The content of Language

The content of Language
One of the major advantages of human language over other forms of animal communication is displacement, the ability to communicate a message when either the sender or the receiver is not directly in contact with the conditions or events involved in the message - in other words, being able to talk about a time or place other than here and now. We can talk about what we ate for dinner last night, about what is going on in another room or another part of town, or about what will happen in the future. This contrasts with most nonhuman communication, which can deal only with evens in the present. A chimp’s cry of fear can refer only to immediate present, not to something that happened yesterday or that might happen tomorrow.

We know that chimps can think about other times and places because they sometimes make tools for getting termites before they actually arrive at the termite nest. This means they can anticipate the need for the tool and take action without the stimulus of seeing the termite nest. But as far as we know, they cannot communicate this message to other chimps. If they ever became able to teach other chimps displacement, using language abilities learned from humans, this would be a major step toward humanlike communication.

Our ability to use displacement is a major reason why we have been able to build up cultural tradition. Because we can talk about the past, we do not have to learn or invent everything ourselves; instead we can rely on learning and inventions of our ancestor. As we look at human evolution, both biological and cultural, we must recognize the important of language in this regard. By using displacement to build on the past, humans were better able to compete with other animals. Thus the evolution of the brain, which allowed for the increase in memory that went along with the expanded use of language, must have provided a new basis for interaction among human groups.

Somewhere between our earliest prehuman ancestors and modern homosapeins, speech and language content became so important for human survival that they led to changes in the vocal apparatus and in the brain. These changes testify to the growing interaction between biological and cultural evolution as the two processes continued to affect each other and together led to modern human culture.
The content of Language

Telegraph – history of start up

Telegraph – history of start up
Just a month of Britain’s Queen Vitoria came to the throne, directors of the London and Birmingham Railway watched a demonstration of a new electric telegraph system. They were told that the four needle instrument could transmit five words a minute, provided the words were short.

The distance the telegraphed words was travel under the modest – less than a mile – although the inventors, Charles Wheatstone and W.F Cooke, needed to lay 19 miles (30km) of line to carry them to their destination. The railway engineer Robert Stephenson sent the first, suitably terse, telegram: ‘Bravo’.

The idea of electric telegraph system had occurred to a numbered of people in both Europe and the United States at about the same time, and it was one of the several ways in which communications were revolutionized in the 19th century. Its development more and less paralleled that of the railway, especially so in the early years when the telegraph poles carrying the wires were erected almost exclusively alongside the railway station.

It was the railway companies that were the first to grasp the significance of this new means of communication, and make practical use of it. It allowed them to establish uniform time, or ‘railway time’ throughout the network, and to create a system of signaling that kept the trains at safe distance, Railway officials could also use the telegraph to summon help.
Telegraph – history of start up