Vyvyan Evans, Author at 91av

How number words may have changed us from zeroes to heroes

Vyvyan Evans — Wed, 03 May 2017 18:00:00 +0000

Do we think differently if our language has number words?

Emmanuel Pierrot/Agence VU/Camera Press

IMAGINE a world without numbers. Time and space would lose their meaning: telling time and counting the passing days, months and years would become impossible. Our ability to use numbers is essential for functioning in our quotidian here and now, from scheduling meetings to reading timetables and paying for groceries at the supermarket.

But in a fascinating new book, Numbers and the Making of Us, linguistic anthropologist Caleb Everett argues that number is a recent cultural invention, deeply tied to our linguistic smarts. Moreover, he likens it to a “flint stone that ignited the human timeline”. Not only does number make it possible to perceive quantities in the world, it has, he claims, “led to the advent of agriculture and writing, and indirectly to the technologies that flowed from the latter two”.

While on the face of it this is bold, heady stuff, the claim seems counterintuitive. After all, numbers are all around us. An octopus has eight legs, while you and I have two. Surely, that’s just an objective fact? And language reflects the reality of numbered quantities. We have a broad array of words for numbers: I can count from zero to 10, and beyond, using number words, and there are other quantifiers such as “few”, “several”, “many”, “a couple”, and so on. Moreover, the grammatical system of English is numerical through and through, with plural words like “coats” denoting a distinction between one versus more than one.

English is by no means unusual, with other languages making more sophisticated grammatical distinctions. In the Austronesian language Moluccan, for example, there is a grammatical tier intermediate between one and more than one: a so-called “trial” category denoting exactly three items.

But there are enough languages that lack number. These range from unrelated spoken languages, such as Pirahã and Mundurukú – both indigenous to different remote parts of Amazonia – to non-spoken languages, such as Nicaraguan Sign Language.

“According to Everett, quantity is not something you can perceive without the help of language”

Users of these languages, it turns out, cannot reliably count more than three items. According to Everett, quantity is not something that you or I can reliably perceive without the help of language: having number words makes it possible to see a world of number.

Moreover, this startling claim has been experimentally verified. For instance, when asked to show how many dots are printed on a card by counting the same number of fingers, Mundurukú speakers cannot go beyond three. This, Everett argues, has nothing to do with any cognitive deficit or the fact that they belong to a pre-industrial society. The decisive factor appears to be the absence of number words.

Recent research reveals that the human brain has, broadly, two number systems. The first is an approximate sense: human infants are born able to distinguish between, for instance, 8 and 16. This enables only fuzzy maths, in which we can determine that one group is larger than the other, rather than the numbers of entities in each. The other system is an exact number sense, but one that only works up to 3. We can distinguish between 1, 2 and 3, precisely.

Unifying abilities

So how do we manage to identify larger quantities? Everett’s answer is: verbal number. Numerate cultures can count and perceive quantities precisely because number words – language – unite these two innate mathematical abilities. His evidence is indigenes such as the Pirahã: anumeric cultures lack “the means of unifying these two genetically endowed capacities”.

The invention of the linguistic means to convey number, a cultural tool, makes it possible to bootstrap our genetic endowment, enhancing and changing how we perceive our world. While anumeric peoples struggle to differentiate quantities greater than three, with the advent of verbal number, we can parcel up space and time in far greater detail.

The central claim of the book is that far from our being born with the ability to precisely identify quantities, number is a cultural achievement; it is facilitated by language rather than being innate. Here Everett raises the spectre of the classic distinction between nature and nurture, although the welter of evidence relating to anumeric peoples strongly supports the cultural-developmental, anti-nativist view.

Nevertheless, there are drawbacks to Everett’s arguments. A nativist sceptic may still argue that correlation is not causation. Everett describes ingenious behavioural experiments with anumeric groups, but they only show that an anumeric language correlates with counting problems. Crucially, this doesn’t establish that the absence of verbal number causes the counting deficit. To do that, we will have to go beyond clever field-based tasks to examine what’s going on in the brain.

Second, the significance of number is perhaps over-egged in terms of human cultural and cognitive development – a tempting thing to do, perhaps, when this is the focus of an entire book. Everett’s claim is that how we perceive time and space is, in part, made possible because of the existence of number.

