The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Pronouns
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The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Pronouns
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Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Pronouns
#2The Eve Theory of Consciousness proposed that consciousness is recent, women were self-aware first, and agriculture was the result.
Any biologists or anthropologists care to chime in on whether that's obviously wrong or not? The author's self-described background is engineering so I find some of his more outlandish claims about human development suspect.
Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Pronouns
#3The Eve Theory of Consciousness proposed that consciousness is recent, women were self-aware first, and agriculture was the result. Any biologists or anthropologists care to chime in on whether that's obviously wrong or not? The author's self-described background is engineering so I find some of his more outlandish claims about human development suspect.
if i remember, anendotally its said prostitution is the first profession, long before agriculture.
how does women being self aware and agriculture come together?
Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Pronouns
#4>> The simplest explanation is their diffusion ~15,000 years ago.
The problem I have with that is everything started to change when the glaciers started melting. Civilization surely extended to areas that we now call the continental shelf. Sea levels gradually rose several hundred feet, washing away an awful lot of everything. It's hard to say what was where and diffused because there isn't there any more.
Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Pronouns
#5The Eve Theory of Consciousness proposed that consciousness is recent, women were self-aware first, and agriculture was the result. Any biologists or anthropologists care to chime in on whether that's obviously wrong or not? The author's self-described background is engineering so I find some of his more outlandish claims about human development suspect.
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Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Pronouns
#6This is excellent writing. I'm not knowledgeable enough but this is typically the reason why I love linguistics.
Typically why I love the effects of postmodernism in 'soft' sciences.
Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Pronouns
#7The Eve Theory of Consciousness proposed that consciousness is recent, women were self-aware first, and agriculture was the result. Any biologists or anthropologists care to chime in on whether that's obviously wrong or not? The author's self-described background is engineering so I find some of his more outlandish claims about human development suspect.
I would say that self-awareness is far more primordial than agriculture, like most psychological traits that are shared with social animals. The main difficulty is that we don't have proper testing procedures for this kind of traits. Coming back to humans (all species under the homo genera), we have cave paintings that are far more older than h. sapiens' development of agriculture. And I'm inclined to think that an ape doing such drawings would also have self-awareness... They are barely related traits, but stil...
Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Pronouns
#8> Why are [first-person singular pronouns] so similar if the languages are so far apart? The answer can only be chance, convergent evolution, or a genetic relationship.
There is also another possibility: the linguist doing the reconstruction was invested in the theory and cherry-picked the data.
E.g. the list of first-person singular pronouns contains these entries:
Austronesian: ’a(ŋ)kƏn
Afro-Asiatic: anāku
which are so simlar that I decided to verify and check Wikipedia, which has slightly different reconstructions
Austronesian: i-aku https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Austronesian_language#Pr...
Afro-Asiatic: (ʔ)ân-/(ʔ)în- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Afroasiatic_language#Pro...
and suddenly one of the examples supporting the theory ends up contradicting it, while the other still has "n", but is otherwise far removed from the reconstruction presented in the article.
I don't think the reconstructions on Wikipedia are necessarily more correct, but they do demonstrate that there is significant leeway when it comes to the inclusion or exclusion of specific consonants. And if you have a dozen options to choose from, it's quite easy to turn random noise into a strong signal.
Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Pronouns
#9I'm a little skeptical of any theory that makes pronouns super important for the simple reason that there are many languages like where pronouns are not super important. In agglutinative languages like Turkish and Finnish, person is shown via conjugation, making pronouns redundant. In topic marker languages like Japanese and Korean, person can be derived from context and pronouns are often replaced by titles.
Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Pronouns
#10I'm a little skeptical of any theory that makes pronouns super important for the simple reason that there are many languages like where pronouns are not super important. In agglutinative languages like Turkish and Finnish, person is shown via conjugation, making pronouns redundant. In topic marker languages like Japanese and Korean, person can be derived from context and pronouns are often replaced by titles.
Could you give some examples in context of how this works? I’m interested in understanding the concept!