AI researcher Michael Running Wolf grew up listening to his community speak Indigenous languages, an increasingly rare experience. Credit: Taehoon Kim/Northeastern University
Colleagues routinely describe Michael Running Wolf as someone who walks seamlessly between two worlds.
As an artificial intelligence (AI) researcher at the software-development company SynthBee in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and as co-founder of the First Languages AI Reality (FLAIR) programme at the Mila–Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute in Montreal, Canada, Running Wolf holds a deep understanding of both the technology underlying AI and the societal benefits it could unlock. And as the son of Lakota and Cheyenne parents, he also knows how technology and data have been weaponized to harm Indigenous communities. Running Wolf therefore approaches his work — in which he revitalizes disappearing languages using AI and virtual-reality tools — with patience, empathy and a healthy dose of scepticism.
“The work that Michael does is so sophisticated and complex because it’s bridging the sacred with the science,” says Estakio Beltran, a partnership adviser at the non-profit organization Native Americans in Philanthropy in Washington DC, who collaborates with Running Wolf and is of Tolteca-Mexica and Tlatoani origin. “We’re fortunate to have him overseeing efforts to reclaim Indigenous languages because his foremost thoughts are to protect and honour Indigenous sovereignty.”
Running Wolf grew up just outside the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation in southeastern Montana, in a remote town called Birney (2020 population: 97). The settlement often lacked running water and electricity, but it was nevertheless a comforting place where he was surrounded by family, literally — everyone in the town was an extended relative through his mother, and Running Wolf didn’t meet a stranger until he left for university age 18. He spent his childhood learning traditional Cheyenne and Lakota artistry and hearing Indigenous languages spoken around him, an experience that is now increasingly rare.
“For decades, the US government oversaw policies of forced assimilation, and as part of that, it was illegal to speak traditional languages or to practise our cultures openly,” he says. “Those policies were often enforced violently, and so we lost generations of fluent speakers that make it really difficult to come back from now.”
Running Wolf was a strong student from a young age, he says, and quickly developed an interest in technology, spurred by his mother’s career as a laser lithographer designing microchips for the computing firm Hewlett-Packard in Colorado. He learnt the basics of computer programming in primary school — including working out how to reprogram his graphing calculator to play games such as Snake. However, when it came to choosing a degree course at Montana State University in Bozeman in 1999, Running Wolf says he picked the then-nascent field of computer science on instinct. “No one in my family, or even my guidance counsellor, actually knew what it was.”
Even as he gravitated towards software development, Running Wolf retained an interest in Indigenous histories, noting that if he hadn’t become an AI researcher, he probably would have become an artist or a poet like his father, who holds a degree in fine arts. When he returned to Bozeman in 2007 after a three-year stint in industry to complete a master’s degree in computer science, Running Wolf’s future bridging the two fields began to take shape.
For his master’s thesis, Running Wolf drew inspiration from the work of researchers who had used oral histories to trace the origins of tales such as Little Red Riding Hood and to identify items eligible for repatriation under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. He spent the summer of 2014 in Siberia, Russia, collecting stories from local Indigenous peoples and using a type of AI called natural language processing to look for similarities between their cultures and those closer to his home. “Ecologically, the area is very similar to the Yellowstone biome in Montana, and so I was interested in how those types of force shape language and culture,” he says. “It stopped being pure computer science and brought in aspects of anthropology.”
Around this time, Running Wolf also met his wife Caroline, a member of the Apsáalooke Nation who speaks 11 languages and was then earning her master’s degree in Native American studies. Together, the two became consumed by thoughts of how computational tools and big data could be used to improve understanding of Indigenous cultures and to reclaim lost languages. The United Nations estimates that roughly half of the world’s 6,700 languages — the majority of which are spoken by Indigenous peoples — are on track to disappear by 2100, yet Running Wolf says there are rarely rigorous plans in place to save them.
“We were both frustrated with the lack of good progress in what was being done at the time,” Running Wolf says. He adds that Caroline has since joined him in co-founding an Indigenous non-profit technology firm called Buffalo Tongue and in managing ongoing projects focused on the applications of AI and immersive technologies for reclaiming Indigenous languages and cultures. “What began as these late-night conversations eventually kicked off this whole new chapter of using technology for language reclamation, and we’ve just become enmeshed in that space.”
The challenges of AI
Indigenous languages differ from those with Latin roots in ways that make them a challenge to reconcile with existing machine-learning frameworks, Running Wolf says. Many Western languages follow a subject–verb–object sentence structure, for example, whereas Indigenous languages tend to be verb-based and polysynthetic, meaning that a single word can include multiple elements that, in English, would be written out as entire sentences. ‘Bird’, for instance, might translate to something like ‘the winged, flying animal that caws’.
Because generative AI models predict the next word in a sentence on the basis of the preceding words, these differences mean that algorithms often do a poor job of recognizing and translating Indigenous languages. However, models perform better when they include Indigenous languages, Running Wolf says, because training on a greater diversity of data ultimately makes the underlying algorithms more adaptive and flexible, just as people who know two languages typically have an easier time learning a third. “But that does create a risk for communities when our language data are suddenly valuable,” he adds.
Staff members at the New Zealand firm Te Hiku Media sought the input of local communities to co-create an automatic speech-recognition system for the Māori language te reo.Credit: Te Hiku Media
Already, there has been a rush by companies such as OpenAI, Amazon and Google to gain access to Indigenous data on language and more; the firms use that information to develop services and products that are then offered back to users, often at a cost. Long-standing mistrust over how their information is likely to be misused has caused some Indigenous communities to disavow themselves of ever turning to AI-based technologies, a stance that Running Wolf respects.
“A lot of this kind of research is without consent, unfortunately, and it has soured people on even trying to engage,” he says. “There’s a lot of risk with AI, and so I think that’s a very healthy response.”
Creating tools for societal good
Running Wolf is working to overcome these hesitations through creating resources by and for Indigenous communities that help to educate them both about their cultures and the technology and, in turn, give them more control over how their data are used.
His early efforts began as employee network groups, including one for Indigenous researchers at Amazon when Running Wolf was there working on the company’s AI-powered assistant, Alexa. Later, he and Caroline were involved in launching two wider initiatives, Indigenous in AI and IndigiGenius. These partner with peer groups such as the information-technology consultancy firm Natives in Tech in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, the Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence Working Group and the Abundant Intelligences research project to shape the future of Indigenous-led AI efforts. In 2019, the Running Wolfs participated in two workshops alongside dozens of other researchers to produce a paper outlining how best to ethically design and create AI tools (J. E. Lewis et al. Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence Position Paper; CIFAR, 2020).
In many instances, one challenge these groups face is a lack of fluent speakers of Indigenous languages to both teach the next generation and to help train AI language models. Although children once learnt their ancestral languages at home, they now mostly engage with languages in the classroom. There’s an urgent need, Running Wolf says, for curricula and other resources — not to replace Indigenous speakers, but to train new teachers and standardize how Indigenous languages are taught. “Now, we have a lot of Native Americans trying to learn in classes using methodologies that don’t have good pedagogy or even good metrics for success,” he says.
Early on in his professional career, Running Wolf sought the advice of Peter-Lucas Jones, chief executive of Te Hiku Media in Kaitaia, New Zealand, who is of Te Aupōuri, Ngāi Takoto and Ngāti Kahu origin and co-created an automatic speech-recognition system for the Māori language te reo. By soliciting input from local communities, Jones was able to amass nearly 200,000 recordings from thousands of people — a data-set size largely unheard of in Indigenous language revitalization work. The resulting system can translate spoken te reo into English text with 92% accuracy, and translate bilingual speech that uses both languages with 82% accuracy. It has been used as the foundation for a platform called Papa Reo, which is intended to help other Indigenous communities to emulate its success. A key part of that equation, Jones says, is relinking language and culture.
“Language springs from the life and the landscape that it describes, and so when we think about language, it’s important to recognize that it is the ideal vehicle for the transmission of culture,” Jones says. “When language is separated from culture, we find that it’s much harder for people to achieve fluency, and so we treat them as the same thing, walking hand in hand.”
The knowledge of community elders is crucial to developing resources that preserve Indigenous languages, such as textbooks.Credit: The Canadian Press/Alamy
Running Wolf is now working with researchers including T’łaḵwama’og̱wa (Sara Child), an Indigenous language educator at North Island College in Courtenay, Canada, who is a member of the Kwakiutl Nation, on a programme centred on Kwak’wala, a language spoken by a few hundred people around Vancouver Island in Canada. The team is following a similar approach to that of Jones, collecting and curating a bank of words and phrases to create a speech-to-text program and an oral dictionary. With those tools in hand, the research group will use virtual reality to create a ‘cultural immersion experience’ in which users accompany virtual, interactive characters as they take a canoe journey to several sacred islands in the area.
“This project has the added bonus of not just teaching language, but in helping us get elders back to places of meaning, which helps them unlock memories from their past,” Child says, adding that bringing community elders into the work has helped the team to structure content in ways that honour history without oversharing.
The hope, Running Wolf says, is that because many Indigenous communities in the area share similar cultures and facets of language, once the resources are made, it will be easy to adapt them for others. The same is true among Indigenous communities such as the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek (Muscogee) and Seminole, and Running Wolf is working towards partnerships with those groups as well. “Languages within the same family have a high overlap of sounds and grammatical structures, and so we can amplify the data with some AI tricks to expand the reach that these tools can have,” he says.
A north star for trust
Even as Indigenous-led efforts take off, there’s an understanding that it will become necessary to work with other partners to fully integrate such efforts into the wider technological ecosystem. Running Wolf says this is especially true when introducing Indigenous languages into spaces such as the digital economy, in which he says Indigenous communities must have a place.
“AI is being rolled into so many aspects of everyday life, and if these new technologies only speak Western languages, Indigenous communities will end up excluded,” says Running Wolf. “Data is something of a new frontier and cutting off access a new form of colonized violence. If we have no place in the digital economy, it’s going to be really hard for us to thrive.”
When looking for collaborative partners, Running Wolf is guided by three principles that others can easily adopt. First, any project he’s part of must have strong and explicit buy-in from the communities involved and a sense of duty to language reclamation. A crucial part of this, he adds, is the second principle — that communities must retain ownership of their information such that they can withdraw access at any time. Third, giving credit to community partners in research publications, presentations and outreach material goes a long way towards creating trust, he says.
“We have very few speakers in many of these communities, and so if one of our partners pulls out because they distrust us, it hurts the overall research,” he says. “We’re always aiming to create an environment of high trust as our north star.”
Derek Eagle LaRance, a language revitalization specialist of Quechan and Morongo descent at Cherokee Film, the Cherokee Nation’s first film and media education centre, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, agrees that although Indigenous people need to lead these efforts, that doesn’t mean there’s no room for others to get involved. “The invitation is out there from Indian country to come to our communities and show up ready to listen,” he says. “The work has to be done by us because there’s a connection we have to the languages that gives us a deeper insight, but it doesn’t mean that an ally couldn’t be right there with us, supporting and protecting and creating a safe environment for this work to be done.”
Todos nós humanos vivemos no mesmo mundo e temos experiências semelhantes. Por isso, todas as línguas faladas no planeta possuem as mesmas categorias básicas para expressar ideias e objetos, refletindo essa experiência humana comum.
Essa noção foi defendida por anos por diversos linguistas, mas para o linguista americano Caleb Everett, quando analisamos os idiomas mais de perto, descobrimos que muitos conceitos básicos não são universais e que falantes de línguas diferentes veem e pensam o mundo de forma diferente.
Em um novo livro, baseado em muitas línguas que ele pesquisou na Amazônia brasileira, Everett mostra que muitas culturas não pensam da mesma forma o tempo, o espaço ou os números.
Talvez poucas pessoas estejam mais aptas a pensar sobre esse problema do que Everett. Nascido nos Estados Unidos, ele teve uma infância incomum nos anos 1980, dividindo seu tempo entre seu país natal, escolas públicas em São Paulo e Porto Velho, e aldeias indígenas no interior da Amazônia, em Rondônia.
Caleb é filho do americano Daniel Everett, que veio ao Brasil nos anos 1970 como missionário cristão com o propósito de traduzir a Bíblia para o idioma pirahã, uma língua falada hoje por cerca de 300 indígenas brasileiros.
Daniel veio para ajudar a converter os indígenas, mas acabou ele próprio convertido: abandonou a religião e passou a se dedicar ao estudo do pirahã, com um doutorado em linguística na Unicamp.
Desde cedo, Caleb acompanhou o pai e a mãe (que também era missionária) em missões na Amazônia brasileira. Chegou a viver entre os indígenas, passando parte da infância pescando e brincando com eles na floresta.
De volta aos EUA, se formou e foi trabalhar no mercado financeiro. Mas uma questão sempre o perturbou: interessado em psicologia, ele lia em revistas científicas que diziam que a forma que os humanos aprendem e entendem os números é universal.
“Nem todos os humanos pensam assim. Eu tenho o grande privilégio de conhecer alguns dos povos indígenas do Brasil que não pensam assim”, diz Everett.
Cada vez mais interessado em pesquisar sobre os indígenas que conheceu na sua infância, ele resolveu dar uma guinada na sua vida. Abandonou o mundo financeiro, fez doutorado e voltou para Rondônia, onde foi investigar as línguas amazônicas.
Da pesquisa, saiu seu primeiro livro, de 2017, “Numbers and the Making of Us: Counting and the Course of Human Cultures”(os números e a nossa formação: a contagem e o curso das culturas humanas). No livro, Caleb Everett defende que os números são um conceito que não é natural ou inato ao ser humano, e varia imensamente de acordo com cada cultura e idioma, ao ponto que é impossível dizer que existe uma forma universal e “natural” para os humanos aprenderem quantidades.
Recentemente, ele lançou outro livro em que volta ao tema. Em “A Myriad of Tongues: How Languages Reveal Differences in How We Think” (uma miríade de línguas: como as línguas revelam diferenças na forma como pensamos), Everett diz que nos acostumamos a acreditar que todas as línguas do mundo usam categorias universais para classificar ideias e objetos, já que a experiência humana é limitada a alguns aspectos comuns de todas as culturas.
Afinal, todos nós, independente de onde nascemos, contamos quantidades, lembramos do passado, planejamos o futuro e usamos pontos geográficos para nos localizarmos.
Mas, segundo Everett, nem todas as línguas refletem o mundo dessa forma. Há línguas no mundo, como a pirahã, que ele aprendeu na infância, que sequer têm números precisos. Algumas línguas possuem apenas dois tempos verbais (o futuro e o não futuro), outras possuem sete.
Essas discrepâncias são muito maiores do que apenas diferenças culturais, argumenta Caleb. Elas determinam de forma profunda como cada ser humano percebe e pensa o mundo.
A diferença é que para um povo, algumas noções de tempo podem ser não só irrelevantes, como quase incompreensíveis. Já outros povos podem ter uma compreensão mais sofisticada de tempo do que outros.
Para entender isso, linguistas como Caleb estão se debruçando sobre muitas línguas que não eram devidamente estudadas no passado, sobretudo na Amazônia. A tecnologia e a facilidade de se viajar no mundo atual acelerou o trabalho dos linguistas.
Mas eles correm contra o tempo, já que a modernidade está “matando” línguas em um ritmo mais acelerado, com povos indígenas tendo cada vez mais dificuldade de se sustentarem sem o aprendizado de outros idiomas.
O estudo das línguas amazônicas também está desafiando noções antigas de intelectuais sobre como os humanos falam. Esse debate traz à tona uma famosa disputa que existe no mundo acadêmico entre seu pai, Daniel, e o linguista americano Noam Chomsky, em torno da língua pirahã, de Rondônia, justamente a que Caleb aprendeu ainda quando criança.
Chomsky é famoso por propor o conceito de “gramática universal”, a ideia de que todas as línguas humanas possuem uma estrutura comum, independente de onde essas línguas se desenvolvem.
Mas Daniel Everett afirma que a língua pirahã desmente a tese de Chomsky. Em pirahã, não existiria a recursividade, algo que Chomsky diz ser inerente a todas as línguas e, portanto, universal. Recursividade é quando se insere uma frase dentro de outra, como em: “O policial que prendeu o bandido que roubou uma casa está na delegacia”.
Esse é um dos debates mais acalorados no mundo da linguística. Chomsky chegou a chamar Daniel Everett de charlatão e sugeriu que sua pesquisa sobre os pirahã era falsificada, já que por anos Daniel foi o único acadêmico a falar a língua.
Em entrevista para a BBC News Brasil, Caleb disse acreditar que este debate está ficando no passado, com os avanços tecnológicos que estão acontecendo no mundo da linguística. No mundo de hoje, são faladas mais de 7 mil línguas, e graças a avanços como ciência de dados e aprendizado de máquina, linguistas estão conseguindo expandir sua compreensão desses idiomas em uma velocidade inédita.
O resultado, segundo Caleb, é que algumas noções clássicas do mundo da linguística dos anos 1970 estão finalmente podendo ser colocadas à prova, e muitas delas não estão sendo aprovadas no teste.
Confira abaixo a entrevista que Caleb Everett deu à BBC News Brasil na qual fala sobre suas experiências na Amazônia brasileira, o debate sobre como as línguas moldam o mundo que experimentamos e os avanços no estudo dos idiomas nos dias de hoje.
Seu livro sugere que estamos tendo uma melhor compreensão das mais de 7.000 línguas que hoje são faladas no mundo. O que os linguistas estão aprendendo com essas línguas menos conhecidas?
Estamos aprendendo muito. O que está claro é que as línguas são muito mais diferentes entre si do que pensávamos. Nós costumávamos supor que existia essa diversidade entre as línguas, mas que por trás delas haveria algum tipo de componente universal, algo que todas as línguas compartilhavam.
E o que estamos descobrindo, à medida que olhamos para mais e mais línguas, é que elas são diferentes em maneiras muito profundas, que não foram previstas em alguns dos modelos teóricos da linguística dos anos 1960 e 1970.
Existem alguns pontos em comum, é claro. Todos nós temos os mesmos ouvidos, as mesmas bocas e os mesmos cérebros.
Há essas semelhanças entre as línguas, mas não é porque existe algo geneticamente programado dentro da linguagem.
Muito do seu trabalho é baseado em línguas amazônicas que você estuda há muito tempo. O que você aprendeu especificamente com elas?
A Amazônia é realmente fascinante, porque embora existam outras regiões do mundo, como a Nova Guiné ou a África Ocidental, que têm mais línguas, as línguas da Amazônia são totalmente não relacionadas entre si.
Existem algumas centenas de línguas, mas existem dezenas de famílias linguísticas, como tupi ou aruaque ou algumas outras línguas isoladas que não têm “parentes” conhecidos.
Algumas são totalmente distintas entre si e estão a apenas 100 quilômetros de distância uma da outra.
A Amazônia é uma espécie de microcosmo fascinante da diversidade linguística que existe no mundo.
E podemos aprender muito sobre as diversas formas como os humanos se comunicam olhando apenas para as pessoas na Amazônia.
Muitas vezes, eu acho, nós somos culpados no Ocidente de uma espécie de homogeneização desses grupos. Nós meio que os colocamos suas línguas, suas culturas no mesmo bojo.
Na Amazônia, o que você descobriu que sustenta essa ideia de que as pessoas pensam diferente porque falam diferente?
Uma forma pela qual as línguas dessa região produziram insights é como as pessoas pensam sobre o tempo.
Em inglês e em muitas línguas, temos a tendência, por exemplo, de usar metáforas em que o futuro está na nossa frente e o passado está atrás de nós.
Mas existem alguns grupos na Amazônia que não falam sobre o tempo dessa forma.
Há um caso famoso de língua Tupi Kawahib, onde eles nem falam sobre tempo em termos de espaço.
Quando uma língua como o inglês tem três tempos, algumas línguas têm até sete tempos. Elas dividem o tempo de maneiras muito diferentes.
Então não se trata apenas de coisas superficiais, como “eles falam sobre plantas e animais de forma diferente”.
E isso é verdade até certo ponto. Mas o que mais me interessa, e o foco do livro, são esses aspectos fundamentais do pensamento humano.
Como pensamos sobre as quantidades, como pensamos sobre o espaço, como pensamos sobre o tempo e como os humanos desenvolvem essas capacidades, e como isso parece variar em alguns aspectos entre culturas.
No seu livro, você dá o exemplo de uma frase em inglês com muitas referências ao tempo: “Na segunda-feira passada eu corri por meia hora, como eu faço todas as semanas”. Você disse que algumas das línguas que estuda não têm todos os recursos para enquadrar o tempo dessa forma. Já outras têm sete tempos verbais. Essas línguas são menos ou mais sofisticadas do que as que estamos acostumados?
Você vê idiomas que talvez prestem atenção ao tempo e às maneiras que nós não fazemos.
Se você tiver na sua língua apenas passado, presente ou futuro, quando você estiver falando, basta indicar se foi em um desses três tempos.
Mas se você tem sete tempos que podem incluir algo como passado muito distante ou um futuro muito distante, então você deve prestar atenção a esses aspectos temporais e talvez a formas mais sutis.
Em que idioma foi isso?
É uma linguagem chamada yagua [falada na Amazônia peruana]. Embora existam muitas línguas que possuem cinco ou seis tempos, há algumas que não possuem nenhum tempo verbal.
Uma das línguas que trabalhei na Amazônia, Karitiana, tem dois tempos: futuro e não futuro. Essa é uma língua falada no Estado de Rondônia. Esse é um sistema de tempo bastante comum. Mas o exemplo que você lembrou, sobre uma corrida que fiz de 30 minutos ontem ou na semana passada. Vamos pensar sobre essa frase. O que são 30 minutos? Minutos é algo muito definido cultural e linguisticamente. O minuto vem de um sistema numérico de base 60 que remonta à Mesopotâmia, e é por isso que dividimos a nossa hora 60, e depois dividimos novamente para ter segundos. São coisas culturais muito arbitrárias que aprendemos, e parecem naturais para nós à medida que aprendemos a contar as horas.
Mas é realmente antinatural para muitas pessoas.
Então você pode imaginar se estiver conversando com um amazônico que nunca topou com o conceito de horas, minutos ou semana, que também é culturalmente construída. Há tantas tradições culturais muito específicas incorporadas apenas nessa frase que impactam como pensamos.
Pense no quanto o seu dia é ditado olhando os relógios e pensando onde você tem que estar em um determinado horário e em determinados minutos. Isso tudo é arbitrário.
