How children pick up a language: Everett's view (Humans)

by dhw, Wednesday, January 11, 2017, 12:24 (2872 days ago) @ David Turell

QUOTE: "Recursion is not the basis of human language. One language shows that. Language does not seem to be innate. There seems to be no narrow faculty of language nor any universal grammar. Language is ancient and emerges from general human intelligence, the need to build communities and cultures."

David’s comment: A very long essay, which deserves reading, but Everett makes reasonable points that our giant brain has enough capacity to create language without an underlying universal grammar.

It is my totally unoriginal belief, which I regard as self-evident, that the thousands of human languages and the languages of every other species have arisen from the need to communicate, and the form of the language (sounds, gestures, chemicals etc.) depends on the physical attributes available to the species. I agree with Everett that the vast range of human language arises from the vast range of our intelligence, which requires a vast range of sounds (evolving into a vast range of vocabulary and structures); that there is no universal grammar; that each human language has evolved to fulfil the needs of the group that uses it, as has the language of every other species on the planet.