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How Language Began
- The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention
- Narrated by: Jonathan Yen
- Length: 13 hrs and 10 mins
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Mankind has a distinct advantage over other terrestrial species: we talk to one another. But how did we acquire the most advanced form of communication on Earth? Daniel L. Everett, a "bombshell" linguist and "instant folk hero" (Tom Wolfe, Harper's), provides in this sweeping history a comprehensive examination of the evolutionary story of language, from the earliest speaking attempts by hominids to the more than 7,000 languages that exist today.
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PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.
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Cutting edge...
- By Douglas on 08-07-14
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On Intelligence
- By: Jeff Hawkins, Sandra Blakeslee
- Narrated by: Jeff Hawkins, Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 9 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Jeff Hawkins, the man who created the PalmPilot, Treo smart phone, and other handheld devices, has reshaped our relationship to computers. Now he stands ready to revolutionize both neuroscience and computing in one stroke, with a new understanding of intelligence itself.
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Epiphany
- By James on 03-14-05
By: Jeff Hawkins, and others
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Riveted
- The Science of Why Jokes Make Us Laugh, Movies Make Us Cry, and Religion Makes Us Feel One with the Universe
- By: Jim Davies
- Narrated by: Matthew Josdal
- Length: 9 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Professor Jim Davies's fascinating and highly accessible book, Riveted, reveals the evolutionary underpinnings of why we find things compelling. Drawing on work from philosophy, anthropology, religious studies, psychology, economics, computer science, and biology, Davies offers a comprehensive explanation to show that in spite of the differences between the many things that we find compelling, they have similar effects on our minds and brains.
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Fun and excellent listen!
- By Alejandro Franco on 04-13-18
By: Jim Davies
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Louder Than Words
- The New Science of How the Mind Makes Meaning
- By: Benjamin K. Bergen
- Narrated by: Benjamin K. Bergen
- Length: 8 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Whether it’s brusque, convincing, fraught with emotion, or dripping with innuendo, language is fundamentally a tool for conveying meaning - a uniquely human magic trick in which you vibrate your vocal cords to make your innermost thoughts pop up in someone else’s mind. You can use it to talk about all sorts of things - from your new labradoodle puppy to the expansive gardens at Versailles, from Roger Federer’s backhand to things that don’t exist at all, like flying pigs.
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Fun But Technical--Glad I Got It On Sale
- By Gillian on 05-22-17
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Masters of the Planet
- The Search for Our Human Origins
- By: Ian Tattersall
- Narrated by: Bob Souer
- Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins
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Fifty thousand years ago - merely a blip in evolutionary time - our Homo sapiens ancestors were competing for existence with several other human species, just as their precursors had done for millions of years. Yet something about our species distinguished it from the pack, and ultimately led to its survival while the rest became extinct. Just what was it that allowed Homo sapiens to become masters of the planet? Ian Tattersall, curator emeritus at the American Museum of Natural History, takes us deep into the fossil record to uncover what made humans so special.
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Great Book, Some Sloppy Editing
- By DB on 11-23-20
By: Ian Tattersall
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The Blind Watchmaker
- Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design
- By: Richard Dawkins
- Narrated by: Richard Dawkins, Lalla Ward
- Length: 14 hrs and 40 mins
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The Blind Watchmaker, knowledgably narrated by author Richard Dawkins, is as prescient and timely a book as ever. The watchmaker belongs to the 18th-century theologian William Paley, who argued that just as a watch is too complicated and functional to have sprung into existence by accident, so too must all living things, with their far greater complexity, be purposefully designed. Charles Darwin's brilliant discovery challenged the creationist arguments; but only Richard Dawkins could have written this elegant riposte.
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Challenging textbook more than an enjoyable listen
- By Eric on 01-15-12
By: Richard Dawkins
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Mind in Motion
- How Action Shapes Thought
- By: Barbara Tversky
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 11 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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In Mind in Motion, psychologist Barbara Tversky shows that spatial cognition isn't just a peripheral aspect of thought, but its very foundation, enabling us to draw meaning from our bodies and their actions in the world. Our actions in real space get turned into mental actions on thought, often spouting spontaneously from our bodies as gestures. Spatial thinking underlies creating and using maps, assembling furniture, devising football strategies, designing airports, understanding the flow of people, traffic, water, and ideas.