Muitas culturas prescindem completamente destas noções. Estas coisas são codificadas na linguagem aprendida pelas crianças desde cedo, que moldam a forma como pensamos sobre a passagem do tempo. E isso parece totalmente natural para nós até que você seja confrontado com alguém para quem esses conceitos sejam totalmente antinaturais e você percebe “este é um humano inteligente e eles não precisam desses conceitos.”
Isso não quer dizer que eles sejam inúteis. Acho que são muito úteis, mas são úteis no nosso contexto cultural. E são apenas uma maneira diferente de pensar sobre o mundo. Eles não são “a” maneira de pensar sobre o mundo.
Vamos pegar, por exemplo, o idioma que você mencionou que tem sete tempos. O que você percebe que é diferente na maneira como eles pensam ou na forma como sua sociedade é?
Parte disso, eu diria, é arbitrário.
Mas o que alguns pesquisadores tentaram fazer é um teste experimental: será que estas diferenças linguísticas têm impacto na forma como as pessoas pensam sobre o tempo em geral, mesmo quando não estão falando?
E há uma boa quantidade de evidências agora de que isso acontece.
Como no exemplo do futuro estando à sua frente no passado, atrás de você.
Há uma boa quantidade de evidências experimentais agora de que, mesmo quando as pessoas nessas línguas estavam, o passado está à sua frente e o futuro está atrás de você, há uma boa quantidade de evidências de que as pessoas pensam sobre o tempo de maneira diferente, mesmo quando elas não estão falando.
Experiências básicas mostraram que quando as pessoas falam sobre o futuro em algumas destas línguas, elas apontam para trás, e quando falam sobre o passado, apontam para a frente, enquanto os falantes de inglês fazem o inverso.
Tendemos a pensar que estamos caminhando em direção ao futuro, enquanto para muitas dessas culturas é o contrário. E se você pensar bem, faz sentido. Porque você pode ver o passado. Você vê o que comeu no café da manhã. Você sabe o que aconteceu ontem. Mas o futuro é meio desconhecido para nós, então esse tipo de metáfora básica de visão e ver o passado, não ver o futuro, é a base de como as pessoas pensam sobre o tempo. E algumas dessas culturas e essa forma de pensar sobre o tempo surge mesmo em contextos não linguísticos.
Você teve uma infância muito interessante e inusitada, tendo passado grande parte do tempo com indígenas no Brasil. Como foi essa experiência?
Tenho boas lembranças da minha infância e do Brasil. Passei grande parte da minha infância na aldeia pirahã com minhas duas irmãs e meus pais.
Mas também passei um tempo em escolas públicas brasileiras, indo e voltando e ocasionalmente visitando os EUA.
Minha infância foi uma mistura de estar na aldeia no meio da selva, estar em cidades brasileiras e depois estar ocasionalmente em cidades americanas.
Em Porto Velho e São Paulo, porque meu pai acabou fazendo doutorado na Unicamp e assim em Campinas e em São Paulo.
As memórias de estar na selva são geralmente muito boas. Eu olho para trás agora e penso que nunca faria isso com meu filho (risos), quando penso nos riscos que corremos. Todos nós contraímos malária. É fácil olhar para trás com carinho quando todos sobreviveram.
Mas porque todos nós sobrevivemos e eu tenho boas lembranças de estar na aldeia nadando no rio com meus amigos indígenas, de caçar ou pescar com minhas irmãs, mas também alguns dos aspectos negativos, como a exploração dos indígenas por comerciantes locais.
No geral, foi uma infância muito positiva e tenho ótimas lembranças de estar na selva.
Você mencionou a língua pirahã e esse tem sido um debate bastante famoso no mundo linguístico entre seu pai e o famoso linguista americano Noam Chomsky. Esse debate intelectual chegou a ser bastante feroz na troca de palavras. O seu trabalho parece estar muito relacionado a essa questão que é central no mundo da linguística. Como você vê esse debate tão polêmico?
É um debate muito polêmico. Gosto de pensar que, de certa forma, a ciência superou alguns desses debates e o campo se tornou mais empírico. Meu pai foi certamente uma das pessoas que contribuiu para isso. Muitos pesquisadores nas últimas décadas trouxeram dados de diferentes idiomas na Austrália, na Amazônia e na África, que não parecem estar de acordo com os modelos que Chomsky e que outros promoveram nas décadas de 60 e 70. E esses modelos se tornaram muito influentes.
Na defesa desses modelos, eles parecem ter funcionado muito bem no começo. Mas na medida em que surgem mais e mais exceções, as coisas simplesmente não parecem se encaixar. E você tem que perguntar qual é a utilidade desse modelo?
O modelo é baseado, em grande parte, no inglês.
A nova safra de pesquisadores, a minha geração e a geração seguinte, não está muito satisfeita com os modelos dos anos 60 e 70. E isso não é um insulto.
Isso acontece em muitos campos. As coisas evoluem.
E agora acho que já ultrapassamos isso de uma forma que não é mais o debate central da linguística.
Mas ele ainda desperta muitas emoções fortes. Você acha que o mundo da linguística vai acabar deixando a gramática universal para trás?
A ideia de gramática universal mudou muito. Se você voltar e olhar os estudos dos anos 60 e 70, eles fizeram previsões muito grandes. Agora as previsões são quase impossíveis de serem provadas falsas.
Eles dizem: todos os humanos têm uma linguagem e então deve haver uma gramática universal.
É algo tão vago que não se pode discordar, mas que já não ajuda a se fazer nenhuma previsão, na minha opinião.
Mas digo isso também porque os pesquisadores que realmente respeito agora, que são talvez 10 anos mais novos que eu, certo, que estão fazendo pesquisas de ponta, eles não parecem estar levando em conta esse debate no seu trabalho.
Em vez disso, eles estão focados em realizar experimentos realmente bons, usando big data, ciência de dados e programação de computador, que se tornaram central para o trabalho que fazemos.
E isso não é verdade apenas na pesquisa linguística.
Quando as pessoas investem décadas de suas vidas em qualquer modelo teórico específico em qualquer disciplina, elas tendem a ser indivíduos bastante tendenciosos.
E então existe uma velha expressão que diz: a ciência muda uma aposentadoria por vez. E, de certa forma, acho que isso é verdade, que leva tempo.
Gostamos de pensar que somos objetivos, mas na verdade não somos, depois que investimos décadas em uma determinada visão e a promovemos, é preciso ser uma pessoa realmente grande para dizer “sabe: eu estive errado nos últimos 30 anos e preciso reconhecer isso diante de tantas evidências”.
Eu não vou ficar parado esperando isso acontecer. Eu acho que é apenas uma mudança social gradual em uma disciplina.
A tecnologia recente acelerou o estudo das línguas. Mas muitas dessas línguas estão morrendo rapidamente também. Existe uma corrida contra o tempo para estudá-las antes que morram?
Sim. Eu acho que há muita documentação linguística ao redor do mundo e às vezes eu acho que na verdade somos meio egoístas como pesquisadores, queremos obter todos esses dados antes que eles desapareçam ou queremos manter as pessoas falando suas línguas.
Na Amazônia, por exemplo, você vê que existem alguns grupos indígenas que realmente importam muito para eles manterem sua língua e para alguns deles isso não parece importar muito.
E quem somos nós para dizer a eles que isso deveria importar?
Acho que às vezes isso é importante para mim porque eu tenho um interesse egoísta de querer mais idiomas e é uma coisa fascinante para mim e para minha carreira olhar para esses dados.
Mas sim, infelizmente, para alguns, as línguas estão morrendo.
Elas estão morrendo principalmente hoje em dia por razões econômicas, na medida em que grupos de pessoas que estão no Brasil e em outros lugares, se quiserem que seus filhos possam ser economicamente viáveis diante do encolhimento das reservas e da dificuldade cada vez maior de sobreviver da caça e da pesca, essas pessoas têm que falar português, espanhol ou inglês.
Dependendo do contexto em que se encontram, as pressões econômicas são tão fortes sobre alguns destes grupos individuais que a maioria dos modelos sugere que muitas destas línguas desaparecerão nos próximos 100 anos.
Ao longo da sua vida, você viu línguas amazônicas morrerem ou prestes a morrer?
Sim. Um exemplo que me vem à mente é o idioma suruí que também é falado em Rondônia e ainda há falantes. O missionário que foi um dos primeiros a contatá-los nos anos 60 falava que era um idioma vibrante em termos linguísticos, mas agora muitas dessas pessoas falam principalmente português.
E se você olhar a proporção de crianças que estão aprendendo a língua como primeira língua e vê que isso está diminuindo. Esse é geralmente o melhor indicador de se uma linguagem sobreviverá ou não.
Para muitas destas línguas, simplesmente não há muitas crianças a aprendê-las.
Existem outras línguas que vimos morrer completamente.
Uma que me vem à mente é uma língua chamada Orouim, que era falada na fronteira brasileira com a Bolívia.
Mas há muitos exemplos de línguas que acabaram morrendo. Ou de línguas onde ainda há muitos falantes, mas a proporção de número de falantes de português aumentou muito entre as crianças. Você vê isso no parque Xingu, por exemplo. Muitas das línguas ainda são faladas, mas muitas vezes as crianças falam principalmente português.
E com a morte das línguas a humanidade está perdendo diversidade na forma de se pensar o mundo?
Uma das coisas que descobrimos e que é mencionada no livro é que há vários grupos que demonstraram ter vocabulários ricos sobre cheiros.
Isso é outra coisa que costumávamos pensar: “nós, humanos, não temos palavras abstratas para cheiros”.
Mas acontece que houve uma série de línguas documentadas nos últimos 10 anos que possuem palavras ricas e abstratas para cheiros.
À medida que essas línguas morrem e algumas delas estão à beira da extinção, estamos perdendo algo crítico sobre como os humanos pensam sobre cheiros e como eles podem falar sobre cheiros. Se perdemos isso, nós perderemos um pouco de como os humanos pensam sobre os cheiros que sentem.
Na medida em que as línguas morrem, estamos perdendo algo básico de nossa compreensão de como os humanos pensam sobre as sensações que sentem.
Você compara línguas amplamente faladas com línguas pouco conhecidas para ilustrar como pessoas podem pensar de formas diferentes. Mas existe essa diferença na forma de pensar o mundo mesmo entre línguas amplamente faladas? Por exemplo, um chinês pensa o mundo diferente de um alemão, por conta da língua que fala?
É sempre difícil saber quanto disso é a cultura e quanto disso é a linguagem. Mas no caso chinês, por exemplo, tem havido algumas pesquisas fascinantes mostrando que os falantes de mandarim parecem pensar sobre o tempo de maneiras diferentes dos falantes de inglês, porque as metáforas que usam para o tempo são um pouco diferentes.
Os chineses usam metáforas verticais, em que o tempo está caindo, em oposição à metáfora horizontal do futuro estar diante de você, como no inglês.
Outro exemplo com falantes de chinês é o da cognição quantitativa, como as pessoas pensam sobre quantidades.
Os falantes de inglês, por exemplo, tendem ser um pouco mais lentos do que os falantes de chinês no aprendizado de números, por causa como de números como 11 (“eleven”) e 12 (“twelve”).
No inglês, nas dezenas de 13 em diante, existe um padrão previsível: “thirteen” (13) e “fourteen” (14) são a junção do número três e quatro com a dezena (“teen”). Mas isso não acontece com as palavras “eleven” (11) e “twelve” (12).
Em idiomas como o chinês isso é mais transparente. Na parte das dezenas, você aprende a junção “um-dezena”, dois-dezena”, etc.
Isso ajudaria a explicar por que as crianças chinesas se saem um pouco melhor mais cedo em alguns exercícios de adição do que as crianças que falam inglês.
Um exemplo que se costuma dar em linguística é que os esquimós têm mais de 50 palavras para neve, já que é algo importante na cultura deles. Mas isso é um exemplo errado?
Isso se tornou uma coisa divertida para os linguistas zombarem.
Chegou ao ponto de o New York Times publicar um artigo que dizia que os esquimós têm centenas de palavras para neve e isso simplesmente não é verdade.
No entanto, a ideia central por trás dessa mentira não é imprecisa, que é a de que as pessoas vivem em ambientes muito diferentes. Não é de surpreender que alguns grupos amazônicos não tenham palavras para neve.
Há algumas evidências agora de que alguns destes termos que existem no ambiente podem ter impacto na forma como as pessoas pensam sobre algumas destas coisas externas.
Você menciona que as sociedades WEIRD (sigla em inglês para sociedades ocidentais, educadas, industrializadas, ricas e democráticas) não são uma população boa para se generalizar as capacidades da humanidade. Por que isso?
Foram pesquisadores de psicologia há cerca de 15 anos que inventaram essa sigla para WEIRD.
E eu acho que é uma maneira muito inteligente de fazer isso. As pessoas estão cientes hoje em dia que, se existem cerca de 7.000 línguas e culturas distintas no mundo, é problemático nós ficarmos nos debruçando repetidamente apenas no que pensam os americanos, os britânicos ou até mesmo os japoneses, e generalizar que é assim que os humanos pensam.
Nós [dos países WEIRD] somos uma pequena amostra da diversidade humana.
E além disso não somos representativos.
Um dos motivos disso é que estudos mostram que a alfabetização, por exemplo, muda a composição do cérebro.
Á medida que as pessoas aprendem a ler e escrever e ficam focadas em imagens bidimensionais. As crianças fazem isso repetidas vezes com livros e telas e isso tem alguns efeitos cognitivos.
Mas na perspectiva da história humana, se pensarmos em escalas de tempo maiores, os humanos deixaram a África há cerca de 100.000 anos, aproximadamente em ondas diferentes.
Eles caminharam por todo o mundo e chegaram a diversos lugares, incluindo o sul da América do Sul, há 20 mil anos.
Durante esse tempo, desenvolvemos formas muito diferentes de pensar.
Na vertente europeia, a agricultura tem apenas cerca de 8.000 anos e a industrialização tem apenas alguns 100 anos.
E a alfabetização generalizada, em que se espera que todas as pessoas leiam e escrevam, é um fenômeno recente.
Quando usamos as pessoas dos países WEIRD para generalizar como os humanos pensam, estamos olhando apenas para uma vertente específica de humanos que se desenvolveu em uma determinada parte do mundo durante apenas alguns mil anos de toda essa história de 100 mil anos.
É uma parte muito pequena da história de uma perspectiva histórica.
Obviamente, hoje é incrivelmente influente porque estes grupos tornaram-se potências colonizadoras e mudaram a forma como o mundo funciona.
Mas de uma perspectiva histórica e antropológica, isso é apenas uma parte do quadro. E às vezes é uma parte não representativa.
Temos que buscar uma amostragem menos tendenciosa de como os humanos falam e pensam.
Você convive há anos com indígenas brasileiros. Na sua visão, a vida deles melhorou ou piorou ao longo dos anos?
Essa é uma pergunta difícil. Depende do contexto. Acho que em muitos aspectos a vida deles piorou. Mas depende de com quem você fala. E não gosto de projetar minha opinião sobre se a situação piorou.
Obviamente, o maior acontecimento na história das populações indígenas no Brasil e em outros lugares foi a introdução de doenças que dizimaram muitas delas e, de muitas maneiras, elas nunca se recuperaram dessa devastação.
Isso segue algo muito importante: ter acesso a bons remédios. Quando você conhece qualquer mãe indígena, independente da formação cultural, ela quer a saúde do filho.
E a saúde continua realmente inadequada. Alguns criticaram e acho que com razão, o governo brasileiro por isso, por não priorizar o suficiente, a saúde dos povos indígenas, apesar da criação de diferentes agências que tentaram fazer isso.
As comunidades indígenas estão tendo poder para conduzir seus rumos? Ou elas estão sendo conduzidas por outros?
Minha opinião é que eles estão sendo mais conduzidos. Os poderes que atuam em suas vidas são muito maiores do que qualquer tipo de liberdade que eles tenham.
É o caso, por exemplo, do povo que eu conheço bem, os karitianas. Eles têm uma reserva enorme. Alguns dos brasileiros que são pobres chegam a ter inveja deles e pensam: “por que eles têm tanta terra e eu não?”
Mas se você pegar uma reserva assim, ela é cercada pelos brasileiros. Isso significa que a caça, os animais e a pesca simplesmente não são mais o que eram. Mesmo sendo um grande pedaço de terra, não há animais e peixes suficientes para subsistir.
Então agora essas pessoas são forçadas a ir a locais como o Porto Velho para tentar ganhar a vida vendendo artefatos. Isso cria todos os tipos de problemas e cria pessoas que agora estão interagindo na cultura brasileira com aspectos dela que talvez não estivessem preparados. Às vezes eles podem não ter tolerância ao álcool ou enfrentar coisas que não enfrentaram na aldeia, e agora você tem filhos que estão lá fora. É uma coisa fundamentalmente econômica.
Alguns deles eu sei que querem viver na reserva e ter uma vida mais tradicional. Até mesmo para alguns dos mais jovens. Mas simplesmente não é viável.
Como é o dia a dia do trabalho de um linguista no Brasil?
Muito do trabalho envolve eu sentado em frente a um computador fazendo programação. Com isso, eu meio que me afastei do trabalho de campo, mas isso também aconteceu porque tive um filho e não queríamos ficar levando ele para a aldeia.
Estou de volta ao início dos anos 2000, quando estava fazendo meu doutorado, passei muito tempo na cidade de Porto Velho pesquisando todos os dias com amigos que falavam a língua e gravando suas vozes, analisando. Fiquei focado principalmente em padrões sonoros que achei bastante interessantes.
Então você pode analisar isso com um software acústico, mas meu dia a dia era andar de moto, andar pela selva, conversar com eles, entrevistá-los. Foi muito divertido.
A pesquisa em si, voltando ao computador e observando esses padrões, porque a linguagem é realmente complexa em certos aspectos, é tentar descobrir alguns desses padrões. Mesmo que algumas pessoas tenham estudado a linguagem antes, é realmente muito desgastante mentalmente.
Você ainda mantém contato com amigos lá?
Sim. Eu não volto tanto, embora espere voltar no próximo ano por um longo tempo.
Eu tenho contato por email com algumas dessas pessoas e muitas delas estão no Facebook agora.
O engraçado é que não estou muito nas redes sociais, mas elas estão. Então, se eu quiser segui-los, talvez eu tenha que entrar no Facebook pela primeira vez em anos e ver o que está acontecendo. Mas mantenho contato por email.
Em português?
Sim, em português. Às vezes eles escrevem na língua deles e eu tenho que tentar lembrar, porque estou sem prática. E isso não é algo que você pode clicar no Google Tradutor para te ajudar (risos).
A inteligência artificial está ajudando a estudar novas línguas. Mas ela também está mudando as línguas que falamos. Quais os perigos da inteligência artificial para as nossas línguas?
Acho que isso está exacerbando a tendência que já existe há muito tempo, de que as maiores línguas estão se tornando ainda mais influentes.
Isso acontece, por exemplo, com os large language models, que são a base de tecnologias como o Chat GPT.
Esses modelos são abastecidos com muitos dados e isso só pode ser feito com poucas línguas no mundo que são muito faladas.
O mundo tem cerca de 7.400 línguas e só algumas poucas dezenas delas possuem dados suficientes para informar esses modelos.
Talvez um dia haja uma maneira de coletar dados suficientes e isso me deixa otimista de que existem maneiras pelas quais a inteligência artificial poderia ser usada para substituir os trabalhadores linguísticos de campo para coletar apenas grandes quantidades de dados desses grupos indígenas, assumindo que eles estão eles concordam com isso para registrar e depois analisar e novas maneiras suas linguagens.
Essa parte ainda não é possível, mas há uma parte de mim que está otimista de que isso será possível nas próximas décadas e que poderá realmente ajudar a preservar algumas destas línguas.
Mas agora eu diria que grande parte da tecnologia baseada em grandes modelos de linguagem apenas cria um “pool” maior para essas linguagens muito grandes
David Gruber began his almost impossibly varied career studying bluestriped grunt fish off the coast of Belize. He was an undergraduate, and his job was to track the fish at night. He navigated by the stars and slept in a tent on the beach. “It was a dream,” he recalled recently. “I didn’t know what I was doing, but I was performing what I thought a marine biologist would do.”
Gruber went on to work in Guyana, mapping forest plots, and in Florida, calculating how much water it would take to restore the Everglades. He wrote a Ph.D. thesis on carbon cycling in the oceans and became a professor of biology at the City University of New York. Along the way, he got interested in green fluorescent proteins, which are naturally synthesized by jellyfish but, with a little gene editing, can be produced by almost any living thing, including humans.
While working in the Solomon Islands, northeast of Australia, Gruber discovered dozens of species of fluorescent fish, including a fluorescent shark, which opened up new questions. What would a fluorescent shark look like to another fluorescent shark? Gruber enlisted researchers in optics to help him construct a special “shark’s eye” camera. (Sharks see only in blue and green; fluorescence, it turns out, shows up to them as greater contrast.) Meanwhile, he was also studying creatures known as comb jellies at the Mystic Aquarium, in Connecticut, trying to determine how, exactly, they manufacture the molecules that make them glow. This led him to wonder about the way that jellyfish experience the world. Gruber enlisted another set of collaborators to develop robots that could handle jellyfish with jellyfish-like delicacy.
“I wanted to know: Is there a way where robots and people can be brought together that builds empathy?” he told me.
In 2017, Gruber received a fellowship to spend a year at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. While there, he came across a book by a free diver who had taken a plunge with some sperm whales. This piqued Gruber’s curiosity, so he started reading up on the animals.
The world’s largest predators, sperm whales spend most of their lives hunting. To find their prey—generally squid—in the darkness of the depths, they rely on echolocation. By means of a specialized organ in their heads, they generate streams of clicks that bounce off any solid (or semi-solid) object. Sperm whales also produce quick bursts of clicks, known as codas, which they exchange with one another. The exchanges seem to have the structure of conversation.
One day, Gruber was sitting in his office at the Radcliffe Institute, listening to a tape of sperm whales chatting, when another fellow at the institute, Shafi Goldwasser, happened by. Goldwasser, a Turing Award-winning computer scientist, was intrigued. At the time, she was organizing a seminar on machine learning, which was advancing in ways that would eventually lead to ChatGPT. Perhaps, Goldwasser mused, machine learning could be used to discover the meaning of the whales’ exchanges.
