Proto-Human language

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Human_language 

The Proto-Human language, also known as Proto-Sapiens, Proto-World, or the Urlanguage is the hypothetical direct genetic predecessor of all human languages.

The concept is speculative and not amenable to analysis in historical linguistics. It presupposes a monogenetic origin of language, that is, the derivation of all natural languages from a single origin, presumably at some time in the Middle Paleolithic period. As the predecessor of all extant languages spoken by modern humans (Homo sapiens), Proto-Human as hypothesized would not necessarily be ancestral to any hypothetical Neanderthal language.

Terminology

The concept has no generally accepted term. Most treatments of the subject do not include a name for the language under consideration (e.g., Bengtson and Ruhlen). The terms Proto-World and Proto-Human are in occasional use. Merritt Ruhlen used the term Proto-Sapiens.

History of the idea

The first serious scientific attempt to establish the reality of monogenesis was that of Alfredo Trombetti, in his book L'unità d'origine del linguaggio (1905). Trombetti estimated that the common ancestor of existing languages had been spoken between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago (not long after the appearance of anatomically modern humans).

Monogenesis was dismissed by many linguists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when the doctrine of the polygenesis of the human races and their languages was popularized.

The best-known supporter of monogenesis in America in the mid-20th century was Morris Swadesh. He pioneered two important methods for investigating deep relationships between languages, lexicostatistics and glottochronology.

In the second half of the 20th century, Joseph Greenberg produced a series of large-scale classifications of the world's languages. These were and are controversial but widely discussed. Although Greenberg did not produce an explicit argument for monogenesis, all of his classification work was geared toward this end. As he stated: "The ultimate goal is a comprehensive classification of what is very likely a single language family."

Notable American advocates of linguistic monogenesis include Merritt Ruhlen, John Bengtson, and Harold Fleming.

Date and location

The first concrete attempt to estimate the date of the hypothetical ancestor language was that of Alfredo Trombetti, who concluded it was spoken between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago, or close to the first emergence of Homo sapiens.

It is uncertain or disputed whether the earliest members of Homo sapiens had fully developed language. Some scholars link the emergence of language proper (out of a proto-linguistic stage that may have lasted considerably longer) to the development of behavioral modernity toward the end of the Middle Paleolithic or at the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic, roughly 50,000 years ago.

Thus, in the opinion of Richard Klein, the ability to produce complex speech only developed some 50,000 years ago (with the appearance of modern humans or Cro-Magnon).

Johanna Nichols (1998) argued that vocal languages must have begun diversifying in our species at least 100,000 years ago.

In 2011, an article in the journal Science proposed an African origin of modern human languages. It was suggested that human language predates the out-of-Africa migrations of 50,000 to 70,000 years ago and that language might have been the essential cultural and cognitive innovation that facilitated human colonization of the globe.

In Perreault and Mathew (2012), an estimate of the time of the first emergence of human language was based on phonemic diversity. This is based on the assumption that phonemic diversity evolves much more slowly than grammar or vocabulary, slowly increasing over time (but reduced among small founding populations). The largest phoneme inventories are found among African languages, while the smallest inventories are found in South America and Oceania, some of the last regions of the globe to be settled. The authors used data from the colonization of Southeast Asia to estimate the rate of increase in phonemic diversity. Applying this rate to African languages, Perreault and Mathew (2012) arrived at an estimated age of 150,000 to 350,000 years, compatible with the emergence and early dispersal of H. sapiens. The validity of this approach has been criticized as flawed.

Claimed characteristics

Speculation on the "characteristics" of Proto-World is limited to linguistic typology, i.e. the identification of universal features shared by all human languages, such as grammar (in the sense of "fixed or preferred sequences of linguistic elements"), and recursion, but beyond this, nothing is known of it.

Christopher Ehret hypothesized that Proto-Human had a very complex consonant system, including clicks.

A few linguists, such as Merritt Ruhlen, have suggested the application of mass comparison and internal reconstruction (cf. Babaev 2008). Several linguists have attempted to reconstruct the language, while many others reject this as fringe science.

