Yes, very interesting.
I've always wondered if language is the compilation of successive "mistakes".
Roger
On 3/11/06, Peter Cudmore <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Just happen to have the following quote from Richard Dawkins' _Selfish Gene_
> to hand:
>
> Cultural transmission is not unique to man. The best non-human example that
> I know has recently been described by P. F. Jenkins in the song of a bird
> called the saddleback which lives on islands off New Zealand. On the island
> where he worked there was a total repertoire of about nine distinct songs.
> Any given male sang only one or a few of these songs. The males could be
> classified into dialect groups. For example, one group of eight males with
> neighbouring territories sang a particular song called the CC song. Other
> dialect groups sang different songs. Sometimes the members of a dialect
> group shared more than one distinct song. By comparing the songs of fathers
> and sons, Jenkins showed that song patterns were not inherited genetically.
> Each young male was likely to adopt songs from his territorial neighbours by
> imitation, in an analogous way to human language. During most of the time
> Jenkins was there, there was a fixed number of songs on the island, a kind
> of 'song pool' from which each young male drew his repertoire. But
> occasionally Jenkins was privileged to witness the 'invention' of a new
> song, which occurred by a mistake in the imitation of an old one. He writes:
> 'New song forms have been shown to arise variously by change of pitch of a
> note, repetition of a note, the elision of notes and the combination of
> parts of other existing songs . The appearance of the new form was an abrupt
> event and the product was quite stable over a number of years. Further, in a
> number of cases the variant was transmitted accurately in its new form to
> younger recruits so that a recognizably coherent group of like singers
> developed.' Jenkins refers to the origins of new songs as 'cultural
> mutations'. (203-4)
--
http://www.badstep.net/
http://www.cb1poetry.org.uk/
|