Inevitably, things are more complex. Space and time are the foundational domains of human experience. And time, at the level of neurological processing, is arguably the cognitive glue that makes perception possible in the first place. For example, both being able to perceive a sequence of events and recognising iterations of events are fundamentally temporal abilities.

In short, temporal abilities underpin number sequences and the ability to add up, which are fundamental to number. This suggests that it may in fact be our temporal smarts that make number systems possible, rather than vice versa.

Finally, Everett invokes divergent quantification abilities across anumeric versus numerate cultures as evidence for linguistic relativity: grammatical differences across languages cause their speakers to perceive the world differently.

This principle suggests that language can lead to cognitive restructuring in the minds of their speakers. To demonstrate this, however, we need to show that different number systems in different languages lead to divergent cognitive behaviour.

While Everett makes a powerful case for the cognitive restructuring of numerate versus anumeric minds, the jury is still out on the effects of number systems across all languages.

But these are minor quibbles. The breadth of research Everett covers is impressive, and allows him to develop a narrative that is both global and compelling. He is as much at home describing the niceties of experimental work in cognitive science as he is discussing arcane tribal rituals and the technical details of grammar.

“Everett makes a powerful case for the cognitive restructuring of numerate versus anumeric minds”

The book is an exemplar of the best kind of academic writing: well researched, while written in a sufficiently engaging way to appeal to many educated lay readers. It is often poignant, and makes a virtue of the author’s experiences with some of the indigenous peoples he describes, based on a childhood following his missionary parents – in particular his famous father, Daniel Everett – into the Amazon jungle.

In many ways, Numbers is eye-opening, even eye-popping. And it makes a powerful case for language, as a cultural invention, being central to the making of us.

Caleb Everett

Harvard University Press

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This article appeared in print under the headline “From zeroes to heroes”

Why Only Us: The language paradox

Vyvyan Evans — Wed, 24 Feb 2016 18:00:00 +0000

Did language originate for internal thought or communication?

John MacLean/Millennium Images, UK

WHEN the Linguistic Society of Paris was founded in 1873, it famously included in its constitution a prohibition against speculating on the evolutionary origins of language. A few years later, the London Philological Society followed suit. This admonition against positing what, then, amounted to no more than “just so” stories held for well over a century. In the last couple of decades, the situation has changed, and with good reason. Discoveries in archaeology, cognitive science, primate behaviour, dating of ancient DNA and computational modelling of how languages have evolved mean we can now do significantly better than merely speculate. Against this backdrop, linguist Noam Chomsky has teamed up with Robert Berwick, a computer scientist. In Why Only Us, they address precisely the question of how language evolved. But at times it feels as if they are still given to speculation. Chomsky’s global reputation was established in the 1950s and 1960s, when relatively little was known about how children acquire language. Chomsky argued that language – by which he means grammar – can be likened to a mental organ. This “language faculty”, he claimed, provides any normally developing human infant with a genetically determined blueprint for grammar. The idea was that, despite the differences between the world’s 7000 or so spoken languages, they all operate on a common “universal grammar”. Chomsky has been working on a simplified version of this universal grammar proposal. For early modern humans to have evolved language, the genetic leap that made it possible must have been as simple as possible. This he boiled down to the capacity for a relatively simple grammatical operation that he called Merge back in the early 1990s, which allows words to be combined.

“It’s quite a stretch to suggest that language didn’t evolve to enable communication“

