What I've Learned - 2019-09-22
First 200 people to use this link https://brilliant.org/WIL/ can get 20% off an annual premium subscription to Brilliant! [NAVIGATION] 0:00 - Location affects how languages sound? 1:26 - Language is complex and difficult, even for babies. Does that mean it must be prewired? Or could we have invented it? 3:10 - If language "evolved," what were the steps it took? [Enter indexes] 4:01 - Icons 5:07 - Symbols 7:31 - What about grammar? | Language is a gestalt: importance of culture, gestures, intonation... 8:27 - NEED CONTEXT. CONTEXT GOOD. CONTEXT BIG. 10:11 - The recursion controversy. What is recursion? Why is it a big deal that Pirahã lacks it? 11:32 - Is the lack of recursion an example supporting the idea that languages are an evolved invention? 15:00 - "immediacy of experience" principle 16:09 - What if you lacked numbers? 17:00 - "So the point is..." Big thanks to Daniel Everett (no relation) for speaking with me over Skype and answering several follow up questions I had about the Pirahã, their language and the ideas presented in his books. Check out https://daneverettbooks.com/ for more information. Link to Transcript with sources (PDF file @ this link) https://www.patreon.com/posts/script-where-did-30173973 ▲Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/WILearned ▲Twitter: https://twitter.com/jeverettlearned ▲IG: https://www.instagram.com/jeverett.whativelearned/ Books Mentioned: "How Language Began" - https://amzn.to/2McfW08 "Don't Sleep, There are Snakes" - https://amzn.to/2QjOing For Business inquiries: joseph.everett.wil@gmail.com
Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick
People who talk too much are a waste of time.
@What I've Learned hehehe
What I've Learned tal goo
@Matrixar's music workshop 😂
@What I've Learned Totally late, but I was wondering - I have watched quite a bit of Chomsky, yet I haven't found any debate, where he has been approached from this vantage point. Are you aware if he has addressed these problems in his theory? I can't seem to find a video/debate/document right off the bat and you seem to be the type of guy that does his research.
You really manage to hit all the topics I'm interested in
you dirty non physics enthusiasts
I want to learn Sangheili
I feel exactly the same!
This might be the best video I have ever watched. You really did a great job! 🙏🏽 Keep it up
...The answer to the riddle from Brilliant would be B, right? Anyone else get that answer?
Why don’t you make linguistics videos anymore 😫
WHERE THE NEW VID AT
"Didn't a kid get lost by the river back there?"
"Nah, I still got a few here"
Their thought process and memory are completely unlike modern westerners. The child has a name
@W.W. probably not. the sentance would be too long.
lol
yea but*
hehehehehe
"The banana is actually classified as a berry"
Damn, that's one smart baby 😂😂😂
So is a watermelon afaik. I thought I'm never gonna need that info, yet look, I recalled it and posted in this comment. What worries me more is evolution of human memory and its adaptation to modern technology being able to instantly provide any information on request. I was old enough when google became the means of finding an answer to most simple questions and my brain already "formed" by then. Will younger generation's brains, knowing from the very youth that memorizing stuff you can google isn't necessary anymore, adapt to such modern circumstances in a way, which will reduce their brain's memory capability in the absence of the need of it?
Actually, the baby isn't very knowledgable at all. A berry is really just a kind of fruit.
I knew that a long time ago !
I call banana by banana and berries are blue berries, rasp berries, strawberries, and so on. Has berry or berries if more than one as part of name.
>
Yodeling is also an example of region-specific language. Austrian people living in the alps had to communicate over long distances between different elevations. So they just kinda startet singing, taking advantage of the echoing.
Alphabet Inc. One the Canary Islands, it calle “El silbo Cabario”
@Ignacio Gramsch i am awaiting ur reply
I was learning Cambodian flute some years back. As well as entertainment, it was a way of communicating long distances, even between villages: whistling, flute, high voice (presefablt nasal for some reason) carry sound quite far.
Thx random dude from the internet, for teaching me something about my own culture i didnt knew before... ^^
Sonnenhafen I watched a video of a woman kulning to call her cows home. It was magical!
One question that is almost always ignored in this contrext is: How does music fit into all this? It may well be "older" than "language", as a means of communication.
