LB390-393

LB390-393
Language geography is further complicated by the fact that the territories of peoples speaking languages of entirely different stock abut. Roman Jakobson noted that it is common for entirely different but adjacent languages to be contaminated by each other in terms of certain phonological features. For instance, clicks are found in many African languages which by their grammar and lexicon cannot be considered as cognate. The distribution of the interdental spirant (th) in Europe is not restricted to cognate languages but is apparently the result of diffusion in the recent past across boundaries of languages of different origin. Some American Indian languages along the pacific and around the Gulf of Mexico have a characteristic sound-cluster, usually transcribed as /tl/, even though the languages are of very different types.

The crazy-quilt pattern of language – and dialect-maps can be accounted for quite well by the resonance theory. The language-acquiring child does not merely resonate to his own family but to the social group at large. This is best seen in immigrant children in America whose parents speak English with a heavy accent but whose own language is standard American. The child’s language is patterned after that of the individuals with whom he comes in contact. Face to face contact in human populations is regulated by certain social institutions and mechanisms. There is no true randomization in individual contact, not even among those individuals who occupy the same territory. This is due to such factors as national and ethnic affiliations and even social class distinctions. Because of these political and social boundaries, language differences do not become gradually more and more accentuated in direct proportion to geographic distance, but instead we find sudden, discontinuous changes; that is isoglosses are sharp boundaries clearly marking dialectal differences. The discontinuities are, of course, much more dramatic in regions where languages from entirely different stock make contact.

The sharing of phonological features across language boundaries may result from children’s resonating to large numbers of individuals in their vicinity who speak with the same foreign accent. This may occur, for instance, along language or national borders. The feature can then penetrate into the language territories through further and further resonance.

(4) A note on Adaptive Value
If the fundamentals of language have evolved in response to natural selection pressures, would it be fair to assume that the present nature of language constitutes in some sense an optimal solution? Such claims have been made, particularly in connection with measurements of the redundancy and information-transmission capacity of natural languages. But the explanations are always post hoc; languages are optimal, given the nature of man. But if the nature of language is partly the nature of man, as is suggested in the present thesis, these assertions become tautological. Is the nature of man, including his language, in any sense optimal? This becomes a question of religion rather than science. Our present era is not the final goal toward which evolution has striven, and we are merely at one stage in the continuity of life. Evolution of man has not stopped, and we cannot say whether the past, present, or future is in any way optimal.

There is a more interesting question, however. What might be the adaptive value of the resonance phenomenon? Resonance is not unique to man as pointed out previously in (v). it is a feature of a specific type of social mechanism out of a collection of many other types in the animal kingdom that are also linked to critical period evolved independently many times over. The physiological and behavioral details that make resonance possible need not be the same in different species. Perhaps man is unique only in the particular way in which he has achieved resonance and the peculiar behavior to which it is relevant.

The evolutionary recurrence of resonance leaves little doubt that it must harbor some selective advantages. What could they be? An examination of acoustic signaling systems among mammals gives us some scanty clues. The noises that most other mammals make can develop ontogenetically in the absence of social contact. Even though communicative behavior may not yet be present at birth, it will develop inexorably according to the species’ immanent laws of maturation (given an adequate physical and social environment), and the adult animal will have a species-specific signal repertoire available to it. The development of communication in man (as well as in some bird species) has a different ontogeny. Here the propensity matures as inexorably, but the actualization is linked to an adaptive feature towards environmental circumstances. It is a two-stage developmental course: at the first stage there is little tolerance for replicative variance, but at second stage there is very high tolerance. It is this splitting of the tolerance levels that may have important consequences for the evolution of behavior.

Tolerance for variance is probably inversely related to the complexity of the communication system and, consequently, to the repertoire of the messages available to the species. If the communication system is very complex but there is no adaptive feature and the whole behavior pattern emerges in the course of a single-stage rigid development, any small biological deviation from the mean is likely to alter the receptive and productive capacities for patterns, thus rendering individuals that are not perfectly replicated incommunicado, and this difficulty in communication might bar them from interacting with the group. Therefore, perfect maintenance of a very complex system demands very low tolerance bringing with it waste due to exclusion of individuals. The waste can only be reduced if tolerance is raised, but since this will admit individuals with lower capacities, the general level or standard of complexity of behavior would be reduced and leveled out until a stage is reached in which communication can be accomplished by any rough approximation to a given sound pattern. Thus, communication systems that mature in a single stage process have their level of complexity balanced against risk of waste and loss of individuals to the reproductive community.
The two-stage development, through introduction of the resonance phenomenon, circumvents the problem to a certain extent. Latent structure is merely a propensity (still lacking form). Language readiness is a primitive stage with final differentiation yet to com. Perhaps accurate replication at this stage is more easily attained because of this primitivity, and, therefore, tolerance for variance, although low, is not yet a critical problem. As the individual matures, the last stages of differentiation approach, and the process of actualization transforms latent to realized structure. But tolerance for variance in this secondary process is very high; through resonance the individual can adapt to a great variety of situations, and shape the realized form after the forms surrounding him. Through this increase of tolerance, the risk of losing individuals is lowered, whereas, at the same, there are fewer limits to the complexity of the system. A wider range of variance is allowed to remain, and out of this communication systems may evolve with special mechanisms that generate virtually unlimited repertoires of messages to the great advantage of social cohesiveness and organization of the group structure.

Notice that the resonance phenomenon in man is actually an aspect of his peculiar and species-specific ontogenetic history. Resonance is linked to a postnatal state of relative immaturity and a concomitant lengthening of infancy and childhood, so that environmental influences (the molding after patterns available in the environment) can actually enter into the formative processes. In Chapter Four we have pointed out how man is unique is this respect. Here, then, we have a highly suggestive chain of reactions. Genetic alterations may lead to a peculiar developmental history in which the communication readiness becomes separated from the actualization process, so that latent structure comes to be distinct from realized structure, each with its own level of tolerance for replicative variance. Although the tolerance for the first level is lowered, that for the second level is heightened, thus opening up new possibilities for the development of zoologically unprecedented complexities in the system of communication.