Origin and evolution of languages: Approaches, Models, Paradigms Paris2002 Language

1
Johanson, D.C. and M.Edey. 1981. The Beginnings
of Humankind.
2
Footprints in Laetoli from 3,500,000 b.p.
3
Sinanthropos Pekinensis
????
4
Tattersall, Ian. Scientific American. December
2001.
Musical instruments, such as this bone flute
from a French site, date back at least 32,000
years. They are some of the most striking
indicators of a new sensibility in early humans.
5
Cavalli-Sforza, L.L.et al.1988. PNAS 85.6002-6.
6
Schleicher, August. Compendium der
vergleichenden Grammatik der indo-germanischen
Sprachen. 4th ed. 1876. Weimar.
7
(No Transcript)
8
Culture among primates.

• Cheney, Dorothy and Robert Seyforth. 1990.
• How Monkeys see the World.
• University of Chicago Press.
• Savage-Rumbaugh, E. Sue and Roger Lewin. 1994.
• Kanzi the ape at the brink of the Human
  Mind. Wiley.
• Whiten, Andrew and Christophe Boesch. 2001.
• The cultures of chimpanzees.
• Scientific American January issue 61-67.

9
W.S-Y.Wang. Diamond Jubilee Lecture. Osmania
University. Dec.1978.
evolved in a mosaic fashion, with the
emergence of semantics, phonology, morphology and
syntax all at different times and according to
different schedules ... language is regarded as
a kind of 'interface' among a variety of more
basic abilities. These abilities underlie
nonlinguistic processes as well, and involve the
perception of patterns in the frequency and
temporal domains, the coding and storage of
events and objects at different levels of memory,
the manipulation of various hierarchical mental
structures, etc. Reprinted in Explorations in
Language 1991116.
10
Major transitions in language evolution L1 Proto
-language indivisible signals, holistic
content L2 Phonemic Language words composed
of phonemes L3 Syntactic Language sentences
composed of words
11
Various Approaches to ModelingLanguage Emergence
Hurford, J.R., M. Studdert-Kennedy, C. Knight,
eds. Approaches to the Evolution of Language
Social and Cognitive Bases. Cambridge University
Press, 1998. Cangelosi, Angelo and Domenico
Parisi, eds. Simulating the Evolution of
Language. Springer. 2002. Alison Wray, ed. The
Transition to Language. Oxford University Press,
Oxford, 2002.
12

• Hermogenes
• Any name which you give is the right one,
• and if you change that and give another, the new
  name is as correct as the old.
• from Platos Cratylus, ca.370 BCE
• translation by B.Jowett 195342

13
Self-organization and selection in the
emergence of vocabulary. J. Ke, J.W. Minett,
C.-P. Au W.S-Y. Wang, Complexity, 74114,
2002 .