Language

It's always good to write on a subject you know at least something about, so I thought I'd at least try to start a blog on my views on language. Hopefully it won't be too academic, though after a year in a Chomskyan school of linguistics at UCL it might be hard to keep the ivory tower at bay. Anyway, here are a few starter discussion points which are probably my favourite ones in the subject. I will just outline one each blog:

• Language is a system unique to human beings

Contrary to some folkloric ideas, humans are the only known species of animal with a language faculty. This is not to say we are unique in having a system of oral or visual communication, as bee dances indicating the position of honey and the warning calls of macaques, tamarins and vervet monkeys suggest. We are unique in having a symbolic linguistic system which we can understand and make use of for, amongst other things, communication, and this system gives us the ability to talk about our thoughts and interpret the thoughts of others.
This species-specific ability has lead many linguists and philosophers to call the phenomenon of human language "innate", but this term is controversial. As humans must acquire language through exposure to the environment, one puts oneself in a difficult position to claim that all of our language is innate, as sounds and vocabulary of different languages must be 'learnt' on some level. However, the fact that only humans have the ability to acquire language surely suggests there is some fundamental difference in our genetic make-up to other animals that allows us to acquire language, like any species-specific trait. This is irrefutable. Despite previous attempts at such things, we could no more teach a chimpanzee, our closest genetic cousin, to acquire a human language fully than could a fish teach us to breathe underwater or a bird instruct us to fly! There are fundamental biological differences which mean we can acquire these species-specific traits- through natural means at least.
So while Nativism has a strong argument due to the situation outlined above, the opposition in the form of Empiricism claims that due to a human being born as a tabula rasa with few innate capabilities, and the emphasis on the environment and learning is key. The strongest version of the Empiricist argument is that with a general learning ability (an idea attributed to John Locke) a human being can acquire language without recourse to needing a specific language faculty, simply by learning it from the linguistic data around him. Even Nativists accept the importance of the environment, and they may fall on their sword a little when introducing the idea of the 'critical period' for language acquisition in childhood, which is the minimum required time of linguistic exposure for a human to acquire a language fully. The debate rages on between the two camps, but one cannot deny the uniqueness of language to human beings, and it may be more of a defining characteristic in terms of differentiating ourselves from our primate cousins than we would like to imagine.