HERE WE GO AGAIN.

The NY Times has decided once again to clamber aboard their spavined, cross-eyed nag and charge creakily into battle with the windmills of linguistics. The lead article in today’s science section is “Early Voices: The Leap to Language,” by Nicholas Wade, a long, long attempt to construct a coherent narrative about the prehistory of language based on misunderstood scraps of interviews and floating ideas. I just can’t bring myself to go into full deconstructive mode (for that, try here and here), so I’ll just offer a supercondensed version of the article:


“…birds… leaf-cutting ants… crows… chimpanzees… of interest to almost everyone, with the curious exception of linguists… many linguists have avoided the subject because of the influence of Noam Chomsky… few firm facts… conflicting views… new research… new clues… even linguists have grudgingly begun to join in the discussion… !Kung… click languages… clicks may have… clicks… possible hint… may be… some profound change… Though some archaeologists dispute… Dr. Richard Klein of Stanford argues that… he suggests… most likely… was perhaps… it is surely reasonable to suppose… seems to have… Vervet monkeys… eagles, leopards, snakes and baboons… Chimpanzees… Dr. Bickerton developed the idea… must have preceded… he argued… Dr. Bickerton has argued… may have been… he suggests… he believes… would have had to… would have… Dr. Michael Corballis, a psychologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, believes… Chimpanzees… He believes… may have… many concede… may both have played some role… must have had… It is easy to see in a general way… might create… Dr. Dunbar believes… Dr. Steven Pinker… disputes… likely… might seem… Some linguists have argued… Other linguists have said… gene… gene… genes… seems to have taken place… what seems to be… genes… genes… Dr. Chomsky… Dr. Chomsky… Dr. Chomsky… a set of propositions… may have been… could have developed… could involve… Dr. Chomsky rejects the notion… Dr. Chomsky… Dr. Chomsky… brilliant… rabid… somewhere…”
There you have it. It all has to do with birds, chimpanzees, and Chomsky, and not much to do with those damn linguists, who can’t even get their act together.
(Thanks to y2karl and Bonnie for pointing me to the article.)

Comments

  1. “As far back as 1866, the Linguistic Society of Paris famously declared that it wanted no more speculative articles about the origin of language.”
    “Bow-wow,” barked Chomsky.
    “Pooh-pooh,” screamed Pinker.
    “Yo-hee-ho,” grunted some anonymous adjunct instructor in linguistics.
    “Who is Nicholas Wade when he’s at home?” asked Jim.
    And just because the Société de Linguistique de Paris outlawed it, that doesn’t seem to have stopped a bajillion crackpot linguists from twisting in the wind with their theories.

  2. I saw this linked elsewhere and promptly came over to check you were dealing with it. Nicely done, although your summary omits the name “Jackendoff”, which is traditionally my cue to stop reading these things.

  3. Thank you for obviating the need to read that article, as I can see from your snippets that I’ve read it a zillion times already.

  4. Dr. Chomsky… brilliant… rabid… somewhere…
    Best found poetry of the day.

  5. You folks would surely enjoy a discovery I made in the angeles national forest, california. I came across a inscription on a rock, in a known Native American site. It looked to me like the western european system of writing called ogam. My Indian friends said “our people didn’t do that.” I slowly and gradually figured out what the lines mean in ogam, and slowly came up with a possible translation, which is consistent with all w. european inscriptions of similar vein. See the photos at http://www.equinox-project.com/nyerges.htm

  6. I thought of blogging this to, and decided not to basically because making the whole case on why I don’t believe Pinker, don’t trust Bickerton and don’t care what Chomsky thinks was just too exhausting to contemplate.

  7. And Christopher might find this interesting as well.

  8. Chomsky, Chomsky,….Where do I start? Major flaws: constant recycling of theory; no heuristic sense; rejects historical perspective yet builds most of SPE on diachronic phonology; has never made a discovery rivaling one by ,say, a Rask; has contributed nothing to computer translation. Even worse, his utopian political thinking is something he should have abandoned when he was a graduate student.

  9. You’re playin’ my song…

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