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| Dr. Guy Deutscher - The Evolution of Language |
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| Dr. Guy Deutscher - The Evolution of Language |
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Index:
Personal Background
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Dr. Guy Deutscher, is a professor with the Department of Languages and Cultures of Ancient Mesopotamia at the University of Leiden in Holland. Dr. Deutscher is the author of a number of scholarly articles and the highly acclaimed book: "The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention". The Unfolding of Language won the Susanne K. Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Symbolic Form (2006), administered by the The Media Ecology Association.
The Unfolding of Language is a stimulating, informative and immensely readable account of language change and evolution, which will appeal both to the professional linguist and to those interested in understanding more about why language is the way it is. - From the Book Review in AMERICAN SCIENTIST (Jan-Feb 2006 issue)
Of all the characteristics that differentiate us from the other animals, I think most people would agree, quite instinctively even, that language is the fundamental thing that makes us qualitatively different. - In the Beginning Was the Word
In Greek, or Latin, for example, once you could view the letters, you could read, you could get the sound. For Greek and Latin, there was almost a perfect match, and what happens in English today is there's still the pretension that it's a system representing sounds, but in fact, it isn't the case anymore. - Unique Processing Challenge
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The following transcript has not been edited for journal or magazine publication (see 'Interview Notes' for more details). Bold is used to emphasize our [Children of the Code] sense of the importance of what is being said and does not necessarily reflect gestures or tones of emphasis that occurred during the interview.
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David Boulton: Your book is a fascinating piece of work.
Dr. Guy Deutscher: Thank you. That's nice to hear.
David Boulton: Yes, it's so wonderful to have an accessible volume that helps put into perspective the language we're so immersed in and so often take for granted.
Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes that was precisely my aim so I'm quite happy if it actually works.
David Boulton: Let’s start by asking you to give us a thumbnail of why you do the work you do. In other words, what's going on inside of you personally that drives you to do this kind of research and learning?
Dr. Guy Deutscher: Actually, this is something I say in the beginning of my book. I tell an anecdote about trying to learn a bit of Latin when I was a child and not quite understanding where it all could have come from. That's a true anecdote. Since I was a child, I have always been fascinated by how that amazing thing called language could have come about and who might have been there when it all happened. I used to ask: was it some sort of prehistoric assembly of elders who decided on all these incredibly complex conventions? Of course, I knew that wasn't the case, but I just had no idea how it could have emerged otherwise. That was really the main question I wanted to answer when I started studying linguistics and language. So I suppose it has been driving me ever since.
David Boulton: That's wonderful. I’ve found that many people who do extraordinary work are propelled by something deeply personal to them, often times by an experience they have had early on, which set them on the path of their inquiry.
Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes and secretly I was writing the Unfolding Language) to myself at the age of 17 or 18, because I couldn't find anything or anyone that could answer my burning questions. So in some sense, I'm closing a cycle there.
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David Boulton: One of the things, which first struck me after somebody sent me the link that introduced me to your book, was the statement: "mankind's greatest invention." Without having read anything about the book, my immediate response to that statement was, "this is the invention that created mankind." It wasn't something that mankind created, but rather it created mankind. And then, when I got your book, I found you were coming from the same place.
Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes, that's right and of course, when I call language "Mankind’s greatest invention" that's tongue-in-cheek somewhat, precisely because of what you’ve just said. Language was not an invention like the wheel, or E-mail. As I say in the book, language is what made us human in the first place. So it was our greatest invention, except it wasn't invented. Of course, some people might wonder why I say that language, of all things, is what made us human. I don't think there's an objective, or true answer, here, because there are clearly lots of things that differentiate us from all other animals. So it must be to some extent a subjective decision about what we feel is absolutely most special about us. Still, of all the characteristics that differentiate us from the other animals, I think most people would agree, quite instinctively even, that language is the fundamental thing that makes us qualitatively different. We can also say that without language, we simply couldn't have achieved everything that we have done.
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David Boulton: It seems pretty clear that language is our species most
distinguishing attribute. However, it seems there's also something that's showing up just before language, which is the human ability to learn together. I believe it has somewhat mediated the emergence of our use of language.Dr. Guy Deutscher: The ability to learn together? Do you mean to transmit knowledge from generation to generation?
David Boulton: Yes, and from person to person - from being to being. It is our learning together, which in some ways is driving the emergence of language. It just depends on what we think is driving the use of language and where we say early communication interactions between primates crossed the line to becoming language between humans.
