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Your Book Review: How Language Began

Finalist #5 in the Book Review Contest

JUL 19, 2024

[This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX
reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about
one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to
vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]

I. THE GOD
You may have heard of a field known as "linguistics". Linguistics is supposedly the
"scientific study of language", but this is completely wrong. To borrow a phrase
from elsewhere, linguists are those who believe Noam Chomsky is the rightful
caliph. Linguistics is what linguists study.

I'm only half-joking, because Chomsky’s impact on the study of language is hard
to overstate. Consider the number of times his books and papers have been cited,
a crude measure of influence that we can use to get a sense of this. At the current
time, his Google Scholar page says he's been cited over 500,000 times. That’s a
lot.

It isn’t atypical for a hard-working professor at a top-ranked institution to, after a

career’s worth of work and many people helping them do research and write
papers, have maybe 20,000 citations (= 0.04 Chomskys). Generational talents do
better, but usually not by more than a factor of 5 or so. Consider a few more
citation counts:

Computer scientist Alan Turing (65,000 = 0.13 Chomskys)

Neuro / cogsci / AI researcher Matthew Botvinick (83,000 = 0.17 Chomskys)

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 Mathematician Terence Tao (96,000 = 0.19 Chomskys)

Cognitive scientist Joshua Tenenbaum (107,000 = 0.21 Chomskys)

Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman (120,000 = 0.24 Chomskys)

Psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker (123,000 = 0.25 Chomskys)

Two-time Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling (128,000 = 0.26 Chomskys)

Neuroscientist Karl Deisseroth (143,000 = 0.29 Chomskys)

Biologist Charles Darwin (182,000 = 0.36 Chomskys)

Theoretical physicist Ed Witten (250,000 = 0.50 Chomskys)

AI researcher Yann LeCun (352,000 = 0.70 Chomskys)

Historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt (359,000 = 0.72 Chomskys)

Karl Marx (458,000 = 0.92 Chomskys)

Yes, fields vary in ways that make these comparisons not necessarily fair: fields
have different numbers of people, citation practices vary, and so on. There is also
probably a considerable recency bias; for example, most biologists don’t cite
Darwin every time they write a paper whose content relates to evolution. But
500,000 is still a mind-bogglingly huge number.

Not many academics do better than Chomsky citation-wise. But there are a few,
and you can probably guess why:

Human-Genome-Project-associated scientist Eric Lander (685,000 = 1.37

Chomskys)

AI researcher Yoshua Bengio (780,000 = 1.56 Chomskys)

AI researcher Geoff Hinton (800,000 = 1.60 Chomskys)

Philosopher and historian Michel Foucault (1,361,000 = 2.72 Chomskys)

…well, okay, maybe I don’t entirely get Foucault’s number. Every humanities
person must have an altar of him by their bedside or something.
:
 Chomsky has been called “arguably the most important intellectual alive today” in
a New York Times review of one of his books, and was voted the world’s top
public intellectual in a 2005 poll. He’s the kind of guy that gets long and gushing
introductions before his talks (this one is nearly twenty minutes long). All of this is
just to say: he’s kind of a big deal.
:
 This is what he looks like. According to Wikipedia, the context for this picture is:

“Noam Chomsky speaks about humanity's prospects for survival”

:
 Since around 1957, Chomsky has dominated linguistics. And this matters because
he is kind of a contrarian with weird ideas.

Is language for communicating? No, it’s mainly for thinking: (What Kind of
Creatures Are We? Ch. 1, pg. 15-16)

It is, indeed, virtual dogma that the function of language is communication. ...
there is by now quite significant evidence that it is simply false. Doubtless
language is sometimes used for communication, as is style of dress, facial
expression and stance, and much else. But fundamental properties of
language design indicate that a rich tradition is correct in regarding language
as essentially an instrument of thought, even if we do not go as far as
Humboldt in identifying the two.

Should linguists care about the interaction between culture and language? No,
that’s essentially stamp-collecting: (Language and Responsibility, Ch. 2, pg. 56-
57)

Again, a discipline is defined in terms of its object and its results. Sociology is
the study of society. As to its results, it seems that there are few things one
can say about that, at least at a fairly general level. One finds observations,
intuitions, impressions, some valid generalizations perhaps. All very valuable,
no doubt, but not at the level of explanatory principles. … Sociolinguistics is, I
suppose, a discipline that seeks to apply principles of sociology to the study of
language; but I suspect that it can draw little from sociology, and I wonder
whether it is likely to contribute much to it. … You can also collect butterflies
and make many observations. If you like butterflies, that’s fine; but such work
must not be confounded with research, which is concerned to discover
explanatory principles of some depth and fails if it has not done so.

Did the human capacity for language evolve gradually? No, it suddenly appeared
around 50,000 years ago after a freak gene mutation: (Language and Mind, third
edition, pg, 183-184)

An elementary fact about the language faculty is that it is a system of discrete

:
 infinity, rare in the organic world. Any such system is based on a primitive
operation that takes objects already constructed, and constructs from them a
new object: in the simplest case, the set containing them. Call that operation
Merge. Either Merge or some equivalent is a minimal requirement. With Merge
available, we instantly have an unbounded system of hierarchically structured
expressions.

The simplest account of the “Great Leap Forward” in the evolution of humans
would be that the brain was rewired, perhaps by some slight mutation, to
provide the operation Merge … There are speculations about the evolution of
language that postulate a far more complex process … A more parsimonious
speculation is that they did not, and that the Great Leap was effectively
instantaneous, in a single individual, who was instantly endowed with
intellectual capacities far superior to those of others, transmitted to offspring
and coming to predominate. At best a reasonable guess, as are all
speculations about such matters, but about the simplest one imaginable, and
not inconsistent with anything known or plausibly surmised. It is hard to see
what account of human evolution would not assume at least this much, in one
or another form.

I think all of these positions are kind of insane for reasons that we will discuss
later. (Side note: Chomsky’s proposal is essentially the hard takeoff theory of
human intelligence.)

Most consequential of all, perhaps, are the ways Chomsky has influenced (i) what
linguists mainly study, and (ii) how they go about studying it.

Naively, since language involves many different components—including sound

production and comprehension, intonation, gestures, and context, among many
others—linguists might want to study all of these. While they do study all of these,
Chomsky and his followers view grammar as by far the most important
component of humans’ ability to understand and produce language, and
accordingly make it their central focus. Roughly speaking, grammar refers to the
set of language-specific rules that determine whether a sentence is well-formed.
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 It goes beyond specifying word order (or ‘surface structure’, in Chomskyan
terminology) since one needs to know more than just where words are placed in
order to modify or extend a given sentence.

Consider a pair of sentences Chomsky uses to illustrate this point in Aspects of

the Theory of Syntax (pg. 22), his most cited work:

(1a) I expected John to be examined by a specialist.

(2a) I persuaded John to be examined by a specialist.

The words “expected” and “persuaded” appear in the same location in each
sentence, but imply different ‘latent’ grammatical structures, or ‘deep structures’.
One way to show this is to observe that a particular way of rearranging the words
produces a sentence with the same meaning in the first case (1a = 1b), and a
different meaning in the second (2a != 2b):

(1b) I expected a specialist to examine John.

(2b) I persuaded a specialist to examine John.

In particular, the target of persuasion is “John” in the case of (2a), and “the
specialist” in the case of (2b). A full Chomskyan treatment of sentences like this
would involve hierarchical tree diagrams, which permit a precise description of
deep structure.

You may have encountered the famous sentence: “Colorless green ideas sleep
furiously.” It first appeared in Chomsky’s 1957 book Syntactic Structures, and the
point is that even nonsense sentences can be grammatically well-formed, and
that speakers can quickly assess the grammatical correctness of even nonsense
sentences that they’ve never seen before. To Chomsky, this is one of the most
important facts to be explained about language.

A naive response to Chomsky’s preoccupation with grammar is: doesn’t real

language involve a lot of non-grammatical stuff, like stuttering and slips of the
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 tongue and midstream changes of mind? Of course it does, and Chomsky
acknowledges this. To address this point, Chomsky has to move the goalposts in
two important ways.

First, he famously distinguishes competence from performance, and identifies the

former as the subject of any serious theory of language: (Aspects of the Theory
of Syntax, Ch. 1, pg. 4)

The problem for the linguist, as well as for the child learning the language, is to
determine from the data of performance the underlying system of rules that
has been mastered by the speaker-hearer and that he puts to use in actual
performance. Hence, in the technical sense, linguistic theory is mentalistic,
since it is concerned with discovering a mental reality underlying actual
behavior. Observed use of language or hypothesized dispositions to respond,
habits, and so on, may provide evidence as to the nature of this mental reality,
but surely cannot constitute the actual subject matter of linguistics, if this is to
be a serious discipline.

Moreover, he claims that grammar captures most of what we should mean when
we talk about speakers’ linguistic competence: (Aspects of the Theory of Syntax,
Ch. 1, pg. 24)

A grammar can be regarded as a theory of a language; it is descriptively

adequate to the extent that it correctly describes the intrinsic competence of
the idealized native speaker.

Another way Chomsky moves the goalposts is by distinguishing E-languages, like

English and Spanish and Japanese, from I-languages, which only exist inside
human minds. He claims that serious linguistics should be primarily interested in
the latter. In a semi-technical book summarizing Chomsky’s theory of language,
Cook and Newson write: (Chomsky’s Universal Grammar: An Introduction, pg. 13)

E-language linguistics … aims to collect samples of language and then

describe their properties. … I-language linguistics, however, is concerned with
what a speaker knows about language and where this knowledge comes from;
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 it treats language as an internal property of the human mind rather than
something external …

Not only should linguistics primarily be interested in studying I-languages, but to

try and study E-languages at all may be a fool’s errand: (Chomsky’s Universal
Grammar: An Introduction, pg. 13)

Chomsky claims that the history of generative linguistics shows a shift from an
E-language to an I-language approach; ‘the shift of focus from the dubious
concept of E-language to the significant notion of I-language was a crucial
step in early generative grammar’ (Chomsky, 1991b, pg. 10). … Indeed
Chomsky is extremely dismissive of E-language approaches: ‘E-language, if it
exists at all, is derivative, remote from mechanisms and of no particular
empirical significance, perhaps none at all’ (Chomsky, 1991b, pg. 10). 1

I Am Not A Linguist (IANAL), but this redefinition of the primary concern of

linguistics seems crazy to me. Is studying a language like English as it is actually
used really of no particular empirical significance?

And this doesn’t seem to be a one-time hyperbole, but a representative claim.

Cook and Newson continue: (Chomsky’s Universal Grammar: An Introduction, pg.
14)

The opposition between these two approaches in linguistics has been long and
acrimonious, neither side conceding the other’s reality. … The E-linguist
despises the I-linguist for not looking at the ‘real’ facts; the I-linguist derides
the E-linguist for looking at trivia. The I-language versus E-language
distinction is as much a difference of research methods and of admissible
evidence as it is of long-term goals.

So much for what linguists ought to study. How should they study it?

The previous quote gives us a clue. Especially in the era before Chomsky (BC),
linguists were more interested in description. Linguists were, at least in one view,
people who could be dropped anywhere in the world, and emerge with a tentative
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 grammar of the local language six months later. (A notion like this is mentioned
early in this video.) Linguists catalog the myriad of strange details about human
languages, like the fact that some languages don’t appear to have words for
relative directions, or “thank you”, or “yes” and “no”.

After Chomsky's domination of the field (AD), there were a lot more theorists.
While you could study language by going out into the field and collecting data,
this was viewed as not the only, and maybe not even the most important, way to
work. Diagrams of sentences proliferated. Chomsky, arguably the most influential
linguist of the past hundred years, has never done fieldwork.

In summary, to Chomsky and many of the linguists working in his tradition, the
scientifically interesting component of language is grammar competence, and real
linguistic data only indirectly reflects it.

All of this matters because the dominance of Chomskyan linguistics has had
downstream effects in adjacent fields like artificial intelligence (AI), evolutionary
biology, and neuroscience. Chomsky has long been an opponent of the statistical
learning tradition of language modeling, essentially claiming that it does not
provide insight about what humans know about languages, and that engineering
success probably can’t be achieved without explicitly incorporating important
mathematical facts about the underlying structure of language. Chomsky’s ideas
have motivated researchers to look for a “language gene” and “language areas”
of the brain. Arguably, no one has yet found either—but more on that later.

How Chomsky attained this stranglehold on linguistics is an interesting

sociological question, but not our main concern in the present work 2. The intent
here is not to pooh-pooh Chomsky, either; brilliant and hard-working people are
often wrong on important questions. Consider that his academic career began in
the early 1950s—over 70 years ago!—when our understanding of language,
anthropology, biology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence, among many other
things, was substantially more rudimentary.

Where are we going with this? All of this is context for understanding the ideas of
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 a certain bomb-throwing terrorist blight on the face of linguistics: Daniel Everett.
How Language Began is a book he wrote about, well, what language is and how it
began. Everett is the anti-Chomsky.

II. THE MISSIONARY

We all love classic boy-meets-girl stories. Here’s one: boy meets girl at a rock
concert, they fall in love, the boy converts to Christianity for the girl, then the boy
and girl move to the Amazon jungle to dedicate the rest of their lives to saving the
souls of an isolated hunter-gatherer tribe.

Daniel Everett is the boy in this story. The woman he married, Keren Graham, is
the daughter of Christian missionaries and had formative experiences living in the
Amazon jungle among the Sateré-Mawé people. At seventeen, Everett became a
born-again Christian; at eighteen, he and Keren married; and over the next few
years, they started a family and prepared to become full-fledged missionaries like
Keren’s parents.

First, Everett studied “Bible and Foreign Missions” at the Moody Bible Institute in
Chicago. After finishing his degree in 1975, the natural next step was to train more
specifically to follow in the footsteps of Keren’s parents. In 1976, he and his wife
enrolled in the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) to learn translation techniques
and more viscerally prepare for life in the jungle:

They were sent to Chiapas, Mexico, where Keren stayed in a hut in the jungle
with the couple’s children—by this time, there were three—while Everett
underwent grueling field training. He endured fifty-mile hikes and survived for
several days deep in the jungle with only matches, water, a rope, a machete,
and a flashlight.

Everett apparently had a gift for language-learning. This led SIL to invite Everett
and his wife to work with the Pirahã people (pronounced pee-da-HAN), whose
unusual language had thwarted all previous attempts to learn it. In 1977, Everett’s
family moved to Brazil, and in December they met the Pirahã for the first time. As
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 an SIL-affiliated missionary, Everett’s explicit goals were to (i) translate the Bible
into Pirahã, and (ii) convert as many Pirahã as possible to Christianity.

But Everett’s first encounter with the Pirahã was cut short for political reasons:
(Don’t Sleep There Are Snakes, Ch. 1, pg. 13-14)

In December of 1977 the Brazilian government ordered all missionaries to

leave Indian reservations. … Leaving the village under these forced
circumstances made me wonder whether I’d ever be able to return. The
Summer Institute of Linguistics was concerned too and wanted to find a way
around the government’s prohibition against missionaries. So SIL asked me to
apply to the graduate linguistics program at the State University of Campinas
(UNICAMP), in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. It was hoped that UNICAMP
would be able to secure government authorization for me to visit the Pirahãs
for a prolonged period, in spite of the general ban against missionaries. … My
work at UNICAMP paid off as SIL hoped it would.

Everett became a linguist proper sort of by accident, mostly as an excuse to

continue his missionary work. But he ended up developing a passion for it. In
1980, he completed Aspects of the Phonology of Pirahã, his master’s thesis. He
continued on to get a PhD in linguistics, also from UNICAMP, and in 1983 finished
The Pirahã Language and Theory of Syntax, his dissertation. He continued
studying the Pirahã and working as an academic linguist after that. In all, Everett
spent around ten years of his life living with the Pirahã, spread out over some
thirty-odd years. As he notes in Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes: (Prologue, pg.
xvii-xviii)

I went to the Pirahãs when I was twenty-six years old. Now I am old enough to
receive senior discounts. I gave them my youth. I have contracted malaria
many times. I remember several occasions on which the Pirahãs or others
threatened my life. I have carried more heavy boxes, bags, and barrels on my
back through the jungle than I care to remember. But my grandchildren all
know the Pirahãs. My children are who they are in part because of the Pirahãs.
And I can look at some of those old men (old like me) who once threatened to
:
 kill me and recognize some of the dearest friends I have ever had—men who
would now risk their lives for me.

Everett interviewing some Pirahã people. (source)

Everett did eventually learn their language, and it’s worth taking a step back to
appreciate just how hard that task was. No Pirahã spoke Portuguese, apart from
some isolated phrases they used for bartering. They didn’t speak any other
language at all—just Pirahã. How do you learn another group’s language when you
have no languages in common? The technical term is monolingual fieldwork. But
this is just a fancy label for some combination of pointing at things, listening,
crude imitation, and obsessively transcribing whatever you hear. For years.

It doesn’t help that the Pirahã language seems genuinely hard to learn in a few
different senses. First, it is probably conventionally difficult for Westerners to
learn since it is a tonal language (two tones: high and low) with a small number of
phonemes (building block sounds) and a few unusual sounds 3. Second, there is
no written language. Third, the language has a variety of ‘channels of discourse’,
or ways of talking specialized for one or another cultural context. One of these is
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 ‘whistle speech’; Pirahãs can communicate purely in whistles. This feature
appears to be extremely useful during hunting trips: (Don’t Sleep, There Are
Snakes, Ch. 11, pg. 187-188)

My first intense contact with whistle speech came one day when the Pirahãs
had given me permission to go hunting with them. After we’d been walking for
about an hour, they decided that they weren’t seeing any game because I, with
my clunking canteens and machete and congenital clumsiness, was making
too much noise. “You stay here and we will be back for you later.” Xaikáibaí
said gently but firmly. …

As I tried to make the best of my solitary confinement, I heard the men

whistling to one another. They were saying, “I’ll go over there; you go that
way,” and other such hunting talk. But clearly they were communicating. It was
fascinating because it sounded so different from anything I had heard before.
The whistle carried long and clear in the jungle. I could immediately see the
importance and usefulness of this channel, which I guessed would also be
much less likely to scare away game than the lower frequencies of the men’s
normal voices.

Fourth, important aspects of the language reflect core tenets of Pirahã culture in
ways that one might not a priori expect. Everett writes extensively about the
‘immediacy of experience principle’ of Pirahã culture, which he summarizes as the
idea that: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 7, pg. 132)

Declarative Pirahã utterances contain only assertions related directly to the

moment of speech, either experienced by the speaker or witnessed by
someone alive during the lifetime of the speaker.

One way the language reflects this is that the speaker must specify how they
know something by affixing an appropriate suffix to verbs: (Don’t Sleep, There
Are Snakes, Ch. 12, pg. 196)

Perhaps the most interesting suffixes, however (though these are not unique
to Pirahã), are what linguists call evidentials, elements that represent the
:
 speaker’s evaluation of his or her knowledge of what he or she is saying. There
are three of these in Pirahã: hearsay, observation, and deduction.

To see what these do, let’s use an English example. If I ask you, “Did Joe go
fishing?” you could answer, “Yes, at least I heard that he did,” or “Yes, I know
because I saw him leave,” or “Yes, at least I suppose he did because his boat is
gone.” The difference between English and Pirahã is that what English does
with a sentence, Pirahã does with a verbal suffix.

Everett also convincingly links this cultural principle to the lack of Pirahã number
words and creation myths. On the latter topic, Everett recalls the following
exchange: (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 7, pg. 134)

I sat with Kóhoi once and he asked me, after hearing about my god, “What else
does your god do?” And I answered, “Well, he made the stars, and he made
the earth.” Then I asked, “What do the Pirahãs say?” He answered, “Well, the
Pirahãs say that these things were not made.”

And all of this is to say nothing of the manifold perils of the jungle: malaria,
typhoid fever, dysentery, dangerous snakes, insects, morally gray river traders,
and periodic downpours. If Indiana Jones braved these conditions for years, we
would consider his stories rousing adventures. Everett did this while also learning
one of the most unusual languages in the world.
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 People on the bank of the Maici river. (source)

By the way, he did eventually sort of achieve his goal of translating the Bible.
Armed with a solid knowledge of Pirahã, he was able to translate the New
Testament’s Gospel of Mark. Since the Pirahã have no written language, he
provided them with a recorded version, but did not get the reaction he expected:
(Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 17, pg. 267-268)

When we returned to the village, I recorded Mark’s gospel in my own voice for
the Pirahãs to listen to. I then brought in a wind-up tape recorder to play the
recording, and I taught the Pirahãs how to use it, which, surprisingly enough,
some of the children did. Keren and I left the village and returned a few weeks
later. The people were still listening to the gospel, with children cranking the
recorder. I was initially quite excited about this, until it became clear that the
only part of the book that they paid attention to was the beheading of John the
Baptist. “Wow, they cut off his head. Play that again!”
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 One reaction to hearing the gospel caught Everett even more off-guard: (Don’t
Sleep, There Are Snakes, Ch. 17, pg. 269)

"The women are afraid of Jesus. We do not want him."

"Why not?" I asked, wondering what had triggered this declaration.

"Because last night he came to our village and tried to have sex with our
women. He chased them around the village, trying to stick his large penis into
them."

Kaaxaóoi proceeded to show me with his two hands held far apart how long
Jesus's penis was—a good three feet.

But the Pirahã had an even more serious objection to Jesus: (Don’t Sleep, There
Are Snakes, Ch. 17, pg. 265-266)

Part of the difficulty of my task began to become clear to me. I communicated

more or less correctly to the Pirahãs about my Christian beliefs. The men
listening to me understood that there was a man named Hisó, Jesus, and that
he wanted others to do what he told them.

"The Pirahã men then asked, "Hey Dan, what does Jesus look like? Is he dark
like us or light like you?" I said, "Well, I have never actually seen him. He lived a
long time ago. But I do have his words." "Well, Dan, how do you have his words
if you have never heard him or seen him?"

They then made it clear that if I had not actually seen this guy (and not in any
metaphorical sense, but literally), they weren't interested in any stories I had to
tell about him. Period. This is because, as I now knew, the Pirahãs believe only
what they see. Sometimes they also believe in things that someone else has
told them, so long as that person has personally witnessed what he or she is
reporting.

In the end, Everett never converted a single Pirahã. But he did even worse than
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 converting zero people—he lost his own faith after coming to believe that the
Pirahã had a good point. After keeping this to himself for many years, he revealed
his loss of faith to his family, which led to a divorce and his children breaking
contact with him for a number of years afterward.

But Everett losing his faith in the God of Abraham was only the beginning. Most
importantly for us, he also lost his faith in the God of Linguistics—Noam
Chomsky.

III. THE WAR

In 2005, Everett’s paper “Cultural constraints on grammar and cognition in Pirahã:
Another look at the design features of human language” was published in the
journal Cultural Anthropology. An outsider might expect an article like this, which
made a technical observation about the apparent lack of a property called
‘recursion’ in the Pirahã language, to receive an ‘oh, neat’ sort of response.
Languages can be pretty different from one another, after all. Mandarin lacks
plurals. Spanish sentences can omit an explicit subject. This is one of those kinds
of things.

But the article ignited a firestorm of controversy that follows Everett to this day.
Praise for Everett and his work on recursion in Pirahã:

He became a pure charlatan, although he used to be a good descriptive

linguist. That is why, as far as I know, all the serious linguists who work on
Brazilian languages ignore him.

Noam Chomsky, MIT professor and linguist

You, too, can enjoy the spotlight of mass media and closet exoticists! Just find
a remote tribe and exploit them for your own fame by making claims nobody
will bother to check!

Andrew Nevins, UCL professor and linguist (Harvard professor at quote time)
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 I think he knows he’s wrong, that’s what I really think. I think it’s a move that
many, many intellectuals make to get a little bit of attention.

Tom Roeper, U. Mass. Amherst professor and linguist

Everett is a racist. He puts the Pirahã on a level with primates.

Cilene Rodrigues, PUC-Rio professor and linguist

Is Daniel Everett the village idiot of linguistics?

bedobi, Redditor

Apparently he struck a nerve. And there is much more vitriol like this; see Pullum
for the best (short) account of the beef I’ve found, along with sources for each
quote except the last. On the whole affair, he writes:

Calling it a controversy or debate would be an understatement; it was a

campaign of vengeance and career sabotage.

I’m not going to rehash all of the details, but the conduct of many in the pro-
Chomsky faction is pretty shocking. Highly recommended reading. Substantial
portions of the books The Kingdom of Speech and Decoding Chomsky are also
dedicated to covering the beef and related issues, although I haven’t read them.

What’s going on? Assuming Everett is indeed acting in good faith, why did he get
this reaction? As I said in the beginning, linguists are those who believe Noam
Chomsky is the rightful caliph. Central to Chomsky’s conception of language is
the idea that grammar reigns supreme, and that human brains have some
specialized structure for learning and processing grammar. In the writing of
Chomsky and others, this hypothetical component of our biological endowment is
sometimes called the narrow faculty of language (FLN); this is to distinguish it
from other (e.g., sensorimotor) capabilities relevant for practical language use.

A paper by Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch titled “The Faculty of Language: What Is
It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?” was published in the prestigious journal
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 Science in 2002, just a few years earlier. The abstract contains the sentence:

We hypothesize that FLN only includes recursion and is the only uniquely
human component of the faculty of language.

Some additional context is that Chomsky had spent the past few decades
simplifying his theory of language. A good account of this is provided in the first
chapter of Chomsky’s Universal Grammar: An Introduction. By 2002, arguably not
much was left: the core claims were that (i) grammar is supreme, (ii) all grammar
is recursive and hierarchical. More elaborate aspects of previous versions of
Chomsky’s theory, like the idea that each language might be identified with
different parameter settings of some ‘global’ model constrained by the human
brain (the core idea of the so-called ‘principles and parameters’ formulation of
universal grammar), were by now viewed as helpful and interesting but not
necessarily fundamental.

Hence, it stands to reason that evidence suggesting not all grammar is recursive
could be perceived as a significant threat to the Chomskyan research program. If
not all languages had recursion, then what would be left of Chomsky’s once-
formidable theoretical apparatus?

Everett’s paper inspired a lively debate, with many arguing that he is lying, or
misunderstands his own data, or misunderstands Chomsky, or some combination
of all of those things. The most famous anti-Everett response is “Pirahã
Exceptionality: A Reassessment” by Nevins, Pesetsky, and Rodrigues (NPR),
which was published in the prestigious journal Language in 2009. This paper got
a response from Everett, which led to an NPR response-to-the-response.

To understand how contentious even the published form of this debate became, I
reproduce in full the final two paragraphs of NPR’s response-response:

We began this commentary with a brief remark about the publicity that has
been generated on behalf of Everett's claims about Pirahã. Although reporters
and other nonlinguists may be aware of some ‘big ideas’ prominent in the field,
the outside world is largely unaware of one of the most fundamental
:
 achievements of modern linguistics: the three-fold discovery that (i) there is
such a thing as a FACT about language; (ii) the facts of language pose
PUZZLES, which can be stated clearly and precisely; and (iii) we can propose
and evaluate SOLUTIONS to these puzzles, using the same intellectual skills
that we bring to bear in any other domain of inquiry. This three-fold discovery
is the common heritage of all subdisciplines of linguistics and all schools of
thought, the thread that unites the work of all serious modern linguists of the
last few centuries, and a common denominator for the field.

In our opinion, to the extent that CA and related work constitute a ‘volley fired
straight at the heart’ of anything, its actual target is no particular school or
subdiscipline of linguistics, but rather ANY kind of linguistics that shares the
common denominator of fact, puzzle, and solution. That is why we have
focused so consistently on basic, common-denominator questions: whether
CA’s and E09’s conclusions follow from their premises, whether contradictory
published data has been properly taken into account, and whether relevant
previous research has been represented and evaluated consistently and
accurately. To the extent that outside eyes may be focused on the Pirahã
discussion for a while longer, we would like to hope that NP&R (and the
present response) have helped reinforce the message that linguistics is a field
in which robustness of evidence and soundness of argumentation matter.

Two observations here. First, another statement about “serious” linguistics; why
does that keep popping up? Second, wow. That’s the closest you can come to
cursing someone out in a prestigious journal.

Polemics aside, what’s the technical content of each side’s argument? Is Pirahã
recursive or not? Much of the debate appears to hinge on two things:

what one means by recursion

what one means by the statement “All natural human languages have
recursion.”

Everett generally takes recursion to refer to the following property of many natural
:
 languages: one can construct sentences or phrases from other sentences and
phrases. For example:

“The cat died.” -> “Alice said that [the cat died].” -> “Bob said that [Alice said that
[the cat died.]]”

In the above example, we can in principle generate infinitely many new sentences
by writing “Z said X,” where X is the previous sentence and Z is some name. For
clarity’s sake, one should probably distinguish between different ways to generate
new sentences or phrases from old ones; Pullum mentions a few in the context of
assessing Everett’s Pirahã recursion claims:

Everett reports that there are no signs of no multiple coordination (It takes
[skill, nerve, initiative, and courage]), complex determiners ([[[my] son’s]
wife’s] family), stacked modifiers (a [nice, [cosy, [inexpensive [little
cottage]]]]), or—most significant of all—reiterable clause embedding (I thought
[ you already knew [that she was here ] ]). These are the primary
constructions that in English permit sentences of any arbitrary finite length to
be constructed, yielding the familiar argument that the set of all definable
grammatical sentences in English is infinite.

Regardless of the details, a generic prediction should be that there is no longest

sentence in a language whose grammar is recursive. This doesn’t mean that one
can say an arbitrarily long sentence in real life 4. Rather, one can say that, given a
member of some large set of sentences, one can always extend it.

Everett takes the claim “All natural human languages have recursion.” to mean
that, if there exists a natural human language without recursion, the claim is false.
Or, slightly more subtly, if there exists a language which uses recursion so
minimally that linguists have a hard time determining whether a corpus of
linguistic data falsifies it or not, sentence-level recursion is probably not a
bedrock principle of human languages.

I found the following anecdote from a 2012 paper of Everett’s enlightening:

:
 Pirahã speakers reject constructed examples with recursion, as I discovered in
my translation of the gospel of Mark into the language (during my days as a
missionary). The Bible is full of recursive examples, such as the following, from
Mark 1:3:

‘(John the Baptist) was a voice of one calling in the desert…’

I initially translated this as:

‘John, the man that put people in the water in order to clean them for God, that
lived in a place like a beach with no trees and that yelled for people to obey
God’.

The Pirahãs rejected every attempt until I translated this as:

‘John cleaned people in the river. He lived in another jungle. The jungle was like
a beach. It had no trees. He yelled to people. You want God!’

