Language Design - Noam Chomsky / Serious Science

Linguist Noam Chomsky from University of Arizona on the syntactic principle of language, the linguistic capacity of humans, and the laws of physics behind snowflakes.
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[@prepatecingles3017]

This is the transcript to the interview. To look into the question of language design, it's useful to think of how human beings evolved, we don’t know a great deal about it, but we know some things, so for example, it's fairly clear from the archaeological record that the modern humans, modern Homosapiens, cognitively modern Homosapiens, developed quite recently in evolutionary time and maybe within the last roughly 100,000 years, which is a flick of an eye. That's when you get the enormous inquiries, increase explosion of indications of that creative activity, complex family structures, symbolism and so on; all of this develops roughly in that period. And interestingly there has been no detectable evolution of these capacities in roughly the past 50,000 years, that's the period since our ancestors left Africa, a small number of them pretty quickly spread over the world, so all humans are pretty much identical with regard to cognitive capacity, linguistic capacity and so on; that which means that there's been essentially no detectable evolution. So there's a small window there, where something happened, and it's generally assumed by paleoanthropologists, people who study these topics, that must have been the emergence of language, because it's hard to imagine any of these basically creative activities without language, and the language does provide the mechanisms for them. So it seems as though the core of human sensibility, and creative and cognitive capacity is the development of this completely unique capacity. There's nothing analogous to it anywhere in the animal world. There are animal signaling systems, but they are completely different in design and use and just in every dimension. So something strange happened, roughly maybe 100,000 years ago, not very long, and language emerged in humans and the question then is, well, what kind of A system is it? On the surface, languages look very different from one another, so if somebody walks into the room and starts speaking Swahili I'm not going to understand a word, though I will recognize that it's a language, I won't understand it, but I know it's not noise, you know? As soon as you look more deeply, you find that these languages are basically molded into a pretty similar design, maybe an identical design. A large part of the language, of what we hear is just the sounds, but that's a very superficial part of language. Now, the core of languages are principles that determine actually an infinite array of possible expressions, structured expressions which have definite meanings; now all of that is well beyond what we can just observe, by say, looking at the texts and when a child is learning a language, the child doesn't learn those things there's no evidence for them, almost no evidence for them. Nobody can teach them even if we don't know what they are. These are just part of our nature. The core principles, so called, syntactic principles that form expressions and that provide specific interpretations for them, that's apparently all just part of our nature and then there are various ways of externalizing in sound or in sign, which is about the same but that’s a kind of a superficial manifestation of their internal uniformity and it's really exciting that it almost has to be this way, if you think about the way the system developed, it apparently developed very suddenly, in evolutionary terms, which meant that there were very limited selectional pressures, so it probably was designed as a, it is a computational system; that’s the only explanation for these capacities computational systems have certain optimal characteristics; there some are more efficient than others, and there's every reason to believe that this development pre suddenly as in optimal communication system especially following laws of nature, very much the way a snowflake assumes a very complex form and not because of experience or training, but that's just because that's the way the laws of physics work, and there's every reason to believe that language is something like this is. Now, to try to show this is no trivial matter; you have to try to show that the superficial variety of languages actually reduces the principles of the common character in which approach notions of optimal design and there has been, I think, notable progress, in that process... it is a long way to go to try to demonstrate it, but then, of course, then one wants to go beyond to try maybe, ultimately discover the neural basis for whatever this unique capacity is. It's a very hard problem to study for humans, so we know a lot about the human visual system, because of direct experimentation with cats and monkeys, and we allow ourselves to direct experimentation, you know, sticking electrodes in the brain, and so on, with controlled experiments, but we don't do with humans, and humans have about the same visual system as cats and monkeys, so we know about the visual system. You can’t do that for language. They’re no analogous systems. So you can’t study other animals; we're unique in this respect and invasive experiments with human beings are barred, so it's a very complex and intricate mattered to try to find clever ways of getting around the barriers to learn something about these topics and some progress is being made I think we can look forward to a period when there will be convergence of the various modes of inquiry into design of language neural basis acquisition varieties of language that's personal task for the future which in fact is directed to the core of human nature core of cognitive human nature the most intriguing question I think is the one that I have basically just mentioned, there's reason to believe that the core of human intellectual nature cognitive nature is a computational system which probably has something like the properties of a snowflake it simply had to develop this way given biological and scientific circumstances and the most intriguing question is to try to see if that's true and if it is to show that it's true. Transcript by: Prepa Tec IB students Gen. 2023

