Re: Italian vs Turkish

From: Greg Lee (greg_at_ling.lll.hawaii.edu)
Date: 12/30/04 

Date: 30 Dec 2004 20:17:02 GMT

Nathan Sanders <nsanders.DIE.SPAM@wso.williams.edu> wrote:
> 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?

About 100 times. It only happens every 10,000 years.

> 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).

It doesn't have to be a trend to have happened a few times in
the last million years.

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

About 3. As your intuition has told you, it's quite rare, so there
are only 4 or so completely independent language families.

> [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. 

-- 
Greg Lee <greg@ling.lll.hawaii.edu>

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