Re: Do Children Learn Languages at Different Rates?

Aidan Kehoe wrote:
>
> Ar an seachtú lá de mí Eanair, scríobh Peter T. Daniels:
>
> > > >> It might mean that there are some languages that children find
> > > >> easier to learn than others.
> > > >
> > > > In that case, why haven't all languages evolved to be like Turkish?
> > > > (Or, more to the point, why would languages have evolved away from
> > > > the Turkish pattern?)
> > >
> > > Is this a test? :-)
> >
> > It's a reductio ad absurdum. You assume something contrary to fact,
> > discover that it leads to nonsense, so the initial assumption was false.
>
> It leads to nonsense if you assume that there is a good reason for Darwinian
> selection in favour of languages slightly more easily acquired in
> childhood. Which assumption is shaky at best; a tribe becoming more
> effective as a group, in combat, say, because its two-year-olds better
> understand orders and can express themselves? Really!

You are looking tens of millennia too late. The selection was between
groups of proto-humans who may have had different capacities for
acquiring language. The one that produced the kind we have now,
obviously, is the one that was most successful.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
.

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