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Animal Communication – Human Language
Dr. Guy Deutscher: We know today that primates can communicate in a much more sophisticated way than we ever imagined. The famous pygmy chimpanzee, Kanzi, is perhaps the best example. But, there is still a huge gap between the most sophisticated things we've seen chimpanzees doing and what every human child is doing. Obviously, that is something that involved long evolutionary and historical processes. But, we have very little to go on when we try to reconstruct this process, and of course, there have been hundreds of proposed scenarios for how it would have happened.
David Boulton: Are you referring to Proto-languages evolving?
Dr. Guy Deutscher: I’m referring to the scenarios that have been proposed for what came before language, and what were the sources for the first words: from gesture to language, and from music and rhythm to language, etc. But, it's very difficult to tell which of these is right, because we have so little evidence. It’s also very difficult to put a precise limit and say, this is where language began.
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A Relatively Recent Development
David Boulton: Yes. I don't mean to go too far into this, but it would seem certain precursors are necessary to produce rapid articulate speech, as we think of it today. Given the
FOXP2 gene study, and the anthropological findings that reveal when the necessary changes in jaw, teeth, and tongue came in, there seems to be a 50,000 to 200,000-year window or something like that, during which language sprouted forth.Dr. Guy Deutscher: That's right. But, even these studies are not conclusive. I think what you're referring to concerning changes in the jaw and tongue are the studies about the lowering of the larynx. We have a much lower larynx than chimpanzees, which enables us to produce a much wider range of sounds. Anatomically modern humans, in other words, humans with precisely the same anatomy as ours, have been around for 150,000-200,000 years, so that gives you a certain kind of limit.
David Boulton: Right. Well, when we talk about roughly seven million years of human evolutionary history, or whatever that number is, ‘language’ is still a relatively new blip on the map.
Dr. Guy Deutscher: But we have to qualify these limits a little. It’s true that hominids with a higher larynx had a much narrower range of possibilities to produce sounds. But the fact that our ancestors, say, 500,000 years ago couldn't produce the vowel 'ee' doesn't tell us that they had no language at all. We simply don’t know whether they had language, and how much language they had.
David Boulton: Right. Yet, there seems to have been a period in time when language itself was being "selected" and our structure started to adapt to producing language. There seems to be a sort of window in which the production of language became more apparent to us in the anthropological record.
Dr. Guy Deutscher: Around 70,000, and according to some new studies as early as 100,000 years ago, there is the emergence of ‘symbolic artifacts’, things like ostrich-shell beads that are clearly there not as utilitarian tools, but as decorative elements. Many people believe that when you find such symbolic artifacts, you can assume a symbolic language. So if they are right (and it does sound on the whole fairly plausible assumption) then language was around for at least 70,000 years. But it is terribly important to stress that there's no direct evidence for anything to do with language before five thousand years ago.
David Boulton: Which is when language began to be written.
Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes.
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David Boulton: Right. OK. Let's move on from here. I think on the one hand, we're saying, what really makes us human, in the ways we most appreciate human-ness today, begins with language. Everything is built on language. What is most interesting to me about this progression is that there must have been a time when language was more of an external utility, a communication mechanism/medium, rather than the kind of internal, self-reflexive, self-talk, which makes our consciousness so different from anything that has ever existed.
Dr. Guy Deutscher: I agree entirely. The only thing is, how exactly did that transition occur? I don’t believe we will be able to pin it down.
David Boulton: Right, and without needing to date it scientifically, and without bringing any kind of religious charge to this, it's interesting that there's the biblical notion of; "in the beginning was the word" - that a connection is there, somewhere.
Dr. Guy Deutscher: Right. I think we instinctively feel it, and it must also reflect, in some sense, a historical reality that will forever be a mystery.
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David Boulton: So, we aren’t able to pinpoint with accuracy the ‘dating’ of some kind of ignition point to this. This wasn’t a singular event, rather a gradual emergence, so as you say, we really can't tell when things happened. Nonetheless, there is something that we can say about how language bootstraps itself into greater complexity, how it's grown if you will, which is really the core of your book.
Dr. Guy Deutscher: That's precisely what I tried to do, yes. I concentrated on the part of the story we can make reasonable conjectures about, tried to start from a point where we already had some simple words.
David Boulton: We can make inferences based on how it looks today.