The non-recursive structure was accepted readily and elicited all sorts of
questions. I subsequently realized looking through Pirahã texts that there were
no clear examples involving either recursion or even embedding. Attempts to
construct recursive sentences or phrases, such as ‘several big round barrels',
were ultimately rejected by the Pirahãs (although initially they accepted them
to be polite to me, a standard fieldwork problem that Jeanette Sakel and I
discuss).

He does explicitly claim (in the aforementioned paper and elsewhere) that Pirahã
probably has no longest sentence, which is about the most generic anti-recursion
statement one can make.

Chomsky and linguists working in his tradition sometimes write in a way

consistent with Everett’s conception of recursion, but sometimes don’t. For
example, consider this random 2016 blogpost I found by a linguist in training:

For generative linguistics the recursive function is Merge, which combines two
:
 words or phrases to form a larger structure which can then be the input for
further iterations of Merge. Any expression larger than two words, then,
requires recursion, regardless of whether there is embedding in that
expression. For instance the noun phrase “My favourite book” requires two
iterations of Merge, (Merge(favourite, book)= [Favourite book], Merge(my,
[favourite book])= [my [favourite book]]) and therefore is an instance of
recursion without embedding.

To be clear, this usage of ‘recursion’ seems consistent with how many other
Chomskyan linguists have used the term. And with all due respect to these
researchers, I find this notion of recursion completely insane, because it would
imply (i) any language with more than one word in its sentences has recursion,
and that (ii) all sentences are necessarily constructed recursively.

The first implication means that “All natural human languages have recursion.”
reduces to the vacuously true claim that “All languages allow more than one word
in their sentences.” 5 The second idea is more interesting, because it relates to
how the brain constructs sentences, but as far as I can tell this claim cannot be
tested using purely observational linguistic data. One would have to do some kind
of experiment to check the order in which subjects mentally construct sentences,
and ideally make brain activity measurements of some sort.

Aside from sometimes involving a strange notion of recursion, another feature of

the Chomskyan response to Everett relates to the distinction we discussed earlier
between so-called E-languages and I-languages. Consider the following
exchange from a 2012 interview with Chomsky:

NS: But there are critics such as Daniel Everett, who says the language of the
Amazonian people he worked with seems to challenge important aspects of
universal grammar.

Chomsky: It can't be true. These people are genetically identical to all other
humans with regard to language. They can learn Portuguese perfectly easily,
just as Portuguese children do. So they have the same universal grammar the
:
 rest of us have. What Everett claims is that the resources of the language do
not permit the use of the principles of universal grammar.

That's conceivable. You could imagine a language exactly like English except it
doesn't have connectives like "and" that allow you to make longer expressions.
An infant learning truncated English would have no idea about this: they would
just pick it up as they would standard English. At some point, the child would
discover the resources are so limited you can't say very much, but that doesn't
say anything about universal grammar, or about language acquisition.

Chomsky makes claims like this elsewhere too. The argument is that, even if there
were a language without a recursive grammar, this is not inconsistent with his
theory, since his theory is not about E-languages like English or Spanish or Pirahã.
His theory only makes claims about I-languages, or equivalently about our innate
language capabilities.

But this is kind of a dumb rhetorical move. Either the theory makes predictions
about real languages or it doesn’t. The statement that some languages in the
world are arguably recursive is not a prediction; it’s an observation, and we didn’t
need the theory to make it. What does it mean for the grammar of thought
languages to be recursive? How do we test this? Can we test it by doing
experiments involving real linguistic data, or not? If not, are we even still talking
about language?

To this day, as one might expect, not everyone agrees with Everett that (i) Pirahã
lacks a recursive hierarchical grammar, and that (ii) such a discovery would have
any bearing at all on the truth or falsity of Chomskyan universal grammar. Given
that languages can be pretty weird, among other reasons, I am inclined to side
with Everett here. But where does that leave us? We do not just want to throw
bombs and tell everyone their theories are wrong.

Does Everett have an alternative to the Chomskyan account of what language is

and where it came from? Yes, and it turns out he’s been thinking about this for a
long time. How Language Began is his 2017 offering in this direction.
:
 IV. THE BOOK
So what is language, anyway?

Everett writes: (How Language Began, Ch. 1, pg. 15)

Language is the interaction of meaning (semantics), conditions on usage

(pragmatics), the physical properties of its inventory of sounds (phonetics), a
grammar (syntax, or sentence structure), phonology (sound structure),
morphology (word structure), discourse conversational organizational
principles, information, and gestures. Language is a gestalt—the whole is
greater than the sum of its parts. That is to say, the whole is not understood
merely by examining individual components.

Okay, so far, so good. To the uninitiated, it looks like Everett is just listing all of the
different things that are involved in language; so what? The point is that language
is more than just grammar. He goes on to say this explicitly: (How Language
Began, Ch. 1, pg. 16)

Grammar is a tremendous aid to language and also helps in thinking. But it

really is at best only a small part of any language, and its importance varies
from one language to another. There are tongues that have very little grammar
and others in which it is extremely complex.

His paradigmatic examples here are Pirahã and Riau Indonesian, which appears to
lack a hierarchical grammar, and which moreover apparently lacks a clear
noun/verb distinction. You might ask: what does that even mean? I’m not 100%
sure, since the linked Gil chapter appears formidable, but Wikipedia gives a pretty
good example in the right direction:

For example, the phrase Ayam makan (lit. 'chicken eat') can mean, in context,
anything from 'the chicken is eating', to 'I ate some chicken', 'the chicken that
is eating' and 'when we were eating chicken'

Is “chicken” the subject of the sentence, the object of the sentence, or something
:
 else? Well, it depends on the context.

What’s the purpose of language? Communication: (How Language Began,

Introduction, pg. 5)

Indeed, language changes lives. It builds society, expresses our highest

aspirations, our basest thoughts, our emotions and our philosophies of life. But
all language is ultimately at the service of human interaction. Other
components of language—things like grammar and stories—are secondary to
conversation.

Did language emerge suddenly, as it does in Chomsky’s proposal, or gradually?

Very gradually: (How Language Began, Introduction, pg. 7-8)

There is a wide and deep linguistic chasm between humans and all other
species. … More likely, the gap was formed by baby steps, by homeopathic
changes spurred by culture. Yes, human languages are dramatically different
from the communication systems of other animals, but the cognitive and
cultural steps to get beyond the ‘language threshold’ were smaller than many
seem to think. The evidence shows that there was no ‘sudden leap’ to the
uniquely human features of language, but that our predecessor species in the
genus Homo and earlier, perhaps among the australopithecines, slowly but
surely progressed until humans achieved language. This slow march taken by
early hominins resulted eventually in a yawning evolutionary chasm between
human language and other animal communication.

So far, we have a bit of a nothingburger. Language is for communication, and

probably—like everything else!—emerged gradually over a long period of time.
While these points are interesting as a contrast to Chomsky, they are not that
surprising in and of themselves.

But Everett’s work goes beyond taking the time to bolster common sense ideas
on language origins. Two points he discusses at length are worth briefly exploring
here. First, he offers a much more specific account of the emergence of language
than Chomsky does, and draws on a mix of evidence from paleoanthropology,
:
 evolutionary biology, linguistics, and more. Second, he pretty firmly takes the
Anti-Chomsky view on whether language is innate: (Preface, pg. xv)

… I deny here that language is an instinct of any kind, as I also deny that it is
innate, or inborn.

These two points are not unrelated. Everett’s core idea is that language should
properly be thought of as an invention rather than an innate human capability. You
might ask: who invented it? Who shaped it? Lots of people, collaboratively, over a
long time. In a word, culture. As Everett notes in the preface, “Language is the
handmaiden of culture.”

In any case, let’s discuss these points one at a time. First: the origins of language.
There are a number of questions one might want to answer about how language
began:

In what order did different language-related concepts and components

emerge?

When did language proper first arise?

What aspects of human biology best explain why and how language
emerged?

To Everett, the most important feature of language is not grammar or any

particular properties of grammar, but the fact that it involves communication
using symbols. What are symbols? (Ch. 1, pg. 17)

Symbols are conventional links to what they refer to. They … need not bear any
resemblance to nor any physical connection to what they refer to. They are
agreed upon by society.

There are often rules for arranging symbols, but given how widely they can vary in
practice, Everett views such rules as interesting but not fundamental. One can
have languages with few rules (e.g., Riau) or complex rules (e.g., German); the
key requirement for a language is that symbols are used to convey meaning.
:
 Where did symbols come from? To address this question, Everett adapts a theory
due to the (in his view underappreciated) American polymath Charles Sanders
Peirce: semiotics, the theory of signs. What are signs? (Ch. 1, pg. 16)

A sign is any pairing of a form (such as a word, smell, sound, street sign, or
Morse code) with a meaning (what the sign refers to).

Everett, in the tradition of Peirce, distinguishes between various different types of

signs. The distinction is based on (i) whether the pairing is intentional, and (ii)
whether the form of the sign is arbitrary. Indexes are non-intentional, non-
arbitrary pairings of form and meaning (think: dog paw print). Icons are
intentional, non-arbitrary pairings of form and meaning (think: a drawing of a dog
paw print). Symbols are intentional, arbitrary pairings (think: the word “d o g”
refers to a particular kind of real animal, but does not resemble anything about it).

Everett argues that symbols did not appear out of nowhere, but rather arose from
a natural series of abstractions of concepts relevant to early humans. The so-
called ‘semiotic progression’ that ultimately leads to symbols looks something like
this:

indexes (dog paw print) -> icons (drawing of dog paw print) -> symbols (“d o g”)

This reminds me of what little I know about how written languages changed over
time. For example, many Chinese characters used to look a lot more like the
things they represented (icon-like), but became substantially more abstract
(symbol-like) over time:
:
 Eight examples of how Chinese characters have changed over time.
:
 (source)

For a given culture and concept, the icon-to-symbol transition could’ve happened
any number of ways. For example, early humans could’ve mimicked an animal’s
cry to refer to it (icon-like, since this evokes a well-known physical consequence
of some animal’s presence), but then gradually shifted to making a more abstract
sound (symbol-like) over time.

The index (non-intentional, non-arbitrary) to icon transition must happen even

earlier. This refers to whatever process led early humans to, for example, mimic a
given animal’s cry in the first place, or to draw people on cave walls, or to collect
rocks that resemble human faces.

Is there a clear boundary between indexes, icons, and symbols? It doesn’t seem
like it, since things like Chinese characters changed gradually over time. But
Everett doesn’t discuss this point explicitly.

Why did we end up with certain symbols and not others? Well, there’s no good a
priori reason to prefer “dog” over “perro” or “adsnofnowefn”, so Everett attributes
the selection mostly to cultural forces. Everett suggests these forces shape
language in addition to practical considerations, like the fact that, all else being
equal, we prefer words that are not hundreds of characters long, because they
would be too annoying to write or speak.

When did language—in the sense of communication using symbols—begin?

Everett makes two kinds of arguments here. One kind of argument is that certain
feats are hard enough that they probably required language in this sense. Another
kind of argument relates to how we know human anatomy has physically changed
on evolutionary time scales.

The feats Everett talks about are things like traveling long distances across
continents, possibly even in a directed rather than random fashion; manufacturing
nontrivial hand tools (e.g., Oldowan and Mousterian); building complex
settlements (e.g., the one found at Gesher Benot Ya'aqov); controlling fire; and
using boats to successfully navigate treacherous waters. Long before sapiens
:
 arose, paleoanthropological evidence suggests that our predecessors Homo
erectus did all of these things. Everett argues that they might have had language
over one million years ago 6.

This differs from Chomsky’s proposal by around an order of magnitude, time-

wise, and portrays language as something not necessarily unique to modern
humans. In Everett’s view, Homo sapiens probably improved on the language
technology bestowed upon them by their erectus ancestors, but did not invent it.

Everett’s anatomy arguments relate mainly to the structure of the head and larynx
(our ‘voice box’, an organ that helps us flexibly modulate the sounds we produce).
Over the past two million years, our brains got bigger, our face and mouth
became more articulate, our larynx changed in ways that gave us a clearer and
more elaborate inventory of sounds, and our ears became better tuned to hearing
those sounds. Here’s the kind of thing Everett writes on this topic: (Ch. 5, pg. 117)

Erectus speech perhaps sounded more garbled relative to that of sapiens,

making it harder to hear the differences between words. … Part of the reason
for erectus’s probably mushy speech is that they lacked a modern hyoid
(Greek for ‘U-shaped’) bone, the small bone in the pharynx that anchors the
larynx. The muscles that connect the hyoid to the larynx use their hyoid anchor
to raise and lower the larynx and produce a wider variety of speech sounds.
The hyoid bone of erectus was shaped more like the hyoid bones of the other
great apes and had not yet taken on the shape of sapiens’ and
neanderthalensis’ hyoids (these two being virtually identical).

Pretty neat and not something I would’ve thought about.

What aspects of biology best explain all of this? Interestingly, at no point does
Everett require anything like Chomsky’s faculty of language; his view is that
language was primarily enabled by early humans being smart enough to make a
large number of useful symbol-meaning associations, and social enough to
perpetuate a nontrivial culture. Everett thinks cultural pressures forced humans to
evolve bigger brains and better communications apparatuses (e.g., eventually
:
 giving us modern hyenoid bones to support clearer speech), which drove culture
to become richer, which drove yet more evolution, and so on.

Phew. Let’s go back to the question of innateness before we wrap up.

Everett’s answer to the innateness question is complicated and in some ways

subtle. He agrees that certain features of the human anatomy evolved to support
language (e.g., the pharynx and ears). He also agrees that modern humans are
probably much better than Homo erectus at working with language, if indeed
Homo erectus did have language.

He mostly seems to take issue with the idea that some region of our brain is
specialized for language. Instead, he thinks that our ability to produce and
comprehend language is due to a mosaic of generally-useful cognitive
capabilities, like our ability to remember things for relatively long times, our ability
to form and modify habits, and our ability to reason under uncertainty. This last
capability seems particularly important since, as Everett points out repeatedly,
most language-based communication is ambiguous, and it is important for
participants to exploit cultural and contextual information to more reliably infer the
intended messages of their conversation partners. Incidentally, this is a feature of
language Chomskyan theory tends to neglect 7.

Can’t lots of animals do all those things? Yes. Everett views the difference as one
of degree, not necessarily of quality.

What about language genes like FOXP2 and putative language areas like Broca’s
and Wernicke’s areas? What about specific language impairments? Aren’t they
clear evidence of language-specific human biology? Well, FOXP2 appears to be
more related to speech control—a motor task. Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas are
both involved in coordinating motor activity unrelated to speech. Specific
language impairments, contrary to their name, also involve some other kind of
deficit in the cases known to Everett.

I have to say, I am not 100% convinced by the brain arguments. I mean, come on,
look at the videos of people with Broca’s aphasia or Wernicke’s aphasia. Also, I
:
 buy that Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas (or whatever other putative language areas
are out there) are active during non-language-related behavior, or that they
represent non-language-related variables. But this is also true of literally every
other area we know of in the brain, including well-studied sensory areas like the
primary visual cortex. It’s no longer news when people find variable X encoded in
region Y-not-typically-associated-with-X.

Still, I can’t dismiss Everett’s claim that there is no language-specific brain area.
At this point, it’s hard to tell. The human brain is complicated, and there remains
much that we don’t understand.

Overall, Everett tells a fascinatingly wide-ranging and often persuasive story. If

you’re interested in what language is and how it works, you should read How
Language Began. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in there I haven’t talked about,
especially for someone unfamiliar with at least one of the areas Everett covers
(evolution, paleoanthropology, theoretical linguistics, neuroanatomy, …).
Especially fun are the chapters on aspects of language I don’t hear people talk
about as much, like gestures and intonation.

As I’ve tried to convey, Everett is well-qualified to write something like this, and
has been thinking about these topics for a long time. He’s the kind of linguist
most linguists wish they could be, and he’s worth taking seriously, even if you
don’t agree with everything he says.

V. THE REVELATIONS
I want to talk about large language models now. Sorry. But you know I had to do
this.

Less than two years ago at the time of writing, the shocking successes of
ChatGPT put many commentators in an awkward position. Beyond all the
quibbling about details (Does ChatGPT really understand? Doesn’t it fail at many
tasks trivial for humans? Could ChatGPT or something like it be conscious?), the
brute empirical fact remains that it can handle language comprehension and
:
 generation pretty well. And this is despite the conception of language underlying
it—language use as a statistical learning problem, with no sentence diagrams or
grammatical transformations in sight—being somewhat antithetical to the
Chomskyan worldview.

Chomsky has frequently criticized the statistical learning tradition, with his main
criticisms seeming to be that (i) statistical learning produces systems with serious
defects, and (ii) succeeding at engineering problems does not tell us anything
interesting about how the human brain handles language. These are reasonable
criticisms, but I think they are essentially wrong.

Statistical approaches succeeded where more directly-Chomsky-inspired

approaches failed, and it was never close. Large language models (LLMs) like
ChatGPT are not perfect, but they’re getting better all the time, and the onus is on
the critics to explain where they think the wall is. It’s conceivable that a
completely orthogonal system designed according to the principles of universal
grammar could outperform LLMs built according to the current paradigm—but
this possibility is becoming vanishingly unlikely.

Why do statistical learning systems handle language so well? If Everett is right,

the answer is in part because (i) training models on a large corpus of text and (ii)
providing human feedback both give models a rich collection of what is
essentially cultural information to draw upon. People like talking with ChatGPT not
just because it knows things, but because it can talk like them. And that is only
possible because, like humans, it has witnessed and learned from many, many,
many conversations between humans.

Statistical learning also allows these systems to appreciate context and reason
under uncertainty, at least to some extent, since both of these are crucial factors
in many of the conversations that appear in training data. These capabilities
would be extremely difficult to implement by hand, and it’s not clear how a more
Chomskyan approach would handle them, even if some kind of universal-
grammar-based latent model otherwise worked fairly well.
:
 Chomsky’s claim that engineering success does not necessarily produce
scientific insight is not uncommon, but a large literature speaks against it. And
funnily enough, given that he is ultimately interested in the mind, engineering
successes have provided some of our most powerful tools for interrogating what
the mind might look like.

The rub is that artificial systems engineered to perform some particular task well
are not black boxes; we can look inside them and tinker as we please. Studying
the internal representations and computations of such networks has provided
neuroscience with crucial insights in recent years, and such approaches are
particularly helpful given how costly neuroscience experiments (which might
involve, e.g., training animals and expensive recording equipment) can be. Lots of
recent computational neuroscience follows this blueprint: build a recurrent neural
network to solve a task neuroscientists study, train it somehow, then study its
internal representations to generate hypotheses about what the brain might be
doing.

In principle, (open-source) LLMs and their internal representations can be

interrogated in precisely the same way. I’m not sure what’s been done already, but
I’m confident that work along these lines will become more common in the near
future. Given that high-quality recordings of neural dynamics during natural
language use are hard to come by, studying LLMs might be essential for
understanding human-language-related neural computations.

When we peer inside language-competent LLMs, what will we find? This is a topic
Everett doesn’t have much to say about, and on which Chomsky might actually be
right. Whether we’re dealing with the brain or artificial networks, we can talk
about the same thing at many different levels of description. In the case of the
brain, we might talk in terms of interacting molecules, networks of electrically
active neurons, or very many other effective descriptions. In the case of artificial
networks, we can either talk about individual ‘neurons’, or some higher-level
description that better captures the essential character of the underlying
algorithm.
:
 Maybe LLMs, at least when trained on data from languages whose underlying
rules can be parsimoniously described using universal grammar, effectively
exploit sentence diagrams or construct recursive hierarchical representations of
sentences using an operation like Merge. It’s still possible that formalisms like
Chomsky’s provide a useful way of talking about what LLMs do, if anything like
that is true. Such descriptions might be said to capture the ‘mind’ of an LLM,
since from a physicalist perspective the ‘mind’ is just a useful way of talking about
a complex system of interacting neurons.

Regardless of who’s right and who’s wrong, the study language is certainly
interesting and we have a lot more to learn. Something Chomsky wrote in 1968
seems like an appropriate summary of the way forward: (Language and Mind, pg.
1)

I think there is more of a healthy ferment in cognitive psychology—and in the

particular branch of cognitive psychology known as linguistics—than there has
been for many years. And one of the most encouraging signs is that
skepticism with regard to the orthodoxies of the recent past is coupled with an
awareness of the temptations and dangers of premature orthodoxy, an
awareness that, if it can persist, may prevent the rise of new and stultifying
dogma.

It is easy to be misled in an assessment of the current scene; nevertheless, it

seems to me that the decline of dogmatism and the accompanying search for
new approaches to old and often still intractable problems are quite
unmistakable, not only in linguistics but in all of the disciplines concerned with
the study of mind.

1 Chomsky 1991b refers to “Linguistics and adjacent fields: a personal view”, a chapter
of The Chomskyan Turn. I couldn’t access the original text, so this quote-of-a-quote
will have to do.
:
 2 Chomsky’s domination of linguistics is probably due to a combination of factors.
First, he is indeed brilliant and prolific. Second, Chomsky’s theories promised to
‘unify’ linguistics and make it more like physics and other ‘serious’ sciences; for
messy fields like linguistics, I assume this promise is extremely appealing. Third, he
helped create and successfully exploited the cognitive zeitgeist that for the first time
portrayed the mind as something that can be scientifically studied in the same way
that atoms and cells can. Moreover, he was one of the first to make interesting
connections between our burgeoning understanding of fields like molecular biology
and neuroscience on the one hand, and language on the other. Fourth, Chomsky was
not afraid to get into fights, which can be beneficial if you usually win.

3 One such sound is the bilabial trill, which kind of sounds like blowing a raspberry.

4 This reminds me of a math joke.

5 Why is this vacuously true? If, given some particular notion of ‘sentence’, the
sentences of any language could only have one word at most, we would just define
some other notion of ‘word collections’.

6 He and archaeologist Lawrence Barham provide a more self-contained argument in

this 2020 paper.

7 A famous line at the beginning of Chomsky’s Aspects of the Theory of Syntax goes:
“Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a
completely homogeneous speech community, who knows its language perfectly and
is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations,
distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in
applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance.”

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Brett Reynolds English Sentence Structure Jul 19

See Pullum on how Everett has been treated https://youtu.be/06zefFkhuKI?

feature=shared&t=1962
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beowulf888 beowulf888 Jul 20

Thanks for that link. I never quite understood the distinctions (or non-
distinctions) between self-embedding and MERGE, but the intro explains it
rather well.
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Anlam Kuyusu Aug 4

Great video. Thanks for sharing.

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Whatever Happened to Anonymous Jul 19

Why does AI research have so many citations? Particularly when compared with
(other branches of?) Computer Science?
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TH Jul 19 · edited Jul 19

Yes, what is going on here? And not just AI research but Deep Learning in
particular (Bengio, Hinton). This area has now captured a significant majority of
researchers for all time?
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Alexander Kurz Alexander Kurz Jul 19

Because there are so many AI researchers. I wonder how the numbers would
look like if normalized by the size of respective research communities.
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 Kenny Easwaran Jul 21

In some of these cases it’s hard to say what “the research community” is. I
would have expected Marx to be higher, since the research community of
all Soviet scientists working on any subject was larger than any particular
modern research community.
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Alexander Kurz Alexander Kurz Jul 21

I agree. One could parameterize the normalized citation indeces by a

notion of community.
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The-Serene-Hudson-Bay Jul 19 · edited Jul 19

Maybe conducting AI research is less expensive because it's primarily digital.

In STEM or social sciences researchers have to interact with meat space. In
humanities here are no resource constraints so maybe artificial limits on
volume of published work is necessary to maintain prestige.
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Kenny Easwaran Jul 21

But humanities researchers publish *much* less than science and

engineering researchers (especially when measured by counting discrete
publications, as citation counts do, so that being cited by 10 articles of 6
pages each shows up more than being cited on every page of a 200 page
book), and there are far fewer humanities researchers than engineering
researchers.
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vv Victor’s Newsletter Jul 20

In part, the publishing conventions in AI (and adjacent fields) lean towards

producing a large number of small papers. That is, the papers per researcher is
very high, and the number of researchers is very high.
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delesley Jul 20

Because the number of researchers has exploded in the past 10 years, driven
by massive investment from industry, rather than academia. Big AI conferences
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 now get more than 10,000 submissions a year. Other areas of computer
science are primarily academic, and are at least two orders of magnitude
smaller.

Hinton's been around for a long time, but if you look at citations prior to 2014
or so, when neural nets were still mostly an academic curiosity, the number will
look much more reasonable.
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javiero Mangos or bananas Jul 20

I did a little experiment. I was browsing some of the papers that cite Chomsky's
most cited book, so I picked up one paragraph from the abstract of one of the
top results that Google Scholar produced, fed it to an AI chatbot (Grok) and
asked for reference suggestions:

"Based on the provided abstract and considering the context of attachment

theory, I can suggest several references that would be relevant to your
academic paper titled 'Patterns of Attachment: A Psychological Study of the
Strange Situation':"

It gave me 8 suggestions. Call me cynical, but I think AI researchers are

actively using AI to write their papers. A lot.
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beowulf888 beowulf888 Jul 20

Which begs the question: what percentage of the conclusions are

hallucinations (which I prefer to call bullshit)?
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MugaSofer Jul 21

Did it suggest any papers actually cited by the allegedly human author?
Were they even real papers (hallucinated citations are a real issue with
LLMs)?
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javiero Mangos or bananas Jul 21

5 out of 8 were actually cited by the human author of the book (it was
a book). Another one was the original book.
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 Arby Jul 21

because the papers are AI-generated? :-)

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Yanek Yuk Jul 30

Because it is industry backed there is constant publishing. See "Two Minute

Papers" in YouTube and you will see. There are always new techniques
published specifically by companies such as Nvidia or universities that are
backed by such companies in this specific area.
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Wasserschweinchen Jul 19

Pirahã is pronounced pretty close to [piɾahã]. Portuguese spelling is rather straight

forward.
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Tamritz Tamritz’s Newsletter Jul 19

There is a big difference between the small amount of language a baby hears when
learning to speak and the large amount of language artificial intelligence needs. It is
not clear that artificial intelligence disproves Chomsky's theories.
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B_Epstein Jul 20

A counter-argument to this “poverty of stimulus” line of thinking is that a baby

doesn’t get merely exposed to some words. It also gets a deluge of visual,
auditory, sensory etc. information, all perfectly synced, and _then_ it also gets
to actively explore and _then_ it also gets multi-faceted types of feedback
from the environment and from fellow humans. ML theory suggests that each
of these differences can matter quite a bit.

This, indeed, doesn’t disprove Chomsky- but it means the poverty of stimulus
argument is far from decisive, as the stimulus is not all that poor.
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Bugmaster Jul 20

I am guessing that the baby has most of the deep layers already hard-coded
(by evolution), and only requires some equivalent of a LoRA to get up to speed
in his native language. The LLM has to be taught from scratch.
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Tamritz Tamritz’s Newsletter Jul 20

Well that's Chomsky's theory. Language is hardcoded.

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Bugmaster Jul 20

No, not language itself (that'd be the LoRA), but rather the facility to
learn language (however that might function, which I suspect no one
knows).
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Matthias Görgens Jul 20 · edited Jul 20

Also keep in mind that human language itself evolved to be easy

to pick up by humans.

LLMs don't have that luxury: they need to learn a language that
evolved not for ease of understanding by them, but by some
aliens with completely different quirks in their underlying
systems.
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Bugmaster Jul 20

LLMs don't really have minds, though: they're just language-

learning machines. That's what makes them ultimately
unsuitable as the sole basis for AGIs.
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Matthias Görgens Jul 20

I fixed my comment to remove the unnecessary

mention of 'minds'. My point is independent of that
word.
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beowulf888 beowulf888 Jul 20

"Easy to pick up by humans" during a specific stage of brain

development. Much more onerous to pick up after the first
five years of life.
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Freedom Jul 22

Much less onerous? An adult dropped into a foreign

language community can pick up the language in
several months, not several years.
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beowulf888 beowulf888 Jul 20

Well, there's been a lot of handwaving and jumping up and down

by behavioral geneticists about the FOXP2 gene and language
acquisition in humans. And FOXP2 seems to play a role in song-
bird song acquisition. Although FOXP2 may help with the ability
to distinguish patterns in sound, it doesn't explain the
emergency of language in the brain.
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George Brotas Jul 22

Doesn't the ability to learn language statistically also need to be

literally hardcoded as the first step of making an LLM?
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beowulf888 beowulf888 Jul 23

Good question. Can anyone answer this?

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Laplace Jul 22

The human genome doesn't really have enough room to provide all that
much hard coding. The entire thing is a couple of gigabytes, and most of it
doesn't have anything to do with how particular synapses in the brain are
wired. You've got basic reflexes, the learning system for training up the
bulk of the mind mostly from scratch, and I'd guess not much else.

I suspect that human babies

1) Get a lot more training signal than just language. You've got to count all
the visual information, audio information, etc. as well. This data is probably
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 lower quality, but it still helps a lot.

2) Just have a more efficient architecture than transformers.

Since everyone's working on better architectures and better training

procedures, I'd guess the AIs will catch up and then surpass the data
efficiency of human brains not too long from now.
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Bugmaster Jul 22

Presumably the human genome still contains some kind of a language

learning bootstrapper, since human babies can easily learn at least
one language, whereas babies of other ape species cannot.
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Leppi Jul 22

I believe most human children can manage about three different

languages, at least if the parents are motivated to teach them.
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pozorvlak Jul 22

This is precisely the question, no? Whether humans have an

innate facility for language, or whether we cobble one together
out of other cognitive adaptations.
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Laplace Jul 22

Definitely. No problem fitting that into a couple of gigabytes.

But I expect that to be coding for a particular kind of brain

architecture/training signal/more neurons of a particular type.
Because those things probably don't require many bytes of
description.

Taking the example of LLMs, encoding the LLM architecture, loss

function and optimiser takes very little space. Whereas
pretrained weights for hard-coding a bunch of deep language
rules would take a lot of space, if our LLMs are any judge.
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 George Brotas Jul 22

Aren't you assuming a sort of 1 to 1 ratio between genotype and

phenotype? Just because computer programing basically has to work
that way most of the time (for the sake of our own sanity when going
through code, if nothing else), I don't see why nature should have to.
I'm not sure how ration works out in humans between pleiotropy,
polygenic traits, and regulatory elements, etc. but if the ratio worked
out in favor of low genotype/ high phenotype (which would make
some sense for natural selection purposes) then a few gigabytes
could actually hold quite a bit.
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Laplace Jul 22

Information isn't infinitely compressible. If there are x different

ways a brain can be (x different possible phenotypes), and if
genes were the sole determinator of which of the x different
brains you'd get, there'd need to be x different possible genome
settings. Otherwise not all x phenotypes could be realised.

