Traditional transmission is a design feature of language that the anthropologist Charles F. Hockett developed to distinguish the features of human language from those of animal communication. He discovered thirteen features that all human languages have. Animals might communicate with some of the thirteen basic design features of language but never with all of them. Traditional transmission is exemplified by the fact that language is learned in social groups. Although there is disagreement about how much linguistic capability humans are born with the only way that humans learn language and refine its use as they grow is in social settings.
Famous quotes containing the word traditional:
“I conceive that the leading characteristic of the nineteenth century has been the rapid growth of the scientific spirit, the consequent application of scientific methods of investigation to all the problems with which the human mind is occupied, and the correlative rejection of traditional beliefs which have proved their incompetence to bear such investigation.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)