Dr. Guy Deutscher: Precisely, that's why I decided to start there. From this starting point we can, based on what we can see today, actually build fairly plausible scenarios about how complex language evolved from a very simple beginning. The stage I choose to start with, which I call, "Me Tarzan"; is undoubtedly already human, because by that stage you have the basic ability to describe things, even if they're very, very simple things. So I start with the most rudimentary materials of language and try to show how, we can extrapolate the processes that we can see in operation in the historical period back and see how the complexity of language has evolved.
David Boulton: That's an interesting approach to the process. So a social-cognitive inertia plus evolution of memes view of how language is differentiated?
Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes, it's the process by which ideas or conventions emerge, not because someone decides on them consciously, but, through the act of communication itself. So, it is the evolution of memes, if one wants to speak in those terms.
David Bouton: As perhaps being driven by the economy, expressiveness, and analogy, which you address in your book.
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In your book I really liked what you termed "short cutters". They reminded me of my daughter, who once came up with the word "butcept".
Dr. Guy Deutscher: To mean?
David Boulton: Well, it was both the word "But" as in warning that a difference is coming, and the word "Except" and she contracted them. I've always marveled at how little children develop these incredibly intelligent word fusions out of parts of other words they hear, which demonstrate the very principles I think you're referring to.
Dr. Guy Deutscher: That is really a wonderful example. So, yes I think the three main driving forces for change are economy, expressiveness, and analogy making. Economy is ultimately just laziness, manifested mostly in pronunciations, trying to pronounce as little as possible, and as little as you can get away with.
David Boulton: So, it's not trying to optimize as much as it's trying to take the path of least resistance.
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Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes. Of course, no one tries to optimize consciously. No one sits and looks at the whole system and thinks, well, we have a redundancy here; we have a word that's too long there, let's do something about it. It's sort of like free-market economies. Things happen through actions people do individually when trying to address very immediate concerns. So, you just instinctively know you don't want to put any more effort than needed for your conversation partner to understand you.
David Boulton: It's built into the process of trying to keep the flow going.
Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes, and the resulting changes come through continuous negotiations that are for the most part unconscious. If you go a little bit too far in economizing, your partner will not understand you, and you will have to repeat it. So, the next time you won't go quite as far as you did. There is always that negotiation between the speaker and the hearer. But, if you economized and you were understood, you will turn that into a habit. The result of this, over time, is a sort of constant drive towards optimization, towards reduction, and making the code more efficient.
David Boulton: Right. On a different level, it is somewhat reminiscent of Einstein saying, "make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler" in terms of the ecology of the dialogue and the conversation.
Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes, that's right. Of course, if that were the only thing around, words would just always get shorter and shorter and shorter, and things would be incredibly efficient, but possibly quite dull also.
David Boulton: Dimensionally constrained.
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Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes. But, there are other driving forces, because of course; we also have this expressive urge – we want to extend our expressive range or say things in a more forceful way, creating greater effect, which drives us in the other direction - towards maybe using more words, or using words with stronger meaning.
David Boulton: Or differentiating more complexity by using words that stretch the edge of communicating with the person we're with.
Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes, that's one manifestation, precisely.
David Boulton: So, we've got expressiveness resulting in some expansion, and the economy, conserving against it, in a way.
Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes, I try to describe it as the cycles of expansion and reduction, where expressiveness builds new or longer or more complex phrases, and then economy (or erosion) gradually reduces them. Erosion checks the excesses of the expressiveness, and vice versa..
David Boulton: Almost like speciation.
Dr. Guy Deutscher: In what sense speciation?
David Boulton: Well, it seems like animals migrate and adapt and become different. But over time the animals will breed back into each other in ways, which end up with a greater base of strengths surviving, rather than just the variations developed in their local extremes.
Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes, that's right.
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David Boulton: So, in addition to these two...
Dr. Guy Deutscher: …there's analogy, which is trying to make order out of that whole mess. Analogy is the instinctive need to find as much order as possible, especially by children, in order to cope with learning the language. When you learn language as a child, you have to cope with absolutely mind-boggling amounts of information and detail. It would be completely impossible to do that if you didn't assume, at least as your default-working hypothesis, that as much as possible works by logic and by rules. That is why children, (but not only children), whenever they are confronted with new forms try to fit them into other rules they already know, or even make new rules on the spot, based on similarities between forms and expressions they already know. Most of the time they get it right, in the sense that they create the same rules or regularities that are really there in the language of their parents. But sometimes they don't. Then, we get all these cute errors children make, which are usually producing a regular form where in real language it happens to be irregular. Or taking one regularity and imposing it in a place where another rule applies.
David Boulton: Trying to reference what's new to what's known.
Dr. Guy Deutscher: Precisely.