Bingo. You nailed it. Music and intonation seem to be related. Singing, for example.
@William Jordan Don't forget dancing. In Africa the name of a style of music often actually describes the accompanying dance. In Cameroon,. f.i., there is a music style that was intially used by the women when they had something to say. It is called "bikutsi", which translates, or so I have been told, as "stomping the feet on the ground".
Rhythm and Melody, Origins
it all started with a big bang, the sculpture already was in the marble, the waves acquire atmosphere and the consciousness sensed coincidence. Music and Lyrics cross over.
@Stabacs McBass But they are each housed in different brain tissues. Can't remember his name, but a pianist experienced a head injury to his language centers in the brain and lost the power of speech. But he still was a brilliant pianist. Complex we are. (Probably singing with words uses brain tissues from both regions; an educated guess.)
Language was invented so people could talk about music. Or, better:
"Lyrics are a trick to get people to listen to your music." -- David Byrne
This expands the significance of the language in the movie "Arrival". Nice video.
Uncolored Man if you like that movie check out Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang, which was the basis for the script.
The difference is that the alien language mixes all tenses, the examples here focus purely on present tenses .. great movie tho
I really enjoy linguistics themed videos, I'd love more!
Me too! More please!
And me.
And me <3
Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana...
fruit flies are drunks
wuh.......what?
Fun fact: In my work we used walkie-talkies a lot. Radio language doesnt have recursion. You invent ways to form simple phrases you would never use in normal speaking.
If you don't adapt your language, you can't be understood.
Roger, that.
I'm learning to drive a motorcycle: my teacher rides either in front or behind me, giving me instructions via radio. The audio quality is sometimes so poor that I wish he would give only single word instructions or as short phrases as possible: I have had enough lessons for not needing for detailed explanations about how to turn left or right at junctions and most debriefing can wait after the ride is over.
In general, I it seems to me people who have lived in a city all their lives are using recursion less than country dwellers. Perhaps the same is happening to everyday language as we communicate more and more with speakers whose native language is not the same as ours, or perhaps if we spend a lot of our time speaking a foreign language we don't master to the level of a native speaker? I certainly found this to be the case of my own language getting more limited structurally when I switched to speaking English, and again when trying to communicate in the language of my current adopted country or communicating in Eglish with them. I haven't lost my ability to understand more complex speech, only I don't use it myself. It's the same with idioms and idiomatic phrases: I didn’t realise how much I was using them until I started communicating with English language students. At first I made a conscious effort to avoid them as to make myself understood but now I don't use idioms even with native English speakers who definitely would understand them all.
I'll see that and raise you this: CW. We brasspounders have a whole language of our own, in order to convey ideas quickly in Morse code. 73 ES TNX QSO.
@Claptrap
shut up. Too much. Make turn. Go home.
Thank you so much! I've always wandered how could people possibly communicate with all that noise.
Doesn't matter the subject, learning about evolution of a human trait always fascinates me.
Also learning that birds have accents. That was awesome.
Whales have accents too.
cows have accents too
To say “did you eat?” In Spanish you only need one word: comiste? Verbs change according to the person you are referring to and simple tenses are created by changing the ending of the word. Ie, “you will eat” would be “comerás” or “I ate” would be “comí “
If anyone knows the Khoisan, Hawaiian or Georgian from the audio clips, please let me know. Would be fun to have the transcription and translation in the subtitles/description!
@What I've Learned შენთან თამაში სურს და თუ დრო გაქვს მოდი ჩემთან არისო , it can be used in both ways. i cant tell in this example which 1 it is, but i'd say its probably more of a hang out.
Terence mkenna could see language
How much?
i know Georgian im Georgian
There are multiple Khoisan languages. Some are extinct now because Khoe peoples are a minority in Namibia and Botswana. In Botswana, kids end up speaking Tswana over their mother tongue. In Namibia, one ends up speaking Nama or Afrikaans over Ju|'hoan or Hai||om (as an example, like I said, there are a lot of Khoe languages).
Schools in the conservancy areas in Namibia teach in English, Afrikaans or Nama, so the education system is further erasing their ties to their language and culture.
You're amazing dude. You're helping me to create a will to live again.
