I'm a little skeptical of any theory that makes pronouns super important for the simple reason that there are many languages like where pronouns are not super important. In agglutinative languages like Turkish and Finnish, person is shown via conjugation, making pronouns redundant. In topic marker languages like Japanese and Korean, person can be derived from context and pronouns are often replaced by titles.
In English, you can say something like "He ate it", but just saying "Ate" as an utterance by itself is ungrammatical. On the other hand, in Japanese and other "pro-drop" languages, you can freely omit pronouns unless they're necessary for disambiguation.
You can use pronouns in Japanese to clarify the subject or object of a verb, but it's not nearly as common to do as in English. For instance: when addressing somebody politely, you would typically refer to them either by name (with an appropriate honorific) if you know it, or a suitable title (like sensei for a teacher, or okyakusan for a customer). There are situations where you would instead use a second-person pronoun like anata, including as a fall-back if you don't know how else to address a stranger, but it's not at all the default choice as it is in English.
Another way this crops up is through the use of so-called "benefactive" constructions. For instance, hon wo kashite kureta could be translated as "[he/she/you] lent me a book", and hon wo kashite ageta means "I lent [him/her/you] a book". The difference has nothing to do with pronouns; it's that you use a different auxiliary verb when describing something that was done for the benefit of the speaker, or for the benefit of someone else.
Similarly, Japanese has a variety of honorific language which, in polite/formal situations, is used to speak respectfully about others and humbly about oneself (or one's "in-group", such as family members or coworkers). So the choice of wording can convey who you're talking about, without needing to explicitly use pronouns.
In Finnish, the smaller words get suffixed into the larger one. Take "talo", nominative for "house". In English you say "in (the) house", in Finnish the "-ssa" suffix means the same thing, so you say "talossa". "from (the) house" would be "talosta". There's like over 20 such modifications to the root word, and they compose. "from my house" would be "talostani", where the "-ni" suffix means "my".
Are case and conjugation not other ways to express pronouns? Making the pronouns explicit is just a kind of error correction.
Also I have read that case (and conjugation?) may have come from particles like classifiers being absorbed into words (weird to think how that would work before written language, but whatever). In which case case and conjugation might literally reflect actual proouns.
> Why are [first-person singular pronouns] so similar if the languages are so far apart? The answer can only be chance, convergent evolution, or a genetic relationship.
There is also another possibility: the linguist doing the reconstruction was invested in the theory and cherry-picked the data.
E.g. the list of first-person singular pronouns contains these entries:
Austronesian: ’a(ŋ)kƏn
Afro-Asiatic: anāku
which are so simlar that I decided to verify and check Wikipedia, which has slightly different reconstructions
and suddenly one of the examples supporting the theory ends up contradicting it, while the other still has "n", but is otherwise far removed from the reconstruction presented in the article.
I don't think the reconstructions on Wikipedia are necessarily more correct, but they do demonstrate that there is significant leeway when it comes to the inclusion or exclusion of specific consonants. And if you have a dozen options to choose from, it's quite easy to turn random noise into a strong signal.
I find self-contradictory the idea that the pronouns have a single origin that at the same time appeared very late and propagated everywhere even in place that have been isolated before the appearance of the pronouns.
He places also the appearance of self-awareness and fully human behavior 12000 years ago, but self-awareness exists in other animals and many human behaviors date from long before (tools: 2.5 Myr, fire: 400-1000 kyr, art: 30kyr)
I also read the article about the snake cult of consciousness that read more like an elaborated numerology than a scientific hypothesis
Your comment needs to be first. The author is stretching the evidence so far here. I hope the Hacker News audience understands that this article is presenting a very fringe theory, with a lot of holes.
But the similarity of pronouns across the world is still a very interesting subject to research. Johanna Nichols has done a lot of work in that area.
The Eve Theory of Consciousness proposed that consciousness is recent, women were self-aware first, and agriculture was the result.
Any biologists or anthropologists care to chime in on whether that's obviously wrong or not? The author's self-described background is engineering so I find some of his more outlandish claims about human development suspect.
I would say that self-awareness is far more primordial than agriculture, like most psychological traits that are shared with social animals. The main difficulty is that we don't have proper testing procedures for this kind of traits. Coming back to humans (all species under the homo genera), we have cave paintings that are far more older than h. sapiens' development of agriculture. And I'm inclined to think that an ape doing such drawings would also have self-awareness... They are barely related traits, but stil...
Lets break down the three clains in reverse order:
1. Are there primitive societies of hunter-gatherer that are not self aware, as in they don't pass neurological test that measure this?
2. From a evolutionary perspective what is the advantage of this sexual dimorphism and given that this advantage exists why did this advantage disappear afterwards and become present in both sexes. Are there any other traits where woman are shown to have larger divergence. I thought men where the "weak" sex in this regard.
3. If consciousness is recent then how do you explain conscious trails and self awareness in lower primates, is this also a case of convergent evolution?
>> The simplest explanation is their diffusion ~15,000 years ago.
The problem I have with that is everything started to change when the glaciers started melting. Civilization surely extended to areas that we now call the continental shelf. Sea levels gradually rose several hundred feet, washing away an awful lot of everything. It's hard to say what was where and diffused because there isn't there any more.
So the theory is that, basically, there were shamans going around introducing ancient peoples to snake venom trips and telling them this new experience of salience they are now having in their brain is called “na”?
I love it, as a fan of Julian Jaynes, I’m definitely adding it in.