“It was not exactly a joke, but almost like a pipe dream,” Goldwasser recollected. “But David really got into it.”
Gruber and Goldwasser took the idea of decoding the codas to a third Radcliffe fellow, Michael Bronstein. Bronstein, also a computer scientist, is now the DeepMind Professor of A.I. at Oxford.
“This sounded like probably the most crazy project that I had ever heard about,” Bronstein told me. “But David has this kind of power, this ability to convince and drag people along. I thought that it would be nice to try.”
Gruber kept pushing the idea. Among the experts who found it loopy and, at the same time, irresistible were Robert Wood, a roboticist at Harvard, and Daniela Rus, who runs M.I.T.’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Thus was born the Cetacean Translation Initiative—Project ceti for short. (The acronym is pronounced “setty,” and purposefully recalls seti, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.) ceti represents the most ambitious, the most technologically sophisticated, and the most well-funded effort ever made to communicate with another species.
“I think it’s something that people get really excited about: Can we go from science fiction to science?” Rus told me. “I mean, can we talk to whales?”
Sperm whales are nomads. It is estimated that, in the course of a year, an individual whale swims at least twenty thousand miles. But scattered around the tropics, for reasons that are probably squid-related, there are a few places the whales tend to favor. One of these is a stretch of water off Dominica, a volcanic island in the Lesser Antilles.
ceti has its unofficial headquarters in a rental house above Roseau, the island’s capital. The group’s plan is to turn Dominica’s west coast into a giant whale-recording studio. This involves installing a network of underwater microphones to capture the codas of passing whales. It also involves planting recording devices on the whales themselves—cetacean bugs, as it were. The data thus collected can then be used to “train” machine-learning algorithms.
The scientist David Gruber explains the mission of Project CETI, and what his team has learned about how whales communicate.
In July, I went down to Dominica to watch the ceti team go sperm-whale bugging. My first morning on the island, I met up with Gruber just outside Roseau, on a dive-shop dock. Gruber, who is fifty, is a slight man with dark curly hair and a cheerfully anxious manner. He was carrying a waterproof case and wearing a ceti T-shirt. Soon, several more members of the team showed up, also carrying waterproof cases and wearing ceti T-shirts. We climbed aboard an oversized Zodiac called ceti 2 and set off.
The night before, a tropical storm had raked the region with gusty winds and heavy rain, and Dominica’s volcanic peaks were still wreathed in clouds. The sea was a series of white-fringed swells. ceti 2 sped along, thumping up and down, up and down. Occasionally, flying fish zipped by; these remained aloft for such a long time that I was convinced for a while they were birds.
About two miles offshore, the captain, Kevin George, killed the engines. A graduate student named Yaly Mevorach put on a set of headphones and lowered an underwater mike—a hydrophone—into the waves. She listened for a bit and then, smiling, handed the headphones to me.
The most famous whale calls are the long, melancholy “songs” issued by humpbacks. Sperm-whale codas are neither mournful nor musical. Some people compare them to the sound of bacon frying, others to popcorn popping. That morning, as I listened through the headphones, I thought of horses clomping over cobbled streets. Then I changed my mind. The clatter was more mechanical, as if somewhere deep beneath the waves someone was pecking out a memo on a manual typewriter.
Mevorach unplugged the headphones from the mike, then plugged them into a contraption that looked like a car speaker riding a broom handle. The contraption, which I later learned had been jury-rigged out of, among other elements, a metal salad bowl, was designed to locate clicking whales. After twisting it around in the water for a while, Mevorach decided that the clicks were coming from the southwest. We thumped in that direction, and soon George called out, “Blow!”
A few hundred yards in front of us was a gray ridge that looked like a misshapen log. (When whales are resting at the surface, only a fraction of their enormous bulk is visible.) The whale blew again, and a geyser-like spray erupted from the ridge’s left side.
As we were closing in, the whale blew yet again; then it raised its elegantly curved flukes into the air and dove. It was unlikely to resurface, I was told, for nearly an hour.
We thumped off in search of its kin. The farther south we travelled, the higher the swells. At one point, I felt my stomach lurch and went to the side of the boat to heave.
“I like to just throw up and get back to work,” Mevorach told me.
Trying to attach a recording device to a sperm whale is a bit like trying to joust while racing on a Jet Ski. The exercise entails using a thirty-foot pole to stick the device onto the animal’s back, which in turn entails getting within thirty feet of a creature the size of a school bus. That day, several more whales were spotted. But, for all of our thumping around, ceti 2 never got close enough to one to unhitch the tagging pole.
The next day, the sea was calmer. Once again, we spotted whales, and several times the boat’s designated pole-handler, Odel Harve, attempted to tag one. All his efforts went for naught. Either the whale dove at the last minute or the recording device slipped off the whale’s back and had to be fished out of the water. (The device, which was about a foot long and shaped like a surfboard, was supposed to adhere via suction cups.) With each new sighting, the mood on ceti 2 lifted; with each new failure, it sank.
On my third day in Dominica, I joined a slightly different subset of the team on a different boat to try out a new approach. Instead of a long pole, this boat—a forty-foot catamaran called ceti 1—was carrying an experimental drone. The drone had been specially designed at Harvard and was fitted out with a video camera and a plastic claw.
Because sperm whales are always on the move, there’s no guarantee of finding any; weeks can go by without a single sighting off Dominica. Once again, though, we got lucky, and a whale was soon spotted. Stefano Pagani, an undergraduate who had been brought along for his piloting skills, pulled on what looked like a V.R. headset, which was linked to the drone’s video camera. In this way, he could look down at the whale from the drone’s perspective and, it was hoped, plant a recording device, which had been loaded into the claw, on the whale’s back.
The drone took off and zipped toward the whale. It hovered for a few seconds, then dropped vertiginously. For the suction cups to adhere, the drone had to strike the whale at just the right angle, with just the right amount of force. Post impact, Pagani piloted the craft back to the boat with trembling hands. “The nerves get to you,” he said.
“No pressure,” Gruber joked. “It’s not like there’s a New Yorker reporter watching or anything.” Someone asked for a round of applause. A cheer went up from the boat. The whale, for its part, seemed oblivious. It lolled around with the recording device, which was painted bright orange, stuck to its dark-gray skin. Then it dove.
Sperm whales are among the world’s deepest divers. They routinely descend two thousand feet and sometimes more than a mile. (The deepest a human has ever gone with scuba gear is just shy of eleven hundred feet.) If the device stayed on, it would record any sounds the whale made on its travels. It would also log the whale’s route, its heartbeat, and its orientation in the water. The suction was supposed to last around eight hours; after that—assuming all went according to plan—the device would come loose, bob to the surface, and transmit a radio signal that would allow it to be retrieved.
I said it was too bad we couldn’t yet understand what the whales were saying, because perhaps this one, before she dove, had clicked out where she was headed.
“Come back in two years,” Gruber said.
Every sperm whale’s tail is unique. On some, the flukes are divided by a deep notch. On others, they meet almost in a straight line. Some flukes end in points; some are more rounded. Many are missing distinctive chunks, owing, presumably, to orca attacks. To I.D. a whale in the field, researchers usually rely on a photographic database called Flukebook. One of the very few scientists who can do it simply by sight is ceti’s lead field biologist, Shane Gero.
Gero, who is forty-three, is tall and broad, with an eager smile and a pronounced Canadian accent. A scientist-in-residence at Ottawa’s Carleton University, he has been studying the whales off Dominica since 2005. By now, he knows them so well that he can relate their triumphs and travails, as well as who gave birth to whom and when. A decade ago, as Gero started having children of his own, he began referring to his “human family” and his “whale family.” (His human family lives in Ontario.) Another marine biologist once described Gero as sounding “like Captain Ahab after twenty years of psychotherapy.”
When Gruber approached Gero about joining Project ceti, he was, initially, suspicious. “I get a lot of e-mails like ‘Hey, I think whales have crystals in their heads,’ and ‘Maybe we can use them to cure malaria,’ ” Gero told me. “The first e-mail David sent me was, like, ‘Hi, I think we could find some funding to translate whale.’ And I was, like, ‘Oh, boy.’ ”
A few months later, the two men met in person, in Washington, D.C., and hit it off. Two years after that, Gruber did find some funding. ceti received thirty-three million dollars from the Audacious Project, a philanthropic collaborative whose backers include Richard Branson and Ray Dalio. (The grant, which was divided into five annual payments, will run out in 2025.)
The whole time I was in Dominica, Gero was there as well, supervising graduate students and helping with the tagging effort. From him, I learned that the first whale I had seen was named Rita and that the whales that had subsequently been spotted included Raucous, Roger, and Rita’s daughter, Rema. All belonged to a group called Unit R, which Gero characterized as “tightly and actively social.” Apparently, Unit R is also warmhearted. Several years ago, when a group called Unit S got whittled down to just two members—Sally and TBB—the Rs adopted them.
Sperm whales have the biggest brains on the planet—six times the size of humans’. Their social lives are rich, complicated, and, some would say, ideal. The adult members of a unit, which may consist of anywhere from a few to a few dozen individuals, are all female. Male offspring are permitted to travel with the group until they’re around fifteen years old; then, as Gero put it, they are “socially ostracized.” Some continue to hang around their mothers and sisters, clicking away for months unanswered. Eventually, though, they get the message. Fully grown males are solitary creatures. They approach a band of females—presumably not their immediate relatives—only in order to mate. To signal their arrival, they issue deep, booming sounds known as clangs. No one knows exactly what makes a courting sperm whale attractive to a potential mate; Gero told me that he had seen some clanging males greeted with great commotion and others with the cetacean equivalent of a shrug.
Female sperm whales, meanwhile, are exceptionally close. The adults in a unit not only travel and hunt together; they also appear to confer on major decisions. If there’s a new mother in the group, the other members mind the calf while she dives for food. In some units, though not in Unit R, sperm whales even suckle one another’s young. When a family is threatened, the adults cluster together to protect their offspring, and when things are calm the calves fool around.
“It’s like my kids and their cousins,” Gero said.
The day after I watched the successful drone flight, I went out with Gero to try to recover the recording device. More than twenty-four hours had passed, and it still hadn’t been located. Gero decided to drive out along a peninsula called Scotts Head, at the southwestern tip of Dominica, where he thought he might be able to pick up the radio signal. As we wound around on the island’s treacherously narrow roads, he described to me an idea he had for a children’s book that, read in one direction, would recount a story about a human family that lives on a boat and looks down at the water and, read from the other direction, would be about a whale family that lives deep beneath the boat and looks up at the waves.
“For me, the most rewarding part about spending a lot of time in the culture of whales is finding these fundamental similarities, these fundamental patterns,” he said. “And, you know, sure, they won’t have a word for ‘tree.’ And there’s some part of the sperm-whale experience that our primate brain just won’t understand. But those things that we share must be fundamentally important to why we’re here.”
After a while, we reached, quite literally, the end of the road. Beyond that was a hill that had to be climbed on foot. Gero was carrying a portable antenna, which he unfolded when we got to the top. If the recording unit had surfaced anywhere within twenty miles, Gero calculated, we should be able to detect the signal. It occurred to me that we were now trying to listen for a listening device. Gero held the antenna aloft and put his ear to some kind of receiver. He didn’t hear anything, so, after admiring the view for a bit, we headed back down. Gero was hopeful that the device would eventually be recovered. But, as far as I know, it is still out there somewhere, adrift in the Caribbean.
The first scientific, or semi-scientific, study of sperm whales was a pamphlet published in 1835 by a Scottish ship doctor named Thomas Beale. Called “The Natural History of the Sperm Whale,” it proved so popular that Beale expanded the pamphlet into a book, which was issued under the same title four years later.
At the time, sperm-whale hunting was a major industry, both in Britain and in the United States. The animals were particularly prized for their spermaceti, the waxy oil that fills their gigantic heads. Spermaceti is an excellent lubricant, and, burned in a lamp, produces a clean, bright light; in Beale’s day, it could sell for five times as much as ordinary whale oil. (It is the resemblance between semen and spermaceti that accounts for the species’ embarrassing name.)
Beale believed sperm whales to be silent. “It is well known among the most experienced whalers that they never produce any nasal or vocal sounds whatever, except a trifling hissing at the time of the expiration of the spout,” he wrote. The whales, he said, were also gentle—“a most timid and inoffensive animal.” Melville relied heavily on Beale in composing “Moby-Dick.” (His personal copy of “The Natural History of the Sperm Whale” is now housed in Harvard’s Houghton Library.) He attributed to sperm whales a “pyramidical silence.”
“The whale has no voice,” Melville wrote. “But then again,” he went on, “what has the whale to say? Seldom have I known any profound being that had anything to say to this world, unless forced to stammer out something by way of getting a living.”
The silence of the sperm whales went unchallenged until 1957. That year, two researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution picked up sounds from a group they’d encountered off the coast of North Carolina. They detected strings of “sharp clicks,” and speculated that these were made for the purpose of echolocation. Twenty years elapsed before one of the researchers, along with a different colleague from Woods Hole, determined that some sperm-whale clicks were issued in distinctive, often repeated patterns, which the pair dubbed “codas.” Codas seemed to be exchanged between whales and so, they reasoned, must serve some communicative function.
Since then, cetologists have spent thousands of hours listening to codas, trying to figure out what that function might be. Gero, who wrote his Ph.D. thesis on vocal communication between sperm whales, told me that one of the “universal truths” about codas is their timing. There are always four seconds between the start of one coda and the beginning of the next. Roughly two of those seconds are given over to clicks; the rest is silence. Only after the pause, which may or may not be analogous to the pause a human speaker would put between words, does the clicking resume.
Codas are clearly learned or, to use the term of art, socially transmitted. Whales in the eastern Pacific exchange one set of codas, those in the eastern Caribbean another, and those in the South Atlantic yet another. Baby sperm whales pick up the codas exchanged by their relatives, and before they can click them out proficiently they “babble.”
The whales around Dominica have a repertoire of around twenty-five codas. These codas differ from one another in the number of their clicks and also in their rhythms. The coda known as three regular, or 3R, for example, consists of three clicks issued at equal intervals. The coda 7R consists of seven evenly spaced clicks. In seven increasing, or 7I, by contrast, the interval between the clicks grows longer; it’s about five-hundredths of a second between the first two clicks, and between the last two it’s twice that long. In four decreasing, or 4D, there’s a fifth of a second between the first two clicks and only a tenth of a second between the last two. Then, there are syncopated codas. The coda most frequently issued by members of Unit R, which has been dubbed 1+1+3, has a cha-cha-esque rhythm and might be rendered in English as click . . . click . . . click-click-click.
If codas are in any way comparable to words, a repertoire of twenty-five represents a pretty limited vocabulary. But, just as no one can yet say what, if anything, codas mean to sperm whales, no one can say exactly what features are significant to them. It may be that there are nuances in, say, pacing or pitch that have so far escaped human detection. Already, ceti team members have identified a new kind of signal—a single click—that may serve as some kind of punctuation mark.
When whales are resting near the surface, their exchanges can last an hour or more. Even by human standards, sperm-whale chatter is insistent and repetitive. “They’re talking on top of each other all the time,” Gero told me.
A snatch of dialogue recorded between two members of Unit R runs as follows. (Both Roger and Rita are adult females.)
Not long ago, suffering from writer’s block, I asked ChatGPT if it could rewrite “Moby-Dick” from the whale’s perspective. The chatbot began modestly. “As an A.I. language model, I can certainly attempt to rewrite a small excerpt,” it told me. Then it launched into what it titled “Moby-Dick—The White Leviathan’s Tale.”
In Moby-Dick’s “Moby-Dick,” the plot turned on an unfortunate case of mistaken identity. Some other whale had gnawed off Ahab’s leg; the white whale was as innocent as the driven snow.
“My heart was one of peace, my spirit one with the rhythm of the currents,” ChatGPT wrote:
I knew not of the vendetta forming against me, for I was but a creature of instinct, a guardian of the seas. But Captain Ahab’s thirst for vengeance loomed large, and I became the object of his undying rage. The scar he bore from a previous encounter with my kind had branded me as his ultimate adversary. In his eyes, I represented a force of nature that defied his understanding, a living enigma of the ocean’s might.
In paragraph seven, I was surprised—and excited—to see the whale/bot allude to the problem of interspecies communication:
Deep within the abyss of the sea, I pondered the futility of the captain’s quest. I longed to communicate with him, to show him that my kind, too, had emotions and families to protect. But the language barrier between our worlds remained an insurmountable chasm.
As anyone who has been conscious for the past ten months knows, ChatGPT is capable of amazing feats. It can write essays, compose sonnets, explain scientific concepts, and produce jokes (though these last are not necessarily funny). If you ask ChatGPT how it was created, it will tell you that first it was trained on a “massive corpus” of data from the Internet. This phase consisted of what’s called “unsupervised machine learning,” which was performed by an intricate array of processing nodes known as a neural network. Basically, the “learning” involved filling in the blanks; according to ChatGPT, the exercise entailed “predicting the next word in a sentence given the context of the previous words.” By digesting millions of Web pages—and calculating and recalculating the odds—ChatGPT got so good at this guessing game that, without ever understanding English, it mastered the language. (Other languages it is “fluent” in include Chinese, Spanish, and French.)
In theory at least, what goes for English (and Chinese and French) also goes for sperm whale. Provided that a computer model can be trained on enough data, it should be able to master coda prediction. It could then—once again in theory—generate sequences of codas that a sperm whale would find convincing. The model wouldn’t understand sperm whale-ese, but it could, in a manner of speaking, speak it. Call it ClickGPT.
Currently, the largest collection of sperm-whale codas is an archive assembled by Gero in his years on and off Dominica. The codas contain roughly a hundred thousand clicks. In a paper published last year, members of the ceti team estimated that, to fulfill its goals, the project would need to assemble some four billion clicks, which is to say, a collection roughly forty thousand times larger than Gero’s.
“One of the key challenges toward the analysis of sperm whale (and more broadly, animal) communication using modern deep learning techniques is the need for sizable datasets,” the team wrote.
In addition to bugging individual whales, ceti is planning to tether a series of three “listening stations” to the floor of the Caribbean Sea. The stations should be able to capture the codas of whales chatting up to twelve miles from shore. (Though inaudible above the waves, sperm-whale clicks can register up to two hundred and thirty decibels, which is louder than a gunshot or a rock concert.) The information gathered by the stations will be less detailed than what the tags can provide, but it should be much more plentiful.
One afternoon, I drove with Gruber and ceti’s station manager, Yaniv Aluma, a former Israeli Navy seal, to the port in Roseau, where pieces of the listening stations were being stored. The pieces were shaped like giant sink plugs and painted bright yellow. Gruber explained that the yellow plugs were buoys, and that the listening equipment—essentially, large collections of hydrophones—would dangle from the bottom of the buoys, on cables. The cables would be weighed down with old train wheels, which would anchor them to the seabed. A stack of wheels, rusted orange, stood nearby. Gruber suddenly turned to Aluma and, pointing to the pile, said, “You know, we’re going to need more of these.” Aluma nodded glumly.
The listening stations have been the source of nearly a year’s worth of delays for ceti. The first was installed last summer, in water six thousand feet deep. Fish were attracted to the buoy, so the spot soon became popular among fishermen. After about a month, the fishermen noticed that the buoy was gone. Members of ceti’s Dominica-based staff set out in the middle of the night on ceti 1 to try to retrieve it. By the time they reached the buoy, it had drifted almost thirty miles offshore. Meanwhile, the hydrophone array, attached to the rusty train wheels, had dropped to the bottom of the sea.
The trouble was soon traced to the cable, which had been manufactured in Texas by a company that specializes in offshore oil-rig equipment. “They deal with infrastructure that’s very solid,” Aluma explained. “But a buoy has its own life. And they didn’t calculate so well the torque or load on different motions—twisting and moving sideways.” The company spent months figuring out why the cable had failed and finally thought it had solved the problem. In June, Aluma flew to Houston to watch a new cable go through stress tests. In the middle of the tests, the new design failed. To avoid further delays, the ceti team reconfigured the stations. One of the reconfigured units was installed late last month. If it doesn’t float off, or in some other way malfunction, the plan is to get the two others in the water sometime this fall.
Asperm whale’s head takes up nearly a third of its body; its narrow lower jaw seems borrowed from a different animal entirely; and its flippers are so small as to be almost dainty. (The formal name for the species is Physeter macrocephalus, which translates roughly as “big-headed blowhole.”) “From just about any angle,” Hal Whitehead, one of the world’s leading sperm-whale experts (and Gero’s thesis adviser), has written, sperm whales appear “very strange.” I wanted to see more of these strange-looking creatures than was visible from a catamaran, and so, on my last day in Dominica, I considered going on a commercial tour that offered customers a chance to swim with whales, assuming that any could be located. In the end—partly because I sensed that Gruber disapproved of the practice—I dropped the idea.
Instead, I joined the crew on ceti 1 for what was supposed to be another round of drone tagging. After we’d been under way for about two hours, codas were picked up, to the northeast. We headed in that direction and soon came upon an extraordinary sight. There were at least ten whales right off the boat’s starboard. They were all facing the same direction, and they were bunched tightly together, in rows. Gero identified them as members of Unit A. The members of Unit A were originally named for characters in Margaret Atwood novels, and they include Lady Oracle, Aurora, and Rounder, Lady Oracle’s daughter.
Earlier that day, the crew on ceti 2 had spotted pilot whales, or blackfish, which are known to harass sperm whales. “This looks very defensive,” Gero said, referring to the formation.
Suddenly, someone yelled out, “Red!” A burst of scarlet spread through the water, like a great banner unfurling. No one knew what was going on. Had the pilot whales stealthily attacked? Was one of the whales in the group injured? The crowding increased until the whales were practically on top of one another.
Then a new head appeared among them. “Holy fucking shit!” Gruber exclaimed.
“Oh, my God!” Gero cried. He ran to the front of the boat, clutching his hair in amazement. “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” The head belonged to a newborn calf, which was about twelve feet long and weighed maybe a ton. In all his years of studying sperm whales, Gero had never watched one being born. He wasn’t sure anyone ever had.
As one, the whales made a turn toward the catamaran. They were so close I got a view of their huge, eerily faceless heads and pink lower jaws. They seemed oblivious of the boat, which was now in their way. One knocked into the hull, and the foredeck shuddered.