Vocabulary

Ruhlen tentatively traces several words back to the ancestral language, based on the occurrence of similar sound-and-meaning forms in languages across the globe. Bengtson and Ruhlen identify 27 "global etymologies". The following table lists a selection of these forms:

Language phylum	Who?	What?	Water	Hair	Smell / Nose
Nilo-Saharan	*na	*de	*nki	*sum	*t͡ʃona
Afroasiatic	*k(w)	*ma	*ak'ʷa	*somm	*suna
Dravidian	*yāV	*yā	*nīru	*pūṭa	*čuṇṭu
Eurasiatic	*kʷi	*mi	*akʷā	*punče	*snā
Dené–Caucasian	*kʷi	*ma	*ʔoχʷa	*tʃām	*suŋ
Indo-Pacific	unknown	*mina	*okho	*utu	*sɨnna
Amerind	*kune	*mana	*akwā	*summe	*čuna
Source:.  The symbol V stands for "a vowel whose precise character is unknown".

Based on these correspondences, Ruhlen lists these roots for the ancestor language:

• *ku = 'who'
• *ma = 'what'
• *akʷa = 'water'
• *sum = 'hair'
• *čuna = 'nose, smell'

Selected items from Bengtson's and Ruhlen's (1994) list of 27 "global etymologies":

No.	Root	Gloss
4	*čun(g)a	'nose; to smell'
10	*ku(n)	'who?'
26	*tsuma	'hair'
27	*ʔaq'wa	'water'

Syntax

There are competing theories about the basic word order of the hypothesized Proto-Human. These usually assume subject-initial ordering because it is the most common globally. Derek Bickerton proposed SVO (subject-verb-object) because this word order (like its mirror OVS) helps differentiate between the subject and object in the absence of evolved case markers by separating them with the verb.

By contrast, Talmy Givón hypothesizes that Proto-Human had SOV (subject-object-verb), based on the observation that many old languages (e.g., Sanskrit and Latin) had dominant SOV, but the proportion of SVO has increased over time. On such a basis, it is suggested that human languages are shifting globally from the original SOV to the modern SVO. Givón bases his theory on the empirical claim that word-order change mostly results in SVO and never in SOV.

Exploring Givón's idea in their 2011 paper, Murray Gell-Mann and Merritt Ruhlen stated that shifts to SOV are also attested. However, when these are excluded, the data indeed supported Givón's claim. The authors justified the exclusion by pointing out that the shift to SOV is unexceptionally a matter of borrowing the order from a neighboring language. Moreover, they argued that, since many languages have already changed to SVO, a new trend towards VSO and VOS ordering has arisen.

Harald Hammarström reanalysed the data. In contrast to such claims, he found that a shift to SOV is in every case the most common type, suggesting that there is, rather, an unchanged universal tendency towards SOV regardless of the way that languages change and that the relative increase of SVO is a historical effect of European colonialism.

Criticism

Many linguists reject the methods used to determine these forms. Several areas of criticism are raised with the methods Ruhlen and Gell-Mann employed. The essential basis of these criticisms is that the words being compared do not show common ancestry; the reasons for this vary. One is onomatopoeia: for example, the suggested root for smell listed above, *čuna, may simply be a result of many languages employing an onomatopoeic word that sounds like sniffing, snuffling, or smelling. Another is the taboo quality of certain words. Lyle Campbell points out that many established proto-languages do not contain an equivalent word for *putV 'vulva' because of how often such taboo words are replaced in the lexicon, and notes that it "strains credibility to imagine" that a Proto-World form of such a word would survive in many languages.

Using the criteria that Bengtson and Ruhlen employed to find cognates to their proposed roots, Campbell found seven possible matches to their root for woman *kuna in Spanish, including cónyuge 'wife, spouse', chica 'girl', and cana 'old (of a woman)' (adjective). He then goes on to show how what Bengtson and Ruhlen would identify as reflexes of *kuna cannot possibly be related to a Proto-World word for 'woman'. Cónyuge, for example, comes from the Latin root meaning 'to join', so its origin had nothing to do with the word 'woman'; chica is related to a Latin word meaning 'insignificant thing'; cana comes from the Latin word for 'white', and again shows a history unrelated to the word for 'woman'. Campbell asserts that these types of problems are endemic to the methods used by Ruhlen and others.

Some linguists question the very possibility of tracing language elements so far back into the past. Campbell notes that given the time elapsed since the origin of human language, every word from that time would have been replaced or changed beyond recognition in all languages today. Campbell harshly criticizes efforts to reconstruct a Proto-Human language, saying: "the search for global etymologies is at best a hopeless waste of time, at worst an embarrassment to linguistics as a discipline, unfortunately confusing and misleading to those who might look to linguistics for understanding in this area".