[@sece258.8]

thank you so much

[@aynurhuseynli3812]

thanks

[@gebser6060]

Well done, thank you :)

[@giulianaferretti7121]

Thank you. This was very helpful

[@tulde12]

Thanks so much for sharing

[@Emile.gorgonZola]

i love the comment section here. 14 year olds thinking they're smarter than chomsky

[@surinurkholifah2083]

I wish could meet him in person, not only knowing him by his books. He's 91 years old now and it saddened me that soon he'll be another history yet I still only knew him by books.

[@noahmcdaniel4920]

It's very funny to watch human beings use a capacity to express the mystery of the capacity they're using.

[@HowiBecameSentient]

Self-referentialism isn't undergrad.

[@rodrigoarturofg5561]

Recreate our knowledge is like meditation

[@ibperson7765]

He’s not the most honest fellow sometimes. Very very political, culture marxist. Poisoned some of his greatness

[@justinasbei]

What's funny about that?

[@moisesdelcastillo6703]

@@ibperson7765 Yeah I am a big fan of Milton Friedman, yet I love Noam Chomsky. Especially his lectures on Manufacturing consent.

[@stevecoley8365]

Henry David Thoreau once said that "one does not know man until one knows the power of words". Which is why wordplay is one of Merlin the Magicians most powerful tools of magic.

[@josemorgado356]

If you ask a group of people to each draw a car, for example, each individual will draw a different car, but still a car. We may consider that each person used a different language to draw his/her car. Essentially, all of them had the capacity to understand the concept of "car" and the capacity to draw a car. And that seems to be the case of languages, they differ in their external aspects, but they all obey to a basic biological capacity of human beings to produce language and to express the same ideas in different ways.

[@ayaboukhayar1005]

Good explanation

[@chortovs]

consciousness wanted to be aware of itself and created language to express that.

[@lopuyh]

Salute to your linguistics study

[@alexcostetti9369]

one of the best intellectuals of the 20th century

[@coreycox2345]

I look forward to the day we understand this if it is in my lifetime. Until then, and probably after, there is a poetry and beauty to us.

[@toufofun]

It is been understood already

[@pacerodi]

Beauty and Understanding is within us. Realise it first!

[@coreycox2345]

@@pacerodi First?

[@pacerodi]

@@coreycox2345 So?

[@coreycox2345]

@@pacerodi That is my point as well. People spend so much time debating if there is or isn't a god. I find it comical. It should all boil down to "prove it." It makes the rest of the arguments redundant. Christopher Hitchens was brilliant. I would have enjoyed watching him attempt to prove that there is no god, though. If there is or is not a god is outside the limits of our understanding. It may be a way of coping with the limits of our understanding.

[@shrisuryarathinam97]

His intelligence is off the charts ❤️🧠

[@abside30glu]

DOES NOAM CHOMSKY NET HIS OWN JERSEYS WE LOVE THE WAY HE LOOKS ! WITH RESPECT. THE DODGES.

[@cockoffgewgle4993]

Fangirls

[@Hallands.]

Lourdes Dodge Probably meaning * knit?

[@luisathought]

Thank You

[@Himalayansuga]

Can someone show me where the full interview of this would be?

[@jjuliayubb]

He's a genius. I admire him so much

[@stevenmasterson2210]

Julieta A. Me 2

[@Jean-yt1lu]

He will be 90 on 7 December 2018. A generous with such incredible humility and so much of his life given to anti war activism. We love you we need you Prof Chomsky.

[@cv4809]

@@Jean-yt1lu We don't need Islamic and communist apologists

[@AJ-xm4xc]

Constantine V Don’t be a jerk.

[@MatterStorm1]

@Constantine V What an ignorant way of considering him.

[@rmiddlehouse]

Anyone know where i can find out more about central v modular?

[@BhikshuniLozangTrinlae]

rmiddlehouse try monad search

[@hoogmonster]

Read Jerry Fodor's "The modularity of Mind" - there he discusses the difference between central processes and peripheral modular processes.

