Re: Italian vs Turkish

From: Nathan Sanders (nsanders.DIE.SPAM_at_wso.williams.edu)
Date: 12/30/04 

Date: Thu, 30 Dec 2004 16:23:27 GMT

In article <cr1143$5kb$1@news.hawaii.edu>,
 Greg Lee <greg@ling.lll.hawaii.edu> wrote:

> Peter T. Daniels <grammatim@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>
> > If a language capacity had evolved more than once, then there would be
> > sets of languages that arose within one or another, and they would
> > differ in some small but essential way(s), and infants' automatic
> > learning of languages would differ at least in efficiency, if not in
> > possibility at all. It has never been observed that infants from one
> > speech community (or ethnic group) have the slightest difficulty
> > learning the language of any other.
>
> Every time all the speakers of a village were killed, leaving only
> young children to fend for themselves and exercise their language
> capacity by inventing one to communicate with one another, you got
> a new language not descended from any one existing. So, it's
> disputable.

But how many times has this actually happened? I'm not aware of a
general trend of wiping out everyone in a village except children of
pre-speaking age[1] (who then somehow manage to survivie without
adults).

More importantly, how many of those times have a resulting language
that flourishes (gets passed down to multiple generations as
first/native languages)?

[1] A requirement if we want to ensure that the neo-language isn't
based on the pre-existing language the children had been exposed to
prior to the untimely slaughter of the speech-capable villagers.

Nathan 

-- 
Nathan Sanders
Linguistics Program       nsanders@wso.williams.edu                           
Williams College          http://wso.williams.edu/~nsanders
Williamstown, MA 01267

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