The Simian Tongue
The Simian Tongue
复制标题
猿猴的舌头
DOI：
10.7208/chicago/9780226835945.001.0001
复制
发表时间：
2008
影响因子：
11.7
通讯作者：
G. Radick
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
G. Radick
19世纪90年代初，进化论获得了一个意想不到的盟友：爱迪生留声机。一位业余科学家使用这种新机器--当时的技术奇迹之一--记录猴子的叫声，把它们放给猴子听，然后观察它们的反应。从这些很快就出名的实验中，他判断自己发现了“猿语”，由他开始翻译的单词组成，包含了人类语言进化的雏形。然而，在接下来的世纪的大部分时间里，猿的语言及其研究手段一直处于科学的边缘。直到20世纪80年代初，一组动物行为学家宣布，实验回放显示，某些非洲猴子发出了基本上有意义的叫声，这两种叫声才重新受到人们的好评。利用新发现的档案资料和对关键科学家的采访，格雷戈里·拉迪克在这里重建了一种被发明和重新发明的技术的非凡轨迹，以监听灵长类动物的交流。《猿猴的舌头》一书记录了从达尔文时代到我们这个时代语言进化的科学争论，记录了丰富的文献和有力的论证，使心理学、人类学和其他行为科学被遗忘的债务重新回到维多利亚时代关于人类语言的动物根源的争论中。
In the early 1890s, the theory of evolution gained an unexpected ally: the Edison phonograph. An amateur scientist used the new machine - one of the technological wonders of the age - to record monkey calls, play them back to the monkeys, and watch their reactions. From these soon-famous experiments he judged that he had discovered "the simian tongue," made up of words he was beginning to translate, and containing the rudiments from which human language evolved. Yet for most of the next century, the simian tongue and the means for its study existed at the scientific periphery. Both returned to great acclaim only in the early 1980s, after a team of ethologists announced that experimental playback showed certain African monkeys to have rudimentarily meaningful calls. Drawing on newly discovered archival sources and interviews with key scientists, Gregory Radick here reconstructs the remarkable trajectory of a technique invented and reinvented to listen in on primate communication. Richly documented and powerfully argued, "The Simian Tongue" charts the scientific controversies over the evolution of language from Darwin's day to our own, resurrecting the forgotten debts of psychology, anthropology, and other behavioral sciences to the Victorian debate about the animal roots of human language.