What are you doing? I mean, what are you doing at this instant? “Reading you,” you say.
So, here we are, separated by space but connected by cyberspace, two minds somehow enjoined; yet, one has already moved on to something else, leaving, as it were, part of his mind for a connection only to be guessed out, rarely to be known.
What’s language?
Better: How did we come to this? We’re not just sending grunts through the vibrating air, not just chiseling runes in stone, and not putting pen to parchment. Yet, here you are, by yourself and not by yourself.
As insightful and as scientific as we wish ourselves to be, we still don’t know why we have the ability to communicate. We even use the word communicate in widely different contexts but accept a common understanding: Cells “communicate”; dolphins and birds “communicate”; humans “communicate.” All have “ways” and “language,” but no one can trace how, specifically, any two organisms arrived at the ability to link through “language.”
“Not so,” you say. The Foxp2 gene is the answer to why we can communicate. But that doesn’t seem to be the opinion of Robert Berwick, a professor of computational linguistics at MIT. As reported in MIT News online* almost a decade ago, Berwick suggests that the “Foxp2 connection is based on a whole chain of events, each of which is speculative, so there’s little chance of the whole story being right.”
Speaking about the difficulties associated with understanding why and how we communicate, Berwick says, “There are some things in science that are very interesting, but that we’re never going to be able to find out about. It’s a sort of romantic view some people have, that anything interesting can be understood.”
Seems that for all our use of it, both the nature of language and its evolutionary history are sill mysterious. Then there’s the question of how you are doing what you are doing at this moment. Berwick proposes that an “underlying sing-song beat” might connect poetry, music, the songs of birds, and how “our brains process language.” That is, there is a “metrical structure” that might lie not only under the control of Foxp2, but also under that of other genes.
So, let me end this piece with you / a real communiqué for two / in music that we both can hear / without vibration in an ear / In some strange way that now combines / in different places, different minds / Some hidden metric and some rhyme / Now crosses space and transcends time.
* http://news.mit.edu/2008/aaas-language-0217
So, here we are, separated by space but connected by cyberspace, two minds somehow enjoined; yet, one has already moved on to something else, leaving, as it were, part of his mind for a connection only to be guessed out, rarely to be known.
What’s language?
Better: How did we come to this? We’re not just sending grunts through the vibrating air, not just chiseling runes in stone, and not putting pen to parchment. Yet, here you are, by yourself and not by yourself.
As insightful and as scientific as we wish ourselves to be, we still don’t know why we have the ability to communicate. We even use the word communicate in widely different contexts but accept a common understanding: Cells “communicate”; dolphins and birds “communicate”; humans “communicate.” All have “ways” and “language,” but no one can trace how, specifically, any two organisms arrived at the ability to link through “language.”
“Not so,” you say. The Foxp2 gene is the answer to why we can communicate. But that doesn’t seem to be the opinion of Robert Berwick, a professor of computational linguistics at MIT. As reported in MIT News online* almost a decade ago, Berwick suggests that the “Foxp2 connection is based on a whole chain of events, each of which is speculative, so there’s little chance of the whole story being right.”
Speaking about the difficulties associated with understanding why and how we communicate, Berwick says, “There are some things in science that are very interesting, but that we’re never going to be able to find out about. It’s a sort of romantic view some people have, that anything interesting can be understood.”
Seems that for all our use of it, both the nature of language and its evolutionary history are sill mysterious. Then there’s the question of how you are doing what you are doing at this moment. Berwick proposes that an “underlying sing-song beat” might connect poetry, music, the songs of birds, and how “our brains process language.” That is, there is a “metrical structure” that might lie not only under the control of Foxp2, but also under that of other genes.
So, let me end this piece with you / a real communiqué for two / in music that we both can hear / without vibration in an ear / In some strange way that now combines / in different places, different minds / Some hidden metric and some rhyme / Now crosses space and transcends time.
* http://news.mit.edu/2008/aaas-language-0217
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