Thought experiment

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Schrödinger's cat (1935), devised by Schrödinger, presents a house cat that is in a superposition of alive and dead states, depending on a random quantum event; it illustrates the counter-intuitive implications of Bohr's Copenhagen interpretation when applied to everyday objects.

A thought experiment is an imaginary scenario that is meant to elucidate or test an argument or theory. It is often an experiment that would be hard, impossible, or unethical to actually perform. It can also be an abstract hypothetical that is meant to test our intuitions about morality or other fundamental philosophical questions.

History

The ancient Greek δείκνυμι, deiknymi, 'thought experiment', "was the most ancient pattern of mathematical proof", and existed before Euclidean mathematics, where the emphasis was on the conceptual, rather than on the experimental part of a thought experiment.

Johann Witt-Hansen established that Hans Christian Ørsted was the first to use the equivalent German term Gedankenexperiment c. 1812.  Ørsted was also the first to use the equivalent term Gedankenversuch in 1820.

By 1883, Ernst Mach used Gedankenexperiment in a different sense, to denote exclusively the imaginary conduct of a real experiment that would be subsequently performed as a real physical experiment by his students. Physical and mental experimentation could then be contrasted: Mach asked his students to provide him with explanations whenever the results from their subsequent, real, physical experiment differed from those of their prior, imaginary experiment.

The English term thought experiment was coined as a calque of Gedankenexperiment, and it first appeared in the 1897 English translation of one of Mach's papers. Prior to its emergence, the activity of posing hypothetical questions that employed subjunctive reasoning had existed for a very long time for both scientists and philosophers. The irrealis moods are ways to categorize it or to speak about it. This helps explain the extremely wide and diverse range of the application of the term thought experiment once it had been introduced into English.

Galileo's thought experiment concerned the outcome (c) of attaching a small stone (a) to a larger one (b).

Galileo's demonstration that falling objects must fall at the same rate regardless of their masses was a significant step forward in the history of modern science. This is widely thought to have been a straightforward physical demonstration, involving climbing up the Leaning Tower of Pisa and dropping two heavy weights off it, whereas in fact, it was a logical demonstration, using the thought experiment technique. The experiment is described by Galileo in his 1638 work Two New Sciences thus:

Salviati: If then we take two bodies whose natural speeds are different, it is clear that on uniting the two, the more rapid one will be partly retarded by the slower, and the slower will be somewhat hastened by the swifter. Do you not agree with me in this opinion?
Simplicio: You are unquestionably right.
Salviati: But if this is true, and if a large stone moves with a speed of, say, eight while a smaller moves with a speed of four, then when they are united, the system will move with a speed less than eight; but the two stones when tied together make a stone larger than that which before moved with a speed of eight. Hence the heavier body moves with less speed than the lighter; an effect which is contrary to your supposition. Thus you see how, from your assumption that the heavier body moves more rapidly than the lighter one, I infer that the heavier body moves more slowly.

Uses

Thought experiments may be used to explore a hypothesis and the implementation of theories around it. They are also used in education, or for personal entertainment.

Examples of thought experiments include Schrödinger's cat, that was meant to attack the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics by showing that its assumptions could lead to the seemingly absurd condition of a cat being simultaneously alive and dead, and Maxwell's demon, which attempts to demonstrate the ability of a hypothetical finite being to violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics.

It is a common element of science-fiction stories.

Thought experiments, which are well-structured, well-defined hypothetical questions that employ subjunctive reasoning (irrealis moods) – "What might happen (or, what might have happened) if . . . " – have been used to pose questions in philosophy at least since Greek antiquity, some pre-dating Socrates. In physics and other sciences many thought experiments date from the 19th and especially the 20th Century, but examples can be found at least as early as Galileo.

In thought experiments, we gain new information by rearranging or reorganizing empirical data in a new way and drawing new inferences from them, or by looking at these data from a different and unusual perspective. In Galileo's thought experiment, for example, the rearrangement of empirical experience consists of the original idea of combining bodies of different weights.

Thought experiments have been used in philosophy (especially ethics), physics, and other fields (such as cognitive psychology, history, political science, economics, social psychology, law, organizational studies, marketing, and epidemiology). In law, the synonym "hypothetical" is frequently used for such experiments.

Regardless of their intended goal, all thought experiments display a patterned way of thinking that is designed to allow us to explain, predict, and control events in a better and more productive way.

