Language change vs. stability in conservative language communities. A case study of Icelandic

In Chapter Twelve I shall examine the on-going search for extraterrestrial intelligent life. I shall argue that evidence from a quite different field—studies of woodpecker evolution on Earth—instructs us about the inevitability of evolving intelligent life, and hence about our uniqueness, not only on Earth but also in the accessible universe. EIGHT BRIDGES TO HUMAN LANGUAGE The gulf between animal vocal communication and human speech has traditionally been viewed as unbridgeable. In fact, recent studies of animal vocalizations show some of them to be far more sophisticated than we had previously suspected. On the other hand, there are dozens of cases in which humans have been forced by exceptional social circumstances to create simplified languages, possibly illustrating two primitive stages in the evolution of human language. Thus, we are beginning to understand how our most unique and important distinction from animals nevertheless arose from animal precursors. The mystery of human language origins is the most crucial in understanding how we became uniquely human ...»