On Tue, 17 Oct 95 13:48:49 MDT you wrote:
[...]
JF>In summary, I'm not currently aware of anyone who would count as an
>expert who claims that Homo erectus did not have some language. Some
>may consider it only a possibility.
SJ>"Homo habilis...The bulge of Broca's area, essential for speech, is
>visible in habilis brain casts, indicates it was probably capable of
>rudimentary speech." (Jim Foley, "Fossil Hominids", Jan. 10, 1995).
SJ> Such "rudimentary speech" may have been "one sound/ one meaning":
JF>Maybe, and maybe Homo erectus was more talented at speech.
Maybe! :-)
Thanks for your response. Under my "two-Adam model", I am not
worried if speech developed as part of an emerging image of God.
But OTOH, there is some evidence that there was a sudden
"explosion" about 40,000 years ago. This would also fit the
"two-Adam model". God could have developed the Homo genus
up to the point of being able to speak, and then taught him to
speak a complex language, as Genesis 2 suggests.
Humans need to be taught to speak from someone who already
does speak. Deaf people who do not learn sign language cannot
understand syntax:
"Language is the most defining feature of human intelligence: without
syntax-the orderly arrangement of verbal ideas-we would be little more
clever than a chimpanzee. For a glimpse of life without syntax, we
can look to the case of Joseph, an 11-year-old deaf boy. Because he
could not hear spoken language and had never been exposed to fluent
sign language, Joseph did not have the chance to learn syntax during
the critical years of early childhood.
As neurologist Oliver W. Sacks described him in Seeing Voices:
"Joseph saw, distinguished, categorized, used; he had no problems with
perceptual categorization or generalization, but he could not, it
seemed, go much beyond this, hold abstract ideas in mind, reflect,
play, plan. He seemed completely literal-unable to juggle images or
hypotheses or possibilities, unable to enter an imaginative or
figurative realm.... He seemed, like an animal, or an infant, to be
stuck in the present, to be confined to literal and immediate
perception, though made aware of this by a consciousness that no
infant could have."
To understand why humans are so intelligent, we need to understand how
our ancestors remodeled the apes' symbolic repertoire and enhanced it
by inventing syntax. Wild chimpanzees use about three dozen different
vocalizations to convey about three dozen different meanings. They
may repeat a sound to intensify its meaning, but they do not string
together three sounds to add a new word to their vocabulary."
(Calvin W.H., "The Emergence of Intelligence", Scientific American,
October 1994, p80).
God bless.
Stephen
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