Octopus Syntax

As I was titling this post, I found it reminded me of the good old days in my intro class, making nasty looking, not-quite-X' trees of sentences like "the man hit the clown with the twinkie on his head." But that's not what I want to talk about.

In this month's Discover magazine, there's an article called "Why not morph? What cephalopods can teach us about language" by Jaron Lanier. The connection to language doesn't come until the very end of the article, but it's kind of a funny question to think about:

Our vocal abilities are part of what enabled our species to develop spoken language. Likewise, our ability to draw pictures--along with the requisite brain structures--was preadaptive for written language. Suppose we had the ability to morph at will: What sort of language might that make possible? Would it be the same old conversation, or would we be able to "say" new things to one another?

For instance, instead of saying, "I'm hungry; let's go crab hunting," you might simulate your own transparency so your friends could see your empty stomach, or you might turn into a video game about crab hunting so you and your compatriots could get in a little practice before the actual hunt. I call this post-symbolic communication. Some people think that the ability to morph would just give you a new dictionary mapping to the same old set of ideas, with avatars in place of words, while others, including me, think there would be fundamental differences.

I guess I disagree. Rubbing my stomach to indicate my hunger for a Bartley's burger is perhaps less cool (and maybe also less effective) than morphing, but I think that's about as far as it goes.