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William S-Y. Wang 王士元 CUHK 香港中文大学 CIEL -4 北京

TIME & language evolution. William S-Y. Wang 王士元 CUHK 香港中文大学 CIEL -4 北京 . Dobzhansky , T. 1973. Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. The American Biology Teacher 35.125-9. Nothing in linguistics makes sense except in the light of evolution.

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William S-Y. Wang 王士元 CUHK 香港中文大学 CIEL -4 北京

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  1. TIME & language evolution William S-Y. Wang 王士元 CUHK 香港中文大学 CIEL-4 北京

  2. Dobzhansky, T. 1973. Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. The American Biology Teacher 35.125-9. Nothing in linguistics makes sense except in the light of evolution. 没有演化论为基础，语言学里的一切都难以理解。

  3. EVOLANG : • 1996 Edinburgh • 1998 London • 2000 Paris • 2002 Harvard • 2004 Leipzig • 2006 Rome • 2008 Barcelona • 2010 Utrecht • 2012 Kyoto CIEL : 2009 Guangzhou 2010 Tianjin 2011 Shanghai 2012 Beijing 2013 Hong Kong

  4. Early efforts in macrohistory. • Berlin Academy 1769: “En supposant les hommesabandonnés àleursfacultés naturelles, sont-ils en état d’inventer le language? et par quels moyens parviendront-ils d’eux-mêmes à cette invention?” • Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) : UrsprungderSprache, 1772. 姚小平。1998。论语言的起源。北京：商务印书馆。

  5. Sapir, Edward 1884 - 1939 • 1907. Herder's "Ursprung der Sprache". Modern Philology 5.109-42. • 1921. Language. Harcourt. • 1983. Selected Writings of Edward Sapir in Language, Culture, and Personality. University of California Press.

  6. Herder as translated in Sapir (1907:17) “What are these properties in objects? They are merely sensed impressions in us, and as such do they not all flow into one another? We are one thinking sensorium commune, only affected on various sides – therein lies the explanation. Feeling underlies all senses, and this gives the most disparate sensations, so intimate, strong, indefinable a bond of union, that out of this combination the strangest appearances arise. There is more than one instance known to me of persons who, naturally, perhaps from some impression of childhood, could not do otherwise than directly combine by some rapid mutation this color with that sound with this appearance that entirely different, indefinite feeling, that, when viewed through the light of slow reason, has absolutely no connection therewith: for who can compare sound and color, appearance and feeling?”

  7. William James (1842-1910)on the neonate. “The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion; and to the very end of life, our location of all things in one space is due to the fact that the original extents or bignesses of all the sensations which came to our notice at once, coalesced together into one and the same space.”

  8. Geschwind, N. 1976. The development of the brain and the evolution of language. Selected Papers on Language and the Brain.86-104. N. Geschwind 1976:93.

  9. Geschwind, Norman. 1976:99.on the importance of angular gyrus. “It is placed between the association cortexes of the three non-limbic modalities: vision, audition, and somesthesis. It is therefore admirably suited to play the role of acting as the way-station by which associations may be formed between these non-limbic modalities. This area may well be termed “the association cortex” of the association cortexes. By providing the basis for the formation of non-limbic associations, it provides the anatomical basis for language – or at least for object-naming.

  10. Catani, Marco, Derek K. Jones & Dominic H. ffytche. 2005. Perisylvian Language Networks of the Human Brain. Ann Neurol ; 57.8-16.

  11. Geschwind 1976: 88: ‘…a real understanding of language will not be achieved until we have a reasonable notion of its neurological mechanisms’ .

  12. Modern Linguistics started with mesohistory.

  13. Thomas, Lewis. 1981. Debating the unknowable. Atlantic Monthly.49-52. “Long before the time when the biologists, led by Darwin and Wallace, were constructing the tree of evolution and the origin of species, the linguists were hard at work on the evolution of language. After beginning in 1786 with Sir William Jones and his inspired hunch that the remarkable similarities among Sanskrit, Greek and Latin, meant, in his words, that these three languages must ‘ … have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists,’ the new science of comparative grammar took off in 1816 with Franz Bopp’s classic work … a piece of work equivalent in its scope and in its power to explain to the best of nineteenth century biology.”

