@farmerman,
farmerman wrote:
Quote: Nonsense... One must conceive of a thing to speak of it...
Actually Im quoting what several noted paleoanthropologists say> ITS NOT THAT SPEECH WAS THE ISSUE. It was that the maxillary structure was morphing so that speech was possible. Communication and speech became the consequence of the changing throat and mouth structure.
You can come down from a tree , but if you cant tell anybody anything, youre still a monkey.
This isn't a question of which came first, Chicken or Egg... Before people needed to say something, they had to have something to say, and since monkeys already have vocalization all that was needed was the symbolic aspect of this sound having that meaning...Look at yourself... Would you need the words you use if you had nothing to say??? I don't know them all, and I have not heard them all... But clearly words alone are not enough to express human thought, or we would not have numbers, and in any even each is a form of communication...
So, as I said: concepts, forms, and ideas... One must make the mental connection before it is expressed, and a form expressed is still a form.. Forms are meanings, and when we communicate we communicate meaning, and it is safe to say that both grew up together, the sense of meaning, and the forms necessary to express that meaning... And words are culture because while people die, the concepts they named are preserved in their language, so when one speaks another may understand without direct experience of the issue under discussion...
We must have already had complex brains capable of making connections and recognizing patterns before the accumulation a larger vocabulary... You can see that words without thought can only express banality, so what contribution to survival would words have had if they were not themselves forms holding bits of meaning??? It was the need for a larger vocal range that brought about the evolution and not the evolution that gave us language...
And; We are still primates... The fact that most of us have nothing to say is not hindered by the fact that we have thousands of words with which to say it.
There is a girl who works in a store near by who needs a mute button... She carries on all day and must drive her co-workers absolutly nuts... Whether she thinks she is charming or engaging or entertaining, or whether she thinks at all is an open question...She has some mental condition in which little gets in and everything in comes out over and over again... For God's sake girl: Shut up... But she can't, with nothing to say and an endless stream of strangers to say it to.