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Physically difficult to listen to
- By Claire Hay on 11-08-19
By: Barbara Tversky
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The Deeper Genome
- Why There Is More to the Human Genome than Meets the Eye
- By: John Parrington
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 9 hrs
- Unabridged
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Over a decade ago, as the Human Genome Project completed its mapping of the entire human genome, hopes ran high that we would rapidly be able to use our knowledge of human genes to tackle many inherited diseases, and understand what makes us unique among animals. But things didn't turn out that way.
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Great Scientific Writing/ Wrong Narrator
- By Richard on 11-24-15
By: John Parrington
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On Human Nature: Revised Edition
- By: Edward O. Wilson
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 7 hrs and 56 mins
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This revised edition of Human Nature begins a new phase in the most important intellectual controversy of this generation: Is human behavior controlled by the species' biological heritage? Does this heritage limit human destiny?
With characteristic pungency and simplicity of style, the author of Sociobiology challenges old prejudices and current misconceptions about the nature-nurture debate.
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A Heralding Voice...
- By Douglas on 07-22-14
By: Edward O. Wilson
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The Language Hoax
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This short, opinionated audiobook addresses the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which argues that the language we speak shapes the way we perceive the world. Linguist John McWhorter argues that while this idea is mesmerizing, it is plainly wrong. It is language that reflects culture and worldview, not the other way around.
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I really love listening to language--and McWhorter
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You'll Never Look at Languages the Same Way Again
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Psychologists study which cognitive operations underpin a given conscious perception. Neuroscientists track the neural correlates of consciousness in the brain, the organ of the mind. But why the brain and not, say, the liver? How can the brain, three pounds of highly excitable matter, a piece of furniture in the universe, subject to the same laws of physics as any other piece, give rise to subjective experience? Koch argues that what is needed to answer these questions is a quantitative theory that starts with experience and proceeds to the brain.
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Constant references to illustrations
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I really love listening to language--and McWhorter
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A few decades into the digital era, scientists discovered that thinking in terms of computation made possible an entirely new way of organizing scientific investigation; eventually, every field had a computational branch: computational physics, computational biology, computational sociology. More recently, "computational thinking" has become part of the K-12 curriculum. But what is computational thinking? This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers an accessible overview.
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Too slow, repetitive for professional programmers
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Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger's What is Life? is one of the great science classics of the 20th century. A distinguished physicist's exploration of the question which lies at the heart of biology, it was written for the layman but proved one of the spurs to the birth of molecular biology and the subsequent discovery of the structure of DNA. It appears here together with "Mind and Matter", his essay investigating a relationship which has eluded and puzzled philosophers since the earliest times.
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Professor John McWhorter of Columbia University takes you back through time and around the world, following the linguistic trails left by generations of humans that lead back to the beginnings of language. Utilizing historical theories and cutting-edge research, these 34 astonishing lectures will introduce you to the major language families of the world and their many offspring, including a variety of languages that are no longer spoken but provide vital links between past and present.
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Two of the boldest and most creative scientists of all time were Michael Faraday (1791-1867) and James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879). This is the story of how these two men - separated in age by 40 years - discovered the existence of the electromagnetic field and devised a radically new theory which overturned the strictly mechanical view of the world that had prevailed since Newton's time.
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Amazing narration of an incredibly well told story
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The Language Game
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Language is perhaps humanity’s most astonishing capacity - and one that remains poorly understood. In The Language Game, cognitive scientists Morten H. Christiansen and Nick Chater show us where generations of scientists seeking the rules of language got it wrong. Language isn’t about hardwired grammars but about near-total freedom, something like a game of charades, with the only requirement being a desire to understand and be understood.
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Good
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The First Thousand Years
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Beginning with the life of Jesus, Robert Louis Wilken narrates the dramatic spread and development of Christianity over the first thousand years of its history. Moving through the formation of early institutions, practices, and beliefs to the transformations of the Roman world after the conversion of Constantine, he sheds new light on the subsequent stories of Christianity in the Latin West, the Byzantine and Slavic East, the Middle East, and Central Asia.
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Excellent Summary!