  14. Schleicher, August. 1863. Die DarwinischeTheorie und die Sprachwissenschaft. Weimar.姚小平译. 2008. 达尔文理论与语言学. 方言.373-83.

  15. Linguistics & Biology in the 19th century. • Richards, R. J. 1987. Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. • Taub, L. 1993. Evolutionary ideas and 'empirical' methods: The analogy between language and species in works by Lyell and Schleicher. The British Journal for the History of Science 26.171-93. • Alter, S.G. 1999. Comparative philology and its natural-historical imagery. Darwinism and the Linguistic Image: Language, Race, and Natural Theology in the Nineteenth Century, 7-14. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

  16. “The length of the lines indicates the amount of time which had elapsed and the distance between them degrees of relationship.” “In this respect, Schleicher believed that his family trees differed from Darwin‘s, which he claimed presented merely an idealized schema, ” W.K.Percival 1987:6, 29. "Die länge der linien deutet die zeitdauer an, die entfernung der selben von einander den verwantschaftsgrad." Compendium 4th ed. p.8.

  17. Balter, Michael. 2004. Search for the Indo-Europeans. Science 303.1323-6.

  18. SociétéLinguistique de Paris 1871. ART 2 – ‘La société n’admet aucune communication concernant, soit l’origine du langage, soit la creation d’une langue universelle. 1866, Linguistic Society of Paris banned all discussion of the origins of language. 1872, London Philological Society followed suit.

  19. Hockett, C.F. 1960. The ORIGIN of SPEECH Scientific American 203.88-96.

  20. Harnad, Stevan R., Horst D. Steklis & Jane Lancaster (eds) 1976. Origins and evolution of language and speech. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences #280.

  21. Harnad et al, eds. 1976:17. • Gordon Hewes: Would you agree with me that serious language-origins speculation is a uniquely Western development? • Hans Aarsleff: … It certainly would be interesting to know whether the Chinese, as a culture entirely separate from that of Western Europe, had anything to say on this subject. … It would be fascinating to have good material for a comparison of what different cultures have done about this problem and which, indeed, have done anything? If one should learn that a major culture, for instance, the Chinese, never worried about the problem, well, then, that would be very interesting information indeed.

  22. 荀子ca 323 BCE • “名无固宜，约之以命，约定俗成谓之宜，异于约则谓之不宜。 • 名无固实，约之以命实，约定俗成，谓之实名。 • 名有固善，径易而不拂，谓至善名。”

  23. Plato & Xunzi Words have no intrinsic correctness. The correctness is established by convention. When the convention is established and the custom formed, the words are then correct. If they are different from convention, they are then incorrect. Words have no intrinsic content. The content is given by convention. When the convention is established and the custom formed, the words then have content. Words have intrinsic appropriateness. Those which are direct and not misleading are appropriate words … to hear it and [thereby] understand it, that is the use of a word. Hermogenes: Any name which you give is the right one, and if you change that and give another, the new one is as correct as the old. Socrates: I quite agree with you, that words should as far as possible resemble things; but I fear this dragging in of resemblance … is a kind of hunger, which has to be supplanted by the mechanical aid of convention with a view of correctness.

  24. Ramachandran,VS & Hubbard,EM. 2001Synaesthesia: A window into perception, thought and language. One is ‘kiki’ and the other is ‘booba’. Which one is which?