David Boulton: And, analogy is the mode of processing that is creating some contextual reference for what's going on now, what's new.
Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes, It is the ability to find similarities between things that are not identical, but nevertheless have some things in common, and to create a rule or a pattern and then apply it along with the patterns you already know to new situations or new forms you encounter. The changes in language over time are driven by the fact that the analogies every generation makes are not entirely identical to those of the previous generation. They don't generate precisely the same system because some forms which had been more frequent became less frequent and so the new generation would not use these forms to draw their analogies. And vice versa. Some forms, which used to be quite infrequent, have become very frequent, so these are now the dominant ones in which to make the patterns on.
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David Boulton: Which you showed really remarkably well with words that have almost changed 180 degrees over time in their meaning and usage across generations.
Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes. The changes in meaning, changes in frequencies, changes even in pronunciation, and then the combination of these three basic forces, each pushing in a slightly different direction is what drives language all the time and what doesn't allow it to stay still. Ultimately, it's what can develop more and more sophisticated grammatical structures, as well as a wider range of vocabulary and abstract terms, which I tried to show toward the end of the book.
David Boulton: Right. I really want to go into that, how our language is this medium of exercise for making complexly constructed, abstract realities in our minds. But, coming right off of economy, expressiveness, and analogy, there's a parallel of sorts between that group and metaphor, destruction, and creation. Yes?
Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes.
David Boulton: Could we just touch on that?
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Metaphor, Destruction and Creation
Dr. Guy Deutscher. Well, in some sense, I suppose these are the characteristic effects of the three forces. Metaphor is a manifestation of expressiveness. Destruction is a manifestation of economy, and creation is slightly more difficult because it is a manifestation of all these things, combined. Metaphor is a manifestation of expressiveness because we try to extend our expressive range to abstract concepts. Abstract concepts don't just grow on trees. They have to come from somewhere, and the only way to create them is to use material that's already there and to extend its meaning. The material that's already there are words for simple things, for simple objects or simple actions. So, metaphor is the means by which we create more sophisticated, abstract vocabulary, from words for simpler concepts.
David Boulton: Express our analogies through assembling words into metaphors?
Dr. Guy Deutscher: Precisely, and use them as images for more abstract things. Then, destruction is obviously the manifestation of laziness. Creation, as I said, is more complex because it really is the combination of the three. In the book I show how different aspects of creation are achieved through the three forces combining together. For example, expressiveness creates new, longer expressions, and then, erosion or destruction compacts them into one longer word; analogy then, is able to pick up on accidental patterns that emerge in these new words and regularize them into more complex paradigms. So, the reason that creation is more elusive or more mysterious, is because it's the three forces coming together in a very particular combination, and in just the right dosages .
David Boulton: When I was going through that part in your book, it struck me as a parallel if you will, of something I worked on some time ago, having to do with creation being the process of resolving our ‘meaning needs’, the need to differentiate meaning.
Dr. Guy Deutscher: I suppose that's mostly manifested in expressiveness and extending the range of words.
David Boulton: Whereas and correct me if I'm wrong here, creation can refer to the growing artifact, so to speak, not necessarily the processes that drove them.
Dr. Guy Deutscher: Let’s put it this way, creation is almost a by-product, especially if you talk about grammatical elements . No one ever sets out to create a grammatical structure. It's always the by-product of the combination of these processes we’ve just been talking about. So, in some sense, it is ironic that the creation of the sophistication of language is always a by-product. It's always the result of other things. It's never....
David Boulton: ...an immediate end-goal motive that caused it.
Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes.
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David Boulton: One of the things we're interested in is the difference between the natural evolutionary processes of spoken language and the more sociological, technological and cultural, "evolution" of writing systems. How they're similar and how they're different. But, before we get to that, there were some other things.
One of the things that caught my interest in your book was your discussion of the relationship between cognates and words as languages differentiated and spread.
By the way, as we proceed here, I think you have some sense of what we ultimately want to be talking about. However, if you sense there's a point that's important to make and I'm not asking a question about it, please come forth and say, wait a minute; we need to talk about this before we can continue talking about that.
I have a lot of respect for you and your work and where you're coming from. What I'm trying to do is help people understand language, from many different dimensions. I want people to understand how important language is to us and how deeply intertwined it is in everything. Also, when we talk about reading and all that is connected with and flows from it, we're actually talking about an ‘overlay’ that’s creating a simulated language experience in our minds and so we've got to understand language processing in order to understand it.