- By Gary Vandenbos on 09-13-21
What listeners say about How Language Began
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- Michael D. Busch
- 09-09-18
Hard to endure
Interesting subject, but the writing is drawn out and incredibly repetitive, and the performance is uninspired. All in all, a disappointment.
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103 people found this helpful
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- Joyce M. Bernheim
- 07-27-18
Extremely Thought Provoking
I came to this book as someone who has a post-graduate degree in a European literature and is now deeply immersed in the research on autism. I learned a lot from it and found its main concepts to be entirely consistent with what other disciplines are discovering about social interaction (of which language is but one type). I truly appreciate the efforts of scholars to share the complexities of their fields with lay readers.
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- Josh
- 09-25-18
Don't bother with it.
I couldn't even make it through the first chapter of this book. The title is interesting, and would make for a great book, if it weren't for the author's preconceived notions of language. He takes a very literal approach to language, and doesn't seem to believe that body language, the act of communicating without words, isn't a thing. The first story told is about a grandfather getting bit by a rattlesnake and how, despite the daughter vividly remembering the snake shaking it's rattle, the snake did not give a warning, as a warning requires language. Any herpetologist that knows snakes can tell you that snakes use body language to communicate, as do most animals, including people. Language is not just something that requires speech, as the author seems to believe. The rest of the book could be quite good, but, unfortunately, I will never know because I can't make it past the author's notion that body language doesn't exist.
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- Elisabeth Carey
- 10-12-18
Interesting but flawed
This is such a frustrating book.
Everett has a lot to say, that's of interest, about the history of human language, and makes an interesting, and to me persuasive, case that language goes back to Homo erectus, if not further. One thing he points to, hardly the only one, is the H. erectus population on the the island of Flores. They must at some point have arrived in numbers sufficient to establish a viable population, which would mean a minimum of fifty men, women, and children arriving together or in close succession. This isn't likely with accidental rafting. It suggests more sophisticated skills, to build craft capable of crossing that distance in sufficient numbers intentionally--which would probably require language.
He's also quite, quite certain that language is an invention, not an instinct. If you think otherwise, you are wrong. Completely wrong. Oh, and he really thinks Noam Chomsky is completely wrong, and doesn't seem to concede him any significant contributions on the subject of language at all.
Chomsky in 1957 published Syntactic Structures, arguing that human language flows from an innate instinct, a universal grammar at the base of how humans think. An important part of his argument is that since only humans have language, it must have emerged fairly recently, due to a single mutation, perhaps 50,000 years ago. There's more to his theory, including the idea that universal grammar didn't develop for the purpose of communication, but instead was originally used to facilitate complex human thought, with language a later effect.
That's not remotely a complete explanation of Chomsky's theory, but it's a good-enough starting point for a review of Everett's book. Everett says, not quite in so many words, that Chomsky is an ignorant fool. Language is obviously an invention, not an instinct, not a mutation, and he has demonstrated this by...as far as I can tell, by asserting it repeatedly.
That's very sad, because there are some obvious weaknesses to Chomsky's theory, starting with the fact that complex features are essentially never the result of a single mutation. This involves a far greater knowledge of genetics than we had in 1957, of course, but it's not surprising that sixty years of research result in some significant damage to a theory grounded in areas we had not yet made major progress in.
It seems far more likely, in light of what we now know, that language emerged more gradually, as mutations, and natural and sexual selection among the natural variations in genus homo, led to the development of language.
Unfortunately, Everett rejects that, too.
Language, he says, is just a straight-up brilliant invention, coming straight from the clever brains of Homo erectus, or Homo habilis, or Homo ergaster, or possibly even Australopithecus afarensis, whoever came up with it first. Also, there was never any proto-language. The very first language was fully functional, able to do everything its users might need language to do.
Because every brilliant invention is perfect when first invented, right? That's normal, isn't it?
Everett also says there are no inherited language defects, which there ought to be if language is an instinct, written in the genes, rather than an invention. This would be persuasive, if true. Alas, other scientists seem to disagree, finding genetics-based language impairment not common, but nevertheless real. Here's a link to one example of a scientific paper discussing it. Full text is pricey, but if interested, your public library may be able to help you.
