Posted: Aug 14, 2017 6:50 pm
Tangential to the topic, this is a quote from the second link in post #8905 above (linked again here), which is a review of Robin Dunbar's book "Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language". There is also a cartoon: “Psst! Did you hear what the gamma ray did to the atomic nucleus?”
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Language compels us to organize our thoughts into sentences, which are basically tidbits of gossip. Every sentence has a subject—who or what, but mostly who—the sentence is about. Every sentence also has a verb—what the subject did, or will do, or is doing right now. And most sentences also have an object—who or what the subject performed the action on.
Even a science lecture takes the form of gossip. We talk about planets revolving around stars and gamma rays smashing into atomic nuclei as if planets and gamma rays were animate beings with minds of their own. We have no other way of talking about things, which is one reason why scientists so often resort to explaining their ideas in mathematical equations instead.
There’s no obvious reason why language, as a communication system, needs to be structured as snippets of gossip. Computer languages certainly aren’t structured that way. There’s also a structure to the waggle dance performed by honeybees to communicate about the location of resources, but it’s not at all like the grammar of human languages. Rather, the dance conveys two pieces of information, direction and distance, much like the polar coordinates used by pilots and air traffic controllers.
Although chimpanzees don’t have language, they do have complex social structures. So they clearly have a well-developed understanding of who-did-what-to-whom. The structure of language is constrained by general brain processes, many of which are used to guide our interactions with others. Perhaps, then, it’s not surprising that language is structured principally to convey social information.
In that sense, we truly are born to gossip.