I know what you mean. Also, so much other material online can make one despair or grow numb.
you always talk about topics that i think about at the moment. thats crazy
Highly doubt it. You just don’t notice the 90% of the time that he talked about topics you weren’t thinking about at the moment.
could it be that your thinking is synched with youtube algorithms in some way, shape or form?
@thecommenter maybe that's what the new 5G towers are used for, or maybe they have AI looking at all the data from our social media and internet use and can now tell how we think? Who knows.
@David does not even have to be conspiratorial, could be just behavioral programming without intent -- a sort of co-evolution.
@thecommenter True that, there are so many possibilities.
"Jackendoff?" That's one for the linguists.
Someone has been playing a lot of GTA lately.
Oh, sorry, I meant: Much GTA play, so meme.
This is one of the the first big questions I had as a kid. Language is amazing.
Mommy, how do we talk? Also, who created the universe and why?
Tower of babel
@Chris Hall The tower of Babel is a child's attempt to explain why there are different languages like the simplistic and ridiculous Adam and Eve fairy tale.
There's a fantastic book that goes into great detail about the ways languages evolve and grow (or don't grow) in complexity. It's called "The Unfolding of Language", by Guy Deutscher. I think it's a great complementary work to continue studying this subject, which is definitely fascinating.
Not sure if you'll read this comment, but if anyone does, is interested and gets the book then I will have done my job.
Cheers!
I really want that Eminem.
It probably began like "Hey girl...."
This was outstanding, really great insight into the keys of communication and the various forms of communication in a single species
“The banana is actually classified as a berry.” 🤯
What I've Learned is the only channel I click that like button before I even watch the video
Time to enjoy 19 minutes of goodness
YES. content quality is always delivered! to the highest standard!
Love the way it's presented like a thinking voyage. Questions answers into Logic pathways backed by scholars books ted talks... Brilliant channel.
Likes don't register until you've watched at least 30 seconds of the video
8:28 Precisely. Swedish and English don't rely on context nearly as much as Japanese does.
I've always wondered how clear headed we would be and in the moment we'd be if we weren't raised with a complex language.
ajzajz123456 that’s not the case at all. Complex language allows for a greater variety of thought and more cognitive thought.
The video said these guys can't count past 3, definitely lower IQ
@Please Complete All Fields That is evidence that learning language is a human instinct.
we'd also be unable to conceptualize a lot of subtle and complex things
The whistle speech though, my mind is blown!
When he mentioned noise, I immediately thought of hour people at construction sites talk when it is loud and completely understood why there is no recursion.
Steven bent1 Doesn't mean you're gonna hear the person next to you talking 🤔
👍No or few recursions in speach, recursions in interpretation may be why experience is req/pref!.
That whistle language blew my mind
To be clear, they're all just codes for normal spoken languages, not actually original whistle languages.
Hans Teeuwen is not an author and did not give a lecture about language hahaha he is a comedian
you stepped the quality way up, well done. thanks for posting
Thanks for noticing - the editing on this one took quite a while.
@What I've Learned
Huge fan of your work, thanks for replying!
@Orion Rodriguez :D
@seemo :D
@What I've Learned more videos about language please :)
That's honestly netflix quality!
Really Jackendoff? really that's his last name ?
A final note: the real challenges of figuring out how language evolved are a lot deeper than what have been covered here. I mean, talk is cheap, so how did it evolve in the first place? Did it begin as a meaning based or emotion based system? Is it uniquely evolved in humans or are there traces of its origins in other primates? Why can't apes ask questions?
I Ray Jackendoffed to this.
Maybe humans developed language when people used it to imitate the sounds of other animals for hunting purposes. That proved advantageous and that skill was essentially a languages version of cells sensitive to light.
i think the better phrasing would be humans and other animals.
Mothers and babies got it started. If you don't learn a language early, you never learn any language. Another poster put in lots of biological details; but to boil it down; if you can't speak by the age of 5 your mental capacities will be forever impaired.
Sorry. No babies or nursing mothers when the hunters pursue the lions with spears. They began to learn language at their mothers' breasts.
FWIW; cross culturally, and internationally, female babies pick up the ability to speak first.
11:12 where he explains how the Piraha language would directly translate to English, it sounds similar to how you'd write computer code... Am I just making things up?
