Re: History of French

From: John Atkinson (johnacko_at_bigpond.com)
Date: 09/17/04 

Date: Fri, 17 Sep 2004 16:21:43 GMT

"Mxsmanic" <mxsmanic@hotmail.com> wrote...

> Nathan Sanders writes:
>
> > You believe wrong. She uses no language, just signs. Language is not
> > an unstructured set of words.
>
> Why not?
>
> > So then why isn't she using ASL?
>
> She lacks the intelligence to do so, I suspect.

How do you define "intelligent"? If it means, able to answer questions
using a human-type language (which seems to be a major component of
"intelligence" as measured by IQ tests), of course you're right, by
definition. If you mean "able to learn to distinguish a couple of hundred
different plants and and know which ones are nutritious", I suspect she's a
good deal more intelligent than most sci.lang regulars.

> > I wonder which subset of ASL speakers would recognize "Koko
> > banana pretty flower table banana Koko Koko" to mean "I'm hungry,
> > please give me a banana"...

> I don't know. Most people do pretty well when human toddlers speak that
> way, though.

No human toddler ever spoke that way. Toddlers' sentences are short (unlike
that one of Koko's), but they are grammatical, even when they're at the
two-word stage. (The rules of their grammar aren't the same as those of the
adult language, of course!)

John.

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