The adults kept pushing the calf around. Its mother and her relatives pressed in so close that the baby was almost lifted out of the water. Gero began to wonder whether something had gone wrong. By now, everyone, including the captain, had gathered on the bow. Pagani and another undergraduate, Aidan Kenny, had launched two drones and were filming the action from the air. Mevorach, meanwhile, was recording the whales through a hydrophone.
To everyone’s relief, the baby began to swim on its own. Then the pilot whales showed up—dozens of them.
“I don’t like the way they’re moving,” Gruber said.
“They’re going to attack for sure,” Gero said. The pilot whales’ distinctive, wave-shaped fins slipped in and out of the water.
What followed was something out of a marine-mammal “Lord of the Rings.” Several of the pilot whales stole in among the sperm whales. All that could be seen from the boat was a great deal of thrashing around. Out of nowhere, more than forty Fraser’s dolphins arrived on the scene. Had they come to participate in the melee or just to rubberneck? It was impossible to tell. They were smaller and thinner than the pilot whales (which, their name notwithstanding, are also technically dolphins).
“I have no prior knowledge upon which to predict what happens next,” Gero announced. After several minutes, the pilot whales retreated. The dolphins curled through the waves. The whales remained bunched together. Calm reigned. Then the pilot whales made another run at the sperm whales. The water bubbled and churned.
“The pilot whales are just being pilot whales,” Gero observed. Clearly, though, in the great “struggle for existence,” everyone on board ceti 1 was on the side of the baby.
The skirmishing continued. The pilot whales retreated, then closed in again. The drones began to run out of power. Pagani and Kenny piloted them back to the catamaran to exchange the batteries. These were so hot they had to be put in the boat’s refrigerator. At one point, Gero thought that he spied the new calf, still alive and well. (He would later, from the drone footage, identify the baby’s mother as Rounder.) “So that’s good news,” he called out.
The pilot whales hung around for more than two hours. Then, all at once, they were gone. The dolphins, too, swam off.
“There will never be a day like this again,” Gero said as ceti 1 headed back to shore.
That evening, everyone who’d been on board ceti 1 and ceti 2 gathered at a dockside restaurant for a dinner in honor of the new calf. Gruber made a toast. He thanked the team for all its hard work. “Let’s hope we can learn the language with that baby whale,” he said.
I was sitting with Gruber and Gero at the end of a long table. In between drinks, Gruber suggested that what we had witnessed might not have been an attack. The scene, he proposed, had been more like the last act of “The Lion King,” when the beasts of the jungle gather to welcome the new cub.
“Three different marine mammals came together to celebrate and protect the birth of an animal with a sixteen-month gestation period,” he said. Perhaps, he hypothesized, this was a survival tactic that had evolved to protect mammalian young against sharks, which would have been attracted by so much blood and which, he pointed out, would have been much more numerous before humans began killing them off.
“You mean the baby whale was being protected by the pilot whales from the sharks that aren’t here?” Gero asked. He said he didn’t even know what it would mean to test such a theory. Gruber said they could look at the drone footage and see if the sperm whales had ever let the pilot whales near the newborn and, if so, how the pilot whales had responded. I couldn’t tell whether he was kidding or not.
“That’s a nice story,” Mevorach interjected.
“I just like to throw ideas out there,” Gruber said.
“My! You don’t say so!” said the Doctor. “You never talked that way to me before.”
“What would have been the good?” said Polynesia, dusting some cracker crumbs off her left wing. “You wouldn’t have understood me if I had.”
—“The Story of Doctor Dolittle.”
The Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (csail), at M.I.T., occupies a Frank Gehry-designed building that appears perpetually on the verge of collapse. Some wings tilt at odd angles; others seem about to split in two. In the lobby of the building, there’s a vending machine that sells electrical cords and another that dispenses caffeinated beverages from around the world. There’s also a yellow sign of the sort you might see in front of an elementary school. It shows a figure wearing a backpack and carrying a briefcase and says “nerd xing.”
Daniela Rus, who runs csail (pronounced “see-sale”), is a roboticist. “There’s such a crazy conversation these days about machines,” she told me. We were sitting in her office, which is dominated by a robot, named Domo, who sits in a glass case. Domo has a metal torso and oversized, goggly eyes. “It’s either machines are going to take us down or machines are going to solve all of our problems. And neither is correct.”
Along with several other researchers at csail, Rus has been thinking about how ceti might eventually push beyond coda prediction to something approaching coda comprehension. This is a formidable challenge. Whales in a unit often chatter before they dive. But what are they chattering about? How deep to go, or who should mind the calves, or something that has no analogue in human experience?
“We are trying to correlate behavior with vocalization,” Rus told me. “Then we can begin to get evidence for the meaning of some of the vocalizations they make.”
She took me down to her lab, where several graduate students were tinkering in a thicket of electronic equipment. In one corner was a transparent plastic tube loaded with circuitry, attached to two white plastic flippers. The setup, Rus explained, was the skeleton of a robotic turtle. Lying on the ground was the turtle’s plastic shell. One of the students hit a switch and the flippers made a paddling motion. Another student brought out a two-foot-long robotic fish. Both the fish and the turtle could be configured to carry all sorts of sensors, including underwater cameras.
“We need new methods for collecting data,” Rus said. “We need ways to get close to the whales, and so we’ve been talking a lot about putting the sea turtle or the fish in water next to the whales, so that we can image what we cannot see.”
csail is an enormous operation, with more than fifteen hundred staff members and students. “People here are kind of audacious,” Rus said. “They really love the wild and crazy ideas that make a difference.” She told me about a diver she had met who had swum with the sperm whales off Dominica and, by his account at least, had befriended one. The whale seemed to like to imitate the diver; for example, when he hung in the water vertically, it did, too.
“The question I’ve been asking myself is: Suppose that we set up experiments where we engage the whales in physical mimicry,” Rus said. “Can we then get them to vocalize while doing a motion? So, can we get them to say, ‘I’m going up’? Or can we get them to say, ‘I’m hovering’? I think that, if we were to find a few snippets of vocalizations that we could associate with some meaning, that would help us get deeper into their conversational structure.”
While we were talking, another csail professor and ceti collaborator, Jacob Andreas, showed up. Andreas, a computer scientist who works on language processing, said that he had been introduced to the whale project at a faculty retreat. “I gave a talk about understanding neural networks as a weird translation problem,” he recalled. “And Daniela came up to me afterwards and she said, ‘Oh, you like weird translation problems? Here’s a weird translation problem.’ ”
Andreas told me that ceti had already made significant strides, just by reanalyzing Gero’s archive. Not only had the team uncovered the new kind of signal but also it had found that codas have much more internal structure than had previously been recognized. “The amount of information that this system can carry is much bigger,” he said.
“The holy grail here—the thing that separates human language from all other animal communication systems—is what’s called ‘duality of patterning,’ ” Andreas went on. “Duality of patterning” refers to the way that meaningless units—in English, sounds like “sp” or “ot”—can be combined to form meaningful units, like “spot.” If, as is suspected, clicks are empty of significance but codas refer to something, then sperm whales, too, would have arrived at duality of patterning. “Based on what we know about how the coda inventory works, I’m optimistic—though still not sure—that this is going to be something that we find in sperm whales,” Andreas said.
The question of whether any species possesses a “communication system” comparable to that of humans is an open and much debated one. In the nineteen-fifties, the behaviorist B. F. Skinner argued that children learn language through positive reinforcement; therefore, other animals should be able to do the same. The linguist Noam Chomsky had a different view. He dismissed the notion that kids acquire language via conditioning, and also the possibility that language was available to other species.
In the early nineteen-seventies, a student of Skinner’s, Herbert Terrace, set out to confirm his mentor’s theory. Terrace, at that point a professor of psychology at Columbia, adopted a chimpanzee, whom he named, tauntingly, Nim Chimpsky. From the age of two weeks, Nim was raised by people and taught American Sign Language. Nim’s interactions with his caregivers were videotaped, so that Terrace would have an objective record of the chimp’s progress. By the time Nim was three years old, he had a repertoire of eighty signs and, significantly, often produced them in sequences, such as “banana me eat banana” or “tickle me Nim play.” Terrace set out to write a book about how Nim had crossed the language barrier and, in so doing, made a monkey of his namesake. But then Terrace double-checked some details of his account against the tapes. When he looked carefully at the videos, he was appalled. Nim hadn’t really learned A.S.L.; he had just learned to imitate the last signs his teachers had made to him.
“The very tapes I planned to use to document Nim’s ability to sign provided decisive evidence that I had vastly overestimated his linguistic competence,” Terrace wrote.
Since Nim, many further efforts have been made to prove that different species—orangutans, bonobos, parrots, dolphins—have a capacity for language. Several of the animals who were the focus of these efforts—Koko the gorilla, Alex the gray parrot—became international celebrities. But most linguists still believe that the only species that possesses language is our own.
Language is “a uniquely human faculty” that is “part of the biological nature of our species,” Stephen R. Anderson, a professor emeritus at Yale and a former president of the Linguistic Society of America, writes in his book “Doctor Dolittle’s Delusion.”
Whether sperm-whale codas could challenge this belief is an issue that just about everyone I talked to on the ceti team said they’d rather not talk about.
“Linguists like Chomsky are very opinionated,” Michael Bronstein, the Oxford professor, told me. “For a computer scientist, usually a language is some formal system, and often we talk about artificial languages.” Sperm-whale codas “might not be as expressive as human language,” he continued. “But I think whether to call it ‘language’ or not is more of a formal question.”
“Ironically, it’s a semantic debate about the meaning of language,” Gero observed.
Of course, the advent of ChatGPT further complicates the debate. Once a set of algorithms can rewrite a novel, what counts as “linguistic competence”? And who—or what—gets to decide?
“When we say that we’re going to succeed in translating whale communication, what do we mean?” Shafi Goldwasser, the Radcliffe Institute fellow who first proposed the idea that led to ceti, asked.
“Everybody’s talking these days about these generative A.I. models like ChatGPT,” Goldwasser, who now directs the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, at the University of California, Berkeley, went on. “What are they doing? You are giving them questions or prompts, and then they give you answers, and the way that they do that is by predicting how to complete sentences or what the next word would be. So you could say that’s a goal for ceti—that you don’t necessarily understand what the whales are saying, but that you could predict it with good success. And, therefore, you could maybe generate a conversation that would be understood by a whale, but maybe you don’t understand it. So that’s kind of a weird success.”
Prediction, Goldwasser said, would mean “we’ve realized what the pattern of their speech is. It’s not satisfactory, but it’s something.
“What about the goal of understanding?” she added. “Even on that, I am not a pessimist.”
There are now an estimated eight hundred and fifty thousand sperm whales diving the world’s oceans. This is down from an estimated two million in the days before the species was commercially hunted. It’s often suggested that the darkest period for P. macrocephalus was the middle of the nineteenth century, when Melville shipped out of New Bedford on the Acushnet. In fact, the bulk of the slaughter took place in the middle of the twentieth century, when sperm whales were pursued by diesel-powered ships the size of factories. In the eighteen-forties, at the height of open-boat whaling, some five thousand sperm whales were killed each year; in the nineteen-sixties, the number was six times as high. Sperm whales were boiled down to make margarine, cattle feed, and glue. As recently as the nineteen-seventies, General Motors used spermaceti in its transmission fluid.
Near the peak of industrial whaling, a biologist named Roger Payne heard a radio report that changed his life and, with it, the lives of the world’s remaining cetaceans. The report noted that a whale had washed up on a beach not far from where Payne was working, at Tufts University. Payne, who’d been researching moths, drove out to see it. He was so moved by the dead animal that he switched the focus of his research. His investigations led him to a naval engineer who, while listening for Soviet submarines, had recorded eerie underwater sounds that he attributed to humpback whales. Payne spent years studying the recordings; the sounds, he decided, were so beautiful and so intricately constructed that they deserved to be called “songs.” In 1970, he arranged to have “Songs of the Humpback Whale” released as an LP.
“I just thought: the world has to hear this,” he would later recall. The album sold briskly, was sampled by popular musicians like Judy Collins, and helped launch the “Save the Whales” movement. In 1979, National Geographic issued a “flexi disc” version of the songs, which it distributed as an insert in more than ten million copies of the magazine. Three years later, the International Whaling Commission declared a “moratorium” on commercial hunts which remains in effect today. The move is credited with having rescued several species, including humpbacks and fin whales, from extinction.
Payne, who died in June at the age of eighty-eight, was an early and ardent member of the ceti team. (This was the case, Gruber told me, even though he was disappointed that the project was focussing on sperm whales, rather than on humpbacks, which, he maintained, were more intelligent.) Just a few days before his death, Payne published an op-ed piece explaining why he thought ceti was so important.
Whales, along with just about every other creature on Earth, are now facing grave new threats, he observed, among them climate change. How to motivate “ourselves and our fellow humans” to combat these threats?
“Inspiration is the key,” Payne wrote. “If we could communicate with animals, ask them questions and receive answers—no matter how simple those questions and answers might turn out to be—the world might soon be moved enough to at least start the process of halting our runaway destruction of life.”
Several other ceti team members made a similar point. “One important thing that I hope will be an outcome of this project has to do with how we see life on land and in the oceans,” Bronstein said. “If we understand—or we have evidence, and very clear evidence in the form of language-like communication—that intelligent creatures are living there and that we are destroying them, that could change the way that we approach our Earth.”
“I always look to Roger’s work as a guiding star,” Gruber told me. “The way that he promoted the songs and did the science led to an environmental movement that saved whale species from extinction. And he thought that ceti could be much more impactful. If we could understand what they’re saying, instead of ‘save the whales’ it will be ‘saved by the whales.’
“This project is kind of an offering,” he went on. “Can technology draw us closer to nature? Can we use all this amazing tech we’ve invented for positive purposes?”
ChatGPT shares this hope. Or at least the A.I.-powered language model is shrewd enough to articulate it. In the version of “Moby-Dick” written by algorithms in the voice of a whale, the story ends with a somewhat ponderous but not unaffecting plea for mutuality:
I, the White Leviathan, could only wonder if there would ever come a day when man and whale would understand each other, finding harmony in the vastness of the ocean’s embrace. ♦
Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza on the “Maxim of Extravagance”
By Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza
September 27, 2022
I noticed it recently when I scheduled my dog for a veterinarian’s appointment. The person who answered the phone was friendly enough and greeted me warmly, and then I made my request.
I’d like to make an appointment for my dog, I said. Wonderful, said the scheduler. June McCrary. Excellent. She needs an anal gland expression. Fantastic!
I was surprised anyone could be so over the moon to empty my chihuahua’s anal glands—if you google the procedure I’m sure you will be as well—but in a way, grateful too.
When I shared this story with a friend, she told me about a conversation she overheard between two parents at the park. What are your children’s names? one of them said as they watched a pair of boys fight each other for one of those cold metal animals that bobs back and forth. The other responded but my friend didn’t catch the answer. The conversation went on and one side sounded something like this: Really? Amazing. That’s so beautiful. Just beautiful.How did you choose names like that?
Their names: Matthew and David. Fine names. But when you ooze words like amazing and beautiful, I imagine we’re dealing with something like Balthazaar and Tiberius.
We reach for over-the-top words for just about anything. These amazings and wonderfuls and incredibles and fantastics, we throw them around as we once did OKs and thank yous and I can help with thats.
Surreal is another favorite word since the spring of 2020. During the first quarantine, driving through the city in the only car on the road really did feel surreal, so did seeing every business closed, like maybe we were living in a Saramago novel. A grocery store full of masked shoppers circling each other at a wary distance of six feet wasn’t exactly surreal, but it was strange enough, so we used it there too.
Eventually we ran out of places to put the word, and by then we were tired, so driving on the road with other cars became surreal, seeing other people standing close to each other in the grocery store was surreal, not having to wear a mask was surreal. It became a way to describe change, or anything out of the ordinary.
What is it that makes us talk this way? That to express a modicum of emotion, we have to reach for words like fantastic, incredible, unbelievable, and unreal, words meant to convey a certain level of magnitude, but that no longer carry their original weight.The less potent our words are, the more we have to reach for particularly emotive ones to say what we want to say.
Martin Hilpert, who teaches linguistics at the Université de Neuchâtel in Switzerland, told me this is nothing new. “Words with evaluative meanings lose potency as speakers apply them to more and more situations. Toilet paper that is especially soft can be ‘fantastic,’ a train delayed by ten minutes can be ‘a disaster.’”
This occurs in a sort of cycle, which Martin Haspelmath, a comparative linguist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, describes in a handful of steps.
It happens like this: To attract attention, we submit to the “maxim of extravagance.” You really want people to see the taxidermied pig you just bought, so you tell your friend, “Man, this thing is incredible. It’s wearing a lederhosen and everything.” Your friend goes to see the pig and he too is surprised by the thing. He starts telling his friends, “that thing is incredible.” This is called “conformity.” Word gets around the neighborhood and then the whole block is talking about the incredible taxidermied pig. This is called “frequency.” You’re out for a walk one day, and you flag down a Door Dasher on a bicycle. “Have you seen the—” “The incredible taxidermied pig? Yeah man, whatever.” This is called “predictability.”
Predictability is useful when we want to fit in with the crowd, but it’s not useful if we want to attract attention, which you need at this point, because you’ve started charging admission to see the pig. Now you need to innovate, and you’re back to the maxim of extravagance again, so the pig becomes unbelievable.
A pop-linguistic term for this is “semantic bleaching,” like staining all the color out of our words, and it happens with overuse. Another way to describe it is supply and demand. When we use a word too much and there are too many excellents and beautifuls floating around, each becomes less valuable.
Bleaching has a circular relationship with hyperbole. The less potent our words are, the more we have to reach for particularly emotive ones to say what we want to say, and we climb a crowded ladder to a place where all words are wispy and white and no one is really saying anything at all. That’s how anal gland expressions become fantastic and ordinary names like David and Matthew become amazing.
Writers and thinkers have many times over made the case that stale language is both a symptom and cause of the deterioration of critical thought. George Orwell, famously, for one. He writes in “Politics and the English Language” that a speaker who uses tired language has “gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself.”
There is a certain point when turns of phrase are so out of fashion they become fresh again. Orwell’s dying metaphors of the 1940s were take up the cudgel for and ring the changes on, which would feel interesting now. Ours are full-throated and deep dive and unpack and dig in and at the end of the day.
I contacted several academics for the writing of this essay and asked them whether the new abundance of communication accelerates the exhaustion of words. They insisted that there isn’t more communication going on now than in the past, it’s just more visible. If we’re talking this much, it might be that we’re desperate to exist. If we’re slinging around words like amazing and incredible and surreal, it might be that we’re looking for these things.
I don’t believe this is true. The overwhelming quantity of means we have for talking to each other, and the fact that we’re using them, tells me there is more communication. There are some friends I talk to daily because we share a text thread. I wouldn’t be calling all five of them every day otherwise. I can watch two people berate each other in the comments section of a Washington Post article about soup, two people that, thirty years ago, would never get the chance to come to blows over curry.
Language is adapted and spread through exposure, so of course change is accelerating. In the same way clothes fall in and out of fashion at shorter intervals now, because of social media and all our instant global connectedness, so do our words.
The fields of linguistics, anthropology, and English are full of hyperbole stans who go to great lengths to make the case for its value and importance. They call it “the master trope,” “the trope of tropes,” “a generator of thought and meaning,” “a tool of philosophical and religious inquiry,” “ an act of becoming,” and “a propelling toward transcendence from an eminent exigency.”
In a paper titled “Recovering Hyperbole: Rethinking the Limits of Rhetoric for an Age of Excess,” the scholar Joshua R. Ritter argues the prescience of hyperbole. For Ritter, hyperbole reflects an innate desire for understanding. He calls it “one of the most effective ways of trying to express the often confounding and inexpressible positions that characterize the litigious discussions of impossibility.”
Ritter also cites Saint Anselm of Canterbury, who believed that the way humans describe God is the archetypal example of hyperbole—it’s everything that cannot be understood, but we do our best to understand anyway.
“It dramatically holds the real and the ideal in irresolvable tension and reveals the impossible distance between the ineptitude and the infinite multiplicity of language to describe what is indescribable,” Ritter writes.
We may be often confounded, but we are hardly ever without something to say. The internet, the great proliferator of communication, incentivizes no one to be speechless. If you’re not talking, you’re not there, so the more frequently you speak, the more real you are. Stop talking and you disappear.
If we’re talking this much, it might be that we’re desperate to exist. If we’re slinging around words like amazing and incredible and surreal, it might be that we’re looking for these things. If we are Generation Hyperbole, it is because we are so desperate to feel something good and tremendous—we’re constantly reaching for something beyond. We want to feel awed, we want to be in touch with something dreamlike, we want to see things that are really beautiful, we’ve only forgotten where to find them. But we’re looking for meaning, you can see it in our language. Even Orwell believed “that the decadence of our language is probably curable.”
Global connectedness means we’re witness to terrible things on a terrible scale, and we share an inadequate language to understand it. We need to feel, even if that feeling is pain, and we need to know that we’re not alone in the feeling. If tragedy is now commonplace, why can’t truly excellent things, amazing things, fantastic things too become commonplace?
Ritter writes:
Once a perplexing and sometimes disturbing disorienting perception occurs, this vertige de l’hyperbole as Baudelaire refers to it, one is ready for a perspectival reorientation—a paradoxical movement leading toward insight and partial apprehension. By generating confusion through excess, hyperbole alters and creates meaning.
A common chimpanzee vocalizing. (Andyworks/Getty Images)
We humans like to think our mastery of language sets us apart from the communication abilities of other animals, but an eye-opening new analysis of chimpanzees might force a rethink on just how unique our powers of speech really are.
In a new study, researchers analyzed almost 5,000 recordings of wild adult chimpanzee calls in Taï National Park in Côte d’Ivoire (aka Ivory Coast).
When they examined the structure of the calls captured on the recordings, they were surprised to find 390 unique vocal sequences – much like different kinds of sentences, assembled from combinations of different call types.
Compared to the virtually endless possibilities of human sentence construction, 390 distinct sequences might not sound overly verbose.
Yet, until now, nobody really knew that non-human primates had so many different things to say to each other – because we’ve never quantified their communication capabilities to such a thorough extent.
“Our findings highlight a vocal communication system in chimpanzees that is much more complex and structured than previously thought,” says animal researcher Tatiana Bortolato from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.
In the study, the researchers wanted to measure how chimpanzees combine single-use calls into sequences, order those calls within the sequences, and recombine independent sequences into even longer sequences.