And the point here is that x<<2^11, or ca. 3 gigabytes. And I think
that's likely not enough to encode all the possible different
pieces of deep language heuristics.

Now in reality, the genes don't actually need to encode the entire
blueprint for the language faculties. They just need to encode
some initial setup that will predictably become a language
faculty once the neural network starts training. This requires
much less description length. You just need to encode the right
optimiser and the right sort of architecture.

This suffices to explain why humans can learn language and

other animals mostly can't. It's not that the whole language
faculty is hard coded, the setup to be able to produce that
language faculty is. Same as how you're not going to get a good
language model out of a 2015 era MLP trained with the methods
of the time, while a modern transformer or mamba model does
great at it.

It can also explain why language faculties usually seem to be

encoded in similar brain regions in different humans, and work in
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roughly the same way. You don't actually need hard coding of the
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George Brotas Jul 23

"(x different possible phenotypes), and if genes were the

sole determinator of which of the x different brains you'd
get, there'd need to be x different possible genome
settings. Otherwise not all x phenotypes could be realised."

Not exactly, there is some variability introduced by the RNA

transcription process, from what I can gather. Therefore,
each combination of DNA could have more than one
phenotype (though the difference is likely to be small). The
big difference however is that DNA is quaternary storage not
binary like our computers. I'm not going to do the math right
now, but scientifically speaking, that's a metric fuck ton
more information that it can hold.
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Laplace Jul 24

'Not exactly, there is some variability introduced by the

RNA transcription process, from what I can gather.
Therefore, each combination of DNA could have more
than one phenotype'

This variability can't be used to encode the information

needed to specify a language faculty. Otherwise,
organisms with the same DNA (humans) would
sometimes come out having a language faculty, and
sometimes come out not having a language faculty. For
each bit that the transcription process contributes, the
number of humans that possess the hard coded
language abilities should be cut in half.

"The big difference however is that DNA is quaternary

storage not binary like our computers."

This is already taken into account in the 'couple of

gigabytes number I gave. Humans have ca. 3 billion
base pairs, each of which takes 2 bits to encode. That's
ca. 0.75 gigabytes total, I misremembered it to be a bit
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 more.And that's not even taking any further
compression into account, which would cut the actually
available storage down even further. And then most of
it is used to specify the rest of our bodies, rather than
our brain
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vindication Jul 21

I don't really understand why Chomsky is so opposed to it or why it would

disprove him. Statistical learning could just statistically learn grammar as well
as or better than an expicit encoding. I suspect he didn't understand machine
learning techniques and made some ill-considered comments, and his pride
won't let him back off of it.
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Chuck Umshen Jul 19

Just rowing in here with my usual comment that we have no idea if humans are the
only animals with language.
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 19

At some point, this becomes a matter of definition, but for most intents and
purposes, we kinda do. (My go-to book for this is Zorina & Smirnova's "What
speaking animals taught us", but it is in Russian.)
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Chuck Umshen Jul 20

It just seems astounding unlikely that we are so unique ... but if you have a
book with good arguments otherwise in a language I can read (just
English, sorry!) then I'll gladly read it
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 20

I mean, there's "Why Only Us?", obviously, but it is a bit too

condescending and abstract to my taste. Rumbaugh and Savage-
Rumbaugh (two different people!) have a number of works, but
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 probably on the more technical side. And Hockett (1966) is a classic.
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 20

Oh, and "Language Instinct" by Pinker, of course. Can't believe I

forgot that one.
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DanielLC Jul 21

We already know we're unique. We've built a giant civilization and all
sorts of crazy technology. Our uniqueness including our language
isn't that surprising.

That said, we also know we're not unique in terms of sheer brain
power. I don't know what pilot whales and the like need all that brain
power for, but it's at least plausible that they could use language.

Dolphins can at least understand basic syntax, in that they've been

taught a language where changing word order can change the
meaning.
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1123581321 Jul 20

We’re not. See, e.g., https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240709-the-sperm-

whale-phonetic-alphabet-revealed-by-ai

I’ve long suspected marine mammals are quite intelligent, and it’s a small leap
of imagination to think they have a language. Water is an excellent sound
conductor; natural underwater waveguides allow sound propagation for literally
thousands of miles. Perfect environment to develop a language.
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Kenny Easwaran Jul 21

This is very far from a proof that whale communication is language. I think
it’s absolutely right to remain open-minded about whether whale
communication is or isn’t like human language in whatever sense you
mean. There might be a few bird species whose communication is
possibly like human language.

But “using AI to identify a ‘phonetic inventory’ of codas” is very far from

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 showing that this is language.
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1123581321 Jul 21

Did you read the whole piece? Where, for example, the researchers
describe “[…]the sperm whale "phonemes" could be used in a
combinatorial fashion, allowing the whales to construct a vast
repertoire of distinct vocalisations. The existence of a combinatorial
coding system, write the report authors, is a prerequisite for "duality
of patterning" – a linguistic phenomenon thought to be unique to
human language – in which meaningless elements combine to form
meaningful words.”

They are pretty far along the road toward “yes whales have a
language”. The help of machine learning pattern recognition is useful,
but far from the only thing pointing toward it.
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Kenny Easwaran Jul 22

I hadn’t read the whole article. I refuse on principle to read BBC

science articles, because they’re about as bad as they come with
sensationalizing things. But the actual Nature article is
interesting.

Here is the key chart, where they classify all 8000 or so codas in
their database on the combinatorial dimensions of rhythm,
tempo, and ornamentation:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-47221-8/figures/3

It’s interesting for sure, and seems like a breakthrough in

interpreting this communication. But this is very far from saying
that this is a language. It’s not possible to show anything
significant about a claimed language if your database includes a
total of 8000 phonemes (the equivalent of about 1500 words)
across several dozen communicative exchanges.
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1123581321 Jul 22

Yeah I’m with you on science coverage, and not just BBC of
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 course. This one seems reasonable enough.

One thing to note: I remember reading somewhere that the

vocabulary of an English peasant in the Shakespearean
comprised only about 600 words, so the whales have at
least the same order of magnitude vocabulary. Sure we
don’t know much about their language - yet - but that’s just
a matter of time, IMHO.

Looking forward to someone dropping a hydrophone into

the ocean and having the first dialog with a whale!
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Kenny Easwaran Jul 23

Note - it's not that they have 600 distinct "words" - it's
that they have recordings of about "600 words" worth
of conversation total. In any human language, about a
hundred of those words would likely be repeats.

But also, I'm very skeptical of a claim that there have

been adult humans with a vocabulary of about 600
words. I could *maybe* believe 6,000. Here's a list that
claims to be the 1,000 most common words in English
now: https://www.gonaturalenglish.com/1000-most-
common-words-in-the-english-language/

I could imagine a peasant from a few hundred years ago

might not know the following words from the first 500
on that list: school, state, student, country, American,
company, program, government, million, national,
business, issue, provide, political, include, community,
president, real, information, office, party, research,
education, policy, process, nation, college, experience,
former, development, economic, military, relationship,
federal.

But a peasant would surely know several dozen names

for animals and plants that aren't on that list, as well as
tools and actions to do with them, even ignoring
whatever religious and family vocabulary they might
have.
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George Brotas Jul 22

They can't mean phonemes in the same way that we mean

phonemes when we talk about human languages, can they?
Because if so, 8000 phonemes would be massive, right?
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Kenny Easwaran Jul 23

No, there are 21 distinct coda-types - they have

recordings of 8000 coda-tokens. It's like they have
recordings of a few dozen people each saying a few
words to each other in a language like Japanese, that
has about 20 distinct phonemes. Definitely not enough
to prove it's a language, but maybe enough to get its
phoneme inventory if they're right.
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vindication Jul 21

I feel that is incredibly dependent on the definition of language. Chomsky's

definition seems incredibly ridged, as is common in foundational research. "A
structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary"
is true of various bird songs. The objection then becomes that grammar is
more than just structure but a structure of a certain complexity defined to
separate human language from other animals, which seems very post-hoc to
me.
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Jeffrey Soreff Jul 21

>The objection then becomes that grammar is more than just structure
but a structure of a certain complexity defined to separate human
language from other animals, which seems very post-hoc to me.

You have a good point, but there are fairly obvious measures of the
complexity of human language which I'd be surprised to see any other
animal's language reach.
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 For instance, human sentences are sufficiently varied that, barring quotes,
repeated sentences (except exceedingly short ones, "Damn!" is common)
are rare. Does any other animal match this? This doesn't require any
specific properties of the language's syntax.
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Kenny Easwaran Jul 22

The simplest and most distinctive features of language:

A very large fraction of utterances (e.g. sentences) are novel

combinations of existing elements

The patterns by which these elements are combined are recursive (e.g.,
any two sentences can be combined with “and”, noun phrases can
combine with a preposition to form a modifier within a bigger noun
phrase).
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diddly diddly links Jul 19

Does anyone know what the Chomsky followers would say about the recent findings
that non-human animals (a large number of them) clearly have methods of
communication?
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Callum Hackett The Great Exhibition Jul 19

I'm not sure what important recent findings you're referring to; the fact of non-
human communication is ancient knowledge. What Chomskyans would say is
that human language is evolutionarily discontinuous (it is not an outgrowth of
the same phenomenon in other species) because there are categorical
differences. Nonhuman communication systems are syntactically basic
(certainly non-recursive), goal-orientated, lack reference, conceptual labelling,
symbol arbitrariness and so on. Claims to the contrary based on e.g. training
apes to sign have always anthropomorphised the data and there is not wide
acceptance that any species has demonstrated human-like capabilities.
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 19

Confirmed by a Chomskyan (me!). Also, note that language is not a tool

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 for communication, that function is secondary and forced (see the quote
in the beginning of the article), it is originally a tool for structuring thought.
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Ryan L Jul 19

"language is not a tool for communication, that function is secondary

and forced (see the quote in the beginning of the article), it is
originally a tool for structuring thought"

Can you summarize, for a complete lay person in this area, what the
evidence is to support this claim?
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 19

Multiple homonymies, synonymies, and other inconsistencies

between the likely syntax (and semantics, which is read off
syntax in a not-quite-trivial way) of sentences and their observed
morphophonologies.
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Ryan L Jul 19

Sorry...more lay-persony, please?

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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 19

Yeah, got too jargony there for a second (although that

itself is a good illustration!). Like, take the "I saw a girl
with a telescope" example above. It has a structural
ambiguity (do you first join "girl" with "with a
telescope" or "a girl" with "saw") _and_ a lexical
ambiguity between instrumental and comitative (in
Russian, for instance, these meanings are expressed
differently). You can also show each of the homonymies
separately. We think hierarchically and only then try to
push that hierarchy into a linear sequence (a sentence);
and, to add insult to injury, our lexical system is also
ripe with various meaning switches (metonymies,
metaphors, and so on): "I saw a mouse" is ambiguous
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 between a computer gadget and a small animal, and it
persists despite us usually not noticing a similarity
between the two (although it is, of course, originally, a
metonymy on visual similarity).

There's an often-found claim that most homonymies

are not a problem in real speech (the one
@jumpingjacksplash begins with below), but there
remainfull
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jumpingjacksplash Jul 19

Wait, the argument is that when I'd never get confused

saying "witch/which" whether I mean "sorceress" or "that,"
but someone listening to me might? That's faintly
interesting, but it's a feature of toy systems which aren't
remotely for the purpose of thought.

For example, imagine two ships communicating with flag

signals, but with a system where letters and concepts use
the same flags and you have to guess what the other person
means. The crew of ship one try to write "halt," but the flags
for H=Denmark, A=Collision, L=Rock and T=West. The crew
of ship two thinks a Danish ship has hit a rock west of them
and sails off in that direction.

The real evolutionary pattern of language must be

something like: 1. Simple sounds to indicate things; 2. more
complex sounds to convey relations that can be thought
non-linguistically (eg. this rock is on top of that rock; 3. the
possibility of having thoughts that couldn't be expressed
non-linguistically due to thinking in language (eg. "language
is ontologically prior to thought"). 4. The utility of non-
linguistic thoughts by allowing complex social co-ordination
(e.g. "Obey the king of Uruk or face the wrath of Marduk").
This then just comes back to Wittgenstein's point that
sentences of type 3 are basically the equivalent of
"colourless green ideas sleep furiously" so far as external
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Matthias Görgens Jul 20

That's the best evidence?

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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 20

That's the evidence that's easiest to explain in non-

technical terms (not that the comment you replied
initially succeeded in it). But yeah, the main thrust of
the argument is along the lines of "we see a bunch of
people hammering nails with microscopes, but the
microscopes' internal structure suggests it wasn't
made for hammering".
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Ryan L Jul 19

How would you respond to this?

https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/3yrw2i/i_never_thought_with
_language_until_now_this_is/

(I originally came across it in Scott's review of "Origin of

Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind")

The person who wrote that claims that they used language to
communicate but not to think. I realize it's one, self-reported Reddit
post, so not exactly high-quality data, but I wonder if there are other
claims like this, and if they have been investigated by linguists?
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 19

There are other claims like this, and they are true at some level
and false at another. We often indeed don't think in language in
the sense of "build a sentence, up to and including how it
sounds/what the articulatory commands are" (the
acoustic/articulatory debate is its own bag of worms), but the
idea is that to formulate _complex_ thoughts specifically, we use
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 a method to chain thoughts which is so similar to syntax it
probably _is_ syntax, even if it never gets sent to the systems of
articulation ("is never sent to spell-out", in jargon-y terms). Note
how using language was tremendously helpful for the guy,
because it helped organize thought.
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Ryan L Jul 19

I think I read that post differently than you. He seems to be

claiming that he didn't have complex thoughts before he
started thinking articulatory in language, e.g.

"I can only describe my past life as

...."Mindless"..."empty"....."soul-less".... As weird as this
sounds, I'm not even sure what I was, If i was even human,
because I was barely even conscious. I felt like I was just
reacting to the immediate environment and wasn't able to
think anything outside of it."

So we seem to have a case where language was used

exclusively for communication, and not at all for thought.
Doesn't this contradict the claim that language is primarily
used for thought, with communication being secondary?
REPLY (2) SHARE

Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 19

Imagine you have a microscope and use it as a hammer.

Doesn't this contradict the claim that the primary use of
microscope, as evidenced by its structure, is for
something else than hammering in nails?
REPLY (2) SHARE

Continue Thread →

The original Mr. X Jul 21

<i>I can only describe my past life as

...."Mindless"..."empty"....."soul-less".... As weird as this
sounds, I'm not even sure what I was, If i was even
human, because I was barely even conscious.</i>
:
 Huh, maybe p-zombies aren't such an outlandish idea
after all.

Also, I wonder if this kind of testimony might be useful

in studying how animals experience the world.
Obviously there are many more differences between
humans and other kinds of animal than just thinking
with language, but still, this might be the closest we
can get to answering the question, "What's it like to be
a bat?"
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Tyler Black Jul 20

Also this woman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=u69YSh-cFXY

Not sure you can readily describe her as chaining thoughts

together using something like syntax.
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 20

An interesting question, but, to be fair, other

explanations are available. (Is she able to imagine to
raise her hand without raising her hand, I wonder?)
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Jeffrey Soreff Jul 20

>We often indeed don't think in language in the sense of

"build a sentence, up to and including how it sounds/what
the articulatory commands are" (the acoustic/articulatory
debate is its own bag of worms), but the idea is that to
formulate complex thoughts specifically, we use a method
to chain thoughts which is so similar to syntax it probably is
syntax, even if it never gets sent to the systems of
articulation ("is never sent to spell-out", in jargon-y terms).

At the very least, some thinking can also be geometrical

rather than syntactic. Visualizing a part dangling from a
flexible support and envisioning where its center of gravity
:
 will be and how it will be oriented is a complex operation,
but it certainly doesn't feel linguistic to me.
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luciaphile Jul 20

This reminds me of the other day I was rolling out a pie

crust. The instructions said to roll out the size of a
sheet of notepaper. (In fairness to the recipe writer, I
had misread and this step was not the final step; rather
she wanted us to roll this shape prior to doing several
folds for flakiness.)

But the point is, I kept trying to do this shape, which

was also hard and impossible for me because I was
making only a small pie in an 8 inch pan so didn’t have
the full amount to make a notebook-paper sized
rectangle. Poor reasoning on my part.

Throughout this process my brain vexingly kept flashing

in my head a *picture* of the round tin, as if to say,
you’re on the wrong track, old girl. Can’t emphasize
enough this was a picture only, that I had to keep
suppressing: “She said notebook paper! She said
rectangle!”
Expand full comment

REPLY (2) SHARE

Continue Thread →

Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 20

It's _complicated_, but I am not sure that when

laypeople (not physicists who learned advanced ways
of modeling such things through, well, language) do it,
it is _complex_ in the sense of explicitly manipulating
multiple parts of the system.
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Continue Thread →

Francis Irving Jul 20 · edited Jul 20

Inner mental experience is far richer than that - this is a

:
 massively under-researched and under-discussed topic in
our society. The best detailed research into it is by Hurlburt
using a technique called Descriptive Experience Sampling.

I recommend this paper:

https://hurlburt.faculty.unlv.edu/heavey-hurlburt-2008.pdf

One result he found is that most people often think in rich

unsymbolized concepts - I do this myself, and I often don't
*have* words for the concepts. I have to invent language, or
spend a long time crafting it to turn the thoughts into words.
This to me makes it pretty clear my underlying mind isn't
primarily linguistic

(I use inner speech a lot too, and it is very useful for certain
kinds of thought. It is but one modality of thought.)

Similarly, lots of people think mainly with images, or mainly

with emotions. Others are mainly paying detailed attention
to sensations, or have no focussed inner mental experience
at all.

There's a phenomena Hurlburt found which the complex

chained thoughts you describe reminds me of, where people
can have "wordless speech". This has the cadence and
rhythym of a sentence, but with concepts in the awreness
Expand full comment
instead of linguistic words.
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 20

So, there are several things to unpack here.

First,

> This has the cadence and rhythym of a sentence, but

with concepts in the awreness instead of linguistic
words.

is indeed prima facie evidence for, not against, "to

formulate _complex_ thoughts specifically, we use a
method to chain thoughts which is so similar to syntax
it probably _is_ syntax, even if it never gets sent to the
systems of articulation". It is just a specific case where
:
 you don't send it to the systems of articulation because
the specific terminal nodes correspond to concepts
which don't have a phonological word to them.
(Compare a situation when you're bilingual and know a
word for the concept you need in one language but not
in the other.)

Second,

> Similarly, lots of people think mainly with images, or

mainly with emotions. Others are mainly paying detailed
attention to sensations, or have no focussed inner
mental experience at all.

Indeed, there are many non-linguistic ways of thought;

Expand full comment
the question is, though, whether any of them are
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Continue Thread →

Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 19

Comparison to aphantasia in the comments, while overreaching

in saying it is literally the same (it isn't), is interesting.
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Xpym Jul 20

Do Chomskyans equate "language" and "abstract thought" when

they say things like this? Seems like some of this conflict could be
definitional.
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 20

Some of the conflict is definitely definitional, but not all of it.

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beowulf888 beowulf888 Jul 20 · edited Jul 20

What is the Chomskyan response to Evelina Fedorenko's work that

suggests that even when the language systems in adult brains are
damaged, their other cognitive functions remain intact? For example,
people with global aphasia can still engage in complex causal
:
 reasoning tasks such as solving arithmetic problems and reasoning
about others' intentions.

From my own experience, I mostly think without using language (i.e.

talking to myself). It's only when I have to break down complex tasks
into logical subunits that I begin to talk to myself about what I'm
doing (but that's mostly a placeholder narrative — "e.g. this is the
screw that I need to insert here, after I get this thingy lined up with
the thingamajig." Also when I need to write, I'll start thinking in
language. So, I'll grant you, language is necessary for structuring
thought that leads to communication with others, but I don't think it's
integral to reasoning. I'm pretty sure I could get the screw into the
thingy and thingamajig without overtly describing the process to
myself.
Expand full comment

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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 20

Aphasias are a prime proof of linguistic module's separateness,

so this is a very important question indeed. The problem is, there
are at least six different kinds of aphasias (Luria's classification),
and none of them looks like "break the syntactic module".
Broca's aphasia (in Luria's terminology, efferent motor aphasia)
is pretty clearly "broken PF" (syntax-phonology interface),
Vernike's aphasia (don't remember the Luria name for it) is pretty
clearly "broken LF", some others are way more specific (there is,
for instance, an aphasia that specifically targets multivalent
concepts like "under").
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Ryan L Jul 19

Maybe he's referring to this?

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-024-02420-w.epdf
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diddly diddly links Jul 20

Yes, and the whales. Thank you.

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:
 Kenny Easwaran Jul 21

Name-like calls are not sentences with grammatical structure. They

don’t imply recursion or an infinitude of possible utterances with a
finite vocabulary.
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FLWAB Flying Lion With A Book Jul 20

They may communicate, but they don't seem to do language well. All the ape-
language studies from the 70s and 80s failed miserably (the most famous of
these research projects, Coco the gorilla, made a good mascot but terrible
science, particularly as the researcher refused to share or release unedited
video of Coco communicating). It seems like even smart animals, like chimps,
can't grok language the way humans can.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-origin-words/201910/why-
chimpanzees-cant-learn-language-1
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diddly diddly links Jul 20

Thank you, this is very informative. I'm thinking about results from whales
and elephants. Do you have thoughts on whether this counts as
"language" from a Chomskian view?

Here's a link from Ryan L about the elephants:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-024-02420-w.epdf

There's a lab at MIT(?) working on the whale translation.

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FLWAB Flying Lion With A Book Jul 20

I don't know Chomsky well enough to comment. My only insight is

that laymen (such as myself) often think that language is simpler and
easier than it is, so much so that we are impressed by chimps that
seem like they can do sign language, or elephants that seem like they
have names for each other. There really does seem to be a huge gulf
in capability between humans and all other animals when it comes to
language.
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:
 Jeffrey Soreff Jul 20

>There really does seem to be a huge gulf in capability between

humans and all other animals when it comes to language.

Agreed. From the point of view of resolving how language

actually evolved, it is a pity that all of our fellow Hominini except
the chimps and the bonobos are extinct. At least the hyoid bones
can fossilize, consonants and vowels, not so much... I'm
skeptical that we will ever really know.
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 20

Yeah, that is broadly correct.

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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 20

It doesn't. Symbolic thinking may be one of the many prerequisites,

but it doesn't have the, you know, grammar prerequisite.
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Kenny Easwaran Jul 21

Having a name for each elephant that they use to get each other’s
attention is more sophisticated than a finite list of alarm calls, but it
does not mean that there is productive recombination of utterances
to express novel meanings. One of the major features of language is
that you can (largely) understand novel expressions that you have
never heard before, and the limitations on your understanding aren’t
due to the novelty, but due to inherent uncertainties of context and
intention.
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Bldysabba Jul 20

They can't grok human language the way humans can. I don't understand
why this is sufficient to decide that they can't grok language? Surely one
would need to study how they communicate with each other to decide
that?
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:
 Kenny Easwaran Jul 21

We need to study the ways they communicate to decide that. There

are many animals whose communication systems have been studied
sufficiently to be sure that they don’t have the complex structure of
human language. This is true for dogs, cats, primates, many birds,
and many other animals. I think there are some animals whose
communication system is complex enough that we know we haven’t
yet understood it, so that we can’t be sure it’s not like human
language. This is true for some whales, elephants, some birds, and
some cephalopods. None of these has been shown to be as complex
as human language, but they haven’t been shown not to be either.
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mst Jul 19

One interesting note: apparently Ken Hale, late well respected field linguist who did
a lot of work on the Australian language Walpiri among many other things,
uncontroversially described Walpiri and some other Australian indigenous
languages as lacking clausal embedding in the 70s. This Language Log blog post
(http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004592.html) muses on
various possible reasons this basically went unnoticed whereas Everett immediately
got in an academic flamewar, but the main reason seems to have basically been
that recursion hadn't been proposed as a linguistic universal until the introduction
of Chomsky's Minimalist Program in 1995, earlier Chomskyan models of universal
grammar did not include it.

So the idea that this may not even be unique to Pirahã seems like an important
counterpoint to some claims I've seen that Pirahã in fact probably does have
syntactic recursion and the real problem is that its sole expert isn't describing the
language correctly. I've seen Everett comment somewhere that a problem may be
that field linguists are essentially trained to fit grammar into a certain framework
and so may be trying to square peg a round theoretical hole (as he himself says he
did in his original PhD thesis description of Pirahã), thus failing to properly
document the true linguistic diversity that really exists in the world.

Disclaimer that I don't have any expert understanding of the technical issue here,
just a longstanding hobbyist fascination with linguistics. I acknowledge that my
amateur understanding is causing me to miss something important here. But overall
my reactions to the Chomskyan team response to this, where Everett is probably
:
 wrong but even if he's right it actually doesn't matter for his theory, strikes me
Expand full comment
similarly to you: it feels like dragging a major hypothesis into an unfalsifiable
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 19

Uh-huh, the so-called non-configurational language hypothesis. See

https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~jlegate/main.pdf.
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Sam Atman Curses and Honours Jul 19

The claim that all human languages have sentences containing more than one word
isn’t vacuously true, it’s profoundly true. Just compare this fact with the norm in the
communications of other species. No equivalent of “the [color] bird” is known in
how any other species communicates. That, is Merge.
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 19

The claim _is_ profoundly true, but note the dolphin comment above.
REPLY (1) SHARE

Lance S. Bush Lance Independent Jul 19

What's profound about it?

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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 19

Communicating in something composed of parts with their own

semantic effect (like, "dog" in "A dog came" has a meaning but "g"
doesn't; these parts are normally called morphemes but layman
explanations often default to "words" because it's simpler) is _not_
trivial, most animal communication systems don't have morphemes.
Of those that do, seemingly none except humans and apes trained by
humans are in the primate tree.
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Lance S. Bush Lance Independent Jul 19

Does, as the author of the article suggest, this mean that any
language that has more than one word thereby has recursion?
:
 REPLY (1) SHARE

Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 19

Interestingly, no! We know the answer from ontogenesis

(children development). There are three prolonged stages in
humans: one-word, two-word (the involved words are short
and probably analyzed as monomorphemic by the child, so
ignore the word/morpheme angle), and then the so-called
"grammatical explosion" where the child rapidly builds more
and more complex structures. So, to answer the question in
a pithy way, two doesn't make recursion (you can combine,
but you can't use the combined thing as the input to the
next combination, which is where recursion kicks in), but
three does.

And see the dolphinspeak comment above on the linearly

recursive vs. hierarchically recursive difference.
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Lance S. Bush Lance Independent Jul 19

Okay, thanks for clarifying.

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Chastity 2 Cradle 2 Grave Jul 19

Prairie dogs communicate both the color and species of intruders.

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Sam Atman Curses and Honours Jul 20

You’re confusing a syntactic claim with a semantic claim. Which is funny in

context.
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Kenny Easwaran Jul 21

There’s a difference between obligatorily one-word utterances and a

possibility of two-word utterances. What I think is actually the interesting
difference though is the difference between utterances with a fixed upper
bound on length and utterances that can be in principle unbounded
(which even Everett says is true of Pirahã).
:
 REPLY SHARE

Cosimo Giusti Sópori Books Jul 19

Say what??

This has to be one of the most hilarious pots we've seen.

Watch out for Jesus! His Chomsky rating is off the charts.
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Cosimo Giusti Sópori Books Jul 19

Pots? No, I meant posts. Oops.

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Wanda Tinasky Jul 20

You can edit posts, you know.

REPLY (1) SHARE

Cosimo Giusti Sópori Books Jul 20

I've done editing in the past. I just can't remember how to do it.
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Wanda Tinasky Jul 20

Hit the "..." at the bottom right of your comment.

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Cosimo Giusti Sópori Books Jul 20

Thanks. It's always something simple, isn't it.

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AC Baseline Visuals Jul 19

LLMs pick up language in super interesting ways, for example (for any of my
Hinglish speakers out there), try asking ChatGPT:

"Kya aap mere se aise baat kar sakte ho?"

The answer I got:

"Bilkul, main aapse Hindi mein baat kar sakta hoon. Aapko kis cheez ki madad
chahiye?"
:
 REPLY (3) SHARE

Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 19

LLMs' way of picking language is interesting but certainly different from

humans', both because humans need less material and because they show
unexpected biases (for instance, non-conservative quantifiers are unlearnable
for human children of the critical age but not for LLMs; you can trivially teach
an LLM extraction from islands or binding violations; and so on and so forth).
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AC Baseline Visuals Jul 19

Could you explain binding violations?

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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 19

"Mary saw her" cannot mean "Mary saw herself".

"Mary wrote a letter to her" cannot mean "Mary wrote a letter to

herself".

"Mary saw a snake in front of her" _can_ mean "Mary saw a snake in
front of herself".

And, finally, "Mary knows that Penny saw herself" cannot mean "Mary
knows that Penny saw her" (and vice versa, but the vice versa is
uninteresting because it's the same as the first).

There are very pecuilar and technical laws surrounding both when a
reflexive _can_ appear and when it _must_ appear.
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AC Baseline Visuals Jul 19

Oh, super interesting. Thanks!

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Wanda Tinasky Jul 20 · edited Jul 20

>"Mary wrote a letter to her" cannot mean "Mary wrote a letter

to herself".

Is that strictly true? What about this: "Mary reflected on the

:
 woman that she hoped she would become. Mary wrote a letter to
her."

Is there some technical linguistic sense in which she's not writing

a letter to herself? Is metaphorical meaning considered out-of-
scope for linguistics? If so, how is that rigorously defined?
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 20

There is a purely technical linguistic sense in which she isn't

writing a letter to herself, yes. The antecedent, to use a
technical term, of the pronoun "her" is "the woman that she
hoped she would become", which is a different phrase than
"Mary" and, again, in a technical sense, we know it not to be
co-indexed with Mary because the first sentence is possible
(cf. #"Mary reflected on her"). The first sentence
establishes the two women as different objects for the
purposes of binidng theory.
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B_Epstein Jul 20

This may not be all that rigorous and obligatory.

Consider Earendil's poem:

In panoply of ancient kings

In chained rings *he armoured him*.

