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May 5, 2021Liked by Michael David Cobb Bowen

You might be onto something. Check out, if you have not already, how language is believed (by a small minority of people who study this their whole life) to have evolved not necessarily for the benefit of communicating with other people, but, so we could think better... or something. Listen to Noam Chomsky tell it... https://youtu.be/7aqNLEnHSyo

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I don't find Chomsky's revelation particularly controversial. I absolutely over-write when I write and I know for a fact that I am able to communicate more efficiently by voice and by that in combination with my physical presence. I think this is clearly evident in the establishment of emotional settings done in Clubhouse. You can almost immediately pick up the 'tone' of a room. I certainly also recognized how different radio work and TV work is from writing.

A friend whose work I have been avoiding for years talks about what music communicates. I'm keen to pick up on that idea as I get deeper into my new audiophile shoes.

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I was hoping the Chomsky video could link your "pitcher and catcher" idea with the idea that language may have evolved out of just such a back and forth (thought). That language may have arisen out of the internal "pitching and catching" and that the usefulness of that internal back and forth to communicate (externally) may have being a side effect benefit. That communications with others may have not been the primary reason for language coming into being.

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Language is several levels of abstraction higher than the pitching and catching I'm talking about which is all about nerve impulses and electromechanical signals. I think if you could cut off the frontal lobes and only deal with the hindbrain humans would make unambiguous monkey sounds, like laughing and crying and various grunts, sighs and such.

My understanding is that infants babble fluently in every human language phoneme, but they get more difficult to pronounce as they age and mature in one language.

The other thing I recall (maybe properly) is that parents think they teach their children language but children learn more of it among their friends. It also makes sense to me that the use and abuse of language, for example the creations of slang and dialect, are more for impressing with flavor than with accurate communication. In that regard the accuracy of pitching and catching is entirely subjective. For example, when an old person (like me) says "That's lit!" to a young person (like my daughter) it has a completely different emotional resonance.

That said, on a larger and slower scale, the pitching and catching of language does change over time. I'm just not sure you can say that there is evolutionary pressure at its root.

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