While call combinations of chimpanzees have been studied before, until now the sequences that make up their whole vocal repertoire had never been subjected to a broad quantitative analysis.
To rectify this, the team captured 900 hours of vocal recordings made by 46 wild mature western chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus), belonging to three different chimp communities in Taï National Park.
In analyzing the vocalizations, the researchers identified how vocal calls could be uttered singularly, combined in two-unit sequences (bigrams), or three-unit sequences (trigrams). They also mapped networks of how these utterances were combined, as well as examining how different kinds of frequent vocalizations were ordered and recombined (for example, bigrams within trigrams).
In total, 12 different call types were identified (including grunts, pants, hoos, barks, screams, and whimpers, among others), which appeared to mean different things, depending on how they were used, but also upon the context in which the communication took place.
“Single grunts, for example, are predominantly emitted at food, whereas panted grunts are predominantly emitted as a submissive greeting vocalization,” the researchers explain in their paper, led by co-first authors Cédric Girard-Buttoz and Emiliano Zaccarella.
“Single hoos are emitted to threats, but panted hoos are used in inter-party communication.”
In total, the researchers found these different kinds of calls could be combined in various ways to make up 390 different kinds of sequences, which they say may actually be an underestimation, given new vocalization sequences were still being found as the researchers hit their limit of field recordings.
Even so, the data so far suggest chimpanzee communication is much more complex than we realized, which has implications for the sophistication of meanings generated in their utterances (as well as giving new clues into the origins of human language).
“The chimpanzee vocal system, consisting of 12 call types used flexibly as single units, or within bigrams, trigrams or longer sequences, offers the potential to encode hundreds of different meanings,” the researchers write.
“Whilst this possibility is substantially less than the infinite number of different meanings that can be generated by human language, it nonetheless offers a structure that goes beyond that traditionally considered likely in primate systems.”
The next step, the team says, will be to record even larger datasets of chimpanzee calls, to try to assess just how the diversity and ordering of uttered sequences relates to versatile meaning generation, which wasn’t considered in this study.
There’s lots more to be said, in other words – by both chimpanzees and scientists alike.
“This is the first study in a larger project,” explains senior author Catherine Crockford, a director of research at the Institute for Cognitive Science at CNRS, in France.
“By studying the rich complexity of the vocal sequences of wild chimpanzees, a socially complex species like humans, we expect to bring fresh insight into understanding where we come from and how our unique language evolved.”
Lucía Blasco, BBC News Mundo – 20 de janeiro de 2022
América. O último continente a ser povoado pelo ser humano. Uma parte do planeta Terra desconhecida do Homo sapiens por milhares de anos.
Até que uma mudança climática — entre muitas outras coisas — permitiu ao inquieto primata pisar naquela região.
Mas como a América foi povoada?
“É uma pergunta vital que ainda não resolvemos e continuamos fazendo porque pulsa em nossa curiosidade humana”, diz à BBC News Mundo, serviço de notícias em espanhol da BBC, Lawrence C. Brody, diretor do departamento de Genômica e Sociedade do Instituto Nacional de Pesquisa do Genoma Humano (NHGRI, na sigla em inglês), nos Estados Unidos.
“Os humanos anatomicamente modernos deixaram a África há pelo menos 100 mil anos e começaram a se espalhar. E em algum momento depois de 40 mil anos, os humanos desenvolveram a tecnologia necessária para começar a explorar mais ao norte”, acrescenta Víctor Moreno, pesquisador de pós-doutorado do Centro de Geogenética da Universidade de Copenhague, na Dinamarca, à BBC News Mundo.
Há várias teorias, mas a corrente dominante atual sustenta que houve uma única migração primeiro para a Ásia, depois para a Australásia e, mais tarde, para a Europa.
A América ainda estava muito longe e, sobretudo, bastante isolada.
Os estudos sobre o DNA foram fundamentais para mapear estas migrações ancestrais.
“Nosso DNA contém um arquivo enorme da história de nossos ancestrais. Um genoma pode representar a história de muitas pessoas diferentes de uma população inteira”, afirmou à BBC News Mundo a antropóloga e geneticista americana Jennifer Raff, especialista no povoamento inicial do continente americano.
Para aprender sobre a árvore genealógica de nossos ancestrais, os cientistas sequenciam o DNA humano que ainda pode ser encontrado em fósseis e esqueletos muito antigos, razão pela qual é chamado de “DNA antigo”.
DNA antigo
As tecnologias modernas de sequenciamento tornaram possível ter acesso a fragmentos de DNA sem ter que sequenciar um genoma inteiro.
“Os antropólogos tiram conclusões gerais a partir de amostras muito, muito pequenas de DNA antigo, como dentes ou fragmentos de ossos e, mais recentemente, argila e areia. Os algoritmos nos ajudam a interpretar os dados e saber se aquele DNA está contaminado”, explicou o geneticista humano Brody.
Isso deu a eles algumas respostas sobre o povoamento da América.
“Por exemplo, descobrimos que várias populações ancestrais contribuíram para a ascendência dos povos indígenas americanos, e não apenas uma como se acreditava anteriormente”, diz Raff.
“Graças a isso, agora sabemos que o cenário do povoamento da América foi muito mais complexo do que se pensava, mas também muito mais interessante.”
Para embarcar nesta jornada fascinante, devemos começar situando-nos há aproximadamente 25 mil anos na linha do tempo.
A última era do gelo
Estamos no período do Último Máximo Glacial (LGM, na sigla em inglês), a última era do gelo conhecida na história da Terra.
“O mapa-múndi era muito diferente do atual. A maior parte da América do Norte estava coberta por uma espessa camada de gelo que tornava a região inabitável”, diz Acuña-Alonzo, antropólogo geneticista da Escola Nacional de Antropologia e História (ENAH) do México.
“As condições eram bastante difíceis. Muitos lugares eram inacessíveis e cobertos de gelo. Fazia muito frio, os humanos tinham que caçar e coletar… e não sabiam quando poderia aparecer o próximo mamute!”, acrescenta o pesquisador Víctor Moreno.
Com o avanço do período glacial, o nível dos mares do mundo foi baixando, à medida que a água era armazenada nas camadas de gelo que cobriam os continentes.
“Toda a água estava sequestrada nas geleiras”, explica Moreno.
Por causa disso, havia duas grandes geleiras que cobriam quase todo o Canadá e tornavam praticamente impossível ir para o sul.
Mas no final desse período glacial, há cerca de 12 mil anos, as camadas de gelo começaram a derreter e surgiram alguns refúgios glaciares.
“Nesses locais, as condições não eram tão terríveis e ainda eram produtivas em termos de recursos para que os humanos pudessem se alimentar”, diz Moreno.
Um desses refúgios foi a Beríngia: uma ponte de terra que emergiu do mar congelado por meio da qual as primeiras populações de humanos entraram na América, segundo acredita a maioria dos pesquisadores.
Ela se estendia do que conhecemos hoje como o Alasca até a Eurásia — e era um território seco, cheio de vegetação e fauna.
Atualmente, está submersa — por isso não é possível encontrar vestígios arqueológicos —, mas há um consenso de que os ancestrais dos indígenas americanos saíram da Sibéria em direção ao Alasca por aquele trecho de terra e ficaram isolados na Beríngia durante algum tempo.
“À medida que as péssimas condições do Último Máximo Glacial melhoravam, foram abertas certas rotas — pelo litoral e pelo interior — que teriam permitido a entrada na América a partir da região da ponte terrestre de Bering”, diz Víctor Moreno.
Mas ainda há dúvidas sobre a rota que seguiram para entrar na América, sobre quantos grupos (ou quais grupos) fizeram este caminho e quando isso aconteceu.
Quando chegaram à América?
Há duas teorias sobre quando os primeiros seres humanos chegaram à América.
As duas principais correntes são a teoria do povoamento precoce (que diz que isso ocorreu há cerca de 30 mil ou 25 mil anos) e a teoria do povoamento tardio (segundo a qual isso teria acontecido há cerca de 12 mil ou 14 mil anos).
Por muito tempo, se pensou que o povoamento foi tardio. Esta hipótese também é conhecida como “teoria clássica do povoamento da América” ou “modelo Clóvis”.
Os Clóvis, considerados em meados do século 20 a cultura indígena mais antiga da América, usavam uma técnica de entalhe de pedra bastante aprimorada para caçar a fauna gigante que existia na Idade do Gelo com ferramentas que hoje conhecemos como “pontas de clóvis”.
Fonte: Getty
Durante décadas, essas “pontas de clóvis” foram encontradas em sítios arqueológicos de cerca de 13 mil anos, espalhados por várias partes da América do Norte. Por isso, se pensava que eles foram os primeiros povoadores da América.
Mas, nos últimos anos, vários estudos genéticos refutaram essa ideia.
Embora não haja consenso, hoje há mais cientistas e arqueólogos que argumentam que a ocupação da América ocorreu muito antes do que se acreditava.
“A maioria dos cientistas e arqueólogos apoia a teoria do povoamento precoce, e não tardia, mas os pesquisadores não chegam a um acordo sobre uma data específica ou sobre que sítios arqueológicos são ‘autênticos'”, diz à BBC News Mundo Jennifer Raff.
A análise genética de populações contemporâneas e antigas foi fundamental para que a teoria do povoamento precoce ganhasse peso.
No entanto, ainda há pesquisadores — principalmente arqueólogos — que continuam a defender a teoria do povoamento tardio.
“Alguns arqueólogos são céticos a respeito dos primeiros sítios arqueológicos encontrados, sobretudo porque não aceitam os métodos de datação, as associações com a atividade humana e a estratigrafia (análise dos estratos arqueológicos) que foram reportados”, explica Acuña-Alonzo.
“A verdade é que demonstrar a antiguidade da presença humana é bastante complicado e difícil, por isso só sítios arqueológicos muito bem escavados e documentados servirão para ir mudando essas posições”, acrescenta o pesquisador.
Também segue aberto o debate sobre como os primeiros seres humanos entraram no continente depois que deixaram a ponte terrestre de Bering, ou Beríngia, mas os cientistas trabalham principalmente com duas possibilidades: uma rota marítima ou uma rota terrestre.
Teoria da via marítima
A hipótese da rota marítima está ligada à teoria do povoamento precoce e tem sido respaldada por estudos arqueológicos, linguísticos e genéticos relativamente recentes.
Segundo essa teoria dominante, os primeiros humanos teriam entrado na América margeando a costa do Pacífico, já que naquela época tão fria “o nível do mar era mais baixo, e as costas muito mais amplas. Eles não teriam conseguido atravessar grandes distâncias nem correntes marítimas que não os favorecessem”, explica o antropólogo Acuña-Alonzo.
Não sabemos a data exata, pode ser há cerca de 17 mil anos ou até mesmo 20 mil ou 30 mil anos.
Teoria da rota terrestre
Mais uma vez, não há consenso, embora menos cientistas digam que a rota foi feita por terra há cerca de 13 mil anos, coincidindo com a teoria do povoamento tardio.
“Os pesquisadores que defendem esse modelo acreditam que os primeiros humanos a chegar à América fizeram isso muito depois do Último Máximo Glacial, viajando por um corredor livre de gelo que abriu caminho nas Montanhas Rochosas canadenses enquanto as geleiras recuavam”, explica Raff.
Segundo essa teoria, os humanos teriam atravessado essa “passagem” entre as geleiras pelo interior da América do Norte e, posteriormente, se espalhado pela América do Sul.
Mas, o estudo de genomas antigos e contemporâneos, a descoberta de sítios arqueológicos pré-Clóvis e alguns estudos ambientais questionam essa teoria, por isso há mais cientistas que defendem que a travessia foi feita pelo mar.
Estas pegadas pertencem a crianças e adolescentes que viveram há pelo menos 21 mil anos. Fonte: Bournemouth University, Reino Unido
Um dos achados mais recentes foi a descoberta em setembro de 2021 de pegadas humanas em um lago do Novo México, nos Estados Unidos, com mais de 20 mil anos.
Essas pegadas sugerem que os primeiros humanos chegaram à América no auge da Última Era do Gelo e que pode ter havido grandes migrações sobre as quais ainda não sabemos muito.
A miscigenação
Mal sabemos que aparência tinham os primeiros seres humanos que chegaram à América.
Para tentar descobrir quem eram, recorremos novamente à genética.
Graças a ela sabemos que os ancestrais dos primeiros americanos se separaram de seus “primos asiáticos” quando entraram na ponte terrestre de Bering, e que se misturaram muito mais do que se supunha, sobretudo durante os últimos 10 mil anos.
Os geneticistas acreditam que houve uma miscigenação entre duas populações ancestrais humanas: os antigos paleo-siberianos e os antigos asiáticos do leste, segundo Acuña-Alonzo.
Raff diz que um desses grupos habitava o que hoje é o Sudeste Asiático. Acredita-se que esse grupo tenha contribuído majoritariamente para a ancestralidade dos primeiros seres humanos que povoaram o continente americano — especificamente, cerca de 60%, indica Víctor Moreno.
O outro ramo ancestral surgiu há cerca de 39 mil anos no que hoje é o nordeste da Sibéria.
Esses dois grupos convergiram há cerca de 25 mil a 20 mil anos atrás.
Não sabemos exatamente como isso aconteceu, mas aconteceu durante uma migração da Sibéria”
diz Raff.
“Temos muito pouca ideia. O mais provável é que tenha ocorrido em algum lugar da Sibéria, mas quão perto da ponte terrestre de Bering isso aconteceu? Quão ao norte ou quão ao sul? Isso é algo que está sendo debatido porque o apoio genético, arqueológico e antropológico que temos é escasso”, diz Víctor Moreno.
O que a genética explica é o que aconteceu a seguir: houve uma série de eventos demográficos complexos e a população, novamente, se dividiu em duas.
Um ramo, o dos antigos beríngios (por sua possível conexão com a Beríngia) não teve descendentes conhecidos. O outro, dos antigos nativos americanos, sim.
Os cientistas chegaram a essas conclusões após descobrir uma afinidade genética muito grande entre grupos ancestrais da Sibéria e populações da Eurásia Oriental.
Pesquisador analisando pegadas de mais de 20 mil anos atrás encontradas nas margens de um lago no Novo México. Fonte: Universidade de Bournemouth, Reino Unido
“Sabemos, por exemplo, que os indígenas americanos estão relacionados geneticamente às populações do nordeste da Ásia por uma série de genes que permitiram a seus ancestrais economizar energia em condições climáticas muito difíceis”, acrescenta o geneticista.
Apesar dessas descobertas, eles ainda estão tentando determinar quantos povos antigos e atuais na América têm uma conexão com a linhagem genética desses antigos nativos americanos.
“Temos que aceitar que há muitas arestas dessa pergunta para as quais ainda não temos uma resposta”, diz Raff.
Na verdade, a última descoberta no Novo México deixa outra grande incógnita no ar: a possibilidade de que as primeiras populações tenham se extinguido sem deixar descendentes, sendo “substituídas” por outros povoadores quando o corredor de gelo foi formado.
Mas ainda não se sabe se foi esse o caso ou como teria acontecido.
“Não temos escolha a não ser abraçar a incerteza. Mas, ao mesmo tempo, é emocionante saber que estamos cada vez mais perto de reconstruir essa primeira viagem à América.”
Enquanto isso, os cientistas esperam que a herança genética nos dê mais respostas sobre a última grande expansão do Homo sapiens no planeta.
Créditos
Pesquisa e reportagem: Lucía Blasco Design e infografia: Cecilia Tombesi Mapa utilizado como base: Ron Blakey, NAU – NSF Programação: Zoë Thomas, Adam Allen e Marcos Gurgel Edição: Carol Olona e Ricardo Acampora Com a colaboração de Hilda Badenes e Sally Morales Projeto liderado por Carol Olona
By Rachel FrittsAug. 13, 2021 , 1:25 PM 5-7 minutes
Grizzly bears in the central coastal region of British Columbia. Michelle Valberg
The bears and Indigenous humans of coastal British Columbia have more in common than meets the eye. The two have lived side by side for millennia in this densely forested region on the west coast of Canada. But it’s the DNA that really stands out: A new analysis has found that the grizzlies here form three distinct genetic groups, and these groups align closely with the region’s three Indigenous language families.
It’s a “mind-blowing” finding that shows how cultural and biological diversity in the region are intertwined, says Jesse Popp, an Indigenous environmental scientist at the University of Guelph who was not involved with the work.
The research began purely as a genetics study. Grizzlies had recently begun to colonize islands along the coast of British Columbia, and scientists and Indigenous wildlife managers wanted to know why they were making this unprecedented move. Luckily, in 2011, the region’s five First Nations set up a collaborative “bear working group” to answer exactly that sort of question. Lauren Henson, a conservation scientist with the Raincoast Conservation Foundation, partnered with working group members from the Nuxalk, Haíɫzaqv, Kitasoo/Xai’xais, Gitga’at, and Wuikinuxv Nations to figure out which mainland grizzlies were most genetically similar to the island ones.
Henson used bear hair samples that researchers involved with the working group had collected over the course of 11 years. To get the samples, the team went to remote areas of British Columbia—some of them only accessible via helicopter—and piled up leaves and sticks, covering them with a concoction of dogfish oil or a fish-based slurry. It “smells really, really terrible to us, but is intriguing to bears,” Henson says.
The researchers then surrounded this tempting pile with a square of barbed wire, which harmlessly snagged tufts of fur—and the DNA it contains—when bears came to check out the smell. In all, the group collected samples from 147 bears over about 23,500 square kilometers—an area roughly the size of Vermont.
Henson and her colleagues then used microsatellite DNA markers—regions of the genome that change frequently compared with other sections—to determine how related the bears were to each other. The scientists found three distinct genetic groups of bears living in the study area, they report this month in Ecology and Society.
DNA analysis reveals three distinct genetic groups of grizzly bears, which align with the boundaries between Indigenous language families (gray lines). L. H. Henson et. al. Ecology and Society, 26(3): 7, 2021
But they could not find any obvious physical barriers keeping them apart. The boundaries between genetic groupings didn’t correspond to the location of waterways or especially rugged or snow-covered landscapes. It’s possible, Henson says, that the bears remain genetically distinct not because they can’t travel, but because the region is so resource-rich that they haven’t needed to do so to meet their needs.
One thing did correlate with the bears’ distribution, however: Indigenous language families. “We were looking at language maps and noticed the striking visual similarity,” Henson says. When the researchers analyzed the genetic interrelatedness of bears both within and outside the area’s three language families, they found that grizzly bears living within a language family’s boundaries were much more genetically similar to one another than to bears living outside them.
The findings don’t surprise Jenn Walkus, a Wuikinuxv scientist who co-authored the study. Growing up in a remote community called Rivers Inlet, she saw firsthand that humans and bears have a lot of the same needs in terms of space, food, and other resources. It would make sense, she says, for them to settle in the same areas—ones with a steady supply of salmon, for instance. This historic interrelatedness means Canada should manage key resources with both bears and people in mind, she says. The Wuikinuxv Nation, for example, is looking into reducing its annual salmon harvest to support the bears’ needs, she notes.
Lauren Eckert, a conservation scientist at the University of Victoria who was not involved with the study, agrees that the findings could have important implications for managing the area’s bears. It’s “fascinating” and “really shocking” work, she says. The resources that shaped grizzly bear distribution in the region clearly also shaped humans, Eckert says, “which I think reinforces the idea that local knowledge and localized management are really critical.”
John McWhorter, contributing writer at The Atlantic and professor at Columbia University
March 31, 2021
The word racism, among others, has become maddeningly confusing in current usage.
Adam Maida / The Atlantic
Has American society ever been in less basic agreement on what so many important words actually mean? Terms we use daily mean such different things to different people that communication is often blunted considerably, and sometimes even thwarted entirely. The gap between how the initiated express their ideological beliefs and how everyone else does seems larger than ever.
The word racism has become almost maddeningly confusing in current usage. It tempts a linguist such as me to contravene the dictum that trying to influence the course of language change is futile.
Racism began as a reference to personal prejudice, but in the 1960s was extended via metaphor to society, the idea being that a society riven with disparities according to race was itself a racist one. This convention, implying that something as abstract as a society can be racist, has always felt tricky, best communicated in sociology classes or careful discussions.
To be sure, the idea that disparities between white and Black people are due to injustices against Black people—either racist sentiment or large-scale results of racist neglect—seems as plain as day to some, especially in academia. However, after 50 years, this usage of racism has yet to stop occasioning controversy; witness the outcry when Merriam-Webster recently altered its definition of the word to acknowledge the “systemic” aspect. This controversy endures for two reasons.
First, the idea that all racial disparities are due to injustice may imply that mere cultural differences do not exist. The rarity of the Black oboist may be due simply to Black Americans not having much interest in the oboe—hardly a character flaw or evidence of some inadequacy—as opposed to subtly racist attitudes among music teachers or even the thinness of musical education in public schools. Second, the concept of systemic racism elides or downplays that disparities can also persist because of racism in the past, no longer in operation and thus difficult to “address.”
Two real-world examples of strained usage come to mind. Opponents of the modern filibuster have taken to calling it “racist” because it has been used for racist ends. This implies a kind of contamination, a rather unsophisticated perspective given that this “racist” practice has been readily supported by noted non-racists such as Barack Obama (before he changed his mind on the matter). Similar is the idea that standardized tests are “racist” because Black kids often don’t do as well on them as white kids. If the tests’ content is biased toward knowledge that white kids are more likely to have, that complaint may be justified. Otherwise, factors beyond the tests themselves, such as literacy in the home, whether children are tested throughout childhood, how plugged in their parents are to test-prep opportunities, and subtle attitudes toward school and the printed page, likely explain why some groups might be less prepared to excel at them.
Dictionaries are correct to incorporate the societal usage of racism, because it is now common coin. The lexicographer describes rather than prescribes. However, its enshrinement in dictionaries leaves its unwieldiness intact, just as a pretty map can include a road full of potholes that suddenly becomes one-way at a dangerous curve. Nearly every designation of someone or something as “racist” in modern America raises legitimate questions, and leaves so many legions of people confused or irritated that no one can responsibly dismiss all of this confusion and irritation as mere, well, racism.
To speak English is to know the difference between pairs of words that might as well be the same one: entrance and entry. Awesome and awful are similar. However, one might easily feel less confident about the difference between equality and equity, in the way that today’s crusaders use the word in diversity, equity, and inclusion.
