Language is not organic chemistry.

Here is Ev's paper on the language network: 
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4091770/ 
<https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4091770/> (one of them)

Here is Steve's paper: 
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/03/190327134547.htm 
<https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/03/190327134547.htm>

These are pretty pristene results. 

My own work, in How Language Began and in a new paper that Larry Barham and I 
just submitted on tools and symbols in the lower paleolithic, offer similar 
evidence.

Symbols are basic. Syntax is derivative according to these research programs. I 
outline a series of grammatical steps in the book and in the paper with Barham 
that explains how this works.

Dan

> On Apr 19, 2019, at 3:50 PM, Jerry LR Chandler <[email protected]> 
> wrote:
> 
> Dan, List:
>> On Apr 19, 2019, at 1:20 PM, Dan Everett <[email protected] 
>> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>> 
>> Also Steve Piantadosi (Berkeley Psychology) has shown that all the memory 
>> needed for much of language is about 1.5 megabytes, a small amount, with the 
>> amount of memory required for syntax neglible, more evidence that symbols 
>> drive syntax.
> 
> If this is true then it is in stark contrast with the symbolic 
> representations of organic chemistry.  The words are limited to the 92 
> elements of the table of elements and the syntax grows, very roughly 
> speaking, factorially with count of the number of symbols of molecular 
> formula and the complete graph representing all the nuclei and electrons of 
> the molecular formula.  
> 
> Cheers
> 
> Jerry
> 
> 

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