Re: unnatural languages

On Mar 13, 2:26 pm, hru...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Herman Rubin) wrote:
In article <12p4tplh1v17z$.1vdl8gg0o0vzr$....@xxxxxxxxxx>,
Brian M. Scott <b.sc...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 12 Mar 2007 15:02:57 -0400, Herman Rubin
<hru...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
<news:et4851$2oro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> in sci.lang:
In article <1173718375.324131.311...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Peter T. Daniels <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

[...]

Human infants are language-acquisition-machines, and their internal
equipment is attuned to certain types of input data -- namely, human
language.
They are knowledge acquisition machines, and there is no
evidence whatever that they are attuned to the various
types of human languages more than others.
There is no evidence that they are attuned to any linguistic
data *except* natural human language.

Has it been tried? There is no evidence that they
are not attuned to "unnatural" languages.

So you, too, are advocating child abuse?

If you had lived before 1865, you could have taken a slave baby at
birth and tried raising it without a human language. (No, there were
probably laws about abusing even slave children.)

Besides, how unnatural are these languages? They are
designed by people who have learned natural ones, so
their structure is affected by this, and more so
their vocabulary.

They are designed by people who share this peculiar idea of yours that
there is something wrong with the way the language capacity evolved
and the way language has been changing ever since, and therefore want
to replace the natural phemomena of language with something they think
is more "structured."

.

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