Fairly clearly, "he" and "him" both refer to Earendil. And

the author knew something about the rules of the
English language :)
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Continue Thread →

Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 20 · edited Jul 20

To take a different example, note how "Joe Biden reflected

on the president of the United States" is an infelicitous
sentence if it happens now but would be felicitous if it
happened four years ago.
:
 REPLY SHARE

Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 19

(Note that nobody explicitly teaches children the laws, and, judging
by CHILDES corpora, they don't get enough data to arrive at the very
generalizations they tend to arrive at.)
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immergence Jul 19

Oh wow, ChatGPT does not realize that this is written using the Latin script.
After directly asking it, it says it's written in Devanagari.

Is that what you meant with this example? I do not speak Hindi
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AC Baseline Visuals Jul 19

Sorry, should've been clearer! I've written Hindi words in English, and
ChatGPT is responding in Hindi written in English after "recognizing" that
that's what I'm doing. Its ability to mimic that form of Hindi is what I was
trying to highlight.
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Cremazie Jul 20

This is kind of a side rant but - I don't think this should be so

surprising. As far as I can tell, there's sort of a "script is a
transliteration with an army and navy" situation going on with
romanized Hindi. It's pretty standardized and extremely commonly
used, and it's mostly political and historical reasons that keep it from
being recognized as a "real" script for the language. ChatGPT had
plenty of examples to learn from online and no real reason not to
learn it.
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Jake Jul 20

Also note though that you can converse in any number of

encoding mechanisms, such as rot13, or, pig-latin, etc ... The
patterns that have been learned aren't just at the level of specific
:
 examples but also at various levels of representation between
the representational, syntactic and semantic.
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skaladom Jul 21

When LLMs were young I remember someone using base64

encoding as a way to bypass moderation filters.
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AC Baseline Visuals Jul 21

This makes sense to me – would be curious if it can similarly

anglicize other languages that are less commonly anglicized.
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immergence Jul 25

Yeah it really shouldn't be surprising. What surprised me is that I

followed up and chatgpt apparently has a hard time recognizing
that the writing system is not the usual one and says it's writing
Devanagari
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Quiop Wrong on the Internet Jul 20 · edited Jul 20

ChatGPT(-4o) can do much more impressive stuff than that with transliterated
language. Try asking it novel questions in romanized Hindi, or in English
transliterated into devanagari. (e.g. "Who was Prime Minister of Australia on
the day Björn Þórðarson became Prime Minister of Iceland?") I can't say for
sure whether it will be able to handle these sorts of questions using romanized
Hindi or devanagari English, but it seems to do pretty well when I ask questions
in katakana English or romanized Japanese.

Somewhat weirdly, it answers romanized Japanese questions in romanized

Japanese, but it answers katakana English in straight Japanese. (This
behaviour is slightly different from what happens with GPT-3.5, which seems to
have trouble recognizing katakana English as English, and responds to
romanized Japanese in English rather than romanized Japanese.) I don't know
exactly what is going on here.
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:
 Kenny Easwaran Jul 21

My tentative conjecture right now is that it reads katakana English as

borrowings into Japanese that it hasn’t seen yet (because the rate of
novel English borrowing into Japanese is very high in recent texts) while it
reads romanized Japanese as Japanese, because there is more use of
romanized Japanese by actual Japanese speakers than there is novel
borrowing of Japanese into English.
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Quiop Wrong on the Internet Jul 21

I don't think there is enough romanized Japanese produced by native

Japanese speakers to train an LLM effectively. I think it's more likely
is that the GPT researchers generated the data artificially by
converting their entire Japanese-language corpus into romaji and
feeding that in as additional training data.

Your explanation for the Japanese responses to katakana English

seems plausible, but I'm still surprised at how well it handles these
questions. It gives convincing answers to:

"If John is standing to the right of Jane, who is standing to the left of
Jane?"

"Which game is easier to play: checkers or chess?"

"Do Australian Rules football players swim better than Canadian

hockey players?"

"Who was Taoiseach of Ireland during the time when John Major was
Prime Minister?"

After numerous attempts, I finally managed to confuse it by asking:

"During the prime ministership that followed the prime ministership of

Tony Blair, which Taoiseach of Ireland finished his term of office?"

Even here, ChatGPT gets the answer right at least some of the time.
But the answers seem inconsistent across separate chat sessions. It
has no problem naming Gordon Brown as the next PM after Blair, but
gets confused trying to make the connection to Ireland. Sometimes it
Expand full comment
correctly answers "Bernie Ahern"; sometimes it names Brian Cowen
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:
 Callum Hackett The Great Exhibition Jul 19

I think this is a shallow take on a complex field. I appreciated that it's well-
researched but the sources have not been well understood, though admittedly the
review is from a non-linguist, and admittedly the discourse in the research literature
is often unprofessional and opaque.

The objections raised against Chomsky's research program are mostly intuitive and
therefore trivial - most were dealt with in the 1950s rejection of structuralism and
behaviorism (which is foundational to almost all of cognitive science, which is why
Chomsky is hugely cited and not as controversial as this makes out), while others
betray a misunderstanding of what generative linguistics studies (this is a
consequence of 'language' itself acceptably meaning many things to many people,
though the review didn't adequately tease these meanings apart).

If anyone is interested to learn about the Chomskyan approach in an informed way, I

would highly recommend exploring Norbert Hornstein's Faculty of Language blog.
It's now no longer active but it is a treasure trove of explanation that helped me
immensely when I was a graduate student trying to make sense of all this.
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LearnsHebrewHatesIP Jul 19

If the Chomskyan paradigm is so uncontroversial and secure, why the profound

insecurity and un-science-like nature of the Chomskyan camp response to
Everett? One or two or ten thin-skinned scientists would be expected and not a
big deal, but why does Everett's claim ruffle feathers so universally?
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Callum Hackett The Great Exhibition Jul 19

The field is large and most working Chomskyan linguists have zero interest
in Everett, which exactly matches the expectation that a secure field
would not take note of him. Popular understanding of his impact is
overestimated because media (even science media) loves drama.

The reason why those who do engage with Everett do so in unprofessional

ways (and I happily criticise them for not controlling themselves) is
because people like Everett rarely take on Chomsky's ideas as scientific
hypotheses; they also want to be iconoclasts and paradigm-shifters,
leading the charge against the big bad man who has hold of the field
because of politics or mysticism or some other conspiracy. It's unscientific
:
 because it's personal, not because Everett's analyses can't be trivially
dismissed.
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tup99 Jul 19

This review claims that several ideas of Chomskyan linguistics seem

obviously wrong. It would be very interesting to hear rebuttals to
those points from a Chomskyan linguist!
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 19

Hello there :)

I have already commented on "language isn't for

communication" angle and recursion angle in the other
comments. As for I-languages vs. E-languages, the "language is
a dialect with an army" problem of distinguishing whether two I-
languages belong to the same E-language or different ones as
well as most aspects of language (especially non-lexical ones)
being essentially in the brain and, importantly, out of conscious
control, should be sufficient.
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Catmint Jul 23

Deciding which are dialects and which are separate

languages can be done the same way biologists decide the
boundaries of genus, species, and subspecies: messily and
with much arguing. Or perhaps biologists should just take
the simpler route and declare every organism a unique
species, save a lot of effort that way.
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 24 · edited Jul 24

Yeah, the species debates are a very good analogy, and

species is much less well-defined than population,
making it a not too useful notion. (The analogue of
population would be a dialect of a tight-knit community;
of course, linguistic communities are generally more
:
 permeable than populations.) There is one benefit
though for biologists: they are not generally under
siege from nationalists to declare certain populations
parts of the same or of different species. Try telling
Arabs that Palestinian Arabic and Moroccan Arabic are
fourteen centuries of development apart, making them
more far from each other than Icelandic and Danish. Or,
conversely, that the differences between Danish and
Bokmål or between the four Yugoslavian literary
varieties (Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, Montenegran;
Slovenian and Macedonian are genuinely separate, but
Macedonian has its own problem of continuum with
western Bulgarian dialects) are laughably small and
don't count as languages by any linguistics-internal
criterion.
Expand full comment

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jumpingjacksplash Jul 19

Isn't, "your theory predicts always ¬X, look, I've found some X,"
basically how taking on a scientific hypothesis is meant to work?
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Callum Hackett The Great Exhibition Jul 19

Yes, I worded it imprecisely. Everett does do that, though he

doesn't stop where that would be sufficient. He embeds it in the
rest that I described, which is what baits bad behaviour.
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Lance S. Bush Lance Independent Jul 19

Baits bad behavior? It almost sounds like you're blaming

Everett for his critics being nasty to him. I also see a lot of
dubious psychologizing, suggesting that he's motivated by
a desire to be an iconoclast. You do that here when you say:

"they also want to be iconoclasts and paradigm-shifters,

leading the charge against the big bad man who has hold of
the field because of politics or mysticism or some other
conspiracy."
:
 ...this kind of psychologizing is part of the bad behavior and
unjustified nastiness directed at Everett, criticizing someone
based on speculative assertions about their motives. If
someone genuinely comes to hold iconoclastic views, they
have every business sharing those views with the broader
community. Maybe you've got the causality reversed here,
and are supposing a desire to be iconoclastic motivates
Everett's views, rather than Everett coming to those views
automatically making him an iconoclast regardless of
whether that's what he wanted? Why psychologize in this
way?
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Bldysabba Jul 20

Yeah, this poster starts as an attempt at calm and

mature dismissal and very quickly dissolves into thinly
veiled ad hominem.
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Dave Madeley Jul 19 · edited Jul 19

>I happily criticise them for not controlling themselves

For me a rancorous style is possible evidence of an idea which is

unparsimonious. It's not just about being rude in the abstract.
Maintaining belief in an unstable hypothesis is exhausting and people
resent having to explain themselves.
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Callum Hackett The Great Exhibition Jul 19

I agree. For me, this is why it's important that these people are a
small minority. In the wider context of quality research being
done in the field (imo), it makes more sense to conclude that
these people are a type who wilfully indulge in undignified
behaviour - I think there are people in lots of fields who have this
trait even when they are broadly right on the technical detail.
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:
 Dave Madeley Jul 19

Thanks for the reply. It’s the human condition for sure. I
don't have much stake in this, except we have a problem
with how 'elites' are viewed, and although a lot of that
discourse is toxic, I have some sympathy with this having
done a humanities degree and seeing what "cultural
marxism", for want of a better word, can do to the study of
beautiful things. Can it do the same thing to the true as to
the beautiful? Well here you have a Marxist who apparently
totally dominates an emerging science and his defenders
will go beyond the confines of typical academic discussion
to defend him and that raises my eyebrow, I suppose. A
person can be completely on top of the technical detail and
still be an ideologue. In fact that's mostly how the left has
come to dominate academia. But I'm getting into
unparsimonious
Expand ideas
full comment of my own!
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Wanda Tinasky Jul 20 · edited Jul 20

You elucidate something subtle and important here,

imo. I've always been puzzled by the fact that there's a
positive correlation between Marxism and IQ despite
the many obvious gaping flaws with Marx. My current
best guess is that the answer is that many academics
crave power and Marxism gives that to them. Marxism
elevates the central planner over the common person
and thus creates an implicit power structure in which
high-IQ academic types are singularly adapted to
thrive. "No no, the collective wisdom of the hoi polloi
inevitably leads to revolution so the best answer is to
let me order society for you." It's sort of a sad irony that
the post-structuralists never turned their tools on
themselves because that would have clearly revealed
how the structure of the ideology perfectly reflects the
megalomania of deflated narcissism that haunts
marginalized academics. "Sure you fools make your
money and ignore your intellectual superiors, but I'll
:
 show you! I'll turn the masses against you!"

What
Expandfield are you in?
full comment

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Lukas Finnveden Jul 21

> It's unscientific because it's personal, not because Everett's

analyses can't be trivially dismissed.

I'd appreciate an explanation (or a link to an explanation) of how

Everett's analyses can be trivially dismissed.
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Callum Hackett The Great Exhibition Jul 21

Here is an accessible article by a couple of researchers. The

dismissal is trivial because it turns on a definitional rather than an
empirical issue. https://inference-review.com/article/fiat-recursio
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Lukas Finnveden Jul 21 · edited Jul 21

Thanks!

To me, that article seems confused on the following point: It

insists that Chomsky wasn't talking about "recursion" in the
sense of "self-embedding", but was instead talking about
recursion in the following sense:

> In 1963, Chomsky wrote that his grammatical theory

expresses “the fact that … our [linguistic] process [is a]
recursive specification”9 and, in 1968, that a “generative
grammar recursively enumerates … sentences.”10 In 2000,
he noted that our linguistic knowledge is “a procedure that
enumerates an infinite class of expressions”11 and, in 2014,
that “we can think of recursion as [an] enumeration of a set
of discrete objects by a computable finitary procedure.”12

Presumably implying that _this_ sense isn't affected by

Everett's study of Piraha.

But I thought that Everett's claims, if true, suggested that

:
 Piraha might have a longest sentence, and thereby only a
finite set of sentences. And this would seem to contradict
this other sense of "recursion" that the article's authors
want the discussion to be about. (One of Chomsky's quotes
refers directly to infinity.)

-----------
Expand full comment
Seperately, there's another route of defense available, and
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Callum Hackett The Great Exhibition Jul 22 ·

edited Jul 22
I think you've somewhat missed why the recursive
operation is said to be innate. The prediction of UG is
not that every existing natural language will exhibit
surface properties that could only be described by
recursive enumeration, the prediction is that every
existing human (without disability) is capable at birth of
learning any of the class of possible natural languages
(impossible languages being conceivable languages
that no human could learn to speak naturally), and that
class includes languages that can only be described by
recursive enumeration. That property in turn is not a
cultural innovation, it's a cognitive computation. The
role of culture is to use or not use recursion; not to
invent it.

So long as we consider all humans at birth to be equally

capable of learning any natural language, theorists
must come to understand linguistic ability by looking at
the class of possible languages, and so particular data
from Piraha is not some kind of disproof, as the
requirements for UG are already established by other
languages. Everett would rather need to demonstrate
that children of Piraha descent cannot acquire e.g.
European languages, which is where the (I think crass)
accusations of culturally relative racism come from.
Expand full comment
It's a slightly coarse analogy but Everett's argument is
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:
 Continue Thread →

TGGP Jul 19

Did you actually read the linked reddit post? That was a Chomsky skeptic
who still thought Everett was unscientific. There isn't the necessary
connection between the things that you think there is.
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 19

...Have you heard of a guy called Fomenko and his "New Chronology"?
Most historians ignore him, but those who do very rarely pretend that this
is a respectable opponent.

Or take biologists' debates with creationists (fitting given Everett's

missionary history). To the extent they react to that, it is an inherently
undignifying thing to have to react to something like this, with obvious
consequences to behavior.

Nevins feels (correctly, in my view, although I wouldn't even waste time on

Everett personally) that is the proper comparison, not your garden variety
"we have a disagreement".
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Sokow Jul 20

It is trivial to build a case against young earth creationists and people

of that sort. If you want to compare them to Everett, it should
therefore be pretty trivial to disprove his point about recursion and
pirahas.

I must admit I am very suspicious of the response to an article stating

that "Chomski is the caliph of linguistics" being "the caliph does not
need to respond to every beggar in the street". Especially when the
beggar in question seems to have done groundwork in a way the
Caliph did not
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 20

Nevins et al did respond. Hell, the guy also, independently got a

whole issue of a journal discussing whether the claims on Piraha
:
 have any merit. Chomsky is not the one and only caliph precisely
because he doesn't need to personally fight every battle,
Chomskyan linguistics is a whole field.

The disproval of Fomenko (done, incidentally, by a linguist,

Andrey Zaliznyak) was somewhat technical and took some fifty-
ish pages. But it was "in the predictable direction". For me, the
points by Everett are in the same bizarre category, and yet a
formal disproval does take a bit longer than for young-earth
creationists. It is no less damning for its being longer and more
technical.
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Lance S. Bush Lance Independent Jul 20

Did Nevins or anyone else trained in linguistics also become

as competent in speaking Pirahã? I'd be curious to see what
we'd find if we simply had more linguists doing field
research and learning more languages.
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 20

His former wife, Karen, did. She disagrees with his

claims. But then, obviously, she isn't exactly an
unbiased observer, either. And yeah, a famously
closed-off people wary of outsiders living in an area of
Brazil that's further restricted for outsiders by the
Brazilian government, is... let's say, poorly accessible
for researchers. It's a serious problem with some
language-rich areas (Amazonia, Iran, China, New
Guinea), it's not because people don't want to do
research (there was a common meme that Chomskyans
only do research on English, but it is largely outdated;
for instance, a lot of Dr. Preminger's career is done on
fieldwork in Mayan languages, Dr. Nevins is a co-author
of a monograph on Basque, and I have a favorite quote
somewhere listing a PhD recruiting data from fifty-ish
disparate languages, although in that case, often
second-hand).
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:
 REPLY (1) SHARE

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Tatu Ahponen Tatu Ahponen Jul 20

>Or take biologists' debates with creationists (fitting given Everett's

missionary history).

An odd little aside, which comes aside as just a drive-by attempt to

associate with Everett with creationism even though there's no
seeming connection.
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 20

I claim that Everett's claims are to linguistics what creationism is

to biology. And I do have a hunch that he is more comfortable
with such breakage of science because of his connection to
another field that famously engages in such.
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Lance S. Bush Lance Independent Jul 21

Which specific claims does Everett make that are equivalent

to creationism? And equivalent in what respect?
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 21

Should we go over that quotation set again? The

equivalence is in level of iconoclasm and holism as well
as in Russell's teapot quality of rejection of analyses
more "traditional" ("Your data don't show what you
claim!" — "They do if you analyze them this way!" —
"But you don't have to analyze them this way!" — "Yes,
you do, I know because I lived in the tribe for decades
and you didn't, so obviously you don't understand!"). I
certainly don't claim that there's specific, concept-to-
concept mapping to creationism.
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:
 Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 21

(Regarding holism specifically, he refuses to

contemplate separation of language and culture
because they interact; imagine telling a biologist that
they can't study genes because they interact with
environment!)
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FrancoVS Jul 20

I'd argue anticolonialist politics was probably a big factor: Everett was an
American that travelled to Brazil to study a remote tribe and made an
ethnographic account, at a time it was becoming increasingly clear that
this had happened before and the result was questionable methodology
and disastrous consequences for the natives. (Napoleon Chagnon and the
Yanomami)

Also, Everett the charming missionary certainly look the part of the gringo
with an agenda.

And Kuhn scientific paradigms: if you take Universal Grammar too

seriously, Everett's claims sound a lot like "Pirahã people are too stupid to
parse tree-like language structures", and this counts as evidence of
Everett being both racist and bad at his job *because* of racism.
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 21

Well, to give credit where credit's due, Everett specifically rejects the
idea of their being mentally deficient. (Whether it is actually logically
consistent with his ideas is a tougher question, but people are known
to espouse inconsistent or not-proven-to-be-consistent ideas.)
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Lance S. Bush Lance Independent Jul 19

Does Chomsky believe language arose recently, and abruptly, in a single

individual?
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:
 Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 20

The mental capacity for language? Seemingly so. And then, by the usual
genetic drift (probably the version for weakly-beneficial mutations,
because being able to do complex thoughts is beneficial, including for
intra-group competition), spread to the rest of the population in one of the
bottleneck events.
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Lance S. Bush Lance Independent Jul 20

Why does he think that? Do you agree with him? What kind of
evidence is there that this is true?
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 20

I do tentatively agree, and one piece of evidence relevant here is

"anatomically modern humans" in Africa who hadn't done much
not-present-in-other-hominids human behaviour in 200000
years, with the parsimonous explanation being their not having
that mutation.
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Wanda Tinasky Jul 20

Isn't the parsimonious conclusion there that the key factor is

IQ, not language? Or is the position that complex cognition
and language are inextricably intertwined?
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 20

Partly but not fully. The problem is, their brain size
_and_ their brain _zones_, to the extent they're
recognizable from the cranium, are the same as in
modern humans. So, we wouldn't expect huge
difference in "horsepower" of the mind.
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Jeffrey Soreff Jul 20

:
 What you wrote earlier (
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-how-
language-began/comment/62600358 ) about a
"grammatical explosion" in children also seems to suggest
something closer to a switch flipping, to abruptness, than to
gradual continuous enhancement.
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 20

Exactly.
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Lance S. Bush Lance Independent Jul 21

"one piece of evidence relevant here is "anatomically

modern humans" in Africa who hadn't done much not-
present-in-other-hominids human behaviour in 200000
years, with the parsimonous explanation being their not
having that mutation."

Can you clarify? They haven't done much in what sense and
in what timeline compared to what other oganisms? And
what is the claim evidence for and why is it evidence for that
claim?

And just to affirm: is the claim that whatever distinctive

genetic capacities allow modern humans to engage in
language as we do arose via mutation in a single mutation
relatively recently? If not, what is the claim, and if so, how
recently?
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 21

Lots to unpack here, but let's see. The idea is:

*On one hand, all Homo sapiens including Khoisan have

language, which means that language must have
appeared before the Khoisan split some 150000 years
ago.
:
 *On the other hand, there's the whole "cultural artifacts
appearing" thing, that seems to happen either after that
or around that time. (Scarcity of African archeological
record is limiting here.)

*Crucially, anatomically modern humans strongly

precede those first artifacts.

*The claim is that the crucial capacity for syntax and its
interpretation appeared first, in what amounts to a
single mutation, and then that system got hooked up to
communicative system in what is plausibly a
_different_, later mutation. So, two mutations: to think
and to articulate the thoughts.

*Both happened and propagated via a bottleneck event

relatively recently (but before Khoisan split — not
50000 years ago, as some places claim, that's a later
and different bottleneck that wasn't decisive for
language for the simple reason it only affected non-
African population). A million years ago, probably
Expand full comment
neither mutation was present yet. So, we have a
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 21

So, that 200000 year old skull may well have not had
that _second_ mutation yet.
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 21

Oh, and note that if someone proves Neanderthals did

have language, it pushes the lower bound further
behind (makes the mutations less recent) but doesn't
change the substantive claims on how it happened — if
anything, it ends up _narrowing_ the window for
mutation. (Then it could align with the 900000-850000
bottleneck, which currently looks too far away.)
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 Continue Thread →

Chastity 2 Cradle 2 Grave Jul 20

Pedantry alert: Genetic drift is when it's random (e.g. you kill off half
the population, turns out this gene was more common in one half
than the other, so now it's more common in descendant populations).
Language reaching fixation would be directional selection since, as
you note, it would be beneficial.
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 20

Yeah, I forgot the proper genetic term, sue me :D

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Trevor Adcock Jul 20

There was no major bottleneck even in the last 150,000+ years and
the Khoisan split off before 150,000 years and they do language just
fine. There has been minimal gene flow between them and other
humans since then and the genes that have been selected for when
they interbred with some Cushitic pastoralists 2000 years ago aren't
related to language.

The Neanderthals also had small amounts of gene flow 200k-250k

and another pulse from 120k-100k, after the most basal, language
using, modern humans split off.
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 20

That depends on your beliefs on

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youngest_Toba_eruption#Toba_cata
strophe_theory and a number of other events that have been
suggested as population bottlenecks (see
https://bio.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Computational_Biology/Bo
ok%3A_Computational_Biology_-
_Genomes_Networks_and_Evolution_(Kellis_et_al.)/29%3A_Pop
ulation_Genetic_Variation/29.05%3A_Human_Evolution). I don't
think anyone in linguistic community is particularly married to the
50000 date, I certainly saw different date estimates which
:
 looked more plausible (some even allow not to depend on
whether Neanderthals had language).
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Trevor Adcock Jul 21

The Khoisan are far too genetically diverse to have gone

through a bottle neck then. That theory predates our ability
to cheaply sequence dna and the dna evidence we have has
refuted it.
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 21

This is partially a matter of point of comparison: if (as is

virtually certain) out-of-Africa population has gone
through an additional bottleneck, our baseline of what
is high variability in humans changes (and cross-
species comparisons obviously have their own
problems). Like, there is no serious theory on the
market that wouldn't predict that relatively highest
diversity would be in Africa, and within Africa — in
Khoisan specifically.
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 20

(There are a lot of components in how the entire edifice of language arose:
for instance, it required greater control of mouth and/or head movements,
and the hominid excavations suggest that this arose earlier, which
confuses scores of researchers into thinking that's when language arose,
including even such brilliant minds as Svetlana Burlak - but it is quite
obvious that better control of fine motorics would benefit tasks beyond
language.)
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Callum Hackett The Great Exhibition Jul 20

Yes. I personally find this implausible and I think he comes to postulate it

because he backs himself into a corner by over-simplifying other (non-
:
 structural) features of linguistic ability. I nonetheless think the recursive
structure-building operation he proposes is essential to explaining some
complex properties of semantics, so I end up in the Chomskyan camp
even though I (and many others who would be characterised as
sympathisers) think we need a strong refinement of the theory.
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 20

I think a lot of those features are relegated to interface between

language and communication (Phonological Form, Distributed
Morphology/Nanosyntax, all that jazz). There is a discussion to be had
- between professionals - to what extent that relegation is plausible
(for instance, whether Marantz-style case assignment happens in
syntax or in the interface), and, of course, the less one can relegate,
the less plausible the theory becomes (although, continuing to use
the same example, one can fully imagine that the protolanguage, well,
didn't have m-case just like many modern languages don't, and the
machinery for that developed later). But that's a discussion on a
whole other level than needed here.
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Callum Hackett The Great Exhibition Jul 20

I'm a big Nanosyntax fan - what it boils down to for me is that I

think the T-model with the two interfaces is a conceptual
mistake. I think if the foundational assumptions under that are
corrected (which requires work at the boundary between
linguistics and philosophy of language), Merge will be preserved
but it won't sit within cognition as an autonomous syntax
module. That then has ramifications for the makeup of the
narrow/broad language faculties and their historical
development, but it's indeed another conversation :)
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 20

Nanosyntax is very much a T-model model though. (Well,

it's a Syntax - Lexicon - Interfaces model rather than
Lexicon - Syntax - Interfaces model, and there's a bit more
:
 lookahead and lookbehind than usual, but it is a T-model
nonetheless, after the insertion phonology and semantics
operate on the result separately.)
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Callum Hackett The Great Exhibition Jul 20 ·

edited Jul 20
Indeed. I don't believe there are many well-developed
non-T-models in generative grammar (however much
the specific interactions are toyed with) because that
model has been taken for granted ever since Aspects.
But I'm not committed to rejecting all T-models
outright; only to claiming that they have explanatory
potential while misdescribing certain phenomena, such
that a future, more explanatory model will incorporate
their strengths and reconceptualise their weaknesses
(as is characteristic of scientific development).
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Kenny Easwaran Jul 21

The 1950s rejection of behaviorism was important and powerful, but it relied on
a lot of arguments about what could and couldn’t in principle be done that have
since been falsified by large language models and other work. Many of
Chomsky’s arguments early on involve the idea that you can’t make sense of
probability as anything but a frequency or some simple observable feature like
pitch or volume, which is an appropriate refutation of Skinner, but not of any of
the many constructions of Bayesian probability in the second half of the 20th
century. He also argues that you need to study language separately from the
world, but modern large language models seem to do a good job of creating a
model of the language-world system, whether or not they adequately separate
it into the two components.
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Callum Hackett The Great Exhibition Jul 21

Many of the criticisms of behaviourism had nothing to do with token

sequence probabilities, or even linguistics, which is why it failed as a
:
 paradigm in all of psychological science. Its foundational problems have
not been addressed in any way by machine learning, and the capability of
LLMs to do better next token prediction than Chomsky expected doesn't
mean much in an integrated theory of human cognition, language
included.
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Kenny Easwaran Jul 21

Saying that behaviorism “failed as a paradigm” doesn’t mean we were

right to dismiss every one of its claims. Every shift of paradigm
usually involves rejecting the problematic claims of that old paradigm,
but also rejecting some of the things it got right. Behaviorism had a
lot of valuable ideas that we are properly learning to appreciate again
after decades of rejecting them because of their association with its
over-ambitious claims.
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Brandon Wright Jul 19

I'm sorry, but since I've recently learned French, the whole time I was reading this I
was thinking about this: https://www.instagram.com/reel/C9hlm5Du71u/?
igsh=MWV0bmRsM3dya3RhMQ==
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SurvivalBias Jul 23

English is also full of this kind of thing if learned as a second language. E.g.
write/right/rite/riot, not to mention such wonderful pairs as come/cum,
sheet/shit, beach/bitch, can't/cunt, fox/fucks.
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Brandon Wright Jul 23

Agreed, it must be crazy-making.

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Kevin M. Jul 19

I'm reminded of Max Planck's line, "Science progresses one funeral at a time."
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:
 Forrest Jul 20

Kind of in poor taste based on Noam Chomsky's recently disclosed health

issues.
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Shankar Sivarajan Shankar’s Newsletter Jul 20

Oh, stop with the pearl-clutching! The man is 95. His death has been
imminent for years.
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Forrest Jul 24

Still, I don't think it's in good taste to eagerly root for someone to die
because you disagree with his ideas about linguistics.
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Chastity 2 Cradle 2 Grave Jul 19

> These two points are not unrelated. Everett’s core idea is that language should
properly be thought of as an invention rather than an innate human capability. You
might ask: who invented it? Who shaped it? Lots of people, collaboratively, over a
long time. In a word, culture. As Everett notes in the preface, “Language is the
handmaiden of culture.”

I feel like the existence of Nicaraguan Sign Language - a natural language

constructed by deaf children in a society without any preexisting sign language use
- very strongly suggests some intrinsic biological quality to language. That is, rather
than it being an invention that propagated the same way as writing or metallurgy, it
is a product of human brains on some level which children can reinvent, including
features like grammar.
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 19

Yup.
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Brian Moore Moore for President 2024 Jul 19 · edited Jul 19

I don't understand the relevance of the question of whether it's one or the
other. Obviously on some level, there is [information encoding of perceived real
world things] occurring in the human (or animal) brain, dependent on the [info
:
 encoding - "brain"] capabilities of that creature. Is that an internal language? I
don't know, does the categorization matter? I'm a computer programmer and
certainly it sounds like a language to me, for whatever that's worth.

This means that you could reverse the process and do something in the real
world (sounds, calls, whistles) that mirrors that encoding in your brain - in a
way that other brains could interpret in the same, real-world verifiable way, for
evolutionarily beneficial reasons like coordination on hunting. This seems to of
course be both invented/learned (i.e. I point at the tiger and make the same
sound, and you understand that it is a reference to it) and innate (people all
around the world seem to understand that the word "squirrel" is more likely to
describe a small fluffy thing than "hippopotamos").

But I don't get why it matters. And by matters I mean "in a way that, if we prove
it's one or the other, that's a thing that can be objective proven, rather than
just vague category definitions, and then informs our understanding of the
science such that we can apply it to productive new insights."

