Fifteen Years Is Enough
The blog's author (Edmund Blair Bolles): Taken shortly before the pandemic when the whole world began to look a little queasy.Sometimes random forces seem to gang up on you. Shortly, I must renew my site name, BabelsDawn.com and Google tells me that shortly after that they will cease offering the free subscriber service whereby over 100 fans receive the blog in their email. Neither one by itself is a big deal and I'm sure I could solve both problems with a tiny amount of effort. But I have been supporting this blog for 15 years and I'm about done.When I started this blog I said I hoped it would become the site for news abo...
Source: Babel's Dawn - April 21, 2021 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs

Why Are We Hairless Bipeds?
Lake Manyara National ParkMy recent posts have discussed Donald M. Morrison ’s new bookThe Coevolution of Language, Teaching, and Civil Discourse among Humans. I am continuing with that theme now even though today ’stopic is pretty speculative and not-directly related to language or cultural origins,   but every now and then this kind of investigation encourages other thoughts about human origins, especially the reason we walk on two legs.Bipedalism is so distinctive for the wholeHomo line and yet there is no clear reason to justify it. I mean, it is convenient to free hands for carrying tools and such, but that came ...
Source: Babel's Dawn - August 27, 2020 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs

The Language Race
My last post reviewed Donald M. Morrison ’s bookThe Coevolution of Language, Teaching, and Civil Discourse among Humans. This entry is a brief meditation inspired by my reading.The fossil skulls of our Homo ancestors show an amazingly rapid growth of theHomobrain.Homo habilis(2.8 million years ago) had a brain only slightly larger than that of a chimpanzee. By 200 thousand years ago, the brain had tripled in size. 2.6 million years is long by most standards but is very fast for an organ to triple in size, and is especially impressive when you realize that sustaining neurons requires much greater support in calories than ...
Source: Babel's Dawn - August 23, 2020 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs

Teaching As a Human Trait
What did people have to talk about when language was new? They had been getting along fine without words, and suddenly they had a few, but what was there to say?Donald M. Morrison has   written a book (The Coevolution of Language, Teaching, and Civil Discourse among Humans) that proposes language got up and running as a teaching system. Speculation about teaching is common, but usually limited to teaching how to make stone tools. Opinions are mixed as to whether language was necessary to teach how to make the early tools, especially Oldowan tools. Showing without talking might well have been enough to teach how to make th...
Source: Babel's Dawn - August 17, 2020 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs

Bilingual Logic
 Monolinguists (people who speak only one language) often give different answers to the same question, depending on how the problem (say, responding to a pestilence) is framed. Frame a choice one way,--e.g., as lives saved--you get one answer. Frame it differently —as lives lost--you get a different response. That’s not terribly surprising, but now look at bilinguists  (people who speak two languages). Pose the choices in their dominant language and the frame matters, but if they hear the question in their second language, the framing bias goes out the w indow. Now they answer the question the same way, not matter ho...
Source: Babel's Dawn - April 30, 2020 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs

What Makes Language Unusual? Epilog
 This is the last of a series of 5 presentations concerning what makes language unusual. This post examines why the differences between language and other forms of animal communication matters. (Source: Babel's Dawn)
Source: Babel's Dawn - February 2, 2020 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs

What Makes Language Unusual? Community
 We continue our examination of what makes language unusual. This time we consider the need for a community of speakers and listeners. (Source: Babel's Dawn)
Source: Babel's Dawn - January 29, 2020 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs

What Makes Language Unusual? Joint Attention
 Here is the latest video in my series on What Makes Language Unusual. This one looks at the role of attention. (Source: Babel's Dawn)
Source: Babel's Dawn - January 26, 2020 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs

What Makes Language Unusual? Topics
 This post presents video #2 in a series of 5 about what makes language unusual. (Source: Babel's Dawn)
Source: Babel's Dawn - January 22, 2020 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs

What Makes Language Unusual? Introduction
Today I am beginning a series of videos on the features that make language so unusual and powerful. I will aim to post two a week for a few weeks. Thanks to my fine nephew, Fernando, for providing a clear audio of my text. (Source: Babel's Dawn)
Source: Babel's Dawn - January 19, 2020 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs

Back to the Drawing Boards
Anyone familiar with this blog knows of my frustrations with Noam Chomsky. He seems to be so smart and logical, and yet never says anything that sounds half-way right or even usable. For example, he recently published an essay (Catalan Journal of Linguistics, “Some Puzzling Foundational Issues”) that considers the evolution of language, by which Chomsky means “the evolution of the Language Faculty." Is that what most people mean when they consider the evolution of language? I doubt it. Any ordinary person picking up an essay on “the evolution of language” would probably be expect ing an account of how people bega...
Source: Babel's Dawn - January 1, 2020 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs

Just How Long Ago Did Adam Eat that Apple?
In thinking about how language might have begun, one of the tempting details of the human vocal system has been the “laryngeal descent.” The larynx (aka, the voice box or the “Adam’s apple”) moved a bit down the throat. This anatomical detail was long thought to be exclusive to humans and was also believed to be important in producing certain acoustic distinctions between vowels, so that English speaker s can saypoke orpuke without causing confusion. As the descent appears to have been only 200,000 years old, it seemed that the descent might have had something to do with the introduction of speech, which many peo...
Source: Babel's Dawn - December 11, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs

Bonobos Converse
 Grooming.Here is part of the scenario for language origins favored on this blog: long ago our ancestors began losing body hair with potentially ruinous dangers to the species. It reduced the ability to form bonds based on grooming and it made it difficult to move with a baby who, in previous generations, held on tightly to mama ’s hair. The solution was bonding via babbling and sharing responsibility for the baby. For a long time, the human lineage made meaningless sounds that provided emotional ties, and eventually particularly sounds became associated with specific things or people.I defend this argument by pointing ...
Source: Babel's Dawn - January 29, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs

What Motivated the First Speakers?
An early (Oldowan) chopping tool.I have received a letter from a reader who goes by the handle jgkess. Under the titlethe origin of communicative intent in the use of hominem proto-language he (or maybe she) writes: “The idea was to get another to Do something, (or not do something) either proximally or distally (in a temporal sense), by way of getting him to think or feel in an intended way. There was no "generic" intent just to "inform" another---that would be insufficiently motivating, and communicative behaviour is, after all, motivated behaviour. In the pragmatics of hominem proto-linguistic communication, I think, ...
Source: Babel's Dawn - November 24, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs