Confronting Friends and Family

[Aractus]

You can't know that. You don't know that. Stop acting like that's some take-as-granted idea.

If other people can take for granted that life self-begins when the right conditions arise (a view I agree with), then I also believe that it's true for language.

A language is a system of communication that is capable of producing an infinite number of possible novel configurations from a finite set of units and rules. That's a very basic, bare-bones definition of what a communicative system needs to be considered a language. Other considerations are displacement, the ability to discuss events and places removed from the speaker and listener both spatially and temporally, as well as a recursiveness, one of the major reasons why language is capable of producing infinite utterances (i.e. we can say "I saw the man next to the table with the book I bought from the store that is next to Walmart on 13th Avenue in New York in The United States on Earth in the Sol System ... etc."). There are more basic requirements, but those are a couple big ones.

Even though sign systems like Koko's or bird mimicking may seem a lot like human language, they unequivocally fall short of these minimum requirements. Gorilla signing does not have a sufficiently complex grammar to produce anything other than a limited set of configurations.

So if I'm not mistaking, your argument is that while Gorillas can learn the words (or at least a certain number of them anyway) of ASL but are incapable of using them to the extent required to demonstrate the use and understanding of the language?

If you want to be picky, of course language is constrained to physics. Fucking everything is. That doesn't mean it's analyzable in terms of physics.

No, but there are an infinite set of theories that could describe the origin of Language, and predict how it develops.

Language is a system that is dependent on so many factors that you're not going to get the same exact development unless everything that led up to it is also absolutely exact. I don't believe in a deterministic universe and therefore reject such a notion.

It's got nothing to do with determinism. When life first started on Earth did it matter which life form survived long enough to reproduce? No it didn't - but the diversity of life would still be the same, regardless. Why? Because evolution follows rules, which lead it to develop in predictable ways. If the first tribe of man that had learned language got murdered by some other barbaric tribe, then language would have started somewhere else - and we wouldn't have English or Hebrew or anything else, but we would still have the same amount and quantity of language as we do today.