Re: LANGUAGE LAWS

>Tommie Powell wrote:
>> So I don't believe that the first language had any defined (or
>> definite) words
>
>The problem with your argument lies in crude sign languages created by
>deaf people isolated from other deaf people.  Before there was any deaf
>community, deaf people simply created a few crude signs, which their
>family could interpret.
This is true, but maybe misleading (and maybe not, I certainly don't
believe any account of language origins, as there's no undebatable
evidence).

Certainly, sign langauges of the more fully formed sort have spontanteously
formed in all the known cases where there were deaf children (plural). As
far as anyone knows, people will figure out a way to commuinicate
linguistically, if they are given the opportunity.

Twin languages, while often consigned to the dustbin of lanauge pathology,
are also very interesting because they are also "spontaneously generated"
linguistic structures. [Twin languages are private langauges occasionally
evolved by identical twins (or siblings), especially if they are isolated
from wide social contact by parental abuse or handicap.]

   -- David
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