[@burhanettinkeskin4295]

A great mind speaks...

[@TheAwillz]

Is he alluding to Zipfs law with his comparison to the Fibonacci sequence in snow flakes? New to studying language would appreciate any help.

[@nicholasdedless4881]

+TheAwillz He's not talking about Zipf's law. He doesn't think much of the approaches to linguistics built on those kinds of statistical analysis. What he is talking about can probably be best understood as a reaction to certain kinds of analysis about language and other behaviors. People sometimes assume that everything must be explained as an adaptation. So if some phenotype has property X the only explanation has to eventually come down to X contributed to increased reproductive success. His point is that this isn't always the case. If you are familiar with the Evo Devo movement in biology those kinds of constraints often play as much a role in understanding a phenotype as understanding how it contributes to reproductive success. For example the layringial nerve in vertebrates is very sub optimal but it ended up being that way because given the existing structure of a vertebrate it was the only design that could evolve. That is the point that things like the laws of physics, chemistry, even mathematics in the case of language often impose constraints on a potential design that are as important to understand as how an adaptation contributed to reproductive success. So in the case of language there are analyses you can make about the computational complexity of the various interfaces (e.g., the interface between perception and recognizing phonemes) and/or the complexity of parsing. His point is that those kinds of analysis may be as or more important to understanding how the Language Faculty evolved as understanding how language contributed to reproductive success.

[@aboubacarsissoko4342]

Great point!

[@coreycox2345]

I can see why I am not a scientist. Zipf's law sounds obvious and I don't see the point. I may be missing something.

[@speedygonzalez5454]

coreycox2345 Would you mind explaining it to me then. It seems contradictory. It states that if you take a sample word out of a large collection of words, the frequency of it is inversely proportionate to its rank in the frequency table. That almost seems like a contradiction in terms, so I would love for you to explain it to me.

[@Maedelrosen]

so animals need context to use their 'language' or signalling systems, and a thing i think of as hes talking is humans are the ones that can be completely out of context in terms of environment and situation yet bring up any concept at any time with a line of words, and animals dont

[@caslavsredojevic3834]

Osmotar ᛉ animals need cues.

[@rolffrazer6998]

What mathematical principle is at play

[@codyjackschwartz1712]

my man's drip is on 1000

[@mycount64]

certainly language arose from common experience... things outside of common experience very small and very large phenomena we us mathematics to explain it. when it comes to explaining quantum mechanics with language it breaks down in fact quantum phenomena cannot be resolved using our normal means to perceive and explain reality. we are lacking the language or symbols to even recognize what it is doing. like we can with other objects we use verbs... no verbs really describe quantum entanglement or particle wave duality at all.

[@Shadowfax2348]

this might make sense if you think about language as a communicative device. on the other hand, we are somehow advancing these fields, and the fact that we are advancing these field means that we do have the "language" as a thought device to advance it. You may not have the verbs, you may not have the means to explain something. this doesn't mean that you don't have the capacity to perceive or understand it. I think your example is actually a good illustration to show that language is a thought device rather than a communication device

[@flochartingham2333]

Being a playwright Shakespeare said: "All the world is a stage..." Chomsky being a cognitive linguist assumes verbal language is the major creative development and epochal event that created a sudden "growth spurt" of the human brain. This is widely attributed by paleoanthropologists to the advent of cooking which made a much wider variety of more nutritious foods easier to consume. I am sure Chomsky is aware of this conjecture, so I am wondering why he would omit it from what he is saying here. It seems strange to me that Chomsky seems to be postulating that language "design" occurred more instantaneously rather than from rudiments of a time from before human beings were human beings. And what of physical expression as language. To dispute what he said at 4:33 that languages "developed very suddenly meaning that there were very limited selectional pressures." Since there is no approximate analog to the human species it is impossible to say for certain, but to me the human form of erectness and shoulders positioned over the feet seems to be optimized for one thing above all else, even adaptation to hunting and gathering: physical expression. To hunt and stalk (stalking being as essential as gathering and hunting) humans needed to disperse and maintain silence. Being able to communicate complex commands and replies silently was the ecological edge that gave humans enough free time to consider stuff like how to do the same thing to make that burnt carcass they found left behind by the forest fire with less charred parts and less raw parts.

