Darren New wrote:
> Thomas de Groot wrote:
>> "Jim Henderson" <nos### [at] nospamcom> schreef in bericht 
>> news:4a766292$1@news.povray.org...
>>> There are good ways and bad ways to learn language.  That we have an
>>> instinct for it now without being taught how to learn a language implies
>>> an instinctive knowledge.
>>>
>>
>> I doubt this very much. The case of the "wild childs" pleads against 
>> this. The "Aveyron child", in the 19th century, was unable to learn 
>> language once he was found in the wild. And other cases go in the same 
>> direction. So, language is taught by example, and is not instinctive. 
>> I am not sure, but I think this is also the common consensus among 
>> scientists.
> 
> I think people don't have an instinct for a particular language, but an 
> instinct to learn whatever language they're around. Much like birds 
> learn how to fly, pretty much reliably.
> 
> Of course, if you're entire raised around non-verbal beings, the 
> instinct to try to learn is going to get frustrated, just like you can 
> starve without food even tho you have an instinct to get hungry and eat 
> when you need to.
> 
What usually happens is that they learn the body language and 
vocalizations of the species they are dealing with. In some cases, its 
easier to teach them basic signs, than teach them *spoken* language. The 
reason being, simply, that often body language, in species with a narrow 
range of ability to vocalize, use body posture and the like more to get 
across basic ideas. But, you are still dealing with a case where the 
person in question is being handed a more "limited" version of allowable 
responses, and thus loses the ability to learn more complex ones, 
especially dealing with vocal control and interpretation.

Sometimes I think this happens in cases of extreme indoctrination too. 
You find people who don't just misread/hear something you said, they 
seem to be almost **incapable** of parsing the meaning, based on any 
definition of an idea, other than their own, and most of them, a) can't 
change their definitions, and b) turn out to have lived isolated from 
alternate meanings, often to an unbelievable extent (no TV, no Internet, 
no books not approved, no friends outside the indoctrination 
environment, no contact with people who have differing views). It seems 
to warp their perceptions so badly that its not like they can't 
understand the word, but its like... how its sometimes described trying 
to learn an Asian language, when all your concepts are Western. Some 
things simply **don't** translate, and you end up trying to find a 
definition you *do* have, which fits the new word, despite the fact that 
no definition you possess fits the real meaning. And, in the case of 
*some* people isolated, by faiths, from the rest of humanity, for a long 
period of their early lives, unless they snuck stuff, or went to friends 
houses and saw it, etc., its like having a Brit ask you where to find 
the crisps, or if they can bum a fag. If you have no word for the 
former, and your entire universe has never contained a version of the 
later than involved tobacco... Only, the sort of problem I am talking 
about is actually *worse*, like, "What does the word 'evidence' or 
'theory' mean to these people?"

-- 
void main () {
   If Schrödingers_cat is alive or version > 98 {
     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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