Dr. Guy Deutscher: I'm entirely with you on that. I think I wrote to you after I looked at your web site online; your work really is incredibly ambitious and extremely important. So, I really appreciate what you're doing.
David Boulton: Thank you. So, from here, because of the rich nature of your work, what's the pathway through your work, which will help us learn into that level of understanding?
One of the things that's fascinated me, is to understand how language itself has differentiated and spread among its users around the world, which is certainly part of understanding how the oral language and written language split from each other in certain ways, or how their relationship became so fragmented in the later, European, post-Renaissance era, et cetera.
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Dr. Guy Deutscher: There are very different directions in which one can answer this. On the one hand there's an enormous amount of regularity in the way language changes; and that's mostly what I concentrate on in the book. But, in addition to that, there's an enormous amount of completely random changes. So, although we can expect that the basic mechanism of change would work in a similar way, nevertheless, there's such an amount of noise in the processes of change, that unless two groups are in contact with one another, and the need for communication keeps the two groups together, then the changes in the two groups just drift apart, which is the basis of linguistic diversity, the real answer to the Tower of Babel story.
David Boulton: This connects back with this notion of speciation. For example, what happened during the Ice Age when significant parts of the population, for a long period of time, were living in relative isolation from one another. If they weren’t interacting with one another then really different languages must have developed.
Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes. It’s no wonder the highest density of different languages in the world is in Papua, New Guinea. There is a joke that half of the world's languages are in Papua, New Guinea. That's a bit of an exaggeration, but it's not so far off. And, the reason is precisely because you have these small, isolated groups living in these valleys with mountains around them that they can't go through. So each group, in isolation, has developed independently and that's why there are so many very different languages around there.
David Boulton: So, before we leave the Tower of Babel story thread, I want to note that there’s an analogue to this story in many of the world's major mythologies – the story of people coming together who are similar enough to coexist but very different. The Upanishads describe this as, "The fruit of the worship of knowledge and the fruit of the worship of ignorance", and in the Bible it’s "the sons of God and the daughters of men", suggesting they have this physical compatibility and ability to emotionally connect but they can't communicate with each other.
Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes.
David Boulton: So, that's an important backdrop to one part of the story.
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One of the things that is particularly interesting is how the dominant languages in the world today have come through this tree, this Indo-European manifold of differentiation.
Dr. Guy Deutscher: Well, Indo-European, of course is just one family. It is of particular importance to English speakers because it's the family that English happens to belong to. But, it is just one family and there are quite a few others. And in each one of them you can see the same processes of divergence. If you take the Indo-European family, there is no agreement on where they came from originally . But wherever they came from, whether it was Asia Minor or Siberia, or somewhere in the Caucasus, what is clear is that they split up and started spreading all the way from what is now India to Western Europe. And in that process, as they lost contact with one another, their languages started to diverge. We see the same process of divergence in all other language families. Because of geographical dispersal, over time, the languages start to diverge from one another.
David Boulton: So, what holds the commonality is that they share certain implicate roots or cognates, even though they may have different ways of expressing the same sound. The cognates could be shared across language families, because they are co-implicate, they’re deeper than the surface sound representation of a word that's shared.
Dr. Guy Deutscher: Of course, some families, such as Indo-European, have diverged so much that although English is Indo-European and Persian is Indo-European, speakers of English and speakers of Persian still can't understand a single word of the other Language.
David Boulton: Right. But, linguists have put together that these two languages are expressions, which are sitting atop of an evolutionary process that's shared.
Dr. Guy Deutscher: That's true, but, they have developed in their separate ways for many thousands of years. Cognates are what remains from that common source that can still be recognized. They're most often not recognizable to the speakers themselves because the sounds have actually changed so much. But, scholars who re-trace the evolutionary process can still recognize that these two words come from the same source.
David Boulton: Yeah, in another language I would think of them as co-implicate assembly components. Meaning that they're implicating across different language systems, which means they're a shared ingredients.
Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes.
David Boulton: So, we have been talking about how language differentiates, or appears to become distinct, to the non-scholar anyway, in the different regions in the world that had various degrees of isolation from one another. Up to that point, (and we did sort of jump over the Tower of Babel piece, which is interesting), is there anything about this stage that sticks out in your mind as something the lay public doesn't understand? Is there something we're missing in our general paradigms about all of this or about the kind of work you've done and the kinds of work linguists do?
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Dr. Guy Deutscher: Perhaps the issue of dialects and languages is something that many people don’t understand. People tend to think there's some mysterious point when, what used to be the same language changes into two different languages. Whereas, for linguists it's essentially a continuous process. If two varieties are not in close enough contact with one another, they will gradually drift apart. There is no such thing as 100 percent mutual comprehension suddenly becoming zero percent mutual comprehension.
