Hello Pole,
To get a more balanced view on the question of what makes language work, I suggest you have a look at the cognitive linguistics approach.
I definitely will. Language is my thing. Up till now I've examined it only by study of specific languages. Now I'm looking at it from a more abstract view, and it is fascinating.
The creol thing is amazing, but it only happens when the culture you are born into doesn't provide you with with sufficient grammatical constructs to fulfill your communicative needs.
Yes. My original point was simply that our need to create causes language to exist. If sufficient means already does exist, well, 'nuff said.
In the case you desctibed there was an activating stimulus: the children were brought together and allowed to interact. There are real examples of people who were held in isolation from birth to the age of 15 and more. They were never able to master any language after reaching the critical age. Just as you will never learn to speak Portugese like a native speaker, you old bastard (sorry that's Gumby's expression).
Yes, I understand that critical acquisition period. But the first part of your quote above almost seems almost silly. I take it as a given that 99.9999% of humans live in contact with other humans. So interaction is a given. The children were certainly not exposed to language - the point is that each generation created what did not exist before. But I think we are in agreement here. A single person in isolation would not create language. Again, to me this seems like a silly point, except for the fact that the poor guy would be deprived of a great tool for organizing and ordering his own thoughts.
If it was a tropical island, would they ever develop the concept of snow? Or is there some determinism involved anyway?
I really don't think this is a function of language. Let's say this tropical tribe has no word for snow, since they've never seen it and never spoken to anyone else who has seen it. Does this lack of vocabulary constrain their ability to think of snowy scenes? Or is it the mere fact that they haven't seen snow that constrains them? If one unusual day a tropical snowstorm dumps a meter of snow on the island, will the islanders somehow be disadvantaged in their ability to comprehend it? Or will they not rather invent new words for the new phenomena at that moment?
Or, from the opposite side, does a child raised in an enivronment that occasionally gets snow know what snow is before she sees it? Does the mere existence of the word in the vocabulary of others somehow confer an understanding in this child that the islanders are sadly lacking?
I consider vocabulary to be fairly divorced from the low-level engine that enables language. Words are just snap-in data components. Obviously, the more real-world knowledge you have, the more easily you will be able to create metaphor to describe other concepts. But this is a function of human ability to compare, anthopomorphize, etc, rather than being a magical power bestowed by possessing a set of words.
Maybe we should move this to a new thread?
SNG