Theoretical consequences

In terms of their theoretical consequences, thought experiments generally:

• challenge (or even refute) a prevailing theory, often involving the device known as reductio ad absurdum, (as in Galileo's original argument, a proof by contradiction),
• confirm a prevailing theory,
• establish a new theory, or
• simultaneously refute a prevailing theory and establish a new theory through a process of mutual exclusion

Practical applications

Thought experiments can produce some very important and different outlooks on previously unknown or unaccepted theories. However, they may make those theories themselves irrelevant, and could possibly create new problems that are just as difficult, or possibly more difficult to resolve.

In terms of their practical application, thought experiments are generally created to:

• challenge the prevailing status quo (which includes activities such as correcting misinformation (or misapprehension), identify flaws in the argument(s) presented, to preserve (for the long-term) objectively established fact, and to refute specific assertions that some particular thing is permissible, forbidden, known, believed, possible, or necessary)
• extrapolate beyond (or interpolate within) the boundaries of already established fact
• predict and forecast the (otherwise) indefinite and unknowable future
• explain the past
• facilitate the retrodiction, postdiction and hindcasting of the otherwise indefinite and unknowable past
• facilitate decision making, choice, and strategy selection
• solve problems, and generate ideas;
• move current unsolved problems into another more productive problem space (e.g. functional fixedness)
• attribute causation, preventability, blame, and responsibility for specific outcomes
• assess culpability and compensatory damages in social and legal contexts
• ensure the repeat of past success
• examine the extent to which past events might have occurred differently
• ensure the future avoidance of past failures

Fields

Thought experiments have been used in a variety of fields, including philosophy, law, physics, and mathematics. In philosophy they have been used at least since classical antiquity, some pre-dating Socrates. In law, they were well known to Roman lawyers quoted in the Digest. In physics and other sciences, notable thought experiments date from the 19th and, especially, the 20th century; but examples can be found at least as early as Galileo.

Philosophy

In philosophy, a thought experiment typically presents an imagined scenario with the intention of eliciting an intuitive or reasoned response about the way things are in the thought experiment. (Philosophers might also supplement their thought experiments with theoretical reasoning designed to support the desired intuitive response.) The scenario will typically be designed to target a particular philosophical notion, such as morality, or the nature of the mind or linguistic reference. The response to the imagined scenario is supposed to tell us about the nature of that notion in any scenario, real or imagined.

For example, a thought experiment might present a situation in which an agent intentionally kills an innocent for the benefit of others. Here, the relevant question is not whether the action is moral or not, but more broadly whether a moral theory is correct that says morality is determined solely by an action's consequences (See Consequentialism). John Searle imagines a man in a locked room who receives written sentences in Chinese, and returns written sentences in Chinese, according to a sophisticated instruction manual. Here, the relevant question is not whether or not the man understands Chinese, but more broadly, whether a functionalist theory of mind is correct.

It is generally hoped that there is universal agreement about the intuitions that a thought experiment elicits. (Hence, in assessing their own thought experiments, philosophers may appeal to "what we should say," or some such locution.) A successful thought experiment will be one in which intuitions about it are widely shared. But often, philosophers differ in their intuitions about the scenario.

Other philosophical uses of imagined scenarios arguably are thought experiments also. In one use of scenarios, philosophers might imagine persons in a particular situation (maybe ourselves), and ask what they would do.

For example, in the veil of ignorance, John Rawls asks us to imagine a group of persons in a situation where they know nothing about themselves, and are charged with devising a social or political organization. The use of the state of nature to imagine the origins of government, as by Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, may also be considered a thought experiment. Søren Kierkegaard explored the possible ethical and religious implications of Abraham's binding of Isaac in Fear and Trembling. Similarly, Friedrich Nietzsche, in On the Genealogy of Morals, speculated about the historical development of Judeo-Christian morality, with the intent of questioning its legitimacy.

An early written thought experiment was Plato's allegory of the cave. Another historic thought experiment was Avicenna's "Floating Man" thought experiment in the 11th century. He asked his readers to imagine themselves suspended in the air isolated from all sensations in order to demonstrate human self-awareness and self-consciousness, and the substantiality of the soul.

Science

Scientists tend to use thought experiments as imaginary, "proxy" experiments prior to a real, "physical" experiment (Ernst Mach always argued that these gedankenexperiments were "a necessary precondition for physical experiment"). In these cases, the result of the "proxy" experiment will often be so clear that there will be no need to conduct a physical experiment at all.

