hellog〜英語史ブログ / 2024-02-14

■ #5406. ダーウィンによる人類の進化，言語の進化，精神の進化 [homo_sapiens][origin_of_language][evolution][history_of_linguistics][darwin][ai]

　Charles Darwin (1809--82) は，言語の進化は人類の進化そのものと平行的なところがあると考えており，また精神の進化とも関係しているとも述べている．特に後者に関して進化を考える上で言語と精神とを結びつけてみた論者は，Darwin が最初に近かったようだ．Mufwene (23) より解説を引用する．

Charles Darwin commented in The Descent of Man (1871) that the evolution of language was in several ways reminiscent of that of mankind itself. He hypotheisized that it had emerged gradually, had not been given by God or invented by design by humans, and could also be explained by natural selection. He was among the first to correlate the evolution of language with that of the human mind . . . , thus accounting for why parrots cannot produce original spoken messages intentionally, although they can imitate human speech fairly accurately. Showing what an important driver role the human mind has played in the evolution of language, he argued that it was for the same reason that other primates do not use their buccopharyngeal structure to speak.

　これは生成AIが産出する言語が真の言語なのかという点にも関わってくる点で，古くて新しい論点かもしれない．
　さらに，上の解説に続けて Mufwene (23) は，言語能力の発現と諸言語の発生は独立しているか否かという，もう1つの重要な論点を指摘している．

We now know that Charles Darwin was only partly right. The other primates' buccopharyngeal structure is not shaped in exactly the same way as that of humans, although, based on the parrot's phonetic accomplishments, we must wonder how critical this particular structure was for the emergence of language (not speech!) in the first place. After all, humans who cannot speak produce signed language, which is just as adequate for communication. This argument may be claimed to support the position that the emergence of the capacity for language must be distinguished from the emergence of languages. However, one must also wonder whether the two questions can be considered independently of each other . . . .

　この論点も現代の視点からみると余計におもしろい．生成AIは，人間が発した多くの既存の言語データをエネルギーとして，言語能力らしきもの（正確にいえば言語産出の手法）を獲得したからである．
　この時代に，Darwin を読んでみるのも有意義かもしれない．

　・ Mufwene, Salikoko S. "The Origins and the Evolution of Language." Chapter 1 of The Oxford Handbook of the History of Linguistics. Ed. Keith Allan. Oxford: OUP, 2013. 13--52.

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