[@cjohns1036]

Chomsky doesn't say that there's been a 'growth spurt' of the brain, in fact he said at the beginning that there's been pretty much no evolution of our brains in the last 100,000 years. I think he's attributing our vast technological development to the development of language, which facilitated the exchange of ideas and thus helped the human species to develop at a greater pace.

[@speedygonzalez5454]

C J Not at all. If we are to take Chomsky’s theory seriously social interaction and facilitation of communication would have nothing to do with it. Chomsky makes the computational argument, not the social cohesion one. The truth is, too little is known to make conclusions about where language came from or what it’s function is (loose notion) and Chomsky correctly recognises this.

[@evalsoftserver]

NOAM CHOMSKY IS A PHYSICICT , COMPUTER SCIENTIST, CHEMIST, NUMBER THEORIST, ALGEBRAIST , GEOMETRY TOPOLOGIST ,AND A ELECTRICAL ENGINEER ROLLED UP IN ONE

[@globaldigitaldirectsubsidi4493]

no physicist and engineer but also philosopher and linguist and historian

[@grip2617]

Don't forget he is a treacherous marxist, lier, manipulator and what he preaches is doom and gloom, similar to Greta Thunberg with other words.

[@lombardia1509]

@@grip2617 Any arguments or facst?

[@gskessingerable]

Genesis 11:1-9 New International Version (NIV) The Tower of Babel 11 Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. 2 As people moved eastward,[a]they found a plain in Shinar[b] and settled there. 3 They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricksand bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. 4 Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scatteredover the face of the whole earth.” 5 But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. 6 The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go downand confuse their language so they will not understand each other.” 8 So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. 9 That is why it was called Babel[c]-because there the Lordconfused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

[@emmanueloluga9770]

STILL is the most awestruck and mind-boggling thing I ever read from the bible unironically. It is like this particular segment of the bible is a meta-commentary of the event to which it describes. The recall is ever as elusive as the story and idea which it presents. "6 The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.” This has been my biggest ever why from the bible ever. Fascinating even if a skeptic considers it as mysticism or allegory,...one cant deny the efficacy of this superb and supreme text inspired by the holy spirit.

[@gskessingerable]

@ What evidence do you have that it was a myth?

[@gskessingerable]

@@finchbevdale2069 The Bible is the only religious text to have recorded what we now know to be true from recent discoveries in contemporary cosmology. The Bible states that space, time and matter came into existence simultaneously in the finite past. Contemporary cosmology has known shown that to be true.

[@gskessingerable]

@ Given the obvious parallels, the earlier Babylonian story must be in the lineage of the Genesis story somewhere, but not every story element made it. DR. CRAIG: That is a conclusion which contemporary scholarship has come to reject. When these early stories were first discovered back around 1870s or so, there arose a school within Old Testament scholarship called pan-Babylonianism where scholars thought that everything in Genesis was derived from these ancient Babylonian myths. Heroic attempts were made to trace the Genesis stories back to these Babylonian accounts. During the course of the 20th century, scholarship has completely reversed on this issue. These accounts (particularly the Enuma Elish) are no longer thought to be sources for Genesis. That doesn’t mean that they’re completely unrelated. I think that these ancient myths tell us something about the literary genre of the first 11 chapters of Genesis. Like these ancient myths, Genesis treats the same themes (creation of the world, creation of humanity, the Flood, things of that sort) so that there is a common interest. But there is not borrowing from these ancient myths by and large. It would be very difficult to show any kind of demonstrable borrowing on the part of Genesis 1 from these ancient myths, with perhaps the exception of certain elements of the Flood story which do seem to be similar. But, for the most part, contemporary scholarship has come to reject the thesis that Bob is expressing here.

@@gskessingerable thanks, i'll look into that. Rejoyce, you're one of the few people that can say they changed somebody's mind in a youtube comment section!

[@Foxxxxx96]

The Holy Quran 2:31 He taught Adam all the names [of things], then He showed them to the angels and said, ‘Tell me the names of these if you truly [think you can].’ 2:32 They said, ‘May You be glorified! We have knowledge only of what You have taught us. You are the All Knowing and All Wise.’ 2:33 Then He said, ‘Adam, tell them the names of these.’ When he told them their names, God said, ‘Did I not tell you that I know what is hidden in the heavens and the earth, and that I know what you reveal and what you conceal?’