Curious what the implications of this could be.
most programming languages today have recursion (C, Python), but not all (BASIC, COBOL.) all general programming languages are Turing-complete, so program you can write in Python could be written in COBOL. I guess in the analogy, the mind's innate symbol processing is the Turing machine, and programming languages are like different human languages. COBOL and Python have very different tradeoffs, but they can express the same concepts.
also, the mere ability to become fluent in a programming language sort of supports the idea of language skills being very general and adaptive. Loops are found in almost all programming languages, but not human languages (AFAIK.)
Human languages have loops, it is our brain's inability to focus on / remember correctly the steps make it difficult for us to go through the loop without mistakes. Loop with 5 steps is difficult, with 1000 almost impossible for most of us. temporary memory can hold 7 places, but some individuals have higher capacity (better short-term memory).
How's the sleep experiment going so far? Will you make a video on it this year? :)
What sleep experience, can you share it with and also the reference.
@Mohammad Huzaifa It's in reference to the previous video WIL made - "What's the Best Position to Sleep in? Do we even need a Pillow?". At the end he mentioned about a sleep experiment he might do. It's very interesting, take a look yourself!
Thankyou, I already watched the video but I don't remember, im gonna rewatch it again.
“Aha!” Moments can be very embarrassing to admit but here goes: I had studied Latin, Greek, German and algebra when, at the advanced age of fifteen, I realized that English was a language. I had been using it to think and communicate and even learn foreign languages without imagining that it too could be thought of as a stand-alone tool like German or math. It was just the way the brain worked! Eek.
Jackendoff must've gotten bullied.
why else would anyone become a linguist?
"did you eat?" in portuguese would be literally translated to "ate?" (or, if i want to be reeeeally literal, "eated?")
Really? o: just like, 'Comeu?'
@Ruairidh McGhee yes! just like that
you can also have the form "did you eat?", which would be "você comeu?", but "comeu?" is grammatically correct, too
My neighbors cat visited my back door this morning. He saw me and licked his lips. Turns out someone in my house was giving him treats. I sat outside with the cat for a while, but he suddenly left to go back home. Turned out that there’s a bird in the woods that sounds just like my neighbor when they call for their cat.
only happend once? Or until now
This was incredible! How you explain something like this is beyond me. Great job. You pulled it off! I could picture everything you were describing and it makes sense. Very impressing video.
'THE BANANA IS CLASSIFIED AS A BERRY' - Mr baby, circa 2019
Omg finally a good video on my favorite subject to this date! You could spend a lifetime studying diffrent languages and the cultural significance each diffrent language has and still have no greater understanding then when you started! The further down the rabbit hole you get into this the less you know and understand
In this video I missed the viewpoint of the 'from where to what' theory of human language development. Was this a deliberate ommission?
I believe that you misunderstood Chomsky's postulates. As he said that there are structures thar are engrained in our biology, not language itself. It's more of a cognitive line of tought, that tries to outline the programs that are responsible for language and speech. That explains why babies can learn any language if they are exposed enough to it., despite the fact that some languages, in a superficial level, do not correlate well to others.
In other words, he says that we are prepared to learn and speak a language, not that we already know it.
B. K. - 2019-11-11
"That's a made up word."
"All words are made up."
Freedom Freespirit - 2020-09-07
I hear your point. I believe the human race was meant to communicate telepathically, or through drawing symbols etc. Words take us away from our true spiritul selves. Created by design, for this purpose, by the top influencial globalist powers, among the planet, who are of negative spiritual people, and opposing spiritual beings to most all of us, on this planet.
B. K. - 2020-09-09
@Freedom Freespirit ....exactly what I was going to say.
hydrolito - 2020-10-05
meow was made up by cat, moo by cow, bah by sheep or was it goat how much do they understand each other? Which taught which bah? PS Humans might not exactly pronounce like the animals do.
Firaxo legirein - 2020-10-06
@hydrolito , actually, cats don't meow each other. It's exclusively used for attention from humans, as well as getting attention from mothers by infants. After they grow old enough, the mother begins to ignore the meows, so they stop doing it
Bitch Lasagna - 2021-02-24
@Freedom Freespirit heh. thats what she said