To me it's obviously sufficiently both, not because I'm a genius linguist (I am

not) but because treating it as a thing that obviously has many influences from
our innate biology AND as an invented thing is necessary to (me!)
understanding it in a way that we (I?) couldn't if I had to declare it 100% one or
the other.
Expand full comment

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Chastity 2 Cradle 2 Grave Jul 19

> But I don't get why it matters. And by matters I mean "in a way that, if
we prove it's one or the other, that's a thing that can be objective proven,
rather than just vague category definitions, and then informs our
understanding of the science such that we can apply it to productive new
insights."

Understanding where language comes from will probably eventually be

useful to genetically modifying other species to be capable of talking.
That's the only end use that immediately comes to mind.

If it's just brain power + culture, that implies you can just keep sticking
more neurons in a dog's brain, and at 86 billion it'll be able to use a full
language. If there's some specialized structures, you'll either need a lot
more than 86 billion neurons (so the resultant creature can use
nonspecialized bits, like how we solve math problems) or to introduce
:
 analogous structures.

I assume linguists have some other use case.

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Brian Moore Moore for President 2024 Jul 19

Hi David Brin! :)

But yes, definitely I would agree that "understanding where language

comes from" would be important in that context, but I'm not sure why
the exact ratio matters.

"If it's just brain power + culture, that implies you can just keep
sticking more neurons in a dog's brain, and at 86 billion it'll be able to
use a full language"

So replace "dog" with "Chatgpt" and obviously we've got a thing that
is pretty language competent, right? I feel like LLMs are the
example/thing we're all implicitly referring to?

" If there's some specialized structures, you'll either need a lot more
than 86 billion neurons (so the resultant creature can use
nonspecialized bits, like how we solve math problems) or to introduce
analogous structures."

But here's where the categorization breaks down for me. Obviously
for human language there ARE specialized bio/neuro structures that
are necessary for actual spoken human language: the parts of your
brain that encode information, voice boxes, those parts of the brain
the article above talks about, etc... for a LLM, though, do we
categorize them as having those things or not? Does the screen and
text output sub-module and hard drive structure count? Why does it
matter,full
Expand atcomment
least in an important way?
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 19

See the other comment of mine on LLMs :) LLMs are the pinnacle
of "every time I fire a linguist, productivity goes up", because,
well, constraints of natural language learning by a child are quite
different from constraints on computers. Look up CHILDES
corpus: it is small and unrepresentative (poverty of stimulus
:
 argument), if you try to teach LLMs on what children actually
hear, rather than on what gazillions on balanced and generally-
more-complicated data OpenAI feeds them, you won't get as
good results as children routinely get, and you won't get biases
toward learnability of existing structures over non-existing. This
suggests that LLMs do just brute-force the problem.
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Brian Moore Moore for President 2024 Jul 19

Yep, my favorite feature of LLMs have been the discussions

they inspire about the extent to which they are doing the
same thing as humans.

"This suggests that LLMs do just brute-force the problem."

That gets right at what I'm curious about with recursion-as-

a-physical-process. But I guess, is the analogy that informs
the conclusion "brute-force" really "kids vs LLMs, two
equivalent things" or "kids, who have billions of years of
evolution that worked on tools for understanding things, vs
LLMs, whose tools are computer submodules designed by
hardware/software people for mostly different things." The
fact that kids do way better with less training data at a
young age, but at "adulthood", ChatGPT seems to, having
been trained on petabytes of data in its "childhood", now
has tools that let it do better at some things.

Did kids (and therefore humanity and animals over millions

of years) just brute-force problems in the distant past,
solving them with (now built in) informational/genetic
structures (brains, memory, eyes, neurons or.... recursion
neural tools?) that they then passed on to their
descendents, so that kids today can learn important things
with vastly less data? What if the comparison doesn't work
because each side isn't at the same starting point, and can't
possibly
Expand fullever be?
comment Is that better described as "they just think
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 19

:
 My bet is on "2 different ways", but this is one thing I
am _not_ ready to debate, and at some point it falls into
semantics (like with pointers-to-pointers: in some
sense, it is a "developed tool", right?).
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Continue Thread →

Jeffrey Soreff Jul 20

>But I don't get why it matters. And by matters I mean "in a way that, if we
prove it's one or the other, that's a thing that can be objective proven,
rather than just vague category definitions, and then informs our
understanding of the science such that we can apply it to productive new
insights."

This has been made moot by LLMs' linguistic success, but, if that
_hadn't_ happened, then the question of "Does language competence
require some special structure, inborn in humans, or is it purely a cultural
artifact, learnable by the same general purpose learning algorithms that
we use for everything else?" would have mattered to AI design. AFAIK, we
now get to ask the same sort of question, but probably about e.g.
executive function, instead.
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Brian Moore Moore for President 2024 Jul 20

That makes sense, thanks.

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Jeffrey Soreff Jul 20

Many Thanks!
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jumpingjacksplash Jul 19

I don't see how humans couldn't have evolved language faculties once they
had language, but developing a cludgy capacity to be able to communicate
with one another, then gradually evolving dedicated capacities to massively
upscale it to the point where it's helpful for thinking seems way more likely
than developing full-on linguistic thought in one step then using it to
:
 communicate (presumably originally just among the kids of whatever super-
hominid developed this ability).
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Chastity 2 Cradle 2 Grave Jul 19

Well, chimpanzees also have a kludgy capacity to communicate with one

another, so obviously our ancestors did. But the most complicated
language encoding we know of in the animal kingdom is, AFAIK, that of
prairie dogs, where they can tell the others about the size, speed, color,
heading, and species of an intruder (and even if a human has a gun or
not!). This is obviously hugely different from the thing we're doing right
now in a way that the thing we're doing right now isn't hugely different
from chatting around the fireplace.

It's possible this is a slow-and-gentle evolution. But the fact that

"behavioral modernity" pretty much appears all at once seems to suggest
there was some big sudden shift.
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Kenny Easwaran Jul 21

What does “behavioral modernity” mean that appears all at once?

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Chastity 2 Cradle 2 Grave Jul 21

People start burying their dead around the same time that they
start painting on cave walls and carving figurines, as well as
other stuff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_modernity

There's some debate on if it's just an artifact of how the

evidence is recorded, versus actual near-simultaneous arrival,
but it reeeeally seems to be near-simultaneous arrival.
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TheGreasyPole Jul 22

If the "I-Language" theory is true, as I understand it.... couldn't the

"big sudden shift" be communication ?

If people were developing grammar/syntax/whatever initially for

"having complex thoughts" then you'd expect all the hard work on
:
 recursiveness to get done on this without communication. It can
continue gradually evolving, just as most other human capabilities
gradually evolved, and would not neccessarily leave any physical
trace. Getting really quite complex, and close to full modern lanuague
complexity as its always adaptive to have beeter, more well
structured, internal thoughts this can drive itself for hundreds of
thousands of years.

Then .... one day.... one human or another discovers he can make
sounds to share this "intuitive personnal i-langauge" with someone
else, and the "someone else" groks it !!! Between the two of them
they are now able to *share* the highly complex thought patterns that
have been evolving for generations for the first time.

Because the huge infrastructure of grammar had been built up

through standard gradual evolution there'd be no need of a "big
bang" genetic evolution, which seems to me unlikely on basic genetic
principles. Genetic I-Language could have developed as slowly as the
mammal eye.

But then once they can *actually communicate ideas* it can move
explosively fast as it is now cultural! You can go from 0 to "burying
Expand full comment
your dead and painting deers on caves" in a few generations as
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DannyTheSwift Jul 19

Or consider developmental verbal dyspraxia. A mutation in a single gene

(FOXP2) causes it. People with this condition seem to exhibit ordinary non-
linguistic intelligence, but only speak language at a very basic level. More
interestingly, this seems to be because they have to learn it without any innate
grammar. For example, if you learn a new word, "phlogon", and then you hear
someone use the word "phlogons", you infer that "phlogons" means more than
one "phlogon". They need to learn both words separately. (As adults, naturally,
people teach them these rules and they can remember them, but they need to
learn each grammatical rule consciously, instead of intuiting it the way that
everyone else seems to)
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Sharkey Jul 20

Phlogons could be a possessive: Phlogon's. Or Phlogons'. You can't tell

:
 without context or seeing it written.
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Sean Trott The Counterfactual Jul 20

Yeah, NSL is sometimes taken to be evidence of a biological wiring for

language, but it’s also in some ways evidence of the importance of social
interaction, since it emerged from a bunch of kids being put together in a
school, who all independently had their own “home sign” systems (home sign
could also be seen as evidence of biological wiring for language at work). I
don’t think it’s either/or. But either way, really fascinating case of a language
emerging!
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Chastity 2 Cradle 2 Grave Jul 20

Yeah. I think realistically, if language-as-we-think-of-it emerges all at

once, you can't say "language is for thinking" OR "language is for
communicating." It would have been a single thing that altered how human
beings both thought AND communicated, at the same time, with the
thinking element probably requiring interaction with others with the same
architecture in order to reach its full potential.
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Sharkey Jul 20 · edited Jul 20

You don't think those kids' parents ever pointed at things or gestured to them
in any way?

Eta: I agree that the existence of home-signers is remarkable, and probably

points to some sort of innate language ability. But these still aren't, like, feral
children raised by wolves.
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Chastity 2 Cradle 2 Grave Jul 20 · edited Jul 20

I don't think their home signs included an actual grammar or anything, no.
And keep in mind that only the young kids developed full fluency.
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Kenny Easwaran Jul 21

:
 It’s probably useful to think of it on analogy with cooking. Humans started
cooking before we adapted to the presence of cooked food, and after those
adaptations cooking is now essential for almost all foods that we eat. But
there’s not one single adaptation that explains this.
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Jeffrey Soreff Jul 21

Agreed. Just as, after the initial invention of cooking, our digestion and
cuisine co-evolved to become more and more dependent on cooking, and
to more thoroughly exploit the advantages of that capability, if a linguistic
"MERGE" capability resulted from a single mutation, I would expect that it
would have e.g. increased the advantage that a larger vocabulary
conferred, and, more generally, increased the frequencies of genes that
provided complementary linguistic capabilities. So, in the end, many
genes may be involved in our current linguistic capabilities, above what
were present pre-"MERGE".
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Mallard Jul 19 · edited Jul 19

1.

>Regardless of the details, a generic prediction should be that there is no longest

sentence in a language whose grammar is recursive

Why then:

>He does explicitly claim (in the aforementioned paper and elsewhere) that Pirahã
probably has no longest sentence, which is about the most generic anti-recursion
statement one can make

Wouldn't a non recursive language *have* a longest sentence?

2.

>I find this notion of recursion completely insane, because it would imply (i) any
language with more than one word in its sentences has recursion

From the quotes, it sounds like the linguisists in question emphasize the role of
recursion as an iterative - not isolated phenomenon. A sentence with two words
might be a primitive instance of recursion, but lack the iterative flexibility that
characterizes it.
:
 3.

>But this is kind of a dumb rhetorical move. Either the theory makes predictions
about real languages or it doesn’t

This objection doesn't seem fully compelling. All models are wrong, but some are
useful. The mere existence of a supposed language doesn't prove that the model
Expand full comment
isn't generally useful. Did not the vast majority of langauges discovered since the
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Neike Taika-Tessaro The Sound of Your Pulse Jul 20

Regarding:

> ... has no longest sentence ...

I think this was just a typo, honestly. (Two other threads on this comment page
think the same.)
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Jeffrey Soreff Jul 20

>Again, how does "large literature" speak against it?

The example that I've seen cited is that thermodynamics owed more to heat
engines than the other way around. I would guess that this is probably true of
mechanical engineering preceding the science of classical mechanics as well.
I'd guess that electromagnetism is probably the other way around: There was a
lot of scientific investigation before the first motor.
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Trevor Adcock Jul 20

Metallurgy is probably the most extreme version of this. Smiths knew how
to create metals with very specific properties with precision without
understanding anything about the underlying chemistry or physics. The
actual understanding of the chemistry of how to make steel and bronze
and, why the specific heatings, coolings, hammerings and ratios of
materials used were necessary, came far later.
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Jeffrey Soreff Jul 20

Great point! Many Thanks!

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:
 Ryan L Jul 19

This was a well written overview of a fascinating topic, but I don't think it's a very
good book review. Like so many of these reviews, the author uses it primarily as an
opportunity to review a topic they are interested in, rather than a book about that
topic. Obviously, one needs to have some background knowledge of the topic, but
when the the actual book under review only takes up one out of five sections, it's
not really about the book or the ideas it discusses.

This is neatly illustrated by this sentence: "There’s a lot of interesting stuff in there I
haven’t talked about..." But isn't talking about the interesting stuff the main point of
a book review?

Still, I enjoyed reading this a lot. Thanks!

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Xpym Jul 20 · edited Jul 20

Yep, plenty of "book reviews" are just guest posts in disguise. Since those
aren't allowed in the pure form, this kind of thing is the result.
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Jordan Aug 4

Exactly my thoughts, great article, not a great book review. Also think some
editing on subject ordering would have been good (define recursion when it
was mentioned, maybe move the chomsky stuff a little later)
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Joseph Shipman Jul 19

I’m afraid Chomsky wins this one because of the work in computation theory that
he did which the reviewer doesn’t reference at all. Chomsky’s biggest insight was
what is now known as the Chomsky Hierarchy of languages or grammars:

Regular Languages, recognized by finite-state machines (animals have these)

Context-Free Languages, recognized by machines with a simple memory element

such as a pushdown stack which allows objects to be merged or linked to each
other (requires a brain modification; perhaps humpback whales and other animals
can handle this)

Context-Sensitive Languages, recognized by linearly bounded automata that can

:
 mark or operate on their input data (allows language to interact with the external
world so that we can build things following instructions)

Recursive (in the Godelian sense) languages, recognized by Turing machines and
other automata which can use expanding amounts of rewritable memory to keep
track of things, attained by humans with the invention of writing (pre-literate
humans were not Turing Complete and the Church-Turing thesis is not actually
about what humans can compute but about what technology-aided humans can
compute).

Pirahã people (or at least the young children in it) have the capability to learn other
human languages and the same brain improvements that the rest of us have. Their
language is restricted in interesting ways but the only really important question
about it, at the very top level, is whether they are capable of doing things that
people in other societies can do, or whether their language makes this impossible.
Expand full comment

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Brian Moore Moore for President 2024 Jul 19 · edited Jul 19

Thank you so much for listing those 4 categories, very helpful.

Honest, a-political question for my own understanding, coming from a

computer science background: how is that categorization not just a measure of
"the amount of working memory available to the user of the language"? At
least, in the context of what is actually going in the animal's brain. I 100% get
how it's useful to us humans, seeking to categorize it by different features.

Regular languages (FSMs) words as you describe, don't necessarily refer to

base primitives. The animal makes a call that says "there is a predator nearby".
It would not be a language, or intelligble to the other animals, if they didn't
understand the concept of predator or subconcepts like "predators are threats
to our ability to pass on our genes." Sure, maybe it's not "memory" but
"instincts" but (from a CS perspective it's still "info we already had")

"Context-Free Languages" add "memory" but it seems (naively, to me) like it's
just more complex "memory."

For the "Context-Sensitive Languages" and "Recursive languages" - again, it

just seems to me like the base difference is "even more memory, better
configured or more complex perhaps." What is the actual physical brain
difference between processing the reference to "predator" in the animal call
"there's a predator nearby" and the highest level of language "the symbology
:
 of X in War and Peace is evocative of the concepts of Y in the bible," except in
the complexity of the concepts being referenced? Does the brain actually do
anything different when it references "the bible" than "predator", except in
scale/complexity?
Expand full comment

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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 19

Working memory increase was certainly a facilitator (this happens to be

Markov the biologist's favorite claim on the matter). However, "better
configured" already betrays that quantity is not yet quality. You can have
an enormous working memory but if you cannot use it to make, as you put
it in the other thread, pointers to pointers, it's moot.

(Also, people whose Daneman-Carpenter test returns 1 or 2 for working

memory can still use language pretty well - although they do have more
problems with complex sentences, if you simplify the number of elements
used enough, you can still get some recursive hierarchies.)
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Brian Moore Moore for President 2024 Jul 19 · edited Jul 19

Ok, makes sense.

"However, "better configured" already betrays that quantity is not yet

quality. "

How do we distinguish though? When I typed that, I recognized that it

would imply a quantity/quality issue, but for...

"people whose Daneman-Carpenter test returns 1 or 2 for working

memory can still use language pretty well"

... how do we know it's not just straight memory capacity? Wouldn't
that be exactly what we see when you say:

"although they do have more problems with complex sentences, if

you simplify the number of elements used enough, you can still get
some recursive hierarchies"

Wouldn't that be consistent with "it's working memory" as the

relevant concept? Let's say you've got 100 bits, where you can get
"the sky is blue" because sky takes up 20 bits and blue takes up 40
bits, and 60 is less than 100. But for "I remember when last week,
:
 Steve said that Alice thought the sky was green" doesn't work for
you, because sky is 20, green is 40, last week is 30, Steve and Alice
each take 50, and the concept of Alice thinking herself (recursive)
about the sky being green is another 110 bits (Alice + sky + green). So
it's hard for you to understand?

IExpand
meanfull
oncomment
some level, the brain kinda has to work that way right? I
could see if the "quality" was an LLM-like capability of
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 19 · edited Jul 19

Your Steve-Alice example is exactly what we'd expect if memory

were the only relevant issue. However, a person who can't
reliably hold a sequence of "Steve, Alice, apple" in their memory
in Daneman-Carpenter test is still able to hold "Steve thinks that
Alice ate an apple", even though without recursive Merge, one
would expect that the latter takes more memory, not less. (While
in reality, it seems that it is composed as "[Steve [thinks [that
[Alice [ate [an apple]]]]]]", with only two elements combined at
each moment.) This suggests some privileged mechanism for
exploiting "pointers to pointers" to ultimately use less memory.
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Brian Moore Moore for President 2024 Jul 19

Okay, bingo, thanks - this gets to the heart of it for me:

"This suggests some privileged mechanism for exploiting

"pointers to pointers" to ultimately use less memory."

The "ultimately less memory" helps a lot.

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Kenny Easwaran Jul 21

The Chomsky hierarchy is an important mathematical result, but I don’t see

how this tells us about human language. We don’t actually have as good
evidence as we think that human minds are Turing complete or even at the
level of context free grammar. We know for sure that a finite neural net like an
LLM *cannot* reproduce a context-free grammar (that is one of Chomsky’s
important results!) and yet it seems to be able to imitate one just as well as
humans do. This is strongly suggestive to me that the human mind (which we
:
 know is also implemented by a finite collection of neurons, though we don’t
know if the architecture is really a neural net) is actually a finite state machine
that has somehow managed to implement within itself a rough approximation
of a large initial fragment of context-free grammars and Turing machines. If so,
then it’s quite possible that in whatever sense a human mind is able to
implicitly define a full Turing machine, a neural net may be able to too, despite
its in-principle limitations.
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Joseph Shipman Jul 21

You didn’t read the part where I said that unaided human minds are NOT
Turing-complete. They are only Turing-complete when combined with the
TECHNOLOGY of writing.

Whether LLMs and neural nets can eventually do the equivalent is an

interesting question—quantity compensates for quality so their limitations
may not be easily apparent. But computers can obviously be Turing
complete and I expect that the next generation of AIs will have more
sophisticated architecture that can emulate human cognition more directly
and require less brute force than now.
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Laplace Jul 22

> We know for sure that a finite neural net like an LLM *cannot* reproduce
a context-free grammar

I don't know much about linguistics, but modern LLMs are basically Turing
complete. At least in the sense that a normal home computer, or a human
with a finite amount of memory and paper to write on are basically Turing
complete.
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 19

> To be clear, this usage of ‘recursion’ seems consistent with how many other
Chomskyan linguists have used the term. And with all due respect to these
researchers, I find this notion of recursion completely insane, because it would
imply (i) any language with more than one word in its sentences has recursion, and
that (ii) all sentences are necessarily constructed recursively.
:
 No. The claim is actually somewhat more technical. Dolphins have the equivalent of
sentences, but they are linear, not recursively hierarchical. An illustration: in English,
"I saw a girl with a telescope" has two readings, "I [saw [a girl with a telescope]]"
and "I [[saw a girl] with a telescope]" (i.e. using a telescope). Such structural
ambiguity is not possible in dolphinspeak, where linear position _is_ hierarchical
position but is possible in human languages.

More generally, Everett is exactly as much of a buffoon as Nevins claims he is, and
"common sense" is a poor guide to linguistics.
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Brian Moore Moore for President 2024 Jul 19

This is an honest, a-political question, coming from a computer programming

background: what is the point of the term "recursion" in the context of "lowest
level description of language?" I know how *we* use it, and the difference in
programming situations that are and are not recursive, and many of the ways it
is used in this discussion seems similar, but at the lowest level of
understanding language and how it relates to the brain, my understanding of
the similarity breaks down: what is the point? Isn't everything expressed in
language (and I mean this as "everything" like down to the atoms) recursive?
When I say "my friend Bob" my brain (and the people I'm talking to)
understands that I "actually" mean "that sack of water and carbon over there,
made up of certain atoms and molecules, and electrical neural structures that
contain the memories of our relationship" - and then all the various recursions
down to "water is H20" and so on.

Even a single word: "telescope" must be "recursive" on a number of different

mental concepts and the way they're encoded in the brain of the
speaker/listener. Certainly a more complex sentence like above: "I thought you
said you saw a telescope" encodes far more complex recursion across multiple
things, but it's all just hierarchical: "this refers to this [ which refers to this,
which refers to this...] and that [which refers to this, which refers to this...]".
This is reflected (haha) in programming where recursion is "really" just "go to
this part of the code and run it" where the code and the parameters and the
variables can be self-referenced and iteratively changed - it is described as
"recursive" for human understanding. The computer doesn't care.

So I guess I'm asking: in the context of understanding language at its lowest

Expand full comment
level, what does "recursive as a concept" get us? That would not be just as
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:
 Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 19

That's an interesting perspective, but, using computer science jargon, I

think you mix the ability for having pointers with the ability for a function
(namely, Merge) to call itself. You can (and probably do) use the former for
the latter, but it doesn't mean they are one and the same, and in practice,
not every system with pointers is a system with recursion (although the
fairly unique ability of humans for symbolic pointers was probably a
prerequisite).

And more generally, "the lowest level" is neurons firing electrons and ions,
which is no more useful than "silicon pieces firing electrons" for computer,
we don't actually describe what computer does that way. (I am reading
"Gödel, Escher, Bach" now, and there's a related discussion.)
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Brian Moore Moore for President 2024 Jul 19

Right, but in computer science, at a very low level, recursion IS just

clever, self-referential (critically: self-referential as perceived by
humans) pointers.

" not every system with pointers is a system with recursion"

Right, recursion (as a CS principle for humans) is pointers pointing at

themselves... but it's still pointers (for computers). The abstraction of
how recursion works on the code and variables it is affecting is
important for humans to understand - not the computer. The
computer still sees it as a one-way stream of 1s and 0s - though
when you add recursion to your language, you often do need to add a
new layer of debugging in order to accurately represent the concept
of recursion so the human can understand it.

"And more generally, "the lowest level" is neurons firing electrons and
ions, which is no more useful than "silicon pieces firing electrons" for
computer, we don't actually describe what computer does that way."

Well, sure, when we are.... talking about the computer's behavior at a

high level! High level = meaning dependent on embedded
(recursive?) concepts. But I'm interested in understanding how that
lowest level can be built up into that highest level, and which parts are
"base", and which parts are just other higher order (potentially
:
 recursive) structures. That lowest level for computers is "is this bit a 1
or 0". For LLMs, a key additional lowest level is added - "what is the
distance
Expand fullbetween
comment the concept this 1 represents, to the concept that 0
represents (represented, of course, as additional 1s and 0s)" - which I
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 19

Sure, if you know how to build - aka if you have a blueprint - aka
if you have a higher-level structure. I do not think the lowest level
is informative on itself, for either human language, other aspects
of human cognition, or computers. At the lowest lowest level,
we're all just a bunch of interacting quarks. We build models of
higher levels because they actually reflect useful generalizations.
Your mileage of what's a useful generalization may vary, but just
like I speak of a processor as an abstract machine that performs
calculations not as of bunch of quarks organized into a bunch of
atoms and electrons interacting in such a way that they happen
to correspond to said calculations, I speak of a function calling
itself not of a line of 1s and 0s that encodes a piece of memory
that... you get the idea.

"A map is not the territory, but you cannot put the territory into
your pants' pocket".
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Brian Moore Moore for President 2024 Jul 19

"Sure, if you know how to build - aka if you have a blueprint

- aka if you have a higher-level structure. "

But at some point, we didn't. Isn't that an important

distinction? The things that existed right before amoebas, or
crystals or brains or languages did not have those
blueprints. They created (evolved) those higher level
structures emergently, based only on [whatever the lowest
level is] and [whatever previous higher level structures they
had built on top of it].

"We build models of higher levels because they actually

reflect useful generalizations."

Totally agree, where "we" is humans who need to

:
 understand it.

"Your mileage of what's a useful generalization may vary,

but just like I speak of a processor as an abstract machine
that performs calculations not as of bunch of quarks
organized into a bunch of atoms and electrons interacting in
such a way that they happen to correspond to said
calculations, I speak of a function calling itself not of a line
of 1s and 0s that encodes a piece of memory that... you get
the idea."

Again, totally agree in the context of "letting humans

understand what's going on." But in the context of the
Expand full comment

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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 19

Evolution throws things around almost at random and

looks what "sticks" in terms of helping/not harming
genetic fitness. But how gradual evolution is is very
different for different things. Getting a pointer to a
pointer is "importantly new break-from-the-past
category of thinking", for the same reason RNA+DNA
system is an importantly new break-from-the-past
category of replicator (over RNA world).
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Continue Thread →

Lance S. Bush Lance Independent Jul 19

Why is it that so many critics of Everett and defenders of Chomsky that I see
don't simply critique Everett, but call him names and say nasty things? You do
that here when you call him a "buffoon." Whatever the merits of either position,
I find it really unappealing and off-putting and it makes me not like people who
defend Chomsky. At least from the outside, it gives me the vibe that people
who defend Chomsky are dogmatic and insecure, that raises a big red flag for
me and probably for others that make us more sympathetic to Everett than we
might otherwise be.
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:
 Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 19

Another thread here goes into detail on this. In short, it's because Everett
(unlike, say, Kenneth Hale with the non-configurational suggestion or Mary
Dalrymple with Lexical-Functional Grammar) "started it first", in a sense,
by playing the big, Fomenko-style iconoclast who has seen past
Chomskyans' delusion. (All the more surprising given that in personal -
well, Facebook - communication he doesn't seem an unpleasant person
you'd expect from this characterization.) Think biologists that have to
respond to creationists. Could one, in principle, be a bigger person and
respond the way you respond to normal scientific disagreement? Sure. Is it
the least bit surprising that this isn't what actually happens? No.
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Lance S. Bush Lance Independent Jul 20

What in particular did he do that you see as "starting it"? You say
"playing the big, Fomenko-style iconoclast." What does that involve?
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 20 · edited Jul 20

Oh, let's see. From the lasst pages of Everett 2005:

> 2. Linguistic fieldwork should be carried out in a cultural

community of speakers, because only by studying the culture
and the grammar together can the linguist (or ethnologist)
understand either.

Read: "Every one of you who hasn't done what I did, living with
the group for many years, is a charlatan who doesn't understand
the language they study".

> 3. Studies that merely look for constructions to interact with a

particular thesis by looking in an unsophisticated way at data
from a variety of grammars are fundamentally untrustworthy
because they are too far removed from the original situation.

Once again but with passion: "You, yes you who wrote your
thesis on binding violations or person-case constraint or
whatever, are fundamentally untrustworthy".

How did the review put it? "This is the closest you come to
insulting someone in a published paper"?
:
 A bit later:

> This beautiful language and culture, fundamentally different

from anything the Western world has produced, have much to
teach us about linguistic theory, about culture, about human
nature, about living for each day and letting the future take care
of itself,
Expand fullabout personal
comment fortitude, toughness, love, and many
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Lance S. Bush Lance Independent Jul 20

Thanks for providing these quotes. Previously, I had said

this: “What in particular did he do that you see as "starting
it"? You say "playing the big, Fomenko-style iconoclast."
What does that involve?”

I do not believe any of the quotes you provide present

significant evidence of what I asked for. Some of the
remarks may be subject to the criticisms you present, but
they don’t seem to me to make a case for the claim you
initially made. I’ll go through each and comment on why that
is.

Quote #1: “> 2. Linguistic fieldwork should be carried out in

a cultural community of speakers, because only by studying
the culture and the grammar together can the linguist (or
ethnologist) understand either.”

You respond to this by interpreting it as “Read: "Every one

of you who hasn't done what I did, living with the group for
many years, is a charlatan who doesn't understand the
language they study".

Where are you getting this stuff about being a “charlatan”

from? If one’s view is that language is integrally tied to
culture in inextricable ways, then it’s simply true that one
cannot fully understand a language without understanding
culture. Nothing about making such a claim requires you to
Expand full comment
believe that anyone who doesn’t do this is a “charlatan.” All
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 20 · edited Jul 20

:
 > If one’s view is that language is integrally tied to
culture in inextricable ways, then it’s simply true that
one cannot fully understand a language without
understanding culture. Nothing about making such a
claim requires you to believe that anyone who doesn’t
do this is a “charlatan.” All it would entail is that those
who don’t do so won’t have a complete understanding
of the language. If one’s view is that language is
integrally tied to culture in inextricable ways, then it’s
simply true that one cannot fully understand a language
without understanding culture. Nothing about making
such a claim requires you to believe that anyone who
doesn’t do this is a “charlatan.” All it would entail is that
those who don’t do so won’t have a complete
understanding of the language.

This paragraph is ripe with inconsistencies. Yes, the

iconoclasm is in some sense a trivial consequence of
Everett's views. It doesn't make them any less
iconoclastic. If your view is "the only way to understand
X is to do Y", then you automatically exclude from
sciencehood those who don't do Y, which, in this case,
is the supermajority of the field (including
supermajority of linguists who do fieldwork, because
this particular way isn't how linguistic fieldwork is
Expand full comment
normally done). And you also try to sneak in
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Continue Thread →

TheKoopaKing TheKoopaKing’s Substack Aug 3

As an outsider looking in, 3 of those 4 quotes strike me as

obvious potential methodological problems in how
linguistics research is performed. The odd one out is the
sappy quote about fortitude and beautiful cultures, which I
think is just fluff (although I disagree with your evaluation
that at least to me seems to leave open the normative
interpretation that science papers should be dry and
boring). Your examples don't seem to me (a random person)
:
 to be particularly felicitous.
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Arbituram Jul 20

I was not aware we had that level of knowledge or confidence regarding the
structure of dolphin communication; could you please point me in the correct
direction to learn more?
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 20

Well, level of confidence varies, of course, but the researcher to cite would
be James T. Fulton.
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Schneeaffe Jul 24

Hey, Ive read a lot of your comments on this article and wanted to collect my
thoughts into a single response.

