<table><tr><th>From:</th><th>Noam Chomsky</th></tr><tr><td>Sent:</td><td>Sunday, January 3, 2016 5:08 PM</td></tr><tr><td>To:</td><td>Jeffrey E.</td></tr><tr><td>Subject:</td><td>RE: Re:</td></tr></table>

Apes can gesture "I'm hungry," but their symbolic systems differ radically from human language in just about every significant respect.

There are very broad uses of language, but I think they're more confusing than helpful. There is a biological system: human language. The English word "language" (which, incidentally, doesn't translate easily, even to closely related languages) covers a lot more than that, just as "move" or "energy" in English cover a lot more than what scientists mean by the term. Seems to me a good idea to follow scientific practice and avoid the broad uses, except in informal discourse.

From: Jeffrey E. [mailto:jeevacation@gmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, January 03, 2016 11:55 AM
To: Noam Chomsk
Subject: Re:

gesturing im hungry, ? does that need a language first with your broad definition?

On Sun, Jan 3, 2016 at 11:51 AM, Noam Chomsky <blackened out> wrote:

Don't see how it would work. We can't tell stories until language is already available.

There are, of course, speculations about how language might have developed very slowly, first with short sentences, then longer ones, etc. One could interweave speculations about story telling into these. Problem with these tales is the usual one with speculation — one can imagine 1 million possibilities. Dick Lewontin's important paper on evolution of cognition is again relevant. And there is a more formidable problem: the leap to unboundedness is saltational, by definition, so nothing is gained by the speculations, a fact that many of those engaged in these efforts seem not to have grasped.

From: Jeffrey E. [mailto:jeevacation@gmail.com <mailto:jeevacation@gmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, January 03, 2016 11:25 AM
To: Noam Chomsky
Subject:

how does story telling fit in to the origin of language. ? internal stories? overlay on music . alarms? how important are stories ?

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