In this usage, equity is not a mere alternate word for equality, but harbors an assumption: that where the races are not represented roughly according to their presence in the population, the reason must be a manifestation of (societal) racism. A teachers’ conference in Washington State last year included a presentation underlining: “If you conclude that outcomes differences by demographic subgroup are a result of anything other than a broken system, that is, by definition, bigotry.” A DEI facilitator specifies that “equity is not an outcome”—in the way equality is—but “a process that begins by acknowledging [people’s] unequal starting place and makes a commitment to correct and address the imbalance.”
Equality is a state, an outcome—but equity, a word that sounds just like it and has a closely related meaning, is a commitment and effort, designed to create equality. That is a nuance of a kind usually encountered in graduate seminars about the precise definitions of concepts such as freedom. It will throw or even turn off those disinclined to attend that closely: Fondness for exegesis will forever be thinly distributed among humans.
Many will thus feel that the society around them has enough “equalness”—i.e., what equity sounds like—such that what they may see as attempts to force more of it via set-aside policies will seem draconian rather than just. The subtle difference between equality and equity will always require flagging, which will only ever be so effective.
The nature of how words change, compounded by the effects of our social-media bubbles, means that many vocal people on the left now use social justice as a stand-in for justice—in the same way we say advance planning instead of planning or 12 midnight instead of midnight—as if the social part were a mere redundant, rhetorical decoration upon the keystone notion of justice. An advocacy group for wellness and nutrition titled one of its messages “In the name of social justice, food security and human dignity,” but within the text refers simply to “justice” and “injustice,” without the social prefix, as if social justice is simply justice incarnate. The World Social Justice Day project includes more tersely named efforts such as “Task Force on Justice” and “Justice for All.” Baked into this is a tacit conflation of social justice with justice conceived more broadly.
However, this usage of the term social justice is typically based on a very particular set of commitments especially influential in this moment: that all white people must view society as founded upon racist discrimination, such that all white people are complicit in white supremacy, requiring the forcing through of equity in suspension of usual standards of qualification or sometimes even logic (math is racist). A view of justice this peculiar, specific, and even revolutionary is an implausible substitute for millennia of discussion about the nature of the good, much less its apotheosis.
What to do? I suggest—albeit with little hope—that the terms social justice and equity be used, or at least heard, as the proposals that they are. Otherwise, Americans are in for decades of non-conversations based on greatly different visions of what justice and equ(al)ity are.
I suspect that the way the term racism is used is too entrenched to yield to anyone’s preferences. However, if I could wave a magic wand, Americans would go back to using racism to refer to personal sentiment, while we would phase out so hopelessly confusing a term as societal racism.
I would replace it with societal disparities, with a slot open afterward for according to race, or according to immigration status, or what have you. Inevitably, the sole term societal disparities would conventionalize as referring to race-related disparities. However, even this would avoid the endless distractions caused by using the same term—racism—for both prejudice and faceless, albeit pernicious, inequities.
My proposals qualify, indeed, as modest. I suspect that certain people will continue to use social justice as if they have figured out a concept that proved elusive from Plato through Kant through Rawls. Equity will continue to be refracted through that impression. Legions will still either struggle to process racism both harbored by persons and instantiated by a society, or just quietly accept the conflation to avoid making waves.
What all of this will mean is a debate about race in which our problem-solving is hindered by the fact that we too often lack a common language for discussing the topic.
WASHINGTON — It has often been claimed that humans learn language using brain components that are specifically dedicated to this purpose. Now, new evidence strongly suggests that language is in fact learned in brain systems that are also used for many other purposes and even pre-existed humans, say researchers in PNAS (Early Edition online Jan. 29).
The research combines results from multiple studies involving a total of 665 participants. It shows that children learn their native language and adults learn foreign languages in evolutionarily ancient brain circuits that also are used for tasks as diverse as remembering a shopping list and learning to drive.
“Our conclusion that language is learned in such ancient general-purpose systems contrasts with the long-standing theory that language depends on innately-specified language modules found only in humans,” says the study’s senior investigator, Michael T. Ullman, PhD, professor of neuroscience at Georgetown University School of Medicine.
“These brain systems are also found in animals – for example, rats use them when they learn to navigate a maze,” says co-author Phillip Hamrick, PhD, of Kent State University. “Whatever changes these systems might have undergone to support language, the fact that they play an important role in this critical human ability is quite remarkable.”
The study has important implications not only for understanding the biology and evolution of language and how it is learned, but also for how language learning can be improved, both for people learning a foreign language and for those with language disorders such as autism, dyslexia, or aphasia (language problems caused by brain damage such as stroke).
The research statistically synthesized findings from 16 studies that examined language learning in two well-studied brain systems: declarative and procedural memory.
The results showed that how good we are at remembering the words of a language correlates with how good we are at learning in declarative memory, which we use to memorize shopping lists or to remember the bus driver’s face or what we ate for dinner last night.
Grammar abilities, which allow us to combine words into sentences according to the rules of a language, showed a different pattern. The grammar abilities of children acquiring their native language correlated most strongly with learning in procedural memory, which we use to learn tasks such as driving, riding a bicycle, or playing a musical instrument. In adults learning a foreign language, however, grammar correlated with declarative memory at earlier stages of language learning, but with procedural memory at later stages.
The correlations were large, and were found consistently across languages (e.g., English, French, Finnish, and Japanese) and tasks (e.g., reading, listening, and speaking tasks), suggesting that the links between language and the brain systems are robust and reliable.
The findings have broad research, educational, and clinical implications, says co-author Jarrad Lum, PhD, of Deakin University in Australia.
“Researchers still know very little about the genetic and biological bases of language learning, and the new findings may lead to advances in these areas,” says Ullman. “We know much more about the genetics and biology of the brain systems than about these same aspects of language learning. Since our results suggest that language learning depends on the brain systems, the genetics, biology, and learning mechanisms of these systems may very well also hold for language.”
For example, though researchers know little about which genes underlie language, numerous genes playing particular roles in the two brain systems have been identified. The findings from this new study suggest that these genes may also play similar roles in language. Along the same lines, the evolution of these brain systems, and how they came to underlie language, should shed light on the evolution of language.
Additionally, the findings may lead to approaches that could improve foreign language learning and language problems in disorders, Ullman says.
For example, various pharmacological agents (e.g., the drug memantine) and behavioral strategies (e.g., spacing out the presentation of information) have been shown to enhance learning or retention of information in the brain systems, he says. These approaches may thus also be used to facilitate language learning, including in disorders such as aphasia, dyslexia, and autism.
“We hope and believe that this study will lead to exciting advances in our understanding of language, and in how both second language learning and language problems can be improved,” Ullman concludes.
ITHACA, N.Y. – Languages have an intriguing paradox. Languages with lots of speakers, such as English and Mandarin, have large vocabularies with relatively simple grammar. Yet the opposite is also true: Languages with fewer speakers have fewer words but complex grammars.
Why does the size of a population of speakers have opposite effects on vocabulary and grammar?
Through computer simulations, a Cornell University cognitive scientist and his colleagues have shown that ease of learning may explain the paradox. Their work suggests that language, and other aspects of culture, may become simpler as our world becomes more interconnected.
Their study was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
“We were able to show that whether something is easy to learn – like words – or hard to learn – like complex grammar – can explain these opposing tendencies,” said co-author Morten Christiansen, professor of psychology at Cornell University and co-director of the Cognitive Science Program.
The researchers hypothesized that words are easier to learn than aspects of morphology or grammar. “You only need a few exposures to a word to learn it, so it’s easier for words to propagate,” he said.
But learning a new grammatical innovation requires a lengthier learning process. And that’s going to happen more readily in a smaller speech community, because each person is likely to interact with a large proportion of the community, he said. “If you have to have multiple exposures to, say, a complex syntactic rule, in smaller communities it’s easier for it to spread and be maintained in the population.”
Conversely, in a large community, like a big city, one person will talk only to a small proportion the population. This means that only a few people might be exposed to that complex grammar rule, making it harder for it to survive, he said.
This mechanism can explain why all sorts of complex cultural conventions emerge in small communities. For example, bebop developed in the intimate jazz world of 1940s New York City, and the Lindy Hop came out of the close-knit community of 1930s Harlem.
The simulations suggest that language, and possibly other aspects of culture, may become simpler as our world becomes increasingly interconnected, Christiansen said. “This doesn’t necessarily mean that all culture will become overly simple. But perhaps the mainstream parts will become simpler over time.”
Not all hope is lost for those who want to maintain complex cultural traditions, he said: “People can self-organize into smaller communities to counteract that drive toward simplification.”
His co-authors on the study, “Simpler Grammar, Larger Vocabulary: How Population Size Affects Language,” are Florencia Reali of Universidad de los Andes, Colombia, and Nick Chater of University of Warwick, England.
Some of your favourite science words are making a comeback.
DAVID NIELD
2 DEC 2016
Researchers analysing several centuries of literature have spotted a strange trend in our language patterns: the words we use tend to fall in and out of favour in a cycle that lasts around 14 years.
Scientists ran computer scripts to track patterns stretching back to the year 1700 through the Google Ngram Viewer database, which monitors language use across more than 4.5 million digitised books. In doing so, they identified a strange oscillation across 5,630 common nouns.
The team says the discovery not only shows how writers and the population at large use words to express themselves – it also affects the topics we choose to discuss.
“It’s very difficult to imagine a random phenomenon that will give you this pattern,” Marcelo Montemurro from the University of Manchester in the UK told Sophia Chen at New Scientist.
“Assuming these patterns reflect some cultural dynamics, I hope this develops into better understanding of why we change the topics we discuss,” he added.“We might learn why writers get tired of the same thing and choose something new.”
The 14-year pattern of words coming into and out of widespread use was surprisingly consistent, although the researchers found that in recent years the cycles have begun to get longer by a year or two. The cycles are also more pronounced when it comes to certain words.
What’s interesting is how related words seem to rise and fall together in usage. For example, royalty-related words like “king”, “queen”, and “prince” appear to be on the crest of a usage wave, which means they could soon fall out of favour.
By contrast, a number of scientific terms, including “astronomer”, “mathematician”, and “eclipse” could soon be on the rebound, having dropped in usage recently.
According to the analysis, the same phenomenon happens with verbs as well, though not to the same extent as with nouns, and the academics found similar 14-year patterns in French, German, Italian, Russian, and Spanish, so this isn’t exclusive to English.
The study suggests that words get a certain momentum, causing more and more people to use them, before reaching a saturation point, where writers start looking for alternatives.
Montemurro and fellow researcher Damián Zanette from the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research in Argentina aren’t sure what’s causing this, although they’re willing to make some guesses.
“We expect that this behaviour is related to changes in the cultural environment that, in turn, stir the thematic focus of the writers represented in the Google database,” the researchers write in their paper.
“It’s fascinating to look for cultural factors that might affect this, but we also expect certain periodicities from random fluctuations,” biological scientist Mark Pagel, from the University of Reading in the UK, who wasn’t involved in the research, told New Scientist.
“Now and then, a word like ‘apple’ is going to be written more, and its popularity will go up,” he added. “But then it’ll fall back to a long-term average.”
It’s clear that language is constantly evolving over time, but a resource like the Google Ngram Viewer gives scientists unprecedented access to word use and language trends across the centuries, at least as far as the written word goes.
Armed with a new list of words and using the power of social media, a new study has found that by the age of 20, a native English-speaking American knows 42,000 dictionary words.
How many words do we know? It turns out that even language experts and researchers have a tough time estimating this.
Armed with a new list of words and using the power of social media, a new study published in Frontiers in Psychology, has found that by the age of twenty, a native English speaking American knows 42 thousand dictionary words.
“Our research got a huge push when a television station in the Netherlands asked us to organize a nation-wide study on vocabulary knowledge,” states Professor Marc Brysbaert of Ghent University in Belgium and leader of this study. “The test we developed was featured on TV and, in the first weekend, over 300 thousand Dutch speakers had done it — it really went viral.”
Realising how interested people are in finding out their vocabulary size, the team then made similar tests in English and Spanish. The English test has now been taken by almost one million people. It takes up to four minutes to complete and has been shared widely on Facebook and Twitter, giving the team access to an unprecedented amount of data.
“At the Centre of Reading Research we are investigating what determines the ease with which words are recognized;” explained Professor Brysbaert. The test includes a list of 62,000 words that he and his team have compiled.
He added: “As we made the list ourselves and have not used a commercially available dictionary list with copyright restrictions, it can be made available to everyone, and all researchers can access it.”
The test is simple. You are asked if the word on the screen is, or is not, an existing word in English. In each test, there are 70 words, and 30 letter sequences that look like words but are not actually existing words.
The test will also ask you for some personal information such as your age, gender, education level and native language. This has enabled the team to discover that the average twenty-year-old native English speaking American knows 42 thousand dictionary words. As we get older, we learn one new word every two days, which means that by the age of 60, we know an additional 6000 words.
“As a researcher, I am most interested in what this data can tell us about word prevalence, i.e. how well each word is known in a language;” added Professor Brysbaert.
“In Dutch, we have seen that this explains a lot about word processing times. People respond much faster to words known by all people than to words known by 95% of the population, even if the words used with the same frequency. We are convinced that word prevalence will become an important variable in word recognition research.”
With data from about 200 thousand people who speak English as a second language, the team can also start to look at how well these people know certain words, which could have implications for language education.
This is the largest study of its kind ever attempted. Professor Brysbaert has plans to improve the accuracy of the test and extend the list to include over 75,000 words.
“This work is part of the big data movement in research, where big datasets are collected to be mined;” he concluded.
“It also gives us a snapshot of English word knowledge at the beginning of the 21st century. I can imagine future language researchers will be interested in this database to see how English has evolved over 100 years, 1000 years and maybe even longer.”
Journal Reference:
Marc Brysbaert, Michaël Stevens, Paweł Mandera, Emmanuel Keuleers. How Many Words Do We Know? Practical Estimates of Vocabulary Size Dependent on Word Definition, the Degree of Language Input and the Participant’s Age. Frontiers in Psychology, 2016; 7 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01116
Oficialmente, o último acordo ortográfico está em vigor em Portugal desde 2009, mas ainda enfrenta resistência em vários setores. Na semana passada, o time dos descontentes recebeu um apoio de peso: o novo presidente português se mostrou favorável à revisão das regras.
Em visita a Moçambique —país lusófono que, assim como Angola, não ratificou as mudanças—, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa admitiu que a não adesão dos africanos pode permitir a Portugal também rever sua posição no acordo.
Mauro Vombe – 4.mai.2016/Xinhua
O presidente português, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, (esq.) saúda o colega moçambicano Filipe Nyusi
Na quarta-feira (11), a Associação Nacional de Professores de Português e vários membros da organização “Cidadãos contra o Acordo Ortográfico” recorreram à Justiça pedindo a anulação da norma que disseminou o uso da nova ortografia no país.
No cargo há dois meses, Rebelo de Sousa nunca escondeu sua contrariedade sobre o tema. Na década de 1990, ele assinou um manifesto que reuniu 400 personalidades portuguesas contrárias ao acordo ortográfico.
Embora as críticas públicas tenham se abrandado, o livro de imagens de sua campanha à Presidência, “Afectos”, não adota as mudanças ortográficas nem no título.
Em “O Acordo Ortográfico Não Está Em Vigor” (ed. Guerra & Paz), o embaixador e professor de direito internacional Carlos Fernandes diz que o acordo fere também princípios jurídicos e, por isso, não deveria ser adotado.
Segundo Fernandes, além de as regras anteriores não terem sido oficialmente revogadas, o governo português tampouco cumpriu trâmites legais obrigatórios para a entrada em vigor dos novos parâmetros da língua.
O debate sobre uma possível revisão do acordo —há quem defenda até um referendo— provocou uma “caça às bruxas” ortográfica. Vários políticos tiveram currículos, biografias e livros vasculhados em busca de indícios de que são contrários às mudanças na escrita.
CRÍTICAS AO BRASIL
Embora tenha sido assinado em 1990 pelos Estados de língua oficial portuguesa, o acordo precisa passar por ratificação interna em cada país para entrar em vigor. Brasil, Portugal, São Tome e Príncipe e Cabo Verde já promulgaram a decisão.
Já Angola e Moçambique —que concentram a maioria dos falantes do português depois do Brasil— ainda não têm data para ratificar.
O português é a quinta língua mais falada do mundo, com cerca de 280 milhões de falantes, dos quais 202 milhões estão no Brasil, 24,7 milhões em Angola, 24,6 milhões em Moçambique e 10,8 milhões em Portugal.
Entre os críticos portugueses e africanos, as alterações são encaradas como submissão aos desejos do Brasil. A língua oficial do país é várias vezes pejorativamente chamada de “brasileiro”.
Um dos motivos da discórdia é o fim das consoantes mudas presentes em várias palavras de Portugal. Com o acordo, prevaleceu a versão brasileira. Por exemplo: actor vira ator e óptimo, ótimo.
Segundo o Ministério da Educação brasileiro, as mudanças afetaram cerca de 0,8% dos vocábulos do Brasil e 1,3% dos de Portugal.
GOVERNO DEFENDE
O governo de Portugal segue o acordo ortográfico, e vários ministros saíram em defesa das regras.
Considerado o pai do acordo e um dos mais mais influentes linguistas lusitanos, Malaca Casteleiro também tem defendido sua aplicação.
O primeiro-secretário do Brasil em Lisboa, André Pinto Pacheco, afirmou que ” a embaixada acompanha com atenção o assunto, procurando esclarecer o Estado e a opinião pública de Portugal sobre a aplicação do Acordo Ortográfico da Língua Portuguesa no Brasil”.
Diretor do setor de lexicografia e lexicologia da Academia Brasileira de Letras, Evanildo Bechara minimizou as críticas do presidente português e ressaltou o ritmo da implementação do acordo na comunidade lusófona. “É um processo irreversível.”
“Uma alteração ortográfica não é para a geração que a fez, mas para uma geração futura”, afirmou Bechara. O uso da nova ortografia é obrigatório no Brasil desde 1º de janeiro deste ano.
The claim that Eskimo languages have many words for different types of snow is well known among the public, but it has been greatly exaggerated and is therefore often dismissed by scholars of language. However, a new study published in PLOS ONE supports the general idea behind the original claim.
The claim that Eskimo languages have many words for different types of snow is well known among the public, but it has been greatly exaggerated and is therefore often dismissed by scholars of language.
However, a new study published in PLOS ONE supports the general idea behind the original claim. Carnegie Mellon University and University of California, Berkeley researchers found that languages that use the same word for snow and ice tend to be spoken in warmer climates, reflecting lower communicative need to talk about snow and ice.
“We wanted to broaden the investigation past Eskimo languages and look at how different languages carve up the world into words and meanings,” said Charles Kemp, associate professor of psychology in CMU’s Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences.
For the study, Kemp, and UC Berkeley’s Terry Regier and Alexandra Carstensen analyzed the connection between local climates, patterns of language use and word(s) for snow and ice across nearly 300 languages. They drew on multiple sources of data including library reference works, Twitter and large digital collections of linguistic and meteorological data.
The results revealed a connection between temperature and snow and ice terminology, suggesting that local environmental needs leave an imprint on languages. For example, English originated in a relatively cool climate and has distinct words for snow and ice. In contrast, the Hawaiian language is spoken in a warmer climate and uses the same word for snow and for ice. These cases support the claim that languages are adapted to the local communicative needs of their speakers — the same idea that lies behind the overstated claim about Eskimo words for snow. The study finds support for this idea across language families and geographic areas.
“These findings don’t resolve the debate about Eskimo words for snow, but we think our question reflects the spirit of the initial snow claims — that languages reflect the needs of their speakers,” said Carstensen, a psychology graduate student at UC Berkeley.
The researchers suggest that in the past, excessive focus on the specific example of Eskimo words for snow may have obscured the more general principle behind it.
Carstensen added, “Here, we deliberately asked a somewhat different question about a broader set of languages.”
The study also connects with previous work that explores how the sounds and structures of language are shaped in part by a need for efficiency in communication.
“We think our study reveals the same basic principle at work, modulated by local communicative need,” said Regier, professor of linguistics and cognitive science at UC Berkeley.
Mr. Grant estimates that thousands of students have read the books and taken courses on the language, first through informal workshops held in the nation’s capital, Canberra, from the early 1990s. In December 2015, at a branch of Charles Sturt University in Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, students completed the first-ever course in Wiradjuri.
To a great extent, Mr. Grant is carrying out a promise to his beloved grandfather, who singled him out as a youngster as his heir to Wiradjuri culture.
“My grandfather was a Wiradjuri elder,” he said, and was anxious to pass along the culture. “But he was arrested after he called to me in Wiradjuri to come home from the park. ‘Barray yanha, barray yanha,’ ‘Come quickly,’ he called out.”
Mr. Grant was probably 8 or 9 years old the night a local policeman heard his grandfather, Wilfred Johnson, and locked him up. But he does not recall a sense of alarm.
“He was an elegant man,” he said of Mr. Johnson. “He was beautifully dressed, usually in a coat and hat. But he was black. So it wasn’t the first time he had spent the night in jail.”
After the arrest, Mr. Johnson, who spoke seven languages, refused to speak Wiradjuri in public.
“He was a linguist with enormous respect for his own people and culture,” said Mr. Grant, who speaks three languages himself: Italian, which he picked up while working at the sawmill, as well as English and Wiradjuri. “But he told me, ‘Things are different now.’ He would only speak his language in the bush.”
It was during those expeditions into the backcountry that Mr. Grant learned Wiradjuri, as well as tracking and hunting skills. He knows that a echidna’s back feet turn inward, complicating tracking. He can describe how his grandfather made a lasso out of long grass to catch a stunned goanna, a type of lizard, for dinner, and he says a rope laid around a bush house will stop snakes from passing over the threshold.
Lloyd Dolan, a Wiradjuri lecturer who has worked with Mr. Grant, said elders took risks teaching Wiradjuri to their children. Mr. Dolan also learned Wiradjuri from his grandfather. His mother forbade him to speak it at home.
“There was a real fear that the children would be taken away if authorities heard kids speaking the language,” Mr. Dolan, 49, said from his office at Charles Sturt University. “The drive to assimilate Aboriginals into white society was systemic.”
Aboriginal people had no right to vote in elections before 1962, and they were counted as wildlife until a change to Australia’s Constitution in 1967.