First, I think a lot of the clashes that you have here are due to different
priorities. While I dont know too much about linguistics, Ive seen those
grammar tree diagramms, and they seem like a reasonable thing for linguists to
do, and like something that could produce real insight about "grammar". But
Chomskyanism also includes a lot of general claims, and often the defense of
these looks like a continuous retreat from falsifiability. For someone not
interested in getting deeper into linguistics, these general claims with potential
takeaways for elsewhere will be the main thing they care about, and they will
give a lot more weight to arguments against them from other fields.

I think your examples of Everett "starting it" by being an iconoclast are pretty
weak. The idea that there could be more relevant evidence than a papers worth
of analysis examples, and that the chomskyian "reanalysis from a distance"
only makes sense in terms of fitting them into their scheme and not in terms of
what makes sense for studying that language - seems like the sort of thing that
is generally accepted without outrage in other sciences, and I suspect it would
have gone over much better in this case if Everett wasnt the sole authority on
Piraha.

Why do you think homonymies and synonymies are evidence that language is
for thinking more than communication? I agree that these are suboptimal for
:
 communication, but arent they even worse for thinking? If you have two
concepts that are homonymous in thought, you just... wont be able to
Expand full comment
distinguish them, period. And if you have a synonymie, you can believe things
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 24

Thanks for your comment!

> Hey, Ive read a lot of your comments on this article

Yeah, I think I'm getting to a hundred by now? I should wrap it up at some

point.

> First, I think a lot of the clashes that you have here are due to different
priorities.

Absolutely.

> often the defense of these looks like a continuous retreat from
falsifiability

There's actually an interesting blogpost on the topic:

https://milway.ca/2021/07/13/what-does-falsification-look-like-anyway/

> I suspect it would have gone over much better in this case if Everett
wasnt the sole authority on Piraha.

Very much so. (My bet is that we wouldn't be having this _discussion_ if
he weren't - someone else would just come out and show their own work.)

> I agree that these are suboptimal for communication, but arent they
even worse for thinking?

The point is that something which is pronounced homonymously is _not_

homonymous for the speaker's thought. You need to specifically _point
out_ to people that, say, witch and which or "I [saw a girl] with a
telescope" and "I saw [a girl with a telescope]" are homonymous, exactly
Expand full comment
because they're represented differently in the speaker's head and only get
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Schneeaffe Jul 24

Thanks for your reply.

>There's actually an interesting blogpost on the topic

The orbit of mercury is evidence against Newton and should reduce

:
 our confidence in him, increasingly so as we keep failing to find
Vulcan, even absent a competing theory, and it doesnt count fully as
evidence for Einstein until were sure there is no Vulcan.

Even if we took the argument at face value, I dont think this works as
an excuse, because it doesnt explain why the issue would appear in
linguistics more so than other sciences. In fact, the arguments apply
to linguistics less than to physics, and theres not a general
impression that physicist are slippery.

Generally, when you resort to philosophical arguments to defend a

particular scientific theory, its because youre losing on the scientifc
front. And even the philosophy here is pretty whack - the "theory
first" post he linked implies apriori knowledge of medical facts, and
he propably doesnt realise.

>Of course, true homonymy in thinking would suck.

Well, I think there is homonymy in thinking. I think the distinctions

between e.g. precision and accuracy, or between different quanitifier
orderings, are not ones that people can naturally use in their thinking.
They need to be tought or discovered through great effort. Of course
there are additional homonymies in speech, but that doesnt show
Expand full comment
thought is favoured - it just means that some popped up in every
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 24

There absolutely is impression that physicists are slippery,

especially when they work on string theory on somesuch.

As for the argument about things like precision and accuracy and
similar — that is a reasonable point, but... There's a difference
between homonymy (two concepts with the same reflection, in
each specific case only one is meant) and vagueness (a
reflection that fails to specify details that could distinguish two
related concepts). Vagueness is inevitable, homonymy is not. It
doesn't invalidate your point but mitigates it. (Example of
vagueness in speech — Russian и fails to specify difference
between BIT vowel and BEET vowel, so the actual pronunciations
are across the whole continuum.)
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:
 Schneeaffe Jul 24

String theory, maybe, but thats ~noone says thats settled

science. Even *in his motivating example* people didnt think
the physicists were slippery.

What detail distinguishes between precision and accuracy,

such that they are otherwise the same? I agree that they are
related, but... if two concepts can fool your mind into
thinking theyre one, why wouldnt they still seem related
after? Are they actually "more" related than the pan and the
stove? Plus, the sitting-bank and the money-bank are also
related, as shown by the etymology, but are usually an
uncontroversial example of homonymy.
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 24

Most science isn't settled. Certainly most linguistics

isn't settled.

Etymological links can be lost — or non-existent, if the

merger is phonological, as in луĸ 'onion' and луĸ 'bow
(weapon)' — without affecting.

To a layperson, neither precision nor accuracy refers to

its statistical definition, both vaguely mean "how close
the thing is to the truth/target/...".
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Continue Thread →

Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 24

As for Piraha children counting past seven once learning

Portuguese, I don't technically know, but no one — certainly not
Everett, who claims that the differences are cultural and
teachable — suggested they can't.
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Schneeaffe Jul 24

I remember him saying that he tried a lot and failed to teach

counting. Maybe he thinks young children are different? But
:
 that would be really weird to believe.
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 24

It wouldn't be weird to believe, if you think culture is the

root cause (as Everett does), that young children
haven't yet imbibed the culture and are indeed
different.
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Continue Thread →

Turtle Jul 19

In addition to being stubbornly wrong on linguistics, Chomsky is also known for

being stubbornly wrong on politics, insisting that communism is the best way of
organising human affairs. Infamously, Chomsky took a trip to Venezuela to
congratulate Hugo Chávez on building a society for the future, a few years before
its dramatic economic collapse.

He also never admitted he was wrong - a diehard “true communism has never been
tried,” he doubled down on the Venezuela situation, saying “Capitalists were free to
undermine the economy in all sorts of ways, like massive export of capital.”

(As per Chomsky, if you have enough resources to flee a failing state, the fact that
it’s failing is now your fault.)
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ContemplativeMood Jul 19

This is a clear ad hominem. You wouldn’t infer from Henry Ford’s adoration of
fascism that he made crappy cars. The two arenas are completely unrelated.
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LearnsHebrewHatesIP Jul 19

Turtle seems to be remarking that Chomsky is wrong on both

independently though.

> **** In addition **** to being stubbornly wrong on linguistics

Emphasis mine.
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:
 ContemplativeMood Jul 19

Well if we’re using caveats then let me just add my own, that if you
***were*** to use Chomsky’s political views to disparage his
academic record ***that would be*** a baseless ad hominem attack.
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Ryan L Jul 19

I agree, but it does reveal a tendency towards dogmatism. That

doesn't mean Chomsky is wrong on linguistics, but it does raise
the question of whether he'd ever admit it if he is?
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ContemplativeMood Jul 19

Why is Left Libertarianism the only ideology labelled as

dogmatic? Because of Venezuela? Has no other ideology
made similar errors? Should the centre-right be disowned
because Margaret Thatcher backed Pinochet?
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Ryan L Jul 19 · edited Jul 19

You are reading *way* too much into my comment. I

never even hinted that Left Libertarianism (not how I
would describe Venezuela, but that's beside the point)
is the only dogmatic ideology, or that other ideologies
aren't dogmatic, or that we should disown anyone
simply because they are dogmatic.

All I said is that we should keep in mind that a person

who tends towards dogmatism in one area might tend
towards it in others.
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Continue Thread →

TGGP Jul 19

The regime I more often hear Chomsky tarred with is

the Khmer Rouge, which was much worse than
Pinochet.
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:
 anon123 Jul 20

Pinochet resulted in today's Chile and Chavez resulted

in today's Venezuela so not the analogy I'd lean into.
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 19

Chomsky is, from what was heard, a person prone to

dogmatic and condescending responses, including to
colleagues and including in detail (there was the whole
"Semantic Wars" thing, for instance...). However, a world's
most dogmatic person can tell you that two plus two equals
four, and it won't make two plus two equal five.
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 19

Specifically, the work in linguistics based on his

assumptions has mostly proved tremendously
_productive_ (including when it shows that some
specific _details_ of his proposal were wrong).
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Continue Thread →

Turtle Jul 20

Nah, I agree with this. Heisenberg was literally a Nazi, but that
doesn’t invalidate the uncertainty principle.
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Jeffrey Soreff Jul 21

Seconded!
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Brian Moore Moore for President 2024 Jul 19

Not trying to argue at all, simple honest question: does Chomsky ever talk
about how his understanding of linguistics underpins/justifies his political
views? I am by no means an expert on the guy, but I do remember reading
some of his stuff where he makes the connection. (Could be wrong!)
:
 REPLY (3) SHARE

Dave Madeley Jul 19

I never got round to reading Manufacturing Consent, if there is any

crossover it will probably be there - how the powers that be use
language to manipulate us etc.
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Brian Moore Moore for President 2024 Jul 19

thanks for jogging my memory, I think that's where I read it too.

My mental recursion substructures must be underperforming
today....
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Dave Madeley Jul 19

You're welcome!
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 19

Haven't read the entire corpus of his works, but I don't think so. There
is an often-made joke that Chomsky the linguist and Chomsky the
anarchist are two different people, and in Russian it is reinforced by
the fact that his surname was traditionally translated as Хомсĸий
(with a [x] sound and declinable) for linguistic works but as Чомсĸи
(with the same-ish sound as in English and usually indeclinable) for
political works.

And, personally, I'm a Chomskian (largely, there are important

differences of detail, as there are bound to be when you do science)
in linguistics but very much not Chomskian in politics.
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Ian Scott Kalman Jul 20

In his debate with Foucault this comes out quite a bit. Universal
grammar suggests a universal human need for things like creativity
which feed into a more university moral and political stance. The
debate is cool. You can watch it on YouTube or read the transcript
online.
:
 REPLY SHARE

TGGP Jul 19

Got any Ford quotes on fascism? I hadn't heard of that.

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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 19

I've heard it many times, found this by a quick search:

https://medium.com/@hrnews1/how-henry-ford-was-a-fascist-turn-
leftist-chris-jeffries-7cb8e7ffb115
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TGGP Jul 19

I didn't see any Ford quotes there. Instead there's a youtube

video from "Turn Leftist & Chris Jeffries", which appears to be
about various things not actually specific to fascism that Ford
believed in.
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JamesLeng Jul 20

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford#Honors_and_recognition

> In 1938, Ford was awarded Nazi Germany's Grand Cross of the
German Eagle, a medal given to foreigners sympathetic to Nazism.
[145]
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TGGP Jul 21

That seems more like evidence of them liking him (as they did
Thomas J. Watson of IBM) than of his "adoration of fascism".
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JamesLeng Jul 22 · edited Jul 22

Near the middle of that same page there's a whole section

on how he earned it. He's mentioned so specifically in Mein
Kampf, the wiki's editors felt it necessary to clarify that
Hitler was already an anti-semite before encountering
:
 Ford's essays.
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TGGP Jul 22

Again, that's evidence of them liking Ford rather than

anything Ford said about fascism.
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Continue Thread →

anon123 Jul 20 · edited Jul 20

The analogy doesn't work because cars are a physical product that can be
personally tested and used unlike his ideas and theories.

I used to be a firm believer in engaging arguments on their own merits. I've

come to realize that it's too difficult to do that in fields I'm not personally
very familiar with, and thus there is a lot of value in using a person's
thoughts on other topics on which I'm more confident to judge how
seriously I should take their thoughts on the topic in question.
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ContemplativeMood Jul 20

This presupposes the need to have a position on every academic

controversy no matter how little knowledge you have about it.
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anon123 Jul 20

Why does it presuppose that?

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Turtle Jul 20

I was just uncritically accepting the thesis of the reviewer that Chomsky
the linguist is a) overrated and b) dogmatic.
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Leo Abstract Jul 20

Cars are the kinds of things that either run or don't, as are assembly lines.
Theories of linguistics, very much not.
:
 Further, imagine if Chomsky had been a die-hard fascist. Think anyone
would care about his linguistic theories today?
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anon123 Jul 20

I've noticed that a person's ability to put together logically consistent

analogies is a good reflection of their general mental horsepower.
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Melvin Jul 20

It doesn't prove he's wrong about linguistics, but it provides a good

reason to hate him.

Given that he's so hateable, though, the most reasonable thing to do

seems to be to quit giving him so much credit for being (supposedly) the
first person to formulate what is in retrospect a fairly obvious idea. Why do
we always need to hear Chomsky's name every time innate grammar is
mentioned? We don't hear Payne-Gaposchkin's name every time the
hydrogen-helium composition of the sun is mentioned. (In fact I've never
heard that name, I had to look it up as an example of a correct idea whose
first proponent is not widely known or celebrated.

Let's discuss linguistics without ever mentioning Chomsky again.

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Oliver Oliver’s Newsletter Jul 21

The argument is that "stubborness" is a personality trait that Chomsky

shares across multiple areas. One can easily think the Ford is "fascist" in
politics, car design and dealing with workers without making the cars
worse it just implies something about his personality.

Orwell thinks there is something inherently fascist about good matadors

while fighting fascism (and liking bull fights).
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TGGP Jul 19

I think he's an anarcho-syndicalist rather than a communist.

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:
 tup99 Jul 19

Typo:

> He does explicitly claim (in the aforementioned paper and elsewhere) that Pirahã
probably has no longest sentence

Seems like this should be "probably has a longest sentence".

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luciaphile Jul 21

I thought maybe he meant, all Piraha sentences are roughly equal in length.
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Alexander Kurz Alexander Kurz Jul 19

I am wondering why the question of whether Piraha has a longest sentence got so
much attention. English has a longest word, German doesnt. Piraha has a longest
sentence (say), English doesnt. What should matter is that no language has a
longest story. The focus on sentences seems arbitrary to me.
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 19

The claim is that sentence is the biggest object built by grammar, while it is not
even clear what a word is, that's a hot debate: for instance, if you claim that
"child seat" is a word that just happens to be written with a space (or, vice
versa, that Kinderstuhl is two words that just happen to be written together),
English suddenly becomes a lot like German.

Moreover/as a consequence, concatenation of sentences for stories does not

appear to be hierarchical (although cf.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetorical_structure_theory).
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Alexander Kurz Alexander Kurz Jul 21

The example of words was just meant for illustration, apologies. My point
was:

One can easily extend any grammar for sentences to a grammar for
stories. The latter grammar will always be recursive. So what is the point in
claiming that the grammar for Pidaha sentences is not recursive when the
more important grammar for Pidaha stories is recursive?
:
 REPLY (1) SHARE

Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 21

Well, again, the argument may be that stories aren't recursively

hierarchical, they just chain sentences linearly. (I am not ready to
discuss whether that argument would be true, mind.)
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StrangeBanana Jul 19

"To Everett, the most important feature of language is not grammar or any
particular properties of grammar, but the fact that it involves communication using
symbols. "

"Can’t lots of animals do all those things? Yes. Everett views the difference as one
of degree, not necessarily of quality. "

Before today, I had never heard of all this tribal language beef. Nevertheless (being
an inveterate prescriptivist, though untrained in formal linguistics), I arrived at
identical versions of the above conclusions independently some years ago.

I'm still not sure whether this points to a sign of weakness in Everett's argument,
but I'm calling it a small win.
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Dave Madeley Jul 19

I can't help feeling that being somewhat more open to Aristotelian 'folk'
metaphysics, purely pragmatically, might take the edge off a lot of academic
rancour. The human mind clearly has a great potential for language, which is
nevertheless realised in act only in certain contexts. I'm sure you all have excellent
jokes about bowling balls tied together with string but I'm looking here at an
interminable debate about what "innate" means, and I do think at least having the
vocabulary to talk about "non-being which in some way is" is a strength of
Aristotelianism (and Thomism). It's not sufficient but it seems necessary, or just
helpful, useful. Anyway, interesting review.
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Mark Carnegie Mark’s Substack Jul 19

Can someone please explain why Chomsky continues to have a role in linguistics
like Marx in communism. What he says has been proved to be wrong again and
:
 again yet he is still deified
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TGGP Jul 19

Marx was disproven (in practice) after he died. Chomsky is still alive.
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Callum Hackett The Great Exhibition Jul 19

The situation is not as black and white as there are Chomskyan linguists and
non-Chomskyan ones, although people do organise themselves institutionally
in these ways for contingent reasons. Few people agree with everything that
Chomsky has claimed but not everything Chomsky has said is false. The useful
stuff sticks around while people reapply it in new frameworks in an improved
form but his personality casts a shadow because people like drama and it gives
outsiders the wrong impression of where the field is intellectually.
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Kenny Easwaran Jul 21

I think Newton was a lot like this as well. And in paleontology at the turn of the
20th century, Cope and Marsh were two competing poles that similarly
dominated a field by sheer force of will, developing useful theories that led to
major progress despite being fundamentally flawed in ways that were known
early on (in Newton’s case, by Leibniz).
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Jeffrey Soreff Jul 21

Similarly in coordination chemistry in the late 19th century, with Sophus

Mads Jørgensen and Alfred Werner
https://www.britannica.com/science/coordination-compound/History-of-
coordination-compounds
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Erythrina Jul 19

> To borrow a phrase from elsewhere, linguists are those who believe Noam
Chomsky is the rightful caliph.

This is the quickest an essay got me angry, ever.

:
 REPLY (1) SHARE

Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 19

Me too, kinda, I hear this crap far too often :D But there's a kernel of truth in it.
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Ran Jul 19

This review got off on the wrong foot, for me, by initially pretending that all of
linguistics has gone Chomskyan, which is the same order of mistake as pretending
that all Americans are Republican. Chomskyans do like to pretend that they're the
whole field (or at least the "theoretical core" of the field), just as politicians like to
pretend that all Americans agree with them; but the rest of us don't have to believe
it.

(In fairness, the review later implicitly backs off of this pretense, both by using
phrases like "Chomskyan linguists" and by citing various non-Chomskyan linguists;
but I don't think there was any reason for the pretense to begin with, and I think that
an uninformed reader would still come away from this review with a *massive*
overestimate of what proportion of the field is Chomskyan.)
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Dave Madeley Jul 19

What are your thoughts on the citation stat?

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Ran Jul 19

In the 2020 election, 74.2 million Americans voted for Donald Trump,
which is (by a large margin) more people than had ever voted for any
candidate in any U.S. Presidential election. It's far more people than ever
voted for Trudeau, Sunak, Macron, Merkel, Putin, Stalin, etc., etc., etc.

If you were given no other information besides that paragraph, you might
conclude that Trump is overwhelmingly popular and everyone supported
him.

But in fact, his main opponent, Joe Biden, won *even more* votes!
Somehow that just didn't come up before. ;-)

Of course, in the case of Chomsky, there's no corresponding "anti-

Chomsky" we can compare him to. (The opposite of a quasi-cult isn't a
:
 different quasi-cult.) And in fact, it wouldn't surprise me if many of
Chomsky's cites are actually from scholars disagreeing with him.

But either way, what the citation counts show (at best) is the size of
Chomskyan linguistics, not the proportion of linguistics that is Chomskyan.
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Dave Madeley Jul 20

It would be useful to have the proportions I agree, but it seems

unlikely that Chomsky's citation share in Linguistics would be less
than Marx's citation share in Economics, judging by the numbers in
the review.
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Ran Jul 20

Sure -- and I'll gladly stipulate that there are more Chomskyan
linguists than Marxist economists -- but are you really under the
impression that most economists are Marxists??
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Dave Madeley Jul 20 · edited Jul 20

No, I just chose Marx from the reviewer's list. My takeaway

was: X(A) = expected % share of citations for an arbitrary
'famous' academic; X(C) = expected % share of citations for
Chomsky. X(A) should be roughly equal to X(C) but they are
way off. That's interesting even if Chomsky's actual share is,
say, 30%.
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Ran Jul 20

Sorry, I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to

say.

The review uses the citation numbers to help make its

case that most linguists are Chomskyan; so when you
asked me "What are your thoughts on the citation
stat?", I thought that you were calling my attention to
that supposed evidence, and asking for my rebuttal.
:
 But from your latest comment, it seems that you don't
actually agree with the review's conclusion — which is
obviously fine — but then I'm not sure what you're
trying to ask me?
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Continue Thread →

Sean Trott The Counterfactual Jul 20

Chomsky has had a huge impact on linguistics in the sense that his work has
established central debates and research questions. So many linguists who are
“non / anti Chomskyan” are in some ways working within the bounds of those
questions (eg, about innateness vs empiricism, gradualism vs saltatory
development of language, communication vs cognitive function of language,
etc). Of course you’re right that the field is much broader than followers of
Chomsky, but it really is helpful to understand his paradigmatic impact to
contextualize Everett’s work, since some of what Everett argues feels like
common sense to outsiders (eg, language is “for” communication).
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Ran Jul 20

Honestly, even that seems overstated to me — plenty of linguists are

perfectly happy to do descriptive work with little or no reference to the
questions you mention (just as plenty of Americans don't vote for either
party) — but it's infinitely better than the review's claim that "linguists are
those who believe Noam Chomsky is the rightful caliph."
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Sean Trott The Counterfactual Jul 20

Yeah that’s fair!

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anon123 Jul 20

I think that whole part was supposed to be "the hook", an amusing little bit at
the start to get readers interested. It ran too long for me though.
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Ran Jul 20
:
 I'm sure you're right, but I think the reviewer really does expect us to take
claims like this one at face value:

> Since around 1957, Chomsky has dominated linguistics.

Especially given that it's repackaged later as a presupposition in claims

like this one:

> [...] the dominance of Chomskyan linguistics has had downstream

effects in adjacent fields like artificial intelligence (AI), evolutionary
biology, and neuroscience.
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Kenny Easwaran Jul 21

I agree. It made me worry that this was going to be written from a pro-
Chomskyan point of view that pretended anti-Chomskyans don’t exist.
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TGGP Jul 19

> bedobi, Redditor

> the conduct of many in the pro-Chomsky faction is pretty shocking

The first thing bedobi says in that post is "I'm sympathetic to criticisms of
Chomsky's universal grammar"
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Jonas Wagner Jul 19

If you've liked this post, you'll love toki pona: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona

toki pona is a minimalist constructed language, made by Sonja Lang about 20 years
ago. It consists of about 130 words and a small grammar. Despite these limitations,
it works surprisingly well for communication, and there are friendly, active online-
communities.

toki pona seems similar to Pirahã in that it has very little recursion. Many things are
broken down in parts. For example, a sentence like "Alice said that the cat died"
would be translated as "jan Ali li toki e ni: soweli li moli" -- literally "person Ali says
this: mammal die".

Interestingly, toki pona *is* an invention. One that has sparked a unique culture,
complete with meetings, music videos, penpals, literature. The language has
:
 attracted many people who are neurodiverse or part of the LGBTQ+ culture, maybe
because toki pona comes without some of the cultural baggage of older languages.
In this case, one can truly say that language is the handmaiden of culture.
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luciaphile Jul 21

Alice’s mother: wait a week before you bury me.

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Jonas Wagner Jul 21

:)

Yes, context is important in toki pona. It seems surprising at first that

words have such broad semantic fields, like soweli which covers all
mammals. Yet in practice, it is usually clear what is being talked about.
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Venkat Jul 19

If anyone is interested in reading more linguistics beef, 'The Linguistics War'

documents the acerbic debates on how linguists should study language in the
1970s, and Chomsky is, of course, the main character.
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MichaeL Roe Jul 19

I'm not a .linguist, but having met linguists, I get the impression that Chomsky is not
universally well-regarded, despite his massive citation count. Sp this review may be
overestimating Chomsky's hold on the field.

It strokes me that there are weaker claims than full Choimskiansism that re still
pretty interesting:

- pretty much all humans can learn all human languages, provided they start early
and put in effort. (language learning easier in childhood). The specifics of
particulars langauages seem noit to be genetically hard-wited at all.

- it sems that this group of people can learn languages like Portuguese with
recursive structures even f (arguably) tgheir own language doesn't use them. So
something like the potential to understand recursive langauges is bioliogically
embedded in all humans
:
 - on the other hand, many non-human animals cant learn our languages, So its
clearly not trivial.
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Steve Byrnes Jul 19

I agree that the FOXP2 mutation is not particularly related to language—I think it
causes a general deficit in learned rapid precise motor control, and as it happens,
speech is the area most saliently impacted by a general deficit in learned rapid
precise motor control. See my blog post here for details including two textbooks
that come to the same conclusion:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/smgwRt5MbY9dwhecL/is-foxp2-speech-and-
language-disorder-really-foxp2-forebrain
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MichaeL Roe Jul 20

I got the impression that FOXP2 was one' of the steps on the way to language
... conveys the ability to make a wider ranger of squeaky noises (in mice)
without grammar. Presumably, in humans, some other adaptation built upon it.
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Yusef Mosiah Nathanson Choir Jul 19 · edited Jul 19

Hot take incoming:

Chomsky consistently repeats the claim that his linguistics and his politics are
utterly separate. I disagree. The through-line is in Chomsky’s implicit belief that the
Good Life is one of mass democratic decision-making. Anarcho-syndicalism, a kind
of radical egalitarian belief that all humans are created equal, would require that all
people/workers/citizens be informed about and actively participate in the collective
decision-making of their workplace and society. Basically, everyone needs to
become middle-class, literate, and non-violent.

Theories of Universal Grammar also posit that all humans are created equal. But, by
centering grammar as the core of language, they privilege the relationship that
educated, articulate people have with language. Grammar just isn’t that important
to the working class and the underclass, people who didn’t get their grammar
corrected in school until they’ve learned to follow the rules.

Now, I know that Chomsky means something peculiar when he uses “grammar”:
Deep Structure. But what evidence do we have for deep structure? Similar people
:
 probably have similar mental representations. But beyond that, can we really say
with confidence that words and sentences encode meaning? No, meaning is
pragmatic, and depends heavily on contextual information. The position that words
have precise meanings, that we can literally evaluate sentences compositionally, is
itself a social construct, and in particular, a hallmark of academic and quasi-
academic discourse, such as this discussion.

In working-class and underclass cultures, it’s uncouth to be so literal. Also true at

some
Expandupper class social events. Often, language is meant to signal communal
full comment
bonds, not make truth claims.
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eldomtom2 Jul 19

The book Decoding Chomsky may of interest as it argues the opposite; that
Chomsky's linguistic theories serve the interests of the American
establishment.
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Yusef Mosiah Nathanson Choir Jul 19 · edited Jul 20

I contend that Chomsky’s leftism also serves the interest of the American
establishment. It’s an intellectual stance that is of no threat to the ruling
class; a particularly erudite form of champagne socialism/anti-imperialism,
inaccessible to the masses required for a real revolutionary movement.
Chomsky is of course more rationalistic than the critical theorists /
continental philosophers he called obscurantist, eg Foucault and other
pomo theorists that paved the way for 21st century identity politics and
intersectionality — though they too are of course part of the Western elite
discourse, and no threat to the world order; indeed, today, LGBTQ+ rights
and racial justice are a justification and tool of Western power.

EDIT: To clarify, my point is that idealistic egalitarianism that imagines all

humans as potential rational educated western middle-class knowledge-
workers participating in democratic collective decision-making systems is
actually not as liberatory as it seems. Advanced human society requires
complex division of labor, including division of decision-making authority,
and the hoarding and wielding of secrets. In other words, a social
hierarchy; workers and bosses.

For all the criticisms of mass media as a means of elite control over
democratic processes, we haven't yet found a better means of social
:
 coordination. The chaotic populism of social media — rampant
misinformation and conspiracy theories, declining trust in authoritative
institutions, a race to the bottom attention economy, incentivizing
everyone to become an influencer — seems to be in many ways worse
Expand full comment
than old-school manufactured consent.
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Yusef Mosiah Nathanson Choir Jul 20

So yes, thank you for the recommendation. I just got the book.
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Geoff Nathan Jul 20

I think it is important to recognize that the way both Chomsky and Everett use
the word grammar is quite different from the way laypeople use the word
grammar. The kind of grammar that linguists are talking about is simply the
organizational structure of speech. This means that Day Labourism professor
is having exactly the same grammar, and it is equally important to all of them.
Conscious knowledge of grammar that is learned in school is not talking about,
it is certainly true that that kind of explicit knowledge is not terribly important
to the average man in the street, but the average man in the street speaks
coherent structure language, which is no different from that of the professor,
perhaps for the number of fancy words being used.that is point on which
Chomsky and Everett would agree
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Yusef Mosiah Nathanson Choir Jul 20

Yes, I understand that grammar has a technical meaning in linguistics. I

just question whether this is actually carving reality at it's joints.

As I wrote above, from a perspective on language and communication that

centers pragmatics and sociolinguistics, it doesn't make sense to imagine
that sentences have a Deep Structure. Sentences don't mean anything
outside of their context! Context — the who, where, when, why, and how of
speech — matters more than compositional semantics — what was said.

The concept of grammar used by academic linguists is a kind of motte-

and-bailey. Linguists retreat to the distinction you mention, between deep
structure (an abstract formalism) and surface structure (the rules you
learn in school) when challenged by the reality that there's scant evidence
:
 for their emphasis on grammar. But in practice, most linguists hate the
distributional hypothesis, The Bitter Lesson, and probabilistic systems like
LLMs; but they like Montague Semantics; and they like rule-based
recursive parsers — converting surface structure to deep structure —
which are
Expand a good model
full comment of computer languages but not natural language.
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Kenny Easwaran Jul 21

“Grammar just isn’t that important to the working class and the underclass”

That seems completely wrong to me. There is a formal grammar of written

academic language that doesn’t matter to them. But if you look at the
grammatical patterns of their natural language, you’ll see that they’re just as
complex and just as important to them - someone who uses “ain’t” wrong, or
fails to double-negate in the standard ways, or in any other way breaks the
grammatical rules of their particular non-privileged varieties of English is going
to sound silly, like an outsider who is interloping and pretending to speak their
language.

That said, I agree with a lot of the other criticism, that people aren’t using
language for the same kind of abstract thinking that Chomsky thinks it is
essentially for.
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Yusef Mosiah Nathanson Choir Jul 21

I'm not saying that working- and underclass people don't have any
linguistic regularity. That would be preposterous. Certainly, how you
communicate signals your affinity with the group, your insider/outsider
status, etc., but this is as much or more a matter of pragmatics and
sociolinguistics as it is about syntax.

