The Library Journal has a short review by Cynthia Knight of my book, Harnessed.
Many scientists believe that the human brain’s capacity for language is innate, that the brain is actually “hard-wired” for this higher-level functionality. But theoretical neurobiologist Changizi (director of human cognition, 2AI Labs; The Vision Revolution) brilliantly challenges this view, claiming that language (and music) are neither innate nor instinctual to the brain but evolved culturally to take advantage of what the most ancient aspect of our brain does best: process the sounds of nature. By “sounds of nature,” Changizi does not mean birds chirping or rain falling. His provocative theory is based on the identification of striking similarities between the phoneme level of language and the elemental auditory properties of solid objects and, in the case of music, similarities between the sounds of human movement and the basic elements of music.
Verdict: Although the book is written in a witty, informal style, the science underpinning this theoretical argument (acoustics, phonology, physics) could be somewhat intimidating to the nonspecialist. Still, it will certainly intrigue evolutionary biologists, linguists, and cultural anthropologists and is strongly recommended for libraries that have Changizi’s previous book.
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Mark Changizi is Director of Human Cognition at 2AI, and the author of
Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man and The Vision Revolution.
I haven’t had a chance to read your research papers. I have come upon your reference in a news appeared in the ‘Telegraph’ which made a way to some of my questions about shape of the alphabets.
My enthusiasm in this topic stems up from my ten year old experience in typography. I have developed two fonts ( Rachana and Meera published as GNU-GPL) for my mother-tongue ‘Malayalam’ (Kerala, India). One type contains nearly thousand glyphs. It was part of a language campaign named ‘Rachana’, which holds the view that the ‘old’ script of Malayalam which was used for nearly 150 years for writing and printing upto 1970 should be resurrected in computing instead of a ‘new’ script that discarded majority of conjunct forms.
Some of my basic questions / doubts are
1. Why does the same sound (for example A) take different shapes in different languages?
2. My own feeling is that the geography and environment where men live influence his aesthetics and thereby shapes of his script. According to the news about your topological investigations, ‘familiar shapes in nature’ do have a say in the shapes in the alphabet. This is why I searched for you in the web and found out your blog.
3. “Every thing changes. Naturally there should be an evolution for alphabets also. So why do you propagate for the old script?” This is often put against us. I’m sceptic about this kind of logic. My own feeling is that the era of evolution of scripts of world languages have come out of that phase for ever. Man is not going to / unable to find out or add a single sign in his mother-tounge. He should preserve the set of shapes of his language very carefully and preciously. Once it is lost, it is lost for ever. What is your opinion?
Many times I searched on these topics in Semiosis / Semiotic, but in vain. Have you come across any articles/ research papers in Semiosis in relation with shapes and evolution of language scripts?
Love
Hussain KH
Hi. Interesting.
(1) We do have reason to believe there are weak associations between the look and sound of a letter. It comes up in the “speech” chapter of my new book, Harnessed.
(2) I haven’t looked for correlations between local geographical features and local scripts, but I suspect there could be. Here’s a link to the paper… http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.1086/502806
(3) Through my research I’ve certainly come to have a greater appreciation of the amount of design that can be in the artifacts (like writing and speech) that we take for granted. When people invent their own script, it usually does not have the design features found in the ones that culturally evolved.
Certainly Chapter 4 of my previous book, The Vision Revolution, will be something you’d be interested in.
Sincerely,
-Mark
Thank you, Mark.
I think I have got some concrete openings to follow my questions and confusions.
I’m looking forward of anything related to Semiotics if you have any reference.
Love
-hussain