Mr. Grant grew up in poverty, his family drifting from place to place: Redfern, a rough-and-tumble Sydney suburb; Griffith, a village 60 miles northwest of Narrandera, where he lives now, and Wagga Wagga, which is 62 miles southeast of that.
He recalls vividly moving from a “humpy,” a dirt-floored makeshift shack, consisting of just a few rooms, on the fringe of a country town, into a house with electricity. “It was the first time we had electricity at home, but it wasn’t on much because we had no money to pay for it,” he said with a laugh.
As a child, Mr. Grant said, he scorned his grandfather’s ways. He was embarrassed to be black. By the time he was 17, in 1957, his grandfather had died, and he had dropped out of school, left home and found a job on the railways.
Soon, he moved from a small town to Sydney, where he says he drank a lot, got a tattoo of a roughly drawn dagger and eventually found himself in jail.
“I cried and cried when that happened,” he said. “I had been drinking and probably brawling, and I didn’t want to be there.”
It was his wife, Betty, now 73, who helped turn his life around. After marrying in August 1962, they spent several weeks living out of a shell of a car on the Aboriginal Three Ways Mission on the fringe of Griffith, in central New South Wales.
Mr. Grant soon found a job at a sawmill, and although an accident mangled two fingers of his left hand, it was steady work. He and his wife started a family.
Around that time, Aboriginal activists began agitating for civil rights. In 1965, Charles Perkins, the first Aboriginal to attend the University of Sydney, led 35 student protesters on a Freedom Ride bus tour around outback country towns. They were pelted with gravel and harassed as they went from small town to small town, where they called for an end to segregated seating on buses and in theaters. They demanded equal service in shops and hotels, and they wanted Aboriginal children admitted to municipal swimming pools with white children.
Six years later, Neville Bonner, a leader from an Aboriginal rights organization, became the first Aboriginal to gain a seat in Australia’s Parliament, filling a Senate vacancy left by a Queenslander who had resigned.
With the help of these small civic changes, Mr. Grant, whose formal education ended at age 15, managed to navigate a way forward for himself and his family. He first found work in Canberra helping Aboriginal children who had skipped school.
Around the same time, there was a push to document Aboriginal culture and language, which was rarely written down. As one of the few who knew Wiradjuri language, he was approached about writing it down. That eventually led him to teaching his language and writing “A New Wiradjuri Dictionary,” published in 2005.
“I was told when you revive a lost language, you give it back to all mankind,” he said, sitting in his kitchen, not far from where the kingfishers darted across the Murrumbidgee.
“We were a nothing people for a long time. And it is a big movement now, learning Wiradjuri. I’ve done all that work. I’ve done all I can.”
IMAGE: A STUDY LED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON HAS FOUND THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE IN THE TIME IT TAKES PEOPLE FROM DIFFERENT COUNTRIES TO READ AND PROCESS DIFFERENT LANGUAGES. view more CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON
A study led by the University of Southampton has found there is no difference in the time it takes people from different countries to read and process different languages.
The research, published in the journal Cognition, finds the same amount of time is needed for a person, from for example China, to read and understand a text in Mandarin, as it takes a person from Britain to read and understand a text in English – assuming both are reading their native language.
Professor of Experimental Psychology at Southampton, Simon Liversedge, says: “It has long been argued by some linguists that all languages have common or universal underlying principles, but it has been hard to find robust experimental evidence to support this claim. Our study goes at least part way to addressing this – by showing there is universality in the way we process language during the act of reading. It suggests no one form of written language is more efficient in conveying meaning than another.”
The study, carried out by the University of Southampton (UK), Tianjin Normal University (China) and the University of Turku (Finland), compared the way three groups of people in the UK, China and Finland read their own languages.
The 25 participants in each group – one group for each country – were given eight short texts to read which had been carefully translated into the three different languages. A rigorous translation process was used to make the texts as closely comparable across languages as possible. English, Finnish and Mandarin were chosen because of the stark differences they display in their written form – with great variation in visual presentation of words, for example alphabetic vs. logographic(1), spaced vs. unspaced, agglutinative(2) vs. non-agglutinative.
The researchers used sophisticated eye-tracking equipment to assess the cognitive processes of the participants in each group as they read. The equipment was set up identically in each country to measure eye movement patterns of the individual readers – recording how long they spent looking at each word, sentence or paragraph.
The results of the study showed significant and substantial differences between the three language groups in relation to the nature of eye movements of the readers and how long participants spent reading each individual word or phrase. For example, the Finnish participants spent longer concentrating on some words compared to the English readers. However, most importantly and despite these differences, the time it took for the readers of each language to read each complete sentence or paragraph was the same.
Professor Liversedge says: “This finding suggests that despite very substantial differences in the written form of different languages, at a basic propositional level, it takes humans the same amount of time to process the same information regardless of the language it is written in.
“We have shown it doesn’t matter whether a native Chinese reader is processing Chinese, or a Finnish native reader is reading Finnish, or an English native reader is processing English, in terms of comprehending the basic propositional content of the language, one language is as good as another.”
The study authors believe more research would be needed to fully understand if true universality of language exists, but that their study represents a good first step towards demonstrating that there is universality in the process of reading.
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Notes for editors:
1) Logographic language systems use signs or characters to represent words or phrases.
2) Agglutinative language tends to express concepts in complex words consisting of many sub-units that are strung together.
3) The paper Universality in eye movements and reading: A trilingual investigation, (Simon P. Liversedge, Denis Drieghe, Xin Li, Guoli Yan, Xuejun Bai, Jukka Hyönä) is published in the journal Cognition and can also be found at: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/382899/1/Liversedge,%20Drieghe,%20Li,%20Yan,%20Bai,%20%26%20Hyona%20(in%20press)%20copy.pdf
Humans’ common cognitive abilities and language dependance may provide an underlying semantic order to the world’s languages
SANTA FE INSTITUTE
We create words to label people, places, actions, thoughts, and more so we can express ourselves meaningfully to others. Do humans’ shared cognitive abilities and dependence on languages naturally provide a universal means of organizing certain concepts? Or do environment and culture influence each language uniquely?
Using a new methodology that measures how closely words’ meanings are related within and between languages, an international team of researchers has revealed that for many universal concepts, the world’s languages feature a common structure of semantic relatedness.
“Before this work, little was known about how to measure [a culture’s sense of] the semantic nearness between concepts,” says co-author and Santa Fe Institute Professor Tanmoy Bhattacharya. “For example, are the concepts of sun and moon close to each other, as they are both bright blobs in the sky? How about sand and sea, as they occur close by? Which of these pairs is the closer? How do we know?”
Translation, the mapping of relative word meanings across languages, would provide clues. But examining the problem with scientific rigor called for an empirical means to denote the degree of semantic relatedness between concepts.
To get reliable answers, Bhattacharya needed to fully quantify a comparative method that is commonly used to infer linguistic history qualitatively. (He and collaborators had previously developed this quantitative method to study changes in sounds of words as languages evolve.)
“Translation uncovers a disagreement between two languages on how concepts are grouped under a single word,” says co-author and Santa Fe Institute and Oxford researcher Hyejin Youn. “Spanish, for example, groups ‘fire’ and ‘passion’ under ‘incendio,’ whereas Swahili groups ‘fire’ with ‘anger’ (but not ‘passion’).”
To quantify the problem, the researchers chose a few basic concepts that we see in nature (sun, moon, mountain, fire, and so on). Each concept was translated from English into 81 diverse languages, then back into English. Based on these translations, a weighted network was created. The structure of the network was used to compare languages’ ways of partitioning concepts.
The team found that the translated concepts consistently formed three theme clusters in a network, densely connected within themselves and weakly to one another: water, solid natural materials, and earth and sky.
“For the first time, we now have a method to quantify how universal these relations are,” says Bhattacharya. “What is universal – and what is not – about how we group clusters of meanings teaches us a lot about psycholinguistics, the conceptual structures that underlie language use.”
The researchers hope to expand this study’s domain, adding more concepts, then investigating how the universal structure they reveal underlies meaning shift.
Marie Wilcox é a última pessoa no mundo fluente no idioma Wukchumi
Conheça Marie Wilcox, uma bisavó de 81 anos e a última pessoa no mundo fluente no idioma Wukchumi. O povo Wukchumi costumava ter uma população de 50.000 pessoas antes de terem contato com os colonizadores, mas agora são somente 200 pessoas vivendo no Vale de São Joaquim, na Califórnia. Sua linguagem foi morrendo aos poucos a cada nova geração, mas Marie se comprometeu com a tarefa de revivê-la, aprendendo a usar um computador para que conseguisse começar a escrever o primeiro dicionário Wukchumni. O processo levou sete anos, e agora que terminou ela não pretende parar seu trabalho de imortalizar sua língua nativa.
O documentário “Marie’s Dictionary”, disponível no Youtube, nos mostra a motivação de Marie e seu trabalho árduo para trazer de volta e registrar um idioma que foi quase totalmente apagado pela colonização, racismo institucionalizado e opressão.
No vídeo, Marie admite ter dúvidas sobre a gigantesca tarefa que ela se comprometeu: “Eu tenho dúvidas sobre minha língua, e sobre quem quer mantê-la viva. Ninguém parece querer aprender. É estranho que eu seja a última… Tudo vai estar perdido algum dia desses, não sei”.
Mas com sorte, esse dia ainda vai demorar. Marie e sua filha Jennifer agora dão aulas para membros da tribo, e trabalham num dicionário em áudio para acompanhar o dicionário escrito que ela já criou.
Análise de textos antigos e de entrevistas expõe as marcas próprias do idioma no país, o alcance do R caipira e os lugares que preservam modos antigos de falar
CARLOS FIORAVANTI | ED. 230 | ABRIL 2015
Estudo para Partida da monção, 1897, de Almeida Júnior (Acervo Pinacoteca do Estado de SP). Os bandeirantes saíam de Porto Feliz rumo ao Centro-Oeste
A possibilidade de ser simples, dispensar elementos gramaticais teoricamente essenciais e responder “sim, comprei”, quando alguém pergunta “você comprou o carro?”, é uma das características que conferem flexibilidade e identidade ao português brasileiro. A análise de documentos antigos e de entrevistas de campo ao longo dos últimos 30 anos está mostrando que o português brasileiro já pode ser considerado único, diferente do português europeu, do mesmo modo que o inglês americano é distinto do inglês britânico. O português brasileiro ainda não é, porém, uma língua autônoma: talvez seja – na previsão de especialistas, em cerca de 200 anos – quando acumular peculiaridades que nos impeçam de entender inteiramente o que um nativo de Portugal diz.
A expansão do português no Brasil, as variações regionais com suas possíveis explicações, que fazem o urubu de São Paulo ser chamado de corvo no Sul do país, e as raízes das inovações da linguagem estão emergindo por meio do trabalho de cerca de 200 linguistas. De acordo com estudos da Universidade de São Paulo (USP), uma inovação do português brasileiro, por enquanto sem equivalente em Portugal, é o Rcaipira, às vezes tão intenso que parece valer por dois ou três, como em porrrta ou carrrne.
Associar o R caipira apenas ao interior paulista, porém, é uma imprecisão geográfica e histórica, embora o R desavergonhado tenha sido uma das marcas do estilo matuto do ator Amácio Mazzaropi em seus 32 filmes, produzidos de 1952 a 1980. Seguindo as rotas dos bandeirantes paulistas em busca de ouro, os linguistas encontraram o Rsupostamente típico de São Paulo em cidades de Minas Gerais, Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso do Sul, Paraná e oeste de Santa Catarina e do Rio Grande do Sul, formando um modo de falar similar ao português do século XVIII. Quem tiver paciência e ouvido apurado poderá encontrar também na região central do Brasil – e em cidades do litoral – o S chiado, uma característica hoje típica do falar carioca que veio com os portugueses em 1808 e era um sinal de prestígio por representar o falar da Corte. Mesmo os portugueses não eram originais: os especialistas argumentam que o Schiado, que faz da esquina uma shquina, veio dos nobres franceses, que os portugueses admiravam.
A história da língua portuguesa no Brasil está trazendo à tona as características preservadas do português, como a troca do L pelo R, resultando em pranta em vez deplanta. Camões registrou essa troca em Oslusíadas – lá está um frautas no lugar de flautas – e o cantor e compositor paulista Adoniran Barbosa a deixou registrada em diversas composições, em frases como “frechada do teu olhar”, do samba Tiro ao Álvaro. Em levantamentos de campo, pesquisadores da USP observaram que moradores do interior tanto do Brasil quanto de Portugal, principalmente os menos escolarizados, ainda falam desse modo. Outro sinal de preservação da língua identificado por especialistas do Rio de Janeiro e de São Paulo, dessa vez em documentos antigos, foi a gente ou as gentes como sinônimo de “nós” e hoje uma das marcas próprias do português brasileiro.
Célia Lopes, da Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), encontrou registros de a gente em documentos do século XVI e, com mais frequência, a partir do século XIX. Era uma forma de indicar a primeira pessoa do plural, no sentido de todo mundo com a inclusão necessária do eu. Segundo ela, o emprego de a gente pode passar descompromisso e indefinição: quem diz a gente em geral não deixa claro se pretende se comprometer com o que está falando ou se se vê como parte do grupo, como em “a gente precisa fazer”. Já o pronome nós, como em “nós precisamos fazer”, expressa responsabilidade e compromisso. Nos últimos 30 anos, ela notou, a gente instalou-se nos espaços antes ocupados pelo nós e se tornou um recurso bastante usado por todas as idades e classes sociais no país inteiro, embora nos livros de gramática permaneça na marginalidade.
Linguistas de vários estados do país estão desenterrando as raízes do português brasileiro ao examinar cartas pessoais e administrativas, testamentos, relatos de viagens, processos judiciais, cartas de leitores e anúncios de jornais desde o século XVI, coletados em instituições como a Biblioteca Nacional e o Arquivo Público do Estado de São Paulo. A equipe de Célia Lopes tem encontrado também na feira de antiguidades do sábado da Praça XV de Novembro, no centro do Rio, cartas antigas e outros tesouros linguísticos, nem sempre valorizados. “Um estudante me trouxe cartas maravilhosas encontradas no lixo”, ela contou.
De vossa mercê para cê Os documentos antigos evidenciam que o português falado no Brasil começou a se diferenciar do europeu há pelo menos quatro séculos. Uma indicação dessa separação é o Memórias para a história da capitania de São Vicente, de 1793, escrito por frei Gaspar da Madre de Deus, nascido em São Vicente, e depois reescrito pelo português Marcelino Pereira Cleto, que foi juiz em Santos. Comparando as duas versões, José Simões, da USP, encontrou 30 diferenças entre o português brasileiro e o europeu. Uma delas é encontrada ainda hoje: como usuários do português brasileiro, preferimos explicitar os sujeitos das frases, como em “o rapaz me vendeu o carro, depois ele saiu correndo e ao atravessar a rua ele foi atropelado”. Em português europeu, seria mais natural omitir o sujeito, já definido pelo tempo verbal – “o rapaz vendeu-me o carro, depois saiu a correr…” –, resultando em uma construção gramaticalmente impecável, embora nos soe um pouco estranha.
Um morador de Portugal, se lhe perguntarem se comprou um carro, responderá com naturalidade “sim, comprei-o”, explicitando o complemento do verbo, “mesmo entre falantes pouco escolarizados”, observa Simões. Ele nota que os portugueses usam mesóclise – “dar-lhe-ei um carro, com certeza!” –, que soaria pernóstica no Brasil. Outra diferença é a distância entre a língua falada e a escrita no Brasil. Ninguém fala muito, mas muinto. O pronome você, que já é uma redução de vossa mercê e de vosmecê, encolheu ainda mais, para cê, e grudou no verbo: cevai?
“A língua que falamos não é a que escrevemos”, diz Simões, com base em exemplos como esses. “O português escrito e o falado em Portugal são mais próximos, embora também existam diferenças regionais.” Simões complementa as análises textuais com suas andanças por Portugal. “Há 10 anos meus parentes de Portugal diziam que não entendiam o que eu dizia”, ele observa. “Hoje, provavelmente por causa da influência das novelas brasileiras na televisão, dizem que já estou falando um português mais correto.”
“Conservamos o ritmo da fala, enquanto os europeus começaram a falar mais rápido a partir do século XVIII”, observa Ataliba Castilho, professor emérito da USP, que, nos últimos 40 anos, planejou e coordenou vários projetos de pesquisa sobre o português falado e a história do português do Brasil. “Até o século XVI”, diz ele, “o português brasileiro e o europeu eram como o espanhol, com um corte silábico duro. A palavra falada era muito próxima da escrita”. Célia Lopes acrescenta outra diferença: o português brasileiro conserva a maioria das vogais, enquanto os europeus em geral as omitem, ressaltando as consoantes, e diriam tulfón para se referir ao telefone.
Há também muitas palavras com sentidos diferentes de um lado e de outro do Atlântico. Os estudantes das universidades privadas não pagam mensalidade, mas propina. Bolsista é bolseiro. Como os europeus não adotaram algumas palavras usadas no Brasil, a exemplo de bunda, de origem africana, podem surgir situações embaraçosas. Vanderci Aguilera, professora sênior da Universidade Estadual de Londrina (Uel) e uma das linguistas empenhadas no resgate da história do português brasileiro, levou uma amiga portuguesa a uma loja. Para ver se um vestido que acabava de experimentar caía bem às costas, a amiga lhe perguntou: “O que achas do meu rabo?”.
O soldado e a filha do fazendeiro No acervo de documentos sobre a evolução do português paulista, está uma carta de 1807, escrita pelo soldado Manoel Coelho, que teria seduzido a filha de um fazendeiro. Quando soube, o pai da moça, enfurecido, forçou o rapaz a se casar com ela. O soldado, porém, bateu o pé: não se casaria, como ele escreveu, “nem por bem nem por mar”. Simões estranhou a citação ao mar, já que o quiproquó se passava na então vila de São Paulo, mas depois percebeu: “Olha o Rcaipira! Ele quis dizer ‘nem por bem nem por mal!’”. O soldado escrevia como falava, não se sabe se casou com a filha do fazendeiro, mas deixou uma prova valiosa de como se falava no início do século XIX.
“O R caipira era uma das características da língua falada na vila de São Paulo, que aos poucos, com a crescente urbanização e a chegada de imigrantes europeus, foi expulsa para a periferia ou para outras cidades”, diz Simões. “Era a língua dos bandeirantes.” Os especialistas acreditam que os primeiros moradores da vila de São Paulo, além de porrta, pulavam consoantes no meio das palavras, falando muié em vez de mulher, por exemplo. Para aprisionar índios e, mais tarde, para encontrar ouro, os bandeirantes conquistaram inicialmente o interior paulista, levando seu vocabulário e seu modo de falar. O R exagerado ainda pode ser ouvido nas cidades do chamado Médio Tietê como Santana de Parnaíba, Pirapora do Bom Jesus, Sorocaba, Itu, Tietê, Porto Feliz e Piracicaba, cujos moradores, principalmente os do campo, o pintor ituano José Ferraz de Almeida Júnior retratou, até ser assassinado pelo marido de sua amante em Piracicaba. Os bandeirantes seguiram depois para outras matas da imensa Capitania de São Paulo, constituída em 1709 com os territórios dos atuais estados de São Paulo, Mato Grosso do Sul, Mato Grosso, Rondônia, Tocantins, Minas Gerais, Paraná e Santa Catarina (ver mapa).
Manoel Mourivaldo Almeida, também da USP, encontrou sinais do português paulista antigo em Cuiabá, a capital de Mato Grosso, que permaneceu com relativamente pouca interação linguística e cultural com outras cidades depois do fim do auge da mineração de ouro, há dois séculos. “O português culto dos séculos XVI ao XVII tinha um Schiado”, conclui Almeida. “Os paulistas, quando foram para o Centro-Oeste, falavam como os cariocas hoje!” O ator e diretor teatral cuiabano Justino Astrevo de Aguiar reconhece a herança paulista e carioca, mas considera um traço mais evidente do falar local o hábito de acrescentar um J ou um T antes ou no meio das palavras, como em djeito, cadju ou tchuva, uma característica da pronúncia típica do século XVII, que Almeida identificou também entre moradores de Goiás, Minas Gerais, Maranhão e na região da Galícia, na Espanha.
Almeida apurou o ouvido para as variações do português no Brasil por conta de sua própria história. Filho de portugueses, nasceu em Piritiba, interior da Bahia, saiu de lá aos 7 anos, morou em Jaciara, interior de Mato Grosso, e depois 25 anos em Cuiabá, foi professor da universidade federal e se mudou para São Paulo em 2003. Ele reconhece que fala como paulista nos momentos mais formais – embora prefira falar éxtra em vez de êxtra como os paulistas –, mas quando descontrai assume o ritmo de falar baiano e o vocabulário matogrossense. Ele estuda o modo de falar cuiabano desde 1991, por sugestão de um colega professor, Leônidas Querubim Avelino, especialista em Camões, que havia verificado sinais do português arcaico por lá. Avelino lhe contou que um roceiro cego de Livramento, a 30 quilômetros de Cuiabá, comentou que ele estava “andando pusilo”, no sentido de fraco. Avelino reconheceu uma forma reduzida de pusilânime, que não era mais usada em Portugal.
“Os moradores de Cuiabá e de algumas outras cidades, como Cáceres e Barão de Melgado, em Mato Grosso, e Corumbá, em Mato Grosso do Sul, preservam o português paulista do século XVIII mais do que os próprios paulistas. Paulistas do interior e também da capital hoje falam dia, com um d seco, enquanto na maior parte do Brasil se diz djia”, observou Almeida. “O modo de falar pode mudar dependendo do acesso à cultura, da motivação e da capacidade de perceber e articular sons de modo diferente. Quem procurar nos lugares mais distantes dos grandes centros urbanos vai encontrar sinais de preservação do português antigo.”