It's my experience that in less academic contexts, with working- and

underclass folks, in both casual speech and text messages, there is
indeed less emphasis on adhering to the grammatical norms of the non-
prestige dialect. Certain conventions must be followed to — don't sound
like an outsider — but beyond that there is more latitude for all sorts of
disfluencies.

This is a somewhat controversial perspective, I acknowledge. Many good-

hearted folks in linguistics want to maintain the view that non-prestige
:
 dialects are equivalently complex to standard dialects. Certainly, it's a fact
that all languages can express all ideas, just not with equal ease. Now, one
could hold that dialects may be morally equal without being equally
complex in some senses. But that's a hard distinction to maintain, and not
one that most academics are comfortable making, for reasons that mirror
the complexities of the discourse around biological differences in ethnic
groups.

When we zoom out from dialectical differences to differences between

languages, it's then rather obvious that some languages are more
grammar-heavy than others. Why would this be untrue of dialects?
Expand full comment
For an example to make this more concrete, while African American
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Brendan Richardson Jul 22

"I should add that I stuttered as a child, and had to go through

speech therapy as a teenager. I "solved" my stutter by learning to
circumlocute. Rather than attempt to say a word that would make me
stutter, I substitute a synonymous word or phrase."

I recall reading John Stossel's account of failing to do this with the

word "dollars," as the initial hard consonant was a problem for him,
and the only synonym he could think of, "bucks," had the same
problem, in addition to being too informal. Did you do any better than
him?
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Yusef Mosiah Nathanson Choir Jul 22

I thankfully didn’t have the experience of having certain words I

would frequently stutter on. I can only imagine how stressful it
would be to constantly avoid key words. For me, it’s more of an
immediate feeling that the word(s) I’ve planned to say won’t
come out the way I intended. The more I would try to force
myself to say something, the more I would stutter.

The temperature parameter in large language models is a good

analogy. Temp = 0 means the model always outputs the most
likely next token. Higher temperatures mean it outputs less
probable tokens with some probability. For me to speak fluently, I
have to have a “higher temperature” — I often surprise myself
:
 with my choice of words.

When I did speech therapy at 15, I realized my stutter was minor

compared to the handful of other teens in my month-long
summer program. The other kids stutters were triggered in
particular contexts like reading aloud or talking on the phone,
and many of them had key words that they would predictably
stutter on. For some it was their own names. And they seemed to
be more self-conscious than me about it, more concerned with
how others judge them. Maybe it was low self-esteem but I didn’t
think other kids thought or cared about me much, nor was I that
concerned with their judgments.

My stuttering then, as now, was only correlated with heightened

emotional
Expand states, particularly
full comment anxiety.
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Victualis Jul 25

Most mathematicians I've met claim to think mostly in geometric terms,

definitely not the kind of grammar-structured language that Chomsky
seems to have advocated through a long career. Maybe this way of
thinking is sometimes compositional and therefore could be brought into a
Merge framework, but I don't think compositionality is universal in such
thought (or in any other styles of thought).
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Kenny Easwaran Jul 25

That sounds right to me.

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Tony Jul 19

This was one of the 10s I gave in the book review primary season, and also my pick
for secret undercover Scott review
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Bldysabba Jul 20

There is no way in hell this is by Scott

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:
 FLWAB Flying Lion With A Book Jul 19 · edited Jul 19

>A more parsimonious speculation is that they did not, and that the Great Leap was
effectively instantaneous, in a single individual, who was instantly endowed with
intellectual capacities far superior to those of others, transmitted to offspring and
coming to predominate.

Isn't this basically what Catholics believe about Adam? That all modern humankind
is descended from a single male (and a single female) ancestor, and that God
granted Adam the gift of rationality, a mind made in his own image?
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Big Worker Jul 19

"He does explicitly claim (in the aforementioned paper and elsewhere) that Pirahã
probably has no longest sentence, which is about the most generic anti-recursion
statement one can make."

Was this meant to say that it probably DOES have a longest sentence? From what I
read up to this point I'd have thought that all languages having no longest sentence
is the standard Chomskyian view.
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Zamua Jul 19

i had same question!

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Kenny Easwaran Jul 21

Ah I misread this! I thought it was saying he was conceding the one most
generic *pro*-recursion point, that it doesn’t have a longest sentence, even
though it doesn’t use any of the standard recursive methods for extending
them.
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Alexander Corwin Jul 19

taking this account at face value, it seems like it would be *extremely valuable* to
the field of linguistics to have one more person actually interact with the Piraha and
learn their language, which would presumably dissolve the questions about
Everett's description of their language. I realize that getting in slow-burning
asynchronous fights is more fun than that but it's kind of embarrassing to read
:
 about as an outsider
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Jonas Wagner Jul 21

That would be cool. This comes at a high cost though, since there are under
400 native speakers and they live in a very remote place.

People are studying recorded material though, and doing smaller experiments
(which do not involve spending years to learn the language).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language
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Thomas L. Hutcheson Radical Centrist Jul 19

I follow linguistics pretty closely and Chomsky's influence would be hard to

_under_state.
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Anon_NLP_Enthusiast Jul 19

Your note about parse trees in the "mechanism" of LLM's is no hypothetical - such
trees have actually been found, as early as 2019 (in BERT, a precursor to GPT)! This
work finds that the trees are linearly embedded in a certain fixed subspace of the
latent vectors. It's powerful evidence that such an algorithm emerged with no
explicit programming, as simply a necessary mechanism to predict the statistics of
language.

https://nlp.stanford.edu/~johnhew/structural-probe.html
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Wanda Tinasky Jul 20

Excellent review! I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that it's Scott.

And call this a non-central objection if you must, but I'd like to respond to the joke
in the link in 4th footnote. Friedman would have won the exchange if he'd simply
used a binary search: ln(2^n) = n so he still would have been able to pin Yessenin-
Volpin down in linear time.
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Fintan Jul 20

I took the joke to connect more to the finitist (even ultrafinitist) view of
:
 mathematical objects, which is that only objects that can actually be calculated
(that is, in a finite time) can exist. This means that the larger the number, the
longer it takes to find out if it exists (hence the increasing wait). Greg Egan has
a great short story called “luminous” that uses this idea.
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Wanda Tinasky Jul 20 · edited Jul 20

Oh I get it - it's very clever! But Friedman missed the chance to out-clever
him. Just sayin'.
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Jeffrey Soreff Jul 20

>Greg Egan has a great short story called “luminous” that uses this idea.

Yup! More-or-less why I took the finitist view in

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-319/comment/51465300
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 20

I respect Scott too much to believe this text is of his authorship.

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Kenny Easwaran Jul 21

I don’t think it’s Scott. He hasn’t expressed significant views on the

Chomskyan debate before, and this seems like someone who has spent a long
time thinking about it (perhaps someone like me who grew up Chomskyan but
had a conversion some time in the past decade).
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Neike Taika-Tessaro The Sound of Your Pulse Jul 20

> I find this notion of recursion completely insane, because it would imply (i) any
language with more than one word in its sentences has recursion, and that (ii) all
sentences are necessarily constructed recursively.

I had to ctrl+f 'Goptjaam' and 'glossable' to see if anyone beat me to this, but it
looks like no. Granted, Goptjaam is a *deliberately* cursed conlang
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ze5i_e_ryTk), but I think it's still an interesting
example of how this statement needn't necessarily follow! Goptjaam isn't glossable
:
 - its words depend entirely on the context of the full sentence. The moment you put
the 'same' word into a different context, it's a different word.

To be clear, this isn't meant as an argument; actual human languages aren't like
this! I just find it fun to look at how one can break languages if one tries.
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Niklas Anzinger Stranded Technologies Jul 20

Isn't from Chomsky to Everett a Wittgensteinian turn?

I think Wittgenstein never thought language was inherent, but he tried to invent a
logically consistent language to make truth statements about the world (an "I-
Language")

He then realised he missed the point, language is something that is practised - and
the practise improves it over time rather than one perfect design

So Chomsky is doubly mistaken

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Wanda Tinasky Jul 20 · edited Jul 20

Wasn't Wittgenstein answering a totally different question? He was interested

in how language is used while linguists are interested in how language is
constructed.
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Niklas Anzinger Stranded Technologies Jul 20

Maybe, but I don't think the distinction between how it's used and how it's
constructed is the relevant difference

The "E-language" [Everett] part seems to me saying that "how it's used is
how it is constructed" while Chomsky [I-Language] says "mental
properties construct how it's used"
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Wanda Tinasky Jul 20 · edited Jul 20

There's clearly some interaction but I think syntax and semantics are
distinct. Building the car vs driving the car would be the rough
analogy I'd use.
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:
 Kenny Easwaran Jul 21

I think the important point of Wittgenstein (which descriptive linguists of

any sort accept) is that languages are defined by how they are used, and
whatever it is to say they are constructed has to be defined by that.
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Wanda Tinasky Jul 21 · edited Jul 21

I know little of either Wittgenstein or linguistics, but whatever W was

talking about didn't involve, for example, parse trees. That seems to
me to be indicative of some sort of fundamental conceptual
distinction.

I do sort of find echoes of W in things like word embeddings: the

meaning of a word is defined by the words which surround it, which
seems suspiciously like "meaning as use". Chomsky's view of word
vectors and LLMs as antithetical to the more analytical approach of
linguistics I feel lends credence to the notion that what he was doing
and what W was doing were pretty distinct.
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smilerz Jul 20

Great review. Linguistics is such an interesting topic area I appreciate the work that
went into creating a layman's summary.

On a side note: can we create a corollary to Godwin's law stating that the longer an
argument goes on the probability of calling someone a racist approaches 1? And
that anyone that does so automatically loses the argument?
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Vampyricon Jul 20

No because there are arguments where calling someone else a racist is correct
and pertinent.
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smilerz Jul 20

There are also conversations where mentioning Hitler or Nazi's is relevant

- the vast majority of the time this isn't true and even in the rare case it is
adds exactly nothing to the conversation anyway.
:
 REPLY SHARE

Xpym Jul 20

Calling someone a racist isn't an argument, it's a status claim. By doing that
you assert that he's a Bad Person, and you're entitled to make that judgement.
This maneuver succeeds or fails mainly based on your relative social standings.
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smilerz Jul 20

you mean exactly like calling someone a Nazi?

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Xpym Jul 20

Well, the original Godwin's law was about comparing something to

Hitler/Nazis, not necessarily insulting the opponent directly, so it was
a bit more subtle. A law for a more civilized age.
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Wanda Tinasky Jul 20

That's an excellent deconstruction. I might just quote that at the next

person who calls me racist.
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Wanda Tinasky Jul 20

I would endorse this.

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Benjamin Jul 20

Some other people have pointed out parts of this, but it's bizarre how this book
review leads in by pretending that non-Chomskyan linguistics doesn't exist. Firstly,
his influence was a lot less in many subdisciplines of linguistics
(phonetics/phonology, historical linguistics, etc.) than in his core
syntax/morphology/child language acquisition specialties. Secondly, even in the
disciplines where Chomsky has had more to say, there's always been a sizable
number of linguists opposing him (see Randy Allen Harris's The Language Wars).
So yeah, Everettian ideas are also building on an established tradition (as should be
:
 clear by the many references to pre-Everett field linguistics)
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Kenny Easwaran Jul 21

Yes, this seems right and important. But I also think it’s interesting to me to see
an Everettian anti-Chomskyan take, because I’ve come to this from a different
angle.
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FrancoVS Jul 20

> He does explicitly claim ( . . . ) that Pirahã probably has *no* longest sentence ( . .
.)

Typo: should be "has *a* longest sentence"

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MichaeL Roe Jul 20

There are a bunch of cryptographers and linguists who are still trying to decipher
the Voynch manuscript. A pattern observed in that community....

a) Someone will point out a statistical feature of the Voynich manuscript which they
claim never occurs in any human language ever. This, they claim, is conclusive
evidence that the Voynich manuscript is a meaningless forgery, not a simple cypher
of some real language.(*)

b) Someone else will point out an example of an absolutely definitely real language
that also exhibits the feature in question. Those guys have samples of lots of
languages in machine-processable format.

(*) Historical context would suggest that if its a real language, its got to be either a
real language known to Europeans around the time of Rudold II of Bavaria, or a
conlang invented by them. This really cuts down the space of likely possibilities.

Had the Voynich manuscript been discovered much later, like in say 1960, after the
widespread use of machine ciphers and with he existence of widely travelled
linguists, our priors for "what kind of cipher of which natural language might this
be" would be so, so much worse.
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MichaeL Roe Jul 20

:
 Relevance to current post: Piraha serving as go to example for some of those
kind of "no human language ever" claims.
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MichaeL Roe Jul 20

Exotic possibilities for the Voynich manuscript include: its a simple cipher
padded with nulls, i.e. most of the ciphertext is random junk padding, but
subset of it deciphers to something cohetrent.
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mst Jul 24

> (*) Historical context would suggest that if its a real language, its got to be
either a real language known to Europeans around the time of Rudold II of
Bavaria, or a conlang invented by them. This really cuts down the space of
likely possibilities.

How much does that really cut it down? It would rule out American and Oceanic
languages sure, but isn't all of Afro-Eurasia still plausible in principle?
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Blackshoe Jul 20 · edited Jul 20

Just want to note that I really enjoyed Kingdom of Speech and found it highly
rewarding to read, though I had a suspicion it started after Wolfe and Chomsky met
each other at a NYC cocktail party and intensely despised each other.

Also to note on this:

"…well, okay, maybe I don’t entirely get Foucault’s number. Every humanities person
must have an altar of him by their bedside or something. "

Basically yes, he dominates citations in the humanities/liberal arts world

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delesley Jul 20

It is worth pointing out that the standard transformer architecture used in modern
LLMs is not recursive (or recurrent). That is to say, an LLM cannot construct a
grammatically correct sequence of tokens that corresponds (parses) to an abstract
syntax tree of unlimited depth. This is obvious on theoretical grounds from the
basic architecture, but you can also demonstrate it quite trivially by training a
transformer on toy languages described by context-free grammars. The maximum
:
 depth of recursion is limited by the number of layers in the transformer.

There are some variants (i.e. feedback transformer, universal transformer) that are
fully recursive. We don't use those variants because in practice it doesn't matter.
Humans can't process grammatical structures of unlimited depth either; once the
complexity of a sentence starts to overflow working memory, the grammatical
structure gets lost. So the difference between English and Pirahã is merely one of
degree -- Pirahã has a maximum recursive depth of 1, while English has unlimited
depth in theory, but in practice has a maximum recursive depth that is slightly
higher, but still small (single digits).

Note that humans can still write code of unlimited length, even though the abstract
syntax trees for human-written programs have finite (and typically small) depth.
The trick is to do exactly what Everett did when translating the Bible to Pirahã --
break big expressions into smaller ones, and use variables (names/pronouns)
instead of nested clauses. An extreme example is assembly language, where each
expression (sentence) has exactly 3 "words" -- e.g. (operation register1 register2).
Recursive
Expand grammar
full comment is unnecessary to represent complex ideas.
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B_Epstein Jul 20

It’s also worth noting that half of the attempts to extend the context
transformers may have run into the quadratic cost (complexity, memory) issue,
and that probably the majority of proposed solutions to this problem are de-
facto injecting recurrence, one way or another.
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 20

See the big discussion in other comments, specifically the "pointers to

pointers" wording.
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MichaeL Roe Jul 20

I have a vague memory that there's a field called psycholinguistics that studies
things like...

although you might write down a grammar of English that sugges6s there are
arbitrarily long valid sentences, there is in practise a limit to what actual human
speakers will put up with, Experimentally ,measure how much stuff there can be on
:
 the parser stack before a human decides the sentence is unreasonable.
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Omer Jul 20

I strongly disliked this review. It is incredibly condescending and equally wrong (and
often "not even wrong"). It honestly strikes me as odd that the reviewer, a self-
admitted layman, believe they can so easily identify the supposed absurd and
"insane" mistakes of thousands of brilliant researchers. The alternative hypothesis,
that the reviewer might be misunderstanding something, should've a at least
crossed their mind. This has all the red flags typical of a crank (possibly due to the
source material, but still...).

Like the reviewer, I'm not a linguist, but even I could spot such misunderstandings
in this review. These include conceptual misunderstandings (such as the
misconception about the meaning and implications of "recursion"), contextual
misunderstandings (e.g. regarding the long history of structuralism, from De
Saussure onward), and disciplinary misunderstandings (there are many counter-
Chomskyan linguists and even entire such linguistics departments; none subscribe
to Everett's views to the best of my knowledge, for what seem like good reasons).
Believing all the linguists are dense and mindless cult-followers lacking critical
thinking is just silly.
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VivaLaPanda Panda's Portentous Portal Jul 20

This review correctly mentions Foucault being extremely cited, and this very
blog has a post claiming that Foucault was basically a liar!

https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/04/book-review-madness-and-civilization/
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Ross Denton Jul 21

I feel these interested amateur reviews are high risk high return. Sometimes
you read something that shares a glimpse into another world and has an
infectious feeling of excitement - and sometimes you get a smart person totally
misunderstanding a really complex topic and leaving you feeling vaguely
annoyed.
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Steve Sailer Jul 20

:
 Do Chomsky's critics want to go back to the pre-Chomsky views within linguistics
before 1958 or so they accept that Chomsky made progress in at least a negative
sense by criticizing the conventional wisdom of the 1950s even if many of positive
theories haven't panned out?
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/\\//\\//\ Jul 20

Any idea what percentage of the Chomsky citations are to his political polemics?
Especially among grad students, his political writings are, because of their volume
and the predictability of his opinions, an ‘easy cite’ for students looking to frame a
debate.
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 20

I would expect that even his linguistic articles have _huge_ citation numbers,
because half the articles include "Following the general premise of Minimalism
(Chomsky, 2000)" or some such intro, which artificially inflates quotations
even if the rest of the article doesn't directly engage with Chomsky's work at
all.
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Judith Stove Judith’s Substack Jul 20

I thought it was pretty clear that the opening paragraphs of the review, which
purport to describe Chomsky's quasi-divine status, were tongue-in-cheek? -
anyway, I very much enjoyed this review - I have only read Wolfe's book, but now I
want to read Everett's own accounts.
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Turtle Jul 20

I thought this was a great review, and I wanted to share another interesting thing
about the Piraha. They are really happy. Relentlessly happy. In the 30 years Everett
studied them, there were zero suicides. The idea was a completely foreign concept.
Here’s Everett:

“I was still a very fervent Christian missionary, and I wanted to tell them how God
had changed my life. So, I told them a story about my stepmother and how she had
committed suicide because she was so depressed and so lost, for the word
depressed I used the word sad. So she was very sad. She was crying. She felt lost.
:
 And she shot herself in the head, and she died. And this had a large spiritual impact
on me, and I later became a missionary and came to the Piraha because of all of this
experience triggered by her suicide. And I told this story as tenderly as I could, and
tried to communicate that it had a huge impact on me. And when I was finished
everyone burst out laughing.”

They burst out laughing! It just didn’t make any sense to them that someone would
even consider doing that.

Does this have to do with their language? Well, language and culture are deeply
intertwined, and we know that the Piraha only use language centred on the present.
They have very limited vocabulary to describe the past and the future. So it
suggests a culture that’s deeply focussed on the present. In Western culture we
sometimes say that depression is living in the past, anxiety is living in the future,
and getting someone out of their head and into the real world (the now) is the point
of therapy
Expand and mindfulness
full comment training.
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drosophilist Jul 21

The Piraha may be very happy, but if their reaction to being told “this person
was very sad and then she killed herself” is to burst out laughing, then I would
describe them as somewhere between “zero emotional intelligence” and
“stone cold sociopaths.” Not great role models!
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Turtle Jul 21

I picture it like - imagine someone told you “this person was so sad that
she ate a thousand bananas until her stomach exploded.” You might laugh,
right? Just cause the concept is so ridiculous and unheard of, not because
you don’t have empathy for people with exploding stomachs.
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Brenton Graefe Jul 20

I love these ACX book reviews, and will read this one in its entirety later, but is it too
much to ask them to be a little more brief? With the length of this one I feel it’s
probably easier just to read the book itself.
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B_Epstein Jul 20
:
 The fact is that many (most?) winners/ front-runners have been very long,
historically. So the revealed preference is for longer rather than shorter
reviews.

Of course we’re all selected for liking Scott’s writing here- and it leans towards
thoroughness at the expense of brevity.
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Kenny Easwaran Jul 21

I was somewhat thinking this, but also thinking that it could have used a longer
section actually talking about the book being reviewed!
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Sniffnoy Jul 20

Have to point out with the other commenters that the idea that linguistics is
primarily Chomskyan is not true.
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static Jul 20

The thing that I find striking about Chomsky is the claim that nothing other than
grammatical analysis really matters. From a philosophy of language perspective, I
am much more sympathetic to the Wittgensteinian view, as expanded by Kripke.
Chomsky in the end seems quite reductionist, mistaking his understanding of how
there can be formal systems that describe how languages function via grammar to
mean that other aspects shouldn't be studied. His project reminds me of
philosophical work trying to derive the basics of arithmetic from the rules of logic,
and then declaring that nothing else you could do with that was worthwhile. Even
without that, there were plenty of things to do in mathematics- and different logical
foundations are possible for the empirical facts that can be observed. If the
Chomsky project ends up just describing a very simple rule for recursion, it may not
be all that useful as a foundation for study of more complex phenomena, as the
complexity that must be built on top of that foundation in order to describe common
uses of language makes those descriptions less useful.
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 20

Language is a complex interaction of many things. The claim is that the

grammatical side (which is richer than just recursion because of interfaces -
:
 again, ChHF 2002 is a _very_ bad intro into UG, good linguistic articles are not
published in Nature!) is basically the only (and existing) _proprietarily
linguistic_ thing among them, while others are purview of psychology,
sociology or whatever.
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static Jul 22

Then studying 'proprietary linguistics' is pointless? Or maybe it's not

important what is considered 'proprietary linguistics'.
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 22

Define "pointless". It certainly leads to discoveries about how

grammar works and indirectly bears on other cognitive science
because language is often the window used to try and look into the
brain.
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Garald Jul 20

" Perhaps the most interesting suffixes, however (though these are not unique to
Pirahã), are what linguists call evidentials, elements that represent the speaker’s
evaluation of his or her knowledge of what he or she is saying. There are three of
these in Pirahã: hearsay, observation, and deduction."

This sort of thing is not so unusual - for instance, Quechua has them. (A page in a
grammar book on my bookshelf lists the situations in which one particular evidential
particle can be used - some examples from memory: I was there but I was asleep, I
was there but I was very drunk, I was there but I was less than five years old...)
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Michael Watts Jul 20

> How Chomsky attained this stranglehold on linguistics is an interesting

sociological question, but not our main concern in the present work

This review is bizarre. Chomsky doesn't have a stranglehold on linguistics. It's like
writing a long essay criticizing Aristotle's stranglehold on physics.
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:
 Kenny Easwaran Jul 21

While it’s overstated, I think it’s right. There are chomskyan departments and
anti-chomskyan departments, but everyone has opinions on Chomsky. There is
no comparable figure in physics.
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Ross Denton Jul 21

I totally agree!! After the first few paragraphs I was seriously confused about
what this guy had actually read. It just seems the opposite of any recent “mass
appeal” linguistics book.
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Matthias Görgens Jul 20

> He does explicitly claim (in the aforementioned paper and elsewhere) that Pirahã
probably has no longest sentence, which is about the most generic anti-recursion
statement one can make.

Should that read 'probably has a longest sentence'?

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Ppau Jul 20

Okay next time someone named Everett proposes new fundamental ideas about a
field I'll be listening from the beginning
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John R Ramsden Jul 20 · edited Jul 20

Did Chomsky really declare that the first language evolved abruptly a mere 50,000
years ago? If that is a prediction of his theories then its epic stupidity largely
discredits them on its own. Anatomically modern humans appeared over 300,000
years ago for a start, and it seems misguided, verging on cranky, to dispute that
throughout that time they were fully capable of speech with a proper language,
even if this may have lacked some modern refinements.

I mean one can teach chimps and gorillas to speak, at least simple sentences. They
may grunt and huff and puff in trying to imitate human vocalizations, but when they
hold up cards saying things like "Koco want banana" and suchlike, there is no doubt
they are meaningfully communicating, and is cast iron evidence they are thinking in
words up to a point. Even my cat clearly recognises a few words, such as her name
:
 and "din dins"!
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Omer Jul 20

If you assume that being anatomically modern means having a fully developed
language ability, then you're making a circular argument (and ironically, you're
kinda agreeing with Chomsky while doing it, though with respect to a slightly
different of definition of "anatomically modern").

Also, writing appeared abruptly about 5,000 years ago, even though humans
300,000 years ago were anatomically capable of writing just like us. This
shows that your reasoning is flawed, and it's reasonable to suggest a similar
trajectory for speech. In fact, this makes more sense for speech: there is
evidence (like types of aphasia) indicating that speech, unlike writing, isn't
genetically stable and can break down isolatedly. While not definitive proof, this
supports the hypothesis of an abrupt development of speech.

Finally, archaeological evidence (as far as I know) shows that about 50,000
years ago, there was a significant cultural leap in art and technology that
spread quickly worldwide. The fact that there were no major anatomical
changes during this time, as you mentioned, actually supports the idea that
language suddenly emerged rather than contradicting it.
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Callum Hackett The Great Exhibition Jul 20

Not to pick on you but there is a lot of confident incorrectness about linguistic
theory because we are prone to assuming that being able to speak language is
a good qualification to start theorising about it but it isn't. Things like "word"
and "sentence" have intuitive meanings to lay people but they are pre-
theoretical terms. When you put in the work to analyse their role in a larger
explanatory model (such as those starting with Eric Lenneberg and Charles
Hockett, who made contributions to the biology of language long before
Chomsky), you realise that these things can be counter-intuitive and you can
reasonably come away with the conclusion that non-humans communicate
with things we might not want to call "words".

In general, in this review and the comments, it ought to be suspicious how

quickly people conclude that Chomsky is ideological or moronic in the face of
counter-evidence, or that the field as a whole is just a cult of acceptance for
:
 everything he says, as if there haven't been hundreds of other linguists in the
same tradition who have done fieldwork and animal studies and psychological
experiments.

I mean, just open journals like Linguistic Inquiry, Syntax, Glossa or Natural
Language and Linguistic Theory etc. - that should have been foundational to a
piece which ultimately disparages the field alongside Chomsky but there is no
evidence in those pages of what the review describes because the Everett
drama is totally unrepresentative.

I think underlying all this, there's really a badly misunderstood model that
people have for how academia works. Perhaps biased by reasonable critiques
Expand full comment
of the postmodernised humanities but that brush can't be used to tarnish
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 20

That's not what evidence from teaching apes language actually suggests, and
anatomically modern humans that seemingly didn't engage in modern
behaviour are an argument in the other direction, that is, that they were _not_
capable; I've already touched on both in other comments.
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avalancheGenesis Jul 20

Must admit to skimming the last two sections. Three parts preface, one part actual
review of the book in question, one part kludged-on red meat for rats (ratmeat?),
with the former roughly 65% of the entire review, and cornucopious blockquotes
throughout (so many blockquotes, mostly from...not-actually-the-book-being-
reviewed)...it's just A Lot. Yet despite all the references and scene-setting, I still find
myself with that nagging [Citation Needed] feeling of insufficiently-supported
statements. This was not helped by c.f.'s to other works that the author admits to
not having actually read/understood, nor ~all the quotes being from within the first
few dozen pages of each work. I want to assume the full texts were indeed read,
and their contexts explicated in prose, but...I dunno, it reminds me a lot of sundry
mandatory Works Cited bibliographies in school stuffed with trite surface-level
references. A palette of bon mots more than integral supporting research. One can
certainly stitch together an argument this way, but it shambles rather than running,
which is optimal for zombies but not rhetoric.

Ultimately I leave with no more knowledge than I started of what linguistics even is,
or why it's important outside departmental funding disputes, or why anyone takes
:
 Chomsky seriously. "It's not my theory that's wrong, it's the world!" says the
dismissively towering Ivyist who's never done any fieldwork. (Also, I still don't
understand what an I-language is. The spherical cow of languages?) Despite
reading it,comment
Expand full it's Not For Me, sorry.
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 21

Without commenting on the rest, I-language is the mental module for language
in each individual's brain, which gives rise to the individual's observed
language, "idiolect".
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avalancheGenesis Jul 21

This would have been helpful to know while reading, thank you. So
language is theorized to be necessarily individual and arises from a
particular <s>candidate gene</s> shared brain module, yet nevertheless
follows certain universal patterns, despite the trivially observable vast
differences between discrete..geocultural expressive groupings, or e-
languages. (And maybe - maybe - some languages that don't follow all the
axioms.) A meta-language, if you will, and an essential H. sapiens
evolutionary stepping stone leading to enhanced cognition overall. That's
at least the seed of a potentially interesting and falsifiable hypothesis. (I
wonder what Chomsky thinks about Neuralink and similar proposed
technologies...)

Should have amended that I...never actually learned proper grammar, and
wasn't even introduced to the concept of certain fundamentals like "parts
of speech" until late teens. Even today, the formalisms continue to
baffle...some language simply seems intuitively correct, and other
constructions not, without really being able to explicate why. Chomsky
obviously means more than *just* the formal Rules Of Proper Language
one learns in school when he refers to Grammarcy Hall, but that's
definitely a part of it...so not having that, uh, brain module is perhaps a
large part of why I bounce hard off linguistics. Not an impediment to
actual speech-as-communication-or-internal-thinking (I assume perfect
written/verbal SAT/WAIS measures *something* real), but probably a big
stumbling
Expand block for
full comment understanding the theoretical underpinnings.
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:
 Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 21

> but that's definitely a part of it...

Not really? If the rules are part of the brain, you don't need to teach
them. More generally, you can't explain how specialized modules of
the brain work by the mere fact you possess them, any more than
possessing a heart makes you a cardiologist.
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avalancheGenesis Jul 21

Not sure I understand. If such knowledge is inherent to all brains,

just as natural as no one needs to be taught how to make their
heart beat or their legs walk, then...why do we teach grammar at
all? Still-disappointing-but-gradually-increasing average literacy
levels certainly seem to suggest there's some additional need
being met (although such paucity remaining a common feature
of the complacency of the learned is also not encouraging). I do
notice that such deficiencies perhaps reflecting on the actual
strength of one's internal thinking, rather than merely
communicative barriers, is...kind of a dark road to go down as
well. A conclusion to flinch away from. One wants to believe in
the rich interior lives of other sentients...

