It's Not All Talk

摘要

I why is it that 20th-century physicists could ask some of the most grandiose questions in science, but if a researcher wondered aloud where language came from, the response was derisive at best. Not only can you not answer the question, they were told, you shouldn't even ask.rnThere are many reasons why language evolution was a bit of a scientific embarrassment, but two are particularly significant. First was the quite reasonable objection that there simply wasn'1 a lot of data. You can't uncover earlier forms of language in the same way you can track a species through deep time. Words don't have petrified ancestors and further back than 8000 years there is no known way to dig up syntactic precedents.