  25. Recent advances in microhistory: Eimas, P.D. et al. 1971. Speech perception in infants. Science171.303-6. Meltzoff, A. N. & M. K. Moore. 1977. Imitation of facial and manual gestures by human neonates. Science 198.75-78. Caramazza, A. et al. 2000. Separable processing of consonants and vowels. Nature 403.428-30. Friederici, A. D., et al. 2007. Brain responses in 4-month-old infants are already language specific. Current Biology 17.1208-11. Mampe, B. et al. 2009. Newborns' Cry Melody Is Shaped by Their Native Language. Current Biology 19.1994-7. Benavides-Varela, S. et al. 2012. Newborn’s brain activity signals the origin of word memories. PNAS 109.17908–13.

  26. Eimas, P.D. et al. 1971. Speech perception in infants. Science 171.303-6.

  27. Meltzoff, A. N. & M. K. Moore. 1977. Imitation of facial and manual gestures by human neonates. Science 198.75-78.

  28. Imitation & mirror neurons Rizzolatti, G. & L. Craighero. 2004. THE MIRROR-NEURON SYSTEM. Annu. Rev. Neurosci 27.169-92. 曾志朗. 2006. 牵动你我神经 - 镜像神经为什么重要？科学人58.72-75. Arbib, Michael A. 2010. Mirror system activity for action and language is embedded in the integration of dorsal and ventral pathways. Brain and Language 112.12-24.

  29. Saffran, J.R., et al. 1996. Statistical Learning by 8-Month-Old Infants. Science 274.1926-28.

  30. Saffran, J.R., et al. 1996. Statistical Learning by 8-Month-Old Infants. Science 274.1926-28.

  31. Kuhl, P.K. 2004. Nature Reviews Neuroscience.

  32. Kuhl, P. K., et al. 2008. Phonetic learning as a pathway to language. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 363.979–1000.

  33. Friederici, Angela D., et al. 2007. Current Biology 17.1208-11.Brain responses in 4-month-old infants are already language specific.

  34. Friederici, Angela D., et al. 2007. Current Biology 17.1208-11.Brain responses in 4-month-old infants are already language specific.

  35. Mampe, B. et al. 2009. Newborns' Cry Melody Is Shaped by Their Native Language. Current Biology 19.1994-7.

  36. Benavides-Varela, S. et al. 2012. Newborn’s brain activity signals the origin of word memories. PNAS 109.17908–13.

  37. Caramazza, A. et al. 2000. Separable processing of consonants and vowels. Nature 403.428-30.

  38. Roman Jakobson1896 -1982. 1929. Remarquessurl‘évolutionphonologique du russecomparée à celles des autreslangues slaves。 1941. Kindersprache, Aphasie, und allgemeineLautgesetze. 1951. Preliminaries to Speech Analysis. [with Gunnar Fant & Morris Halle].

  39. Julian Huxley. Evolution in Action. 1953:28. When we take an instantaneous snapshot, we freeze the process into a set of unreal static pictures. What we need is the equivalent of a film. … If this is run at what seems natural speed, we see only individual lives and deaths. But when, with the aid of our scientific knowledge and our imagination, we alter the time scale of our vision, new processes become apparent. With a hundredfold speeding up, individual lives become merged in the formation and transformation of species. With our film speeded up perhaps ten thousand times single species disappear, and group radiations revealed; … Only in the longest perspective, with a hundred-thousand-fold speed-up, do the overall processes of evolution become visible – the replacement of old types by new, the emergence and gradual liberation of the mind, the narrow and winding staircase of progress, and the steady advance of life up its steps of novelty.'

  40. A vision for evolutionary linguistics. Over the long course over which language has evolved, perhaps 100,000 years, we now have a variety of sparsely located snapshots, taken at different time scales. Compared with Herder’s century, we now have a much richer knowledge of history & prehistory, structure & typology, vertical & horizontal transmission, etc. Of particular significance are the recent explorations into the brain. A vision for evolutionary linguistics is to understand how all these snapshots fit together to form one coherent account of the life and growth of the most precious possession of our species – our language.

  41. Thank you! 谢 谢 ！ 3q!

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