Incidentally, I appreciate you bothering to patiently interlocute in

good faith with the sundry ignorant commenters on this topic,
self included obviously. Edification on impenetrable topics is a
worthy endeavor even if it doesn't stick. "More of this, please,"
as the full
Expand kids say these days.
comment

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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 21

Oof. What we teach in schools is an attempt to formalize

and standardize what has already happened in heads, and
the grammatical differences between how kids speak and
what they are taught are differences between their grammar
and "Standard English" grammar, not between presence
and absence of grammar.
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:
 VNodosaurus Jul 20 · edited Jul 20

Language emerging suddenly is a somewhat separate claim from language being

innate. If humans rapidly developed true language ~50 thousand years ago (as SF
ideas go, I like the suggestion that we were taught language by sperm whales at
that time, or if you're boring you can just go with aliens, but really I'm talking about
an existing proto-language rapidly making a qualitative jump in some tribe), and
other humans already had the capability for it because anyone smart enough can
learn language, it could spread very quickly, as useful technologies do. And there
really was a spurt of Homo sapiens expansion that started ~50 thousand years ago,
for unclear reasons. But blaming it on a de novo mutation that rapidly spread to
literally everyone seems dubious.

By contrast, you could also argue for a biologically innate language ability,
hardcoded in, that nevertheless evolved gradually, through multiple levels of
selection, from a proto-language towards today through millions of years of
selection for better linguistic ability.

And, frankly, I feel that this would be a more logical alignment of the abrupt-gradual
and hardcoded-general questions than the one the review describes linguists as
going for. Hardcoded linguistic ability should emerge at the speed of evolution;
language as a teachable invention, after a "hardware overhang", can spread at the
speed full
Expand of culture.
comment

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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 21

But not all evolution is gradual. If the intuition about the system is broadly
correct, the recursive property is as abrupt as switching from RNA to
RNA+DNA, and this lines up well with ontogenesis.
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VNodosaurus Jul 21

That's a strange analogy, given that we don't know how the RNA-DNA
transition happened. But yes - evolutionary changes can happen quickly.
However, quick by evolutionary standards is still pretty slow by cultural
standards.
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 21

:
 Sure, but, seeing as we speak about hominids, the proper comparison
is paleontological standards not cultural, and evolution can be much
quicker than those, especially under adverse pressure by quasi-kins
(Ashkenazi selection, lactose tolerance selection, that fish speciation
in recently separated lakes story...)
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VNodosaurus Jul 21

I mean, the question is whether language should be thought of

as primarily a biological adaptation or primarily a cultural
invention. So the comparison is between evolution and culture.
Mind you, obviously you can still argue for a rapid genetic shift,
or a slow cultural evolution; it's just ironic that the "sides" (if the
review is to be trusted, since I understand that it drastically
simplifies disagreements among linguists) are fast genetic vs.
slow cultural.
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 21

Slow genetic is fairly popular among non-Chomskyans (see

Svetlana Burlak, see some comments under this very post).
But yeah, virtually absent "fast cultural" is interesting. The
reason may be that cultural guys tend to be holists, and
holists will (obviously) see language as more complicated
than analysts, because, well, they include more into their
notion of language.
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 21

(And as for "don't know how" — that makes the analogy more
illuminative for me: the nature of the nucleotides implies it should've
been rather abrupt, as ribonucleotides don't form stable chains (I
mean the "vertical" connection, not the complementarity-based
"horizontal" one) with disoxyribonucleotides, so it wasn't nucleotides
changing one by one in a hybrid molecule, so we can conclude
abruptness without seeing it.)
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:
 luciaphile Jul 20 · edited Jul 20

This was a terrific review.

Commenters have expressed on other reviews a desire for economy where book
reviews are concerned.

This was really economical to me. Kind of the difference between a NYT book
section review and a NY Review of Books review: something (the former) can be
short and yet in some cases a waste of time compared to the longer thing.

I found the dispute and more so the background info fascinating but I would never
want to read a whole book on it. This was “just right” in Goldilocks terms.

I loved reading about Chomsky and not having any of the obligatory stuff about his
politics.

And yet - by the end - it did seem to me that his undoubted brilliant scholarship -
displayed as time went on (if this review is anything to go by) a sort of unearned
totalizing tendency, rather in keeping with his natural radicalism.
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Spencer Finkel Jul 21

I like how the author presented acronyms in parenthesis before using them. The
Author of The Family That Could Not Sleep review did not do this, and I struggled
slightly because of it.
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Arby Jul 21

"I’m not going to rehash all of the details, but the conduct of many in the pro-
Chomsky faction is pretty shocking."

isn't that also exactly how pro-Chomsky faction behaves regarding his political
views? weird.
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vindication Jul 21

Both these people raise red flags for me. Chompsy is the archetype celebrity
scientist holding a field hostage to his ridged interpretation, and Everett is making
limited claims but writing as if he is overturning the entire field.
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:
 Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 21

Everett's claims would plausibly overturn the entire generative linguistics field
if they were true, make no mistake. They suggest interdependence between
language and culture at a level incompatible with language being a module of
mind.
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Lance S. Bush Lance Independent Jul 22

What about Christiansen and Chater's views on language? Would they do

something similar?
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 22

I am having trouble extracting a coherent approach from the three-

page thing, but likely so.
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Lance S. Bush Lance Independent Jul 22

I don't see Everett as turning over an entire field so much as overturning a

specific paradigm within that field. And overturning paradigms is a standard
feature of scientific progress. It's especially not much of a red flag to me if that
paradigm never established itself all that firmly in the first place, and was
promulgated on considerations that have their origins in a more rationalistic
and less empiricist approach, which is how it seems in this case.

Critical views of the Chomskyean approach to language are not unique or

confined to Everett, either, and others working in related fields have offered
alternative approaches that, if true, would be seriously at odds with Chomsky's
views. For instance, Christiansen and Chater also present a perspective on
language that runs contrary to Chomsky's views. I don't see work like this as
overturning a field, I see it as overturning ... well, Chomsky. I don't see any red
flags in that.
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Arby Jul 21

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dGZ2I4aVuY&t=38s the article also reminded

me of this video on the artificial language Toki Pona that only has 120 words
:
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Oliver Oliver’s Newsletter Jul 21

How many times was an alphabet invented?

Possibly by a scribe in a Phonecian city state.

It is a different question, but if we have reason to believe it only happened once,

that would increase the probability that language was only invented once.
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 21

Well, alphabet is a cultural invention — specifically, a cultural modification of

another cultural invention, writing, which did appear several times. And yes, all
modern alphabets except probably Hanguyl go back to an old Semitic
consonantal writing system. I am not sure this recent development is of any
relevance to the question of language evolution.
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George Brotas Jul 23

What's crazy is that Hangul is obviously the correct way to make a

phonetic alphabet, and it's only been done once and adopted by one small
country.
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 23

I mean, both Hebrew and Arabic still use an abjad, which is literally
worse than hieroglyphics. Writing systems are sticky unless you have
Ataturk or Red Terror at hand.

(Also, in digital age non-linearity of Hanguyl is a bit of a problem.)

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George Brotas Jul 23 · edited Jul 23

I agree about the linearity issue. I was just thinking about how
easy it makes teaching kids how to read, which makes perfect
sense since it was made specifically to make literacy easy for
people without much formal education.
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:
 MichaeL Roe Jul 21

I think we have evidence that writing was independently invented multiple

times. Some of the scripts were syllabic rather than alphabetic. e.g. the Mayan
script was probably an independent invention.
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Dmitrii Zelenskii Jul 22

Yes. There are four to five independently appearing writing system

systems. But only one gave rise to systems with alphabetic principle.
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Ross Denton Jul 21

This review should come with a strawman warning. I am not a linguistics academic
but enjoy books on the topic and this reviewer’s characterisation of linguistics as
just Chomsky seems completely at odds with recent books. There are multiple
established schools of thought and most recent books seem to have moved on -
but reading this you would think there was some David and Goliath struggle.

Also I felt the LLM conclusions were pretty weak - if you’re going to bring them in I’d
want to get more of a “So What?”. Concluding that LLMs show that Chomsky is
wrong seems a bit too obvious.
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Kaspars Melkis Avepri Substack Jul 21

Thanks. I was interested in Chomsky's claims about universal grammar 20

years ago but I think gradually the consensus shifted to the strong version of it
being wrong and the weak version suffering from vagueness that could explain
anything and nothing, so I lost interest.

I was intrigued to read this book review and indeed, it seemed to be the old
perspective that is irrelevant today.
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Kenny Easwaran Jul 22

The LLM case is made more forcefully here:

https://lingbuzz.net/lingbuzz/007180
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:
 Kaspars Melkis Avepri Substack Jul 21

As for Pirahã language and people, we have to take into account that this a very
small group of only 200-300 speakers who live in harsh primitive environment. It is
not unimaginable that they have experienced societal upheavals like violence from
neighbouring tribes, diseases, famine, loss of habitats etc.

Spoken languages change rather quickly and we cannot even be sure that what
Everest witnessed wasn't some kind of pidgin formed from merging several local
dialects and languages. Wikipedia gives an example that women sometimes
pronounce s as h which is an indication of a different linguistic background. You
could expect eventual development into full-fledged creole language. However, the
number of speakers are so low that now the school has been opened for them
where they learn Portugese instead of Pirahã.
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mst Jul 24

Some issues with what you suggest:

- there are extinct but historically attested languages that seem

straightforwardly related. It's not like there's a total absence of data of current
and some historical neighbouring languages, and it's known to have borrowed
vocabulary from unrelated languages like Nheengatu

- Pirahã does not typologically look like a creole at all: it has complex verbal
morphology for one thing, creoles usually lack verbal morphology altogether. It
has phonemic tone which I believe is rare in creoles. Etc.

- Differences in women's and men's speech differences is not unique to Pirahã,

it exists elsewhere in the world. I can't remember what it was but I once read of
a language that goes as far as to have entirely different versions of common
morphemes based on the gender of the speaker, so one phonological
difference doesn't seem all that striking. Also I don't think this is a typical
creole thing?
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Kaspars Melkis Avepri Substack Jul 25 · edited Jul 25

You make good points that Pirahã language could not be pidgin or creole.
However, I think that simplified verb structure of creole is due to mixing of
dissimilar languages like English and Chinese. What if those two
languages are on dialectum continium like Russian and Ukrainian? It is
:
 called Surzhyk (Ukrainian-Russian pidgin) and I don't believe it is
standardized and yet contains full complexity of verbal forms. Even the
most defining features such as a specific pronunciation of Ukrainian [g] is
undefined, some speakers might use it and other not.

In case of Pirahã it is not that women speak differently but that some
women speak differently. How is it possible for such a small group to
develop different phonetic features? We think of Pirahã people as a static
group but reality might be that they are mixing with neighbouring tribes,
possibly even with violence (like stealing wives from neighbour tribes?). I
don't know how much I can trust researchers who are religious
proselytizers. They always have their own agenda, even with Everest
losing his faith in Christianity, he still might be a person of a strong
ideology
Expand fullinstead
commentof science.
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VNodosaurus Jul 21

On further thought, I think my main issue with Chomsky-the-linguist is the whole I-

language concept. While studying, in practice, normal (external) language,
excluding stuff like errors to make the issue tractable, he felt the need to instead
claim to be describing an internal language that didn't have those issues in the first
place. I suspect part of this was because forming a model that's in any way less
complex than reality, in the social sciences, will get you an instant swarm of
humanitarians with "everything is holistic and fundamentally connected to
everything else" and such. Either way, the result is that Chomsky is a linguist (and
political theorist) that thinks he's a cognitive scientist, and interprets his claims
about language as claims about the human mind. Ergo weirdness like "language
isn't for communication" or "only humans can have language, AI and other species
have no relevance to it" or the single mutation 50 kiloyears ago (stuff like that can
happen, sure, but the prior should be very low).

And so - the calm Chomskyan response to Everett saying that the Piraha language
doesn't have recursion would be "if this is true, then it's not a true language".
Eventually that's what Chomsky concluded. But if you equate language and mind,
then "the Piraha don't have a true language" is interpreted as "the Piraha are
literally subhuman". And so the response was as toxic as you'd expect from a
debate involving
Expand full commentthe word "subhuman".

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:
 owlmadness Jul 21

‘John, the man that put people in the water in order to clean them for God, that lived
in a place like a beach with no trees and that yelled for people to obey God’.

Heck, I'd reject that too! Never mind the tortuous syntax, it's the esthetics that's
the deal-breaker here.

By comparison -- and overlooking the cryptic rendering (or mistranslation) of Mark

1:3 and the ambiguity of the last two sentences; is he supposed to be saying that
the people lack God or desire God? -- this comes like a breath of fresh air:

‘John cleaned people in the river. He lived in another jungle. The jungle was like a
beach. It had no trees. He yelled to people. You want God!’

I guess these short punchy statements might grow tiresome after a while. But then
again, I could also imagine getting used to them.

And meanwhile, doesn't the very fact that these sentences occur together and form
a coherent whole imply that parataxis is all you really need to coordinate a
collection of ideas? Surely no one is suggesting that Chomskyan grammar stands or
falls on the presence or absence of an explicit conjunction like 'and' as opposed to
-- in this case -- a period that's in essence fulfilling the same function?
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mbsq Jul 21

It sounds like Chomsky just did his own version of formal logic and declared it to be
empirically significant.
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Lance S. Bush Lance Independent Jul 22

That's what it seems like to me.

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gmmac Jul 27 · edited Jul 27

Thanks for your comments here, I think they perfectly complement the
impression I had from other conversations with Chomskian linguists. It's
typically toxic, in bad faith, overclaiming their (mostly theoretical)
achievements, and it lacks any sort of self-irony and applicability. Also
they constantly reference to their supreme leader more than anyone else,
who is the greatest example of this behavior. I mean, Darwin didn't refer to
his predeccessors like "mere collectors", neither did Linney, Mendeleev or
:
 other global theorists. They typically expressed some gratitude and
admiration to those who 'collected stuff' for them. I think now that the
success of this approach was less 'grammarian generative' and more
'dissertation generative', because it opens an infinite field of theorizing. I
mean, you'd probably expect that good theory would somehow predict
how we learn languages, how we model them, and what languages can
and cannot exist, or how they evolve. In all of this Ch. didn't provide much.
I don't devaluate their work fully, that'd be a very low bar given probably
majority of linguists still following this paradigm. But now I think it did more
harm than
Expand good, suppressing
full comment less dogmatic research and thinking.
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Roger Sweeny Jul 21

"Everett’s answer to the innateness question is complicated and in some ways

subtle. He agrees that certain features of the human anatomy evolved to support
language (e.g., the pharynx and ears). He also agrees that modern humans are
probably much better than Homo erectus at working with language, if indeed Homo
erectus did have language.

"He mostly seems to take issue with the idea that some region of our brain is
specialized for language. Instead, he thinks that our ability to produce and
comprehend language is due to a mosaic of generally-useful cognitive capabilities,
like our ability to remember things for relatively long times, our ability to form and
modify habits, and our ability to reason under uncertainty."

This makes me think of Cecelia Heyes' Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of
Thinking (2018). She argues that many things we think of as innate, like "theory of
mind" are learned. "Theory of mind" is the idea that you think a lot like me: you have
emotions like I do, you have desires like I do, etc. On the other hand, our brain
makes it relatively easy to learn some "cognitive gadgets" and not others.
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foobar6754 Jul 22

"The intent here is not to pooh-pooh Chomsky" writes the author of a review that
transparently tries to do just that; and fails spectacularly.

The crux of the argument is that Piraha doesn't use recursion but as Chomsky has
explained many times (e.g. https://youtu.be/u6Lk79bnUbM?t=0h22m47s) what is of
interest is what human capacities are, not whether they are always expressed. In
:
 the video above Chomsky makes the analogy to a tribe that wears a patch over one
eye, which doesn't refute humans having the capacity for binocular vision.

The reviewer goes on to imply that this means the theory is vacuous or unfalsifiable
("the statement that some languages in the world are arguably recursive is not a
prediction; it’s an observation, and we didn’t need the theory to make it... can we
test it by doing experiments involving real linguistic data...?") but that is not true:
linguists like Moro *have* done experiments that show that humans don't seem to
be able to process certain made-up linear-order (i.e. non-recursive) languages as
easily as made-up recursive ones and use non-language areas of the brain to do so
(see Moro, "Secrets of Words"), which suggests that humans cannot understand
arbitrary linguistic structures but can understand recursive ones, just as UG would
have predicted. Had the result been the reverse it would have falsified (or at least
severely weakened) the theory. (Note that Piraha is like a degenerate recursive
language [no center embedding], so it is still "natural" for humans). Also note that
the Moro experiment does falsify the "mosaic of generally-useful cognitive
capabilities" claim made later on (which is an actually vacuous theory as it doesn't
explain anything in any case).

Furthermore, as others have commented the reviewer completely misunderstands

Expand full comment
recursion, the fundamental characteristic they are supposed to be critiquing. The
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Clive Jul 22

the eye appeared suddenly?

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foobar6754 Jul 22

Yes (obviously?). At some point there was no light sensor, then there was.
It then evolved further.
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Lance S. Bush Lance Independent Jul 23

It's not at all obvious, because I'm not sure others interpret "eye" as
inclusive of "light sensor." Can you clarify what you're claiming?
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foobar6754 Jul 23

I have no idea what misunderstanding you have, maybe you

:
 should be the one clarifying. You can read the wikipedia article
about the "Early eye". If your objection is the word "eye" then
you can use the term "eyespot" instead, it's irrelevant to the
point that it is an organ that appeared suddenly.
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Lance S. Bush Lance Independent Jul 23

Do you think people who are wondering about whether an

"eye" arose suddenly have in mind a notion of an "eye" this
is so broad so as to include a very simple light sensor? Or
do you think they may have something else in mind by an
"eye"?
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foobar6754 Jul 23

I was very careful to explicitly write the *appearance* of

the eye which leaves no ambiguity.
REPLY (1) SHARE

Continue Thread →

Lance S. Bush Lance Independent Jul 23

You said they can't process them "as easily," but then you say, "which
suggests that humans cannot understand arbitrary linguistic structures but can
understand recursive ones." Is it that they can't understand them, or can't
understand them as easily? Also, "people will understand languages with
recursion more readily than ones without it" strikes me as a fairly tepid
prediction that isn't exclusively consistent with UG or nativist views more
generally. I'd also have some questions about who the participants in these
studies were; if they'd already been enculturated into one set of languages
rather than another, those difficulties may have been acquired rather than
innate.

> Also note that the Moro experiment does falsify the "mosaic of generally-
useful cognitive capabilities" claim made later on (which is an actually vacuous
theory as it doesn't explain anything in any case).

Could you say a bit more about what it falsifies and how?

>- "Language is for communication, and probably—like everything else!—

:
 emerged gradually over a long period of time." No, not the appearance of the
eye or multicellular organisms.

Can you clarify what the misunderstanding is here?

>- Purposely conflating biological language faculties with cultural influences,

two entirely separate things that are both referred to as "language". Chomsky
specifically avoids this by using specialized terms (FLM, I-language).

*Purposefully*
Expand conflating?
full comment How do you know what their intentions were?
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foobar6754 Jul 23

> Is it that they can't understand them, or can't understand them as easily

They don't process them as quickly and they use non-language

(specifically problem solving parts) of the brain to do so.

> ... strikes me as a fairly tepid prediction that isn't exclusively consistent
with UG or nativist views more generally

It's not tepid at all, it provides reasonably strong evidence that language
processing requires hierarchical structures, not arbitrary ones, which is
what UG predicts and is not what "general processing" theories predict.
It's probably one of the most important recent experimental results in
linguistics.

> I'd also have some questions about who the participants in these studies
were; if they'd already been enculturated into one set of languages rather
than another, those difficulties may have been acquired rather than innate.

I have no idea what you mean. Obviously people in the experiment have
pre-existing language ability. (It's not ethical to raise a child from birth in a
fake-language experiment)

> Could you say a bit more about what it falsifies and how?

It takes longer to process a certain structure and it uses non-language

parts of the brain which strongly suggests it is not using the language-
specialized machinery to do it but other general problem solving
machinery.

> Can you clarify what the misunderstanding is here?

Expand full comment

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:
 Lance S. Bush Lance Independent Jul 23 · edited Jul 23

>I have no idea what you mean. Obviously people in the experiment
have pre-existing language ability. (It's not ethical to raise a child
from birth in a fake-language experiment)

What I'm asking is if they already spoke languages with recursion in

them. If they do, then could it be that it's easier for people to process
languages that share similar features to the languages they already
speak?

>It's not tepid at all, it provides reasonably strong evidence that

language processing requires hierarchical structures, not arbitrary
ones, which is what UG predicts and is not what "general processing"
theories predict. It's probably one of the most important recent
experimental results in linguistics.

But even the results as described don't seem to show that it's
*required.* Without more details I'd also have questions about why
people may have responded this way.

>It takes longer to process a certain structure and it uses non-

language parts of the brain which strongly suggests it is not using the
language-specialized machinery to do it but other general problem
solving machinery.

Okay, that makes sense, thank you. I'm still wondering why this is the
case, though.

>There are crucial instances of evolution that are not gradual but
sudden.
Expand full comment

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foobar6754 Jul 23

> What I'm asking is if they already spoke languages with

recursion in them

Yes every language does (except possibly Piraha).

>If they do, then could it be that it's easier for people to process
languages that share similar features to the languages they
already speak?

It wouldn't explain the fMRI data. You can certainly come up with
:
 a hypothesis that is consistent with the experiments without UG
but they are just harder to believe than the "simple" explanation
that language is recursive and as far as I know don't have
corresponding supporting experiments. It's true that it isn't
irrefutable dispositive proof but that rarely exists in psychology
and psychology-adjacent fields.

> But even the results as described don't seem to show that it's
*required.*

Required for what? I can put a gun to your head and force you
talk without recursive sentence structure, what has that proven?
If you have a Turing machine and only feed it regular grammars
does that prove it is not a Turing machine? If you have a joint with
6 degrees of freedom but observe it only moving in 1 does that
prove that it doesn't have 6? If you observe a small tribe in the
Amazon that crawls on all fours throughout their lives does that
Expand full comment
prove that bipedalism is not a "required" property of humans?
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Lance S. Bush Lance Independent Jul 23

>It wouldn't explain the fMRI data.

Why not?

>You can certainly come up with a hypothesis that is

consistent with the experiments without UG but they are just
harder to believe than the "simple" explanation that
language is recursive and as far as I know don't have
corresponding supporting experiments.

That doesn't seem simpler to me.

> It's true that it isn't irrefutable dispositive proof but that
rarely exists in psychology and psychology-adjacent fields.

I'm not asking if it's irrefutable. I'm wondering if it's

especially strong evidence at all.

>Required for what?

You said "It's not tepid at all, it provides reasonably strong

evidence that language processing requires hierarchical
structures." With respect to the rest of your questions: what
:
 point are you illustrating with those questions? At least with
respect to the last one, the answer strikes me as a trivial
yes: bipedalism isn't "required," so if someone said "all
human populations are bipedal" and we observed one that
wasn't, that person would be wrong. If they said we had an
innate predisposition for bipedality, that'd be fine, but that's
Expand full comment
a different claim. Evidence of languages without recursion is
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foobar6754 Jul 23

> Why not?

You would have to come up with some theory about

why only recursive language processing is localized to
areas of the brain associated with language and linear-
order language processing is not. As I said you could
certainly do that: Maybe during childhood development
the language area becomes "trained" on whatever
language it is exposed to and then it crystallizes that
way so if you were trained on linear-language it would
live in the language area and recursive language would
have to be interpreted using puzzle-solving parts of the
brain, the opposite to what we observe now. But there
isn't any evidence for that and it's just more to believe
than the simple explanation that that part of the brain
came pre-wired to process hierarchical structure. You
may disagree. It also creates its own unanswered
questions like how did recursive language become
predominant if other language structures could be
processed equally well.

But if you want to come up with some experiment

refuting the Moro results I think that would be an
enormous scientific contribution, even if it is driven by
animus against Chomsky.

> At least
Expand with respect
full comment to the last one, the answer
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Richard Meadows Deep Dish Jul 23

:
 this comment was very clarifying to me, thanks for writing it out (and engaging
with the other guy below)
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Misha Saul Kvetch Jul 22

You might like my kvetch on Don't Sleep There Are Snakes!

https://www.kvetch.au/p/dont-sleep-there-are-snakes
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quiet_NaN Jul 22

>> Any expression larger than two words, then, requires recursion, regardless of
whether there is embedding in that expression. For instance the noun phrase “My
favourite book” requires two iterations of Merge, (Merge(favourite, book)=
[Favourite book], Merge(my, [favourite book])= [my [favourite book]]) and therefore
is an instance of recursion without embedding.

For crying out loud, the fact that I am able to chain instances of Merge (a glorified
concat) does not imply recursion any more than the fact that I can write (1+2)+3
means that addition is recursive.

Coming at this from computer science, that example would be possible with the
following formal grammar (in EBNF):

decorated_noun={possessive , " " }, adjective_noun

adjective_noun={adjective, " "}, noun

possessive="my"|"your"|...

adjective="favorite"|"green"|...

noun="book"|"duck"|...

By contrast, I would reserve "recursion" for cases where a production rule refers
directly or indirectly to itself:

and_list = noun, "," and_list | noun, "and", noun

The claim is as silly as the claim that a bike is self-similar because a bike is made-
up-of wheels and a frame, and the wheels are made-up-of a tires, spokes and a
hub. Hence to describe a bicycle, you have to use 'made-up-of' on things which are
Expand full comment
themselves 'made-up-of' things, hence self-similarity.
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:
 Omer Jul 22

Does it really make sense to you that an entire field is full of clueless nitwits
who’ve never heard of this exotic "formal grammar" of yours?

Wikipedia, anyway, suggests otherwise: "BNF is a notation for Chomsky's

context-free grammars. Backus was familiar with Chomsky's work."

I honestly don't see why you (and apparently many other) are having an issue
with the term "recursion" here. As someone in computer science, you must
have heard terms like "recursive grammar" and "recursively enumerable sets"
before, right?

And by the way, also from wiki: "Addition is a function that maps two natural
numbers (two elements of N) to another one. It is defined recursively as: a+0=a
and a+S(b)=S(a+b)". I admit this is possibly a bit nitpicky, but it too suggests
that you might want to reconsider your understanding of the term "recursion"...
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quiet_NaN Jul 31

I am aware that some guy named Chomsky (what a coincidence) has

established a hierarchy of formal languages, and I am fine with the use of
recursion there. Per WP on recursive grammar:

> In computer science, a grammar is informally called a recursive grammar

if [...] expanding a non-terminal according to these [production] rules can
eventually lead to a string that includes the same non-terminal again.
Otherwise it is called a non-recursive grammar.

I am also okay with 'recursive[ly enumerable] language', even if I prefer

'[semi-]decideable language' -- all languages expressible without
recursive production rules are decideable, after all.

The crux of my disagreement is this:

> The term recursion, when used by Generative linguists, refers to a

property of functions. Functions are relations between a set of inputs and
a set of outputs. A function is recursive if its output can also serve as its
input.

This is a bizarre definition to me. I have googled for 'recursion generative

linguistics', but not quickly found more people making the claim, so for all I
know this might be just one grad student. For all I know, the rest of the
world calls what he calls 'recursive' an 'endofunction'. (Naturally, one can
:
 have plenty of indirect recursion without employing any endofunctions!)

The equivalent for biology of that definition might be:

> The term 'heart', when used by rhino researchers refers to the big blood
Expand full comment
vessels between the blood pumping organ (BPO) and the lungs.
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Omer Jul 31

I'm not a linguist or an etymologist, but from what I understand, the

term "recursion" in linguistics doesn't meant to imply a precise deep
meaning. Instead, it's more of a vague relic from historical jargon that
makes sense within its original context.

In the case of "recursive", this context is the foundational concept of

early generative linguistics, which posits that syntax is, well,
generative - meaning that that syntax of natural languages is
characterized by production rules that generate syntactically valid
sentences. While this might seem like a simplistic or even trivial idea
today, this computational approach was novel, revolutionary, and
instrumental at the time.

To me, it seems sensible to use the term "recursion" to emphasize

the process of building sentences from simpler fragments by
iteratively applying production-rules.
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Alice K. Jul 23

Not even close to finished with the review and I am so intrigued I will absolutely be
buying this book and more. So that bodes well as a vote.
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SurvivalBias Jul 23

By far the best review I've read so far, thank you! Also finally learned something
about this Chomsky guy (seems like another case where great intelligence is used
in large part or even mostly to defeat itself).
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Evan Brizius Jul 23

Fantastic post, also introduced me to a new rabbit hole on finitism and ultrafinitism.
:
 REPLY SHARE

Scarlett Scarlett’s Substack Jul 26

meeting with a Psychic medium and I have to say, it's really worth it. It had been
6months since my husband left me without saying anything.All thanks to Dr Adoda I
was able to connect with my husband again with his powerful reunion love spell and
now he loves me more than he used to. Eternally grateful with The Great Dr Adoda! I
highly recommend, His Website is http://dradodalovetemple.com
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Yanek Yuk Jul 30

Do any of you readers also start to feel that sentences such as,

> Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are not perfect, but they’re getting
better all the time

are repeated too much? I mean 2 years ago, ChatGPT released i-forgot-what-
version and everyone was amazed, but from there, "the law of diminishing returns"
hit hard. To the educated eye, one can see that the model simply stopped
advancing "so greatly" and all the features they advertise nowadays are some extra
pre and postprocessing tasks rather than the capabilities of model itself along with
maybe extended memory or so.
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Chris K. N. Aug 3

Good review. I find it interesting that the Christian missionary is the one making
such a strong case for gradual evolution and natural selection, and the Marxist
professor is the one arguing some version of human exceptionalism and mysterious
endowment.

I also got confirmation of my priors, that Chomsky would be (would have been)
more helpful if he could just dial it down to about 65% and make room for a bit more
humility in most things.
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Monkyyy Monkyyy’s Newsletter Aug 9

im very late; but does anyone have example of linguistic theories about non
recursive languages?

Im anti the hyper recursion of programming languages; for example, while you could
:
 define the allocation of space using "binary space partition trees"(and I use
bspwm), you really really shouldnt, artists and designers subdivide 2d space with
grids for a reason.

Likewise instead of 2+3*4 instead of letting that statement equal 20 reducing the
complexity and let more parsing be left to right; everyone thinks you *need* to push
everything into a 10 step hyper abstract process; for what exactly?, you shouldnt
ever depend on ambiguous statement grammer.
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