Scientists also use thought experiments when particular physical experiments are impossible to conduct (Carl Gustav Hempel labeled these sorts of experiment "theoretical experiments-in-imagination"), such as Einstein's thought experiment of chasing a light beam, leading to special relativity. This is a unique use of a scientific thought experiment, in that it was never carried out, but led to a successful theory, proven by other empirical means.

Properties

Further categorization of thought experiments can be attributed to specific properties.

Possibility

In many thought experiments, the scenario would be nomologically possible, or possible according to the laws of nature. John Searle's Chinese room is nomologically possible.

Some thought experiments present scenarios that are not nomologically possible. In his Twin Earth thought experiment, Hilary Putnam asks us to imagine a scenario in which there is a substance with all of the observable properties of water (e.g., taste, color, boiling point), but is chemically different from water. It has been argued that this thought experiment is not nomologically possible, although it may be possible in some other sense, such as metaphysical possibility. It is debatable whether the nomological impossibility of a thought experiment renders intuitions about it moot.

In some cases, the hypothetical scenario might be considered metaphysically impossible, or impossible in any sense at all. David Chalmers says that we can imagine that there are zombies, or persons who are physically identical to us in every way but who lack consciousness. This is supposed to show that physicalism is false. However, some argue that zombies are inconceivable: we can no more imagine a zombie than we can imagine that 1+1=3. Others have claimed that the conceivability of a scenario may not entail its possibility.

Causal reasoning

The first characteristic pattern that thought experiments display is their orientation in time. They are either:

• Antefactual speculations: experiments that speculate about what might have happened prior to a specific, designated event, or
• Postfactual speculations: experiments that speculate about what may happen subsequent to (or consequent upon) a specific, designated event.

The second characteristic pattern is their movement in time in relation to "the present moment standpoint" of the individual performing the experiment; namely, in terms of:

• Their temporal direction: are they past-oriented or future-oriented?
• Their temporal sense:
  • (a) in the case of past-oriented thought experiments, are they examining the consequences of temporal "movement" from the present to the past, or from the past to the present? or,
  • (b) in the case of future-oriented thought experiments, are they examining the consequences of temporal "movement" from the present to the future, or from the future to the present?

Relation to real experiments

The relation to real experiments can be quite complex, as can be seen again from an example going back to Albert Einstein. In 1935, with two coworkers, he published a paper on a newly created subject called later the EPR effect (EPR paradox). In this paper, starting from certain philosophical assumptions, on the basis of a rigorous analysis of a certain, complicated, but in the meantime assertedly realizable model, he came to the conclusion that quantum mechanics should be described as "incomplete". Niels Bohr asserted a refutation of Einstein's analysis immediately, and his view prevailed. After some decades, it was asserted that feasible experiments could prove the error of the EPR paper. These experiments tested the Bell inequalities published in 1964 in a purely theoretical paper. The above-mentioned EPR philosophical starting assumptions were considered to be falsified by the empirical fact (e.g. by the optical real experiments of Alain Aspect).

Thus thought experiments belong to a theoretical discipline, usually to theoretical physics, but often to theoretical philosophy. In any case, it must be distinguished from a real experiment, which belongs naturally to the experimental discipline and has "the final decision on true or not true", at least in physics.

Interactivity

Thought experiments can also be interactive where the author invites people into his thought process through providing alternative paths with alternative outcomes within the narrative, or through interaction with a programmed machine, like a computer program.

Thanks to the advent of the Internet, the digital space has lent itself as a new medium for a new kind of thought experiments. The philosophical work of Stefano Gualeni, for example, focuses on the use of virtual worlds to materialize thought experiments and to playfully negotiate philosophical ideas. His arguments were originally presented in his 2015 book Virtual Worlds as Philosophical Tools.

Gualeni's argument is that the history of philosophy has, until recently, merely been the history of written thought, and digital media can complement and enrich the limited and almost exclusively linguistic approach to philosophical thought. He considers virtual worlds (like those interactively encountered in videogames) to be philosophically viable and advantageous. This is especially the case in thought experiments, when the recipients of a certain philosophical notion or perspective are expected to objectively test and evaluate different possible courses of action, or in cases where they are confronted with interrogatives concerning non-actual or non-human phenomenologies.