast and have listened almost religiously every
25:19
Speaker 1: morning for almost three years. Then one day my faith
25:22
Speaker 1: was solidified. While listening and walking my dog cheap Ee,
25:26
Speaker 1: I crossed the street. I should probably c o a walking.
25:30
Speaker 1: This guy's really hitting all the points here. Um, walking
25:34
Speaker 1: with headphones is a dangerous thing. Uh. If one of
25:37
Speaker 1: you died because of a headphone walking incident, I would
25:39
Speaker 1: never forgive myself. Back to the story, A car was
25:43
Speaker 1: unbeknownst to me, hurtling down the street at me, I
25:45
Speaker 1: started crossing when all of a sudden buzz how flies
25:51
Speaker 1: work had just begun. Remember the loud buzz. It really
25:55
Speaker 1: flipped me out and I jumped backwards just as the
25:57
Speaker 1: car flew by me. Oh no, it was Um, it
26:00
Speaker 1: was from the fly remember help me? And he said
26:04
Speaker 1: that scared him enough to jump back and didn't even
26:06
Speaker 1: see the car. So we saved this dude and cheap ee,
26:11
Speaker 1: which is pretty exciting. That was a while ago, but recently,
26:14
Speaker 1: actually two days ago. You have changed the course of
26:16
Speaker 1: the rest of my life. After listening to the Sauna
26:19
Speaker 1: and Viking podcasts, I have fallen in love with Scandinavia
26:23
Speaker 1: so much so that I'm going to be a foreign
26:25
Speaker 1: exchange student in Finland for the entirety of next year.
26:30
Speaker 1: That's awesome. So we inspired uh Noah to go to
26:34
Speaker 1: Finland because of the SOUNDA and Viking casts enjoyed the
26:38
Speaker 1: really so much love and many thanks. And that's from
26:42
Speaker 1: Noah f F nice Noah Finster Finkelstein, that's his name
26:48
Speaker 1: now it is um. Thanks for that. No, we're glad
26:51
Speaker 1: you're alive. We hope you have a very good time
26:52
Speaker 1: in Finland. Um and uh, we're glad cheap. He's doing
26:57
Speaker 1: well too. I bet no one never comes back like
27:01
Speaker 1: in a sinister way or now. I bet he loves
27:03
Speaker 1: it so much that he's like, I'm here nice until
27:07
Speaker 1: winter hits exactly. UM. If you we always love hearing
27:12
Speaker 1: how we've saved your life or enriched your life or
27:16
Speaker 1: something like that. UM, we want to hear about it.
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