In Why Only Us, Chomsky and Berwick argue that this pared- down version of universal grammar is what would have enabled early humans to make the evolutionary jump from language-less creatures to the loquacious beings of the Upper Palaeolithic, some 40,000 years ago. This, in turn, would have resulted in the unheralded rich cultural explosion around that time, including cave art, jewellery and ritual burials. Their argument goes like this. As our capability for grammar is genetically programmed, and as no other species has language, it stands to reason that language emerged fairly suddenly, in one fell swoop, because of a random mutation. This is what the authors refer to as the “gambler’s-eye view” in contrast to a “gene’s-eye view” of evolution. The sudden appearance of language occurred perhaps no more than 80,000 years ago, just before modern humans engaged in an out-of-Africa dispersion. But to be convinced by this, the reader has to swallow a number of sub-arguments that are debatable at best. For one thing, the authors presume the Chomskyan model of human language – that the rudiments of human grammar (or syntax) are unlearnable without an innate knowledge of grammar. Its position seems less reasonable today that it once did. Developmental and cognitive psychologists now have a clearer sense of the ways in which conceptual and linguistic learning works. A human infant seems to have a range of both primate and species-specific learning mechanisms and abilities that enable the acquisition of language. The emerging consensus is that language acquisition can occur without an innate blueprint for grammar. Second, the authors make dubious assumptions about the evolutionary trajectory of language, and attempt to convince the reader that Darwinian theory breaks down when applied to language. The issue, they claim, is that no other species has language, and that the cognitive abilities of all extant species simply couldn’t be scaled up to achieve the capability. In short, as language exists only in our species, without precedent elsewhere, then it did not evolve from some simpler form of communication. Hence, it must have evolved fairly quickly and in one discontinuous jump. As the hallmark of language is a simple, computational syntax-engine, then, so the argument goes, this sort of species-specific event is not at all improbable. However, this ultimately paints Homo sapiens, a species no more than about 200,000 years old, into a corner. Modern humans become an evolutionary curiosity, isolated from the 2.8-million-year evolutionary trajectory of the genus that led to us. It also amounts to a highly selective and partial presentation of the recent research literature. Although Berwick and Chomsky are dismissive, recent evidence points to Neanderthals, who died out around 30,000 years ago, as having been, more or less, our cognitive equals. Recent archaeological findings suggest that they possessed a material culture approaching that of late StoneAge humans. And they may have had the anatomy, acoustic facility and cognitive smarts that made language possible. Moreover, there is clear evidence of interbreeding between Neanderthals and humans. The implication is obvious: both species must have had language. That being the case, this pushes the origins of spoken language back much further, perhaps even to half a million years ago. In addition, research in primatology and animal behaviour suggests that some of the precursors for language do exist in other species, ranging from European starlings to chimpanzees – with the latter using a sophisticated gestural form of communication in the wild. In fact, gesture may well have been the medium that incubated language until ancestral humans evolved the full-blown capacity for it. An influential, alternative view of the evolution of language is to take a bigger-picture perspective from the one that Berwick and Chomsky espouse. The alternative sees language as an evolutionary outcome of a shift in cognitive strategy among ancestral humans, fuelled by bipedalism, tool use and meat-eating. This new biocultural niche required a different cognitive strategy to encourage greater cooperation between early humans. Building on the rudimentary social-interactional nous of other great apes, an instinct for cooperation does seem to have emerged in ancestral humans. And this would have inexorably led to complex communicative systems, of which language is the most complete example. Ultimately, Why Only Us is something of a curiosity. It takes a reverse engineering perspective on the question of how language evolved. It asks, what would language evolution amount to if the Chomskyan proposition of universal grammar were correct? The answer is language as a mutation that produces a phenotype well outside the range of variation previously existing in the population – a macromutation. This flies in the face of the scientific consensus. Indeed, the book attempts to make a virtue of disagreeing with almost everyone on how language evolved. To see language bucking the kind of gradual evolutionary change that Darwin proposed is surely a controversial perspective.

“Gestures may have incubated language until humans evolved the full-blown capacity for it“

The reader is asked to swallow the following unlikely implication of their logic: language didn’t evolve for communication, but rather for internal thought. If language did evolve as a chance mutation, without precedent, then it first emerged in one individual. And what is the value of language as a communicative tool when there is no one else to talk to? Hence, the evolutionary advantage of language, once it emerged, must have been for something else: assisting thought. But this conclusion seems unlikely. The structure and organisation of the world’s 7000 or so languages indicates that its primary function is for communication between individuals. It’s quite a stretch to suggest that language didn’t evolve to enable this sort of interpersonal interaction. Ultimately, the reader is left with a paradox: the evolutionary view entailed by Chomsky’s stripped down, minimalistic universal grammar calls into question the very account of language Berwick and Chomsky attempt to provide us with.

Robert C. Berwick and Noam Chomsky

MIT Press (Buy from *)

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