[@sarminsarmin3843]

Your theory is easy .but your giving explanation is very hard to understand about the topic between competence and performance. Those are noted our linguistic book for 3rd year.

[@user-tl6iu3ee3f]

before the human came to this earthe they had language's spoken .

[@tomokinariyuki185]

Linguist Chomsky says the language is computational and Physicist Penrose says Consciousness is not computational, Quantum in nature.

[@ozbakarmarc5188]

I'm quite okay with the language as a computational system. But, it is clearly more than that. Language is in the same time the system and what allows to create it. It is the end and the beginning of everything. Schools should put linguistic aptitudes as the most importants to learn. And also : language has other ways to be expressed : every sense can produce a language. Language is sensitivity and sensitivity is language.

[@MaartenvanRossemLezingen]

What do you mean by linguistic aptitudes?

[@matthewfrazier9254]

Maarten van Rossem Lezingen language usage is the pinnacle of human intelligence and is behind basically everything. A linguistic or vocabulary test is the most accurate approximation for G as well.

[@MaartenvanRossemLezingen]

Matthew Frazier Says you? What's "G"?

[@matthewfrazier9254]

Maarten van Rossem Lezingen Says all of psychometric research. “G” is the construct of general intelligence which is correlated extremely highly with all cognitive tasks.

[@matthewfrazier9254]

Maarten van Rossem Lezingen Also this should just be obvious but there’s so much philosophy and psych about it. You can’t think without language. Our processing, math, science, english, history, blah blah blah. Everything requires language.

[@lambdasun4520]

0:40 LIE it's 30000 years and he knows it

[@alexpeek8760]

I think Chomsky is making this more complex than it needs to be. I believe that the only syntactic commonality to all languages is the subject-predicate pair. When comparing languages, you will not find any consistency in the way words are ordered and the rules of grammar. Conversely, its impossible to imagine how a language could convey any meaning without a subject-predicate pair.

[@krummja4823]

Chomsky is actually radically understating how complex language is to the benefit of the viewer. In any case, you misunderstand what universals are in Chomsky's sense; they are not properties that all languages share, but rather principles that must be available in the initial state humans come equipped with in order for acquisition to proceed at all. You are right that some mechanism for predication is a pretty good candidate for a universal property, but there are other formal universals that we have ample evidence for. The most important formal universal is the hierarchical organization of the computational system; it seems that syntactic operations obey hierarchical, rather than say linear, organizational principles.

[@spooky_zen]

poetry

[@mycount64]

study cave paintings from 100k years and later... look at the symbolism.

[@gordonbgraham]

study the Piraha, who have existed for thousands of years, with no symbolism, no metaphor, no abstractions...and no recursion

[@bobaldo2339]

And try much earlier as well while you are at it.

[@assinicole]

😯😯

[@Skandalista_fotograf]

Determinism....

[@bobaldo2339]

Always and ever humans will pontificate about what makes them "special". I see no reason to assume that our pre-human ancestors going back well over 300k years, possibly 1M years, did not have language. No reason other than arrogance that is..

[@efraimcardona8452]

You are right, if one studies the evolution of babbling one realizes how comunnicatuve some prelinguistic acts are. Then comes recursion, which is the central problem.

[@villiestephanov984]

Language design pure river of water of life clear as crystal song of Solomon's or Pinker' s linguistics onto pure sex words purified Seven times

[@adrianglennbionat]

Chomsys theory is the most likely. All the rest of them egghead posers are bums trying to get lucky and get rich.

[@SomitPal]

I just somehow think Noam Sir is overrated

[@anaglyphx]

Why do "intellectual" completely lack personality and humour? So dry and serious and dull, despite how intelligent they seem.

[@fellowcitizen]

Just as conveying understanding requires technique, you must receive and render the understanding with technique. Your impressions imply a passive state of entertainment rather than transforming yourself with processes of understanding. They're habits that you have the power to change or command, and which will alter your presumptions and impressions.

[@jamisonlamkin5576]

Fellow Citizen Precisely.

[@kytv9000]

Scientists are all boring. I'd rather ride on a plane that's designed by Justin Bieber.