Recently I watched a documentary on the tanzanian Hadza tribe, one of the last hunter gatherer tribes on Earth. Their language is a distinct click and pop language and they regularly imitate animal calls (monkeys, baboons, birds) when they hunt but also when they communicate with each other, tell stories etc.
replyI think it's not impossible that words evolved as adaptations of the environmental sounds with which our ancestors lived. The human creativity producing DNA is also a remix of preexisting molecules formed under evolutionary pressure, so the view that it's turtles all the way down, unintuitive as it is, may not be so indefensible after all.
I mean what is your criterion on invention here? On the one hand, each specific word could be seen as a new invention. On the other hand, all languages basically correlate strongly with the environment of their users - it's why LLMs turn out to be universal translators - and pattern-matching is hardly an invention, isn't it?
replyBut LLMs aren't turtles all the way down, they stop at vector embedded tokenized words.
replyMy view is that LLMs meet the standards by which we judge human creativity/inventiveness, and thus that one cannot claim LLMs "just repeat, never invent" without the same being true about humans.
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