Posted by Nick Edwards on July 14, 1999 at 17:08:53:
On language as a cultural product.
Language is not a social construct. You do not need language in order to understand heirachy, sexual difference or availability, cheats, favours, kin, strangers, danger, novelty, food, fear, compassion. Many animals are able to act upon these ideas (which is as good a definition as any of comprehension), without language.
(By language i mean a verbal exchange of abstract symbols representing ideas).
Children, without parents to teach them, develop their own language, children refine pidgin into creole. Deaf children evolve the clumsy adult-acquired sign language of (vocally able) adoptive parents into more fluent and expressive grammars. And these grammars are repeated exactly throughout all the cultures of the world. The studies that have proposed differences in the basic grammars (or even vocabularies) of the world, have, on close examination, been flawed.
Opinion on this, is admittedly divided. On the one hand we see the scientists, on the other are the formidable linguists who inhabit an obscure BBS, dedicated to an underrated writer and thinker.
Language is a complex adaptive response to environment, like, for example, the eye.