Tales from the Geek, Part One

There have been some neato-keen geeky stories recently, so I'm going to plow through some of them. Savor these few moments; the bad news will return soon enough.

This time, it's news via the BBC that

[f]ive lines of ancient script on a shard of pottery could be the oldest example of Hebrew writing ever discovered, an archaeologist in Israel says. ...

Experts at Hebrew University said dating showed it was written 3,000 years ago - about 1,000 years earlier than the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The writing is in proto-Canaanite, a precursor of the Hebrew alphabet, and only a few words - including judge, slave, and king - have been deciphered so far. Researchers say they believe it's Hebrew because of the presence of a word that is only used in that language, but others aren't so sure: Lead archaeologist Yosef Garfinkel's

colleagues at Hebrew University said the Israelites were not the only ones using proto-Canaanite characters, therefore making it difficult to prove it was Hebrew and not a related tongue spoken in the area at the time.

But not matter if it's Hebrew or not,

Hebrew University archaeologist Amihai Mazar said the inscription was "very important", as it is the longest proto-Canaanite text ever found.

The idea of "lost languages," the fact that there are ancient languages which can't be translated because there aren't enough surviving texts long enough to do analysis, has long fascinated me. In fact, the very idea of language itself interests me. Noam Chomsky made his name by arguing that there is a basic, common, underlying syntax to all languages - which strongly suggests that not only the ability for, but the root structure of, language is hard-wired into the human brain. (His famous line "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" was to illustrate the idea: Even though the statement is complete, internally-contradictory nonsense that is unlikely to ever have been spoken before he came up with it, we instantly recognize its syntactic correctness.)

Others - notably, Stephen Pinker - have challenged that idea, but even he admits that the ability to language is inherent in people.

Related to that is the recent finding that birds "learn to sing from a hymn sheet in their head," as the BBC put it a couple of days ago.

Swiss researchers have identified a region of the Zebra Finch brain which they believe has an internal recording of how the birds ought to be singing.

A separate region seems to enable the birds to identify mistakes in their songs, they wrote in Nature journal.

What happened was that a team from the University of Zurich monitored the brain activity of the birds as they sang and as they listened to a recording of other zebra finches singing. They found that while the birds were singing, parts of their brain associated with listening were always active and other neurons became active when the birds made a mistake. According to team leader Professor Richard Hahnloser,

"This is a proof of concept that birds do actually listen to their own songs, and they do seem to be comparing it to something that they expect, or would like to hear." ...

The authors believe their research could also shed light on how humans learn to speak.

It has long been assumed that, like songbirds, humans learn complex vocal patterns by first listening to their speech and then comparing it to patterns stored in the brain.

But very little is known about the neural mechanisms involved.

This could well add to that knowledge.