Genetics of Speech and Language Disorders Changsoo Kang and Dennis Drayna Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics 2011 12:1, 145-164
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-genom-090810-183119?rfr_dat=cr_pub%3Dpubmed&url_ver=Z39.88-2003&rfr_id=ori%3Arid%3Acrossref.org&journalCode=genom
There's also the awkward fact that every human population, no matter how isolated, has language. Why is this awkward? Because things invented in one place, don't automatically spread to other populations the inventors' population isn't in contact with. Every culture has language. Not every culture invented written language, even though it's incredibly useful, once you have spoken language and a moderately complex culture. Invention of an alphabetic-style written language is even rarer.
And the wheel appears to have been invented once, in Sumeria, and spread from there. There's one exception; ancient Mexicans, but no other New World cultures, did invent wheels--and use them only in what appear to have been either toys or cult objects. Yet these were advanced, complex, sophisticated cultures, arguably more complex and advanced than the Spanish who arrived to conquer them. It wasn't lack of brains or sophistication that kept wheels as a useful concept from being invented in the New World.
So, why does everyone have language?
Why do two children, kept in isolation from anyone who speaks to them during the entire period they should be acquiring language, invariably emerge from that abuse speaking their own language? Why do twins not kept in that kind of extreme isolation not uncommonly develop their own "secret" language, separate from the one they use with adults around them?
Humans in contact with other humans develop language. It doesn't matter how sophisticated or complex their culture is otherwise. Humans speak to each other. If they're deaf, if there's more than one deaf child even if there's no one around who teaches them sign language, they create their own sign language. It's universal. It's how humans in contact with other humans behave.
It's innate.
It's also quite obviously for communication, another way Chomsky appears to be wrong, so one would think Everett wouldn't need to pound so incoherently on Chomsky rather than more calmly discussing the specifics.
This is an interesting book. I find I've not touched nearly enough on the aspects that I like, or that I found persuasive. Yet the weaknesses are important, and also interesting.
If interested in the topic, I recommend giving it a try.
I bought this audiobook.
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35 people found this helpful
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- Guido
- 05-10-18
0MG
Words alone cannot do this book justice. If you have a degree in any language, or even speak one, read this book.
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25 people found this helpful
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- Ijw
- 09-30-18
Pedantic
Pop science presented in a studiously boring manner. Meandering, argumentative, and short on reasoning. Blithely states that humans lost body hair because walking upright meant they had less skin exposed that needed to be shaded by fur, without a reference.
Next chapter starts arguing with Norm Chomsky, without laying out evidence in a progression, before attacking Professor Chomsky. Something somebody would read to bore people at Thanksgiving dinner.
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- RickyF
- 09-28-18
Didatic, pendantic but unpersuasive.
Everett disagrees with many other linguists, anthropologists and cognitive scientists on how and when language began and what the evidence for the origins of language are.
I find his arguments strident and unconvincing. He says the people who he is criticizing have no evidence and then spins his own theory on scant, if any, evidence.
No one knows when or how language began and we probably won't ever know unless someone invents a time machine.. Unfortunately, there are no fossil records for speech. Therefore, everyone who theorizes in this field is guessing, including Daniel L. Everett..
If I were grading this thesis, I would give the professor a "C".
The narration is top-notch and Jonathan Yen should not be criticized for the author's shortcomings.
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- Jim L.
- 09-27-18
Disapointed
I was surprised to find that a large part of this book is devoted to evolution, and the make up of skeletal mechanics of the humanoids throuout archialogic history. I did not at all expect to hear details of how the spinal chord of a pre-human enters the skull or how it would affet that pre human if it were to walk up right. It was mind numbing with this sort detail of homo species for many chapters. I cant recomend this book unless you are a graduate student studying in this field.
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- Lmaris
- 10-09-18
Author's preconceived definitions spoil it
The topic is one which I find very interesting, but in the introduction he makes broad assumptions which are in no way broadly accepted by others in the field.
The narrator is in a perpetual state of excitement which is very offputting and when he pretends to imitate others' speech it is almost offensive.
I should have paid more attention to the reviews left by others.
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- Amazon Customer
- 09-27-18
Eh
I've read better. I was pleasantly surprised in the narrator's correct pronunciation of all the phonemes.
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