"So, Darwin writes, "Man has an instinctive tendency to speak, as we see in the babble of our young children, while no child has an instinctive tendency to bake, brew or write."
And one reason we know this is because of the demonstrated case studies where a language is created within a single generation. The standard example is people involved in the slave trade. The slave trade revolving around tobacco or cotton or coffee or sugar would tend to mix slaves and laborers from different language backgrounds, in part deliberately, so as to avoid the possibility of revolt. What would happen is these people who were enslaved from different cultures would develop a makeshift communication system so they could talk to one another. And this is called a "pidgin," p-i-d-g-i-n, a pidgin.
And this pidgin was how they would talk.
And this pidgin was not a language.
It was strings of words borrowed from the different languages around them and put together in sort of haphazard ways. The question is what happens to the children who are raised in this society. And you might expect it that they would come to speak a pidgin, but they don't. What happens is, in the course of a single
generation, they develop their own language. They create a language with rich syntax and morphology and phonology, terms that we'll understand in a few minutes. And this language that they create is called a "creole." And languages that we know now as creoles, the word refers back to their history. That means that they were developed from pidgins. And this is interesting because this suggests that to some extent the ability to use and understand and learn language is part of human nature. It doesn't require an extensive cultural history. Rather, just about any normal child, even when not exposed toa full-fledged language, can create a language."
© Paul Bloom
Yale Lectures on Introduction to Psychology, 2007
[link]
And one reason we know this is because of the demonstrated case studies where a language is created within a single generation. The standard example is people involved in the slave trade. The slave trade revolving around tobacco or cotton or coffee or sugar would tend to mix slaves and laborers from different language backgrounds, in part deliberately, so as to avoid the possibility of revolt. What would happen is these people who were enslaved from different cultures would develop a makeshift communication system so they could talk to one another. And this is called a "pidgin," p-i-d-g-i-n, a pidgin.
And this pidgin was how they would talk.
And this pidgin was not a language.
It was strings of words borrowed from the different languages around them and put together in sort of haphazard ways. The question is what happens to the children who are raised in this society. And you might expect it that they would come to speak a pidgin, but they don't. What happens is, in the course of a single
generation, they develop their own language. They create a language with rich syntax and morphology and phonology, terms that we'll understand in a few minutes. And this language that they create is called a "creole." And languages that we know now as creoles, the word refers back to their history. That means that they were developed from pidgins. And this is interesting because this suggests that to some extent the ability to use and understand and learn language is part of human nature. It doesn't require an extensive cultural history. Rather, just about any normal child, even when not exposed toa full-fledged language, can create a language."
© Paul Bloom
Yale Lectures on Introduction to Psychology, 2007
[link]
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