Listening to Daniel Dor on Saturday Morning with Kim Hill.
Dor is another academic who does no appear to know what he is talking about and prefers to complicate things rather than simplify them.
He also supports gnome chumpsky who had some nasty little ideas that he tried to foist on the world as fact but never succeeded.
Chomsky had an agenda which was to tie the study of linguistics up in such a knot that ordinary people could not unravel it but the kernel was that if language was innate then so were other things like soviet communism.
yes indeedy.
Well human language like other things in the evolutionary scheme of things was an accident.
When humans became erect the hyoid bone evolved into an anatomical position where it held the tongue in such a way that it could produce phonemes and not just noises.
Language evolved when the human brain not only acquired the capacity to name objects in reality but to negate any assertion.
As Bertrand Russell averred any proposition is always a question and one word is sufficient to be a proposition.
So while the ignorant can gasp at the 125 words that eskimos can use to describe snow the most important thing is to be able to say no it is not that one.
Thus any mystery evaporates.
There is no deep structure here.
What is most important about language is what we say.
Dor is another academic who does no appear to know what he is talking about and prefers to complicate things rather than simplify them.
He also supports gnome chumpsky who had some nasty little ideas that he tried to foist on the world as fact but never succeeded.
Chomsky had an agenda which was to tie the study of linguistics up in such a knot that ordinary people could not unravel it but the kernel was that if language was innate then so were other things like soviet communism.
yes indeedy.
Well human language like other things in the evolutionary scheme of things was an accident.
When humans became erect the hyoid bone evolved into an anatomical position where it held the tongue in such a way that it could produce phonemes and not just noises.
Language evolved when the human brain not only acquired the capacity to name objects in reality but to negate any assertion.
As Bertrand Russell averred any proposition is always a question and one word is sufficient to be a proposition.
So while the ignorant can gasp at the 125 words that eskimos can use to describe snow the most important thing is to be able to say no it is not that one.
There is no deep structure here.
What is most important about language is what we say.
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