Re: THEORY: Question about the evolution of language

On Tue, 7 Sep 1999, Nik Taylor wrote:

> JOEL MATTHEW PEARSON wrote:
> > I have to go with Boudewijn on this one.  There have been well-documented
> > cases of children who were raised (singly or in pairs/groups) by abusive
> > or psychotic parents who kept them isolated and never spoke to them,
> > and in all cases they failed to develop language.
>
> But those were extremely small groups.  I think that, once you reach a
> certain critical mass (my guess is a few dozen), language will
> spontaneously develop.  But, this is unprovable, and little more than a
> guess.
Well, the first human language(s) had to come from somewhere, I guess.
The questions for your hypothetical experimenter to answer are:  What
is the critical mass, and what sort of time period are we talking
about?  Would the original isolated group of children develop a full-
blown language, given their 'hard-wiring', or would the development
of a full-blown language take a few - or few hundred - generations
to come about?

> > Linguistic development
> > requires linguistic input, pure and simple.
>
> Ah, but Nicaraguan Sign Language seems to violate that.  Admittedly,
> they did come from families where they had some sort of crude
> communication (a few dozen signs at most), however, I don't see any
> reason why these hypothetical children would not develop first a few
> dozen signs, and then perhaps a full-blown sign-language in the manner
> of NSL.  Speach is harder to see a development of.
Well, I think you're seriously downplaying the significance of the
linguistic input the Nicaraguan children received, however limited it
might have been.  (And anyway, I doubt it was really so limited.
'Homesign' systems usually consist of more than a few dozen signs;
IIRC, some of the better studied homesign systems ran into the
hundreds of signs.  If so, then we're edgin' up towards a pidgin
level of complexity, I think.)

> > This isn't to say that the NSL case is uninteresting - it's extremely
> > interesting.  But it's interesting as an example of spontaneous
> > creolisation in action - the development of a 'complete' language out
> > of pidgin source material.  I don't think it qualifies as a case of
> > spontaneous language invention.
>
> Well, it was far more limited than most creoles.  Creoles typically come
> from fully-developed languages, first pidginized.  From what I
> understand, they had nothing approaching even a crude pidgin before
> being brought together.
I'm not so sure about that.  And anyway, I'm not disputing the fact
that NSL is a 'new' language, spontaneously developed by a new
speech community which did not previously share a common language.
What I'm disputing is your characterisation of NSL as having arisen sui
generis, as it were.  NSL definitely developed out of a pidgin, which
in turn grew out of the sharing of certain common homesign conventions
among students at the recently-established school for the deaf in
Managua.  Just because NSL developed differently from spoken creoles
that we know about is no reason not to call it a creole.  It still
fits the definition, I think.

Anyhow, we seem to be remembering the case study rather differently.
I guess I'll have to go back and re-read the original articles.  It's
been awhile...

Matt.