Rua 25 de março, 1894, de Antonio Ferrigno (Acervo Pinacoteca do Estado de SP). A cidade de São Paulo tinha um sotaque próprio
De 1998 a 2003, uma equipe coordenada por Heitor Megale, da USP, seguiu a rota das bandeiras do século XVI em busca de traços da língua portuguesa antiga que tenham permanecido ao longo de quatro séculos. As entrevistas com moradores com 60 anos a 90 anos de quase 40 cidades ou povoados de Minas Gerais, Goiás e Mato Grosso trouxeram à tona termos esquecidos como mamparra(fingimento) e mensonha (mentira), uma palavra de um dos poemas de Francisco de Sá de Miranda do século XV, treição, usada no interior de Goiás no sentido de surpresa, e termos da linguagem popular ainda usados em Portugal, como despois, percisão e tristura, comuns no sul de Minas. O que parecia anacronismo ganhou valor. Dizer sancristia em vez de sacristia não era um erro, “mas uma influência preservada do passado, quando a pronúncia era assim”, relatou o Jornal da Manhã, de Paracatu, Minas, em 20 de dezembro de 2001.
Ao norte, a língua portuguesa expandiu-se para o interior a partir da cidade de Salvador, que foi a capital do Brasil Colônia durante três séculos. Salvador era também um centro de fermentação da língua, por receber multidões de escravos africanos, que aprendiam o português como língua estrangeira, mas também ofereciam seu vocabulário, ao qual já haviam se somado as palavras indígenas.
Para impedir que a língua de Camões se desfigurasse ao cruzar com os dialetos nativos, Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, o Marquês de Pombal, secretário de Estado do reino, resolveu agir. Em 1757, Pombal expulsou os jesuítas, entre outras razões de ordem política, porque estavam ensinando a doutrina cristã em língua indígena, e, por decreto, fez do português a língua oficial do Brasil. O português se impôs sobre as línguas nativas e ainda hoje é a língua oficial, embora os linguistas alertem que não possa ser chamada de nacional por causa das 180 línguas indígenas faladas no país (eram 1.200, estima-se, quando os portugueses chegaram). A miscigenação linguística, que reflete a mistura de povos formadores do país, explica em boa parte as variações regionais de vocabulário e de ritmos, sintetizadas em um mapa dos falares do Museu da Língua Portuguesa, em São Paulo. É fácil encontrar variações em um mesmo estado: os moradores do norte de Minas falam como os baianos, os da região central mantêm o autêntico mineirês, no sul a influência paulista é intensa e a leste o modo de falar assemelha-se ao sotaque carioca.
A pandorga e o bigato Há 10 anos um grupo de linguistas estuda um dos resultados da miscigenação linguística: os diferentes nomes com que um mesmo objeto pode ser chamado, registrados por meio de entrevistas com 1.100 pessoas em 250 localidades. Brasil afora, o brinquedo feito de papel e varetas que se empina ao vento por meio de uma linha é chamado de papagaio, pipa, raia ou pandorga – ou ainda coruja em Natal e João Pessoa –, de acordo com o primeiro volume do Atlas linguístico do Brasil, publicado em outubro de 2014 com os resultados das entrevistas nas capitais (Editora UEL). Já o aparelho com luzes vermelha, amarela e verde usado em cruzamentos de ruas para regular o trânsito é chamado apenas de sinal no Rio de Janeiro e em Belo Horizonte e também de semáforo nas capitais do Norte e Nordeste. Goiânia registrou os quatro nomes para o mesmo objeto: sinal, semáforo, sinaleiro e farol.
Começa agora a busca de explicações para essas diferenças. “Onde nasci, em Sertanópolis, a 42 quilômetros de Londrina”, disse Vanderci Aguilera, uma das coordenadoras do Atlas, “chamamos bicho de goiaba de bigato por influência dos colonizadores, que eram imigrantes italianos vindos do interior paulista”. Segundo ela, os moradores dos três estados do Sul chamam urubu de corvo por influência dos europeus, enquanto os do Sudeste mantiveram o nome tupi, urubu.
Cena de família de Adolfo Augusto Pinto, 1891, de Almeida Júnior (Acervo Pinacoteca do Estado de SP). No final do século XIX o pronome você já era mais formal que o tu
Cada estado – ou região – tem seu próprio patrimônio linguístico, que deve ser respeitado, enfatizam os especialistas. Os professores de português, alerta Vanderci, não deveriam repreender os alunos por chamarem beija-flor de cuitelo, como é comum no interior do Paraná, nem recriminar os que dizem caro, churascoou baranco, como é comum entre os descendentes de poloneses e alemães no Sul, mas ensinar outras formas de falar e deixar a meninada se expressar como quiser quando estiver com a família ou com os amigos. “Ninguém fala errado”, ela enfatiza. “Todo mundo fala de acordo com sua história de vida, com o que foi transmitido pelos pais e depois modificado pela escola. Nossa fala é nossa identidade, não temos por que nos envergonhar.”
A diversidade do português brasileiro é tão grande que, apesar do empenho dos locutores de telejornais de alcance nacional em tentar criar uma língua neutra, despida de sotaques locais, “não há um padrão nacional”, assegura Castilho. “Há diferenças de vocabulário, gramática, sintaxe e pronúncia mesmo entre pessoas que adotam a norma culta”, diz ele. Insatisfeito com as teorias importadas, Castilho criou a abordagem multissistêmica da linguagem, segundo a qual qualquer expressão linguística mobiliza simultaneamente quatro planos (léxico, semântica, discurso e gramática), que deveriam ser vistos de modo integrado e não mais separadamente. Ao lado de Verena Kewitz, da USP, ele tem debatido essa abordagem com estudantes de pós-graduação e com outros especialistas do Brasil e no exterior.
Também está claro que o português brasileiro se refaz continuamente. As palavras podem morrer ou ganhar novos sentidos. Almeida contou que Celciane Vasconcelos, uma das estudantes de seu grupo, verificou que somente os moradores mais antigos do litoral paranaense conheciam a palavra sumaca, um tipo de barco antes comum, que hoje não se constrói mais, tirando a antiga serventia da palavra que hoje nomeia uma praia em Paraty (RJ). Os modos antigos de falar podem ressurgir. O R caipira, asseguram os linguistas, está voltando, até mesmo em São Paulo, e readquirindo status, na esteira dos cantores de música sertaneja. “Hoje ser caipira é chique”, assegura Vanderci. Ou ao menos é aceitável e parte do estilo pessoal, como o da apresentadora de TV Sabrina Sato.
Bilhetes de amor Os linguistas têm notado a expansão do tratamento informal. “Tenho 78 anos e devia ser tratado por senhor, mas meus alunos mais jovens me tratam por você”, diz Castilho, aparentemente sem se incomodar com a informalidade, inconcebível em seus tempos de estudante. O você, porém, não reinará sozinho. Célia Lopes, com sua equipe da UFRJ, verificou que o tu predomina em Porto Alegre e convive com o você no Rio de Janeiro e em Recife, enquanto você é o tratamento predominante em São Paulo, Curitiba, Belo Horizonte e Salvador. O tu já era mais próximo e menos formal que vocênas quase 500 cartas do acervo on-line da UFRJ, quase todas de poetas, políticos e outras personalidades do final do século XIX e início do XX.
Como ainda faltava a expressão do falar das pessoas comuns, Célia e sua equipe exultaram ao encontrar 13 bilhetes escritos em 1908 por Robertina de Souza para seu amante e para seu marido. Esse material era parte de um processo-crime movido contra o marido, que expulsou de sua casa um amigo e a própria mulher ao saber que tinham tido um caso extraconjungal e depois matou o ex-amigo. Em um dos 11 bilhetes para o amante, Álvaro Mattos, Robertina, que assinava como Chininha, escreveu: “Eu te adoro te amo até a morte sou tua só tu é meu só o meu coracao e teu e o teu coracao é meu. Chininha e todinha tua ate a morte”. Já o marido, Arthur Noronha, que recebeu apenas dois bilhetes, ela tratava de modo mais formal: “Eu rezo pedindo a Deus para você me perdoar, mas creio que voce não tem coragem de ver morrer um filho o filha”. E mais adiante: “Não posso me separar de voce e do meu filho a não ser com a morte”. Não se sabe se ela voltou para casa, mas o marido foi absolvido, por alegar que matou o outro homem em defesa da honra.
Outro sinal da evolução do português brasileiro são as construções híbridas, com um verbo que não concorda mais com o pronome, do tipo tu não sabe?, e a mistura dos pronomes de tratamento você e tu, como em “se você precisar, vou te ajudar”. Os portugueses europeus poderiam alegar que se trata de mais uma prova de nossa capacidade de desfigurar a língua lusitana, mas talvez não tenham tanta razão para se queixar. Célia Lopes encontrou a mistura de pronomes de tratamento, que ela e outros linguistas não consideram mais um erro, em cartas do marquês do Lavradio, que foi vice-rei do Brasil de 1769 a 1796, e, mais de dois séculos depois, em uma entrevista do ex-presidente Fernando Henrique Cardoso.
Projeto Projeto de história do português paulista (PHPP – Projeto Caipira) (nº 11/51787-5); Modalidade Projeto Temático; Pesquisador responsável Manoel Mourivaldo Santiago Almeida(USP); Investimento R$ 87.372,10 (FAPESP).
Emmanuel Levinas disse que a “consciência é a urgência de uma destinação dirigida a outro, e não um eterno retorno sobre si mesmo”. Penso que, embora não pareça, a frase se relaciona intimamente à “crise hídrica” em São Paulo.
Temos sido obrigados a ouvir e a falar em “crise hídrica”, na “maior seca em 84 anos” e expressões afins, que culpam a natureza, e não em catástrofe, colapso, responsabilidade ou palavras de igual gravidade.
O cidadão comum vive, na gestão do governo paulista, sob um regime eufemístico de linguagem, em aparência elegante, mas, na verdade, retoricamente totalitário, com o qual somos obrigados a conviver e, ainda, forçados a mimetizar.
“Crise hídrica”, “plano de contingência”, “obras emergenciais”, “volume morto”, “reservatórios”, tal como vêm sendo usados, não são mais que desvios covardes da linguagem e da política para ocultar o enfrentamento do real.
Não há água, houve grande incompetência, haverá grandes dificuldades, é necessário um plano emergencial de orientação e a criação de redes de contenção e de solidariedade. É preciso construir e distribuir cisternas, caixas d’água para a população carente, ensinar medidas de economia, mobilizar as subprefeituras para ações localizadas e, sobretudo, expor pública e claramente medidas restritivas à grande indústria e à agricultura, que podem ser bem mais perdulárias do que o cidadão.
Mas nada disso se diz ou faz. E por quê? A impressão que tenho é a de que a maioria dos políticos não trabalha sob o regime da responsabilidade –a condição de “destinação ao outro”–, mas sim na forma do “eterno retorno sobre si mesmo”.
Vive-se, em São Paulo, uma situação de absurdo, em que, além das enormes dificuldades cotidianas –deslocamento, saúde, segurança, educação, enchentes, e agora, a de ter água–, ainda é preciso ouvir o presidente da Sabesp dizer que São Pedro “tem errado a pontaria”.
Meu impulso é o de partir para o vocativo: “Ei, presidenta Dilma, deputados federais, governador Alckmin, prefeito Haddad, vereadores! Ouçam! Nós os elegemos para que vocês batalhem por nós, e não por seus mandatos! Nós é que somos aquele, o outro, a quem vocês devem responsabilidade!”.
Ou não tem relação com a “crise hídrica” um deputado federal receber cerca de R$100.000,00 por mês em “verbas de gabinete”? Por que deputados têm direito a um benefício que, entre outros, lhes garante seguro de saúde e carro, se quem ganha muitíssimo menos não tem?
Desafio os deputados, um a um, a abrirem mão publicamente de seus seguros de saúde e a usarem o transporte público para irem ao trabalho –a entrarem no real.
Até quando a população, sobretudo a mais carente, que tem poucos instrumentos para amenizar o que já sofre, vai ser tutelada e oprimida sob o manto eufemístico da “maior seca em 84 anos”?
Queremos o real, a linguagem responsável, que explicita o olhar para o outro e dá sustentação e liberdade para que se possam superar as dificuldades com autonomia.
O eufemismo livra os políticos e aliena a população da chapa maciça do real. Ele representa um estado semelhante à burocracia ineficaz. Como ser responsável se, para cada ação, há infinitas mediações?
O resultado é que as mediações acabam por alimentar muito mais a si mesmas do que ao objetivo final e inicial de governar: ser para o outro –no caso, nós, impotentes diante do que nos obrigam e do que, há meses, nos forçam a presenciar.
NOEMI JAFFE, 52, é doutora em literatura brasileira pela USP e autora de “O que os Cegos Estão Sonhando?” (editora 34)
Linguists have long agreed that languages from English to Greek to Hindi, known as ‘Indo-European languages‘, are part of a language family which first emerged from a common ancestor spoken thousands of years ago. Now, a new study gives us more information on when and where it was most likely used. Using data from over 150 languages, linguists at the University of California, Berkeley provide evidence that this ancestor language originated 5,500 – 6,500 years ago, on the Pontic-Caspian steppe stretching from Moldova and Ukraine to Russia and western Kazakhstan.
This article provides new support for the “steppe hypothesis” or “Kurgan hypothesis”, which proposes that Indo-European languages first spread with cultural developments in animal husbandry around 4500 – 3500 BCE. (An alternate theory proposes that they spread much earlier, around 7500 – 6000 BCE, in Anatolia in modern-day Turkey.)
Chang et al. examined over 200 sets of words from living and historical Indo-European languages; after determining how quickly these words changed over time through statistical modeling, they concluded that the rate of change indicated that the languages which first used these words began to diverge approximately 6,500 years ago, in accordance with the steppe hypothesis.
This is one of the first quantitatively-based academic papers in support of the steppe hypothesis, and the first to use a model with “ancestry constraints” which more directly incorporate previously discovered relationships between languages. Discussion of prior studies in favor of and against the steppe hypothesis can be found in the paper.
Members of the media who are interested in discussing the article and its findings may contact Brice Russ, LSA Director of Communications, and Andrew Garrett, Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley.
Assunto está em debate na Comissão de Educação do Senado
O professor Pasquale Cipro Neto defendeu nesta quarta-feira (22) revisão no Acordo Ortográfico da Língua Portuguesa. “O texto do acordo é tão cheio de problema que foi preciso a Academia [Brasileira de Letras] publicar nota explicativa [sobre pontos do acordo]. Por que foi preciso isso? Porque há problemas”, ressaltou o professor, ao participar do segundo dia de debates sobre o assunto na Comissão de Educação do Senado.
Segundo Pasquale, o Brasil saiu na frente dos demais países signatários na implementação do acordo impedindo uma adoção simultânea da nova regra. Para ele, houve atropelo e falta de organização do país no processo. “Nós não podemos ir adiante com um texto que carece de polimento, soluções concretas”, disse.
As diversas situações do uso do hífen, considerado pelo professor uma das grandes fragilidades da norma, foi um dos pontos mais criticados. Para Pasquale Neto, no texto do acordo, “o hífen foi maltratado, mal resolvido”. A seu ver, a questão precisa ser solucionada. De acordo com ele, é inexplicável o fato da palavra “pé-de-meia” ser escrita com hífen e “pé de moleque”, não.
Para a professora Stella Maris Bortoni de Figueiredo Ricardo, integrante da Associação Brasileira de Linguística (Abralin), qualquer sugestão de mudança deve ser acordada com os países signatários. “A Abralin recomenda que se consolide o Acordo Ortográfico de 1990, sem que haja nenhuma alteração unilateral. Qualquer alteração que se queira fazer no acordo, que seja feito no âmbito da CPLP [Comunidade dos Países de Língua Portuguesa] e do Iilp [Instituto Internacional da Língua Portuguesa]”, defendeu.
Para debater as sugestões visando a melhorar o acordo, a Comissão de Educação do Senado criou, em 2013, grupo técnico de trabalho formado pelos professores Ernani Pimentel e Pasquale Cipro Neto, que deverão apresentar uma síntese em março de 2015. Por interferência da comissão, a implantação definitiva foi adiada de janeiro de 2013 para janeiro de 2016 por decreto da presidenta Dilma Rousseff.
Na rodada de ontem (21) o presidente do Centro de Estudos Linguísticos da Língua Portuguesa, Ernani Pimentel, polemizou a discussão ao cobrar maior simplificação gramatical. Ele lidera movimento para adoção de critério fonético na ortografia, ou seja, a escrita das palavras orientada pela forma como se fala. Por esse critério, a palavra “chuva”, por exemplo, seria escrita com x (xuva), sem preocupação em considerar a origem. Para o professor, a simplificação evitaria que as novas gerações sejam submetidas a “regras ultrapassadas que exigem decoreba”.
A sugestão foi rechaçada pelo gramático Evanildo Bechara que considera que a simplificação fonética, “aparentemente ideal”, resultaria em mais problemas que soluções, pois extinguiria as palavras homófonas – aquelas que têm o mesmo som, mas com escrita e significados diferentes. Segundo ele, as palavras seção, sessão e cessão, ficariam reduzidas a uma só grafia – sesão –, o que prejudicaria a compreensão da mensagem. “Aparentemente teríamos resolvido um problema ortográfico, mas criaríamos um problema maior na função da língua, que é a comunicação entre as pessoas”, lembrou.
O gramático avalia que o acordo reúne qualidades e representa um avanço para o uso do idioma e para unificar regras entre os países lusófonos. Ele ressaltou que os países que assinaram o acordo poderão, depois da implementação das novas regras, aprovar modificações e ajustes, caso necessário.
Para o presidente da comissão, senador Cyro Miranda (PSDB-GO), a intenção dos debates não é alterar o acordo, uma vez que, segundo ele, o papel cabe ao Executivo, em entendimento com os demais países signatários. “Nossa obrigação é chamar as pessoas envolvidas para dar opinião. Mas quem toma a frente é o Ministério da Educação e o Ministério de Relações Exteriores. Estamos mostrando as dificuldades e se, for possível, vamos contribuir”, disse.
Indigenous children in Mexico can now learn their mother tongues with specialized computer games, helping to prevent the further loss of those languages across the country.
“Three years ago, before we employed these materials, we were on the verge of seeing our children lose our Native languages,” asserted Matilde Hernandez, a teacher in Zitacuaro, Michoacan.
“Now they are speaking and singing in Mazahua as if that had never happened,” Hernandez said, referring to computer software that provides games and lessons in most of the linguistic families of the country including Mazahua, Chinanteco, Nahuatl of Puebla, Tzeltal, Mixteco, Zapateco, Chatino and others.
The new software was created by scientists and educators in two research institutions in Mexico: the Victor Franco Language and Culture Lab (VFLCL) of the Center for Investigations and Higher Studies in Social Anthropology (CIHSSA); and the Computer Center of the National Institute of Astrophysics, Optics and Electronics (NIAOE).
According to reports released this summer, the software was developed as a tool to help counteract the educational lag in indigenous communities and to employ these educational technologies so that the children may learn various subjects in an entertaining manner while reinforcing their Native language and culture.
“This software – divided into three methodologies for three different groups of applications – was made by dedicated researchers who have experience with Indigenous Peoples,” said Dr. Frida Villavicencio, Coordinator of the VLFCL’s Language Lab.
“We must have an impact on the children,” she continued, “offering them better methodologies for learning their mother tongues, as well as for learning Spanish and for supporting their basic education in a fun way.”
Villavicencio pointed out that the games and programs were not translated from the Spanish but were developed in the Native languages with the help of Native speakers. She added that studies from Mexico’s National Institute of Indigenous Languages (NIIL) show that the main reason why indigenous languages disappear, or are in danger of doing so, is because in each generation fewer and fewer of the children speak those languages.
“We need bilingual children only in that way can we preserve their languages,” she added.
Summary: Researchers have found evidence that genetic factors may contribute to the development of language during infancy. Scientists discovered a significant link between genetic changes near the ROBO2 gene and the number of words spoken by children in the early stages of language development.
Researchers have found evidence that genetic factors may contribute to the development of language during infancy.
Scientists from the Medical Research Council (MRC) Integrative Epidemiology Unit at the University of Bristol worked with colleagues around the world to discover a significant link between genetic changes near the ROBO2 gene and the number of words spoken by children in the early stages of language development.
Children produce words at about 10 to 15 months of age and our range of vocabulary expands as we grow — from around 50 words at 15 to 18 months, 200 words at 18 to 30 months, 14,000 words at six-years-old and then over 50,000 words by the time we leave secondary school.
The researchers found the genetic link during the ages of 15 to 18 months when toddlers typically communicate with single words only before their linguistic skills advance to two-word combinations and more complex grammatical structures.
The results, published in Nature Communications today [16 Sept], shed further light on a specific genetic region on chromosome 3, which has been previously implicated in dyslexia and speech-related disorders.
The ROBO2 gene contains the instructions for making the ROBO2 protein. This protein directs chemicals in brain cells and other neuronal cell formations that may help infants to develop language but also to produce sounds.
The ROBO2 protein also closely interacts with other ROBO proteins that have previously been linked to problems with reading and the storage of speech sounds.
Dr Beate St Pourcain, who jointly led the research with Professor Davey Smith at the MRC Integrative Epidemiology Unit, said: “This research helps us to better understand the genetic factors which may be involved in the early language development in healthy children, particularly at a time when children speak with single words only, and strengthens the link between ROBO proteins and a variety of linguistic skills in humans.”
Dr Claire Haworth, one of the lead authors, based at the University of Warwick, commented: “In this study we found that results using DNA confirm those we get from twin studies about the importance of genetic influences for language development. This is good news as it means that current DNA-based investigations can be used to detect most of the genetic factors that contribute to these early language skills.”
The study was carried out by an international team of scientists from the EArly Genetics and Lifecourse Epidemiology Consortium (EAGLE) and involved data from over 10,000 children.
Journal Reference:
Beate St Pourcain, Rolieke A.M. Cents, Andrew J.O. Whitehouse, Claire M.A. Haworth, Oliver S.P. Davis, Paul F. O’Reilly, Susan Roulstone, Yvonne Wren, Qi W. Ang, Fleur P. Velders, David M. Evans, John P. Kemp, Nicole M. Warrington, Laura Miller, Nicholas J. Timpson, Susan M. Ring, Frank C. Verhulst, Albert Hofman, Fernando Rivadeneira, Emma L. Meaburn, Thomas S. Price, Philip S. Dale, Demetris Pillas, Anneli Yliherva, Alina Rodriguez, Jean Golding, Vincent W.V. Jaddoe, Marjo-Riitta Jarvelin, Robert Plomin, Craig E. Pennell, Henning Tiemeier, George Davey Smith. Common variation near ROBO2 is associated with expressive vocabulary in infancy. Nature Communications, 2014; 5: 4831 DOI:10.1038/ncomms5831
Uma (in)certa antropologia 
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