David Boulton: There are no singularities here.
Dr. Guy Deutscher: No, and we can see that even in English dialects. There is a joke about an American and a Scotsman, who meet somewhere and can't understand a word of what each other is saying, and so, in the end, they decide to speak French.
It’s the same story in Germany, for instance, where you get dialects of what's supposed to be the same language, which are almost entirely mutually incomprehensible. So, you get the whole range from 100 percent comprehensibility, to almost zero. But, on the other hand you have separate languages such as Norwegian and Swedish, where there's nevertheless a fair amount, of mutual comprehensibility,. So, the point, when you decide to call a different variety a different language, is to a large extent, arbitrary, and depends on many other, political...
David Boulton: More to do with the convenience of the researcher.
Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes, or the feelings of the actual people using the language.
David Boulton: For example, perhaps, just as when the
English tried to restore the English language after the French in the fourteenth century?Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes or more modern examples are Serbo-Croatian, which used to be one language when Yugoslavia was one country. But after the war, it suddenly became two languages. Nothing has changed in terms of the real linguistic situation. They still can understand each other perfectly, but now they feel they are speaking different languages, so they call it different languages. In any case, the underlying process is that when two varieties are not in contact, they gradually diverge and so the mutual comprehensibility decreases. Now if you wait, I don't know, a thousand years or so, you can be sure the two languages will become mutually incomprehensible, but before that, you will get all these shades in between. What you decide to call them in those cases is, to a large extent, arbitrary. I think that's something that people are not always aware of.
David Boulton: Right, right. Well, that's helpful. I have this sense; in wrapping this section that we could say language is always on the move. It's always a dynamic process with creative and destructive elements. It's always changing. The issue is whether or not people who are engaging in languages are staying in a sufficient relationship with one another for the languages to be co-evolving, or people's use of language to be co-evolving, rather than separately evolving.
Dr. Guy Deutscher: Precisely. I can't put it any better.
David Boulton: Again, it seems so amazing there's such a parallel in the workings of this process with how life itself works.
Dr. Guy Deutscher: I agree.
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David Boulton: As we go into the differences between written and spoken language, one important piece has to do with
Deacon's notion that languages are constrained in their range and growth by how learnable they are to children, whereas writing systems are almost the opposite. The statement refers to language being generational. Language has got this generational evolutionary dynamic in it that's constrained by its learnability to children.Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes. I entirely agree I think this is one of these things that sound so simple and obvious once someone has explained it the way Deacon has. But, it needed someone to actually say it. I think that's an extremely, powerful explanatory mechanism for the evolution of language in general, and it explains why children manage to learn language even though it's so complex. In many ways, it puts the traditional explanations for why language is learnable on their head. The idea is that if only learnable elements or rules in language which are can survive, then it's not surprising that children can learn language so effectively and so quickly. Simply, the things they couldn't learn are not part of our language.
David Boulton: They died off. They're adaptations that didn't take, for exactly that reason.
Dr. Guy Deutscher: Precisely. So, I really admire that argument.
David Boulton: Good.
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Dr. Guy Deutscher: And, I while I never thought about this before, you’re right that unfortunately one cannot apply this argument in such a simple way to writing because, well I suppose, because writing is...
David Boulton: ...not really language.
Dr. Guy Deutscher: Well, that's also true in some sense. But, what I meant was that a writing system that requires years of hard work and frustration and energy, can still be perpetuated through the generations because it's learned at a later age, where you actually can force people to learn. You can't force two-year-olds to learn to speak.
David Boulton: It's not an option. It's going to happen. They're going to grow to participate in the patterns of language around them.
Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes. But, what I mean is, suppose you now devise a language that is almost unlearnable to speak, and you try to force your two-year-old to speak it. What can you do? You can tell them "if you don't start speaking it I won't give you any food", or "I'll beat you", or whatever you want. But, that won't help you, because at that age, if they can learn it, they learn it. If they can't, they won't. But, with writing, it's different because that's something you do later, and you force people who are already at an age when the whole system of social coercion is in place and is workable, and that is why writing systems can allow themselves to have so much more unnecessary complications and difficulty than spoken language.
David Boulton: In the sense that clearly the writing systems we use have different kinds of confusions in the relationships amongst their elements than the kinds of confusions that exist in the purely oral, spoken language.
Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes, and some of them are even intended.
