At 06:55 AM 07/30/1999 -0400, George Murphy wrote:
> No doubt I could get this answer by reading his book, but what does he
>consder the "same forms of organization as all other language?"
>
Syntax. Syntax falls into consistent patterns and seems to be hardwired
into our brains. This is the advance that Nom Chomsky successfully made.
Stephen Pinker, in the Language Instinct discusses how the various syntaxes
form. Pinker advocates that there are master switches which control the
syntax.
Pinker says:
"Chomsky suggests that the unordered super-rules (principles) are
universal and innate, and that when children learn a particular language,
they do not have to learn a long list of rules, because they are born
knowing the super-rules. All they have to learn is whether a particular
language has the parameter value head-first, as in English or head-last, as
in Japanese. They can do that merely by noticing whether a verb comes
before or after its object in any sentence in their parent's speech. If
the verb comes before the object, as in Eat your spinach!, the child
concludes that the language is head-first; if it comes after, as in Your
spinach eat!, the child concludes that the language is head-last. Huge
chunks of grammar are then available to the child, all at once, as if the
child were merely flipping a switch to one of two possible positions. If
this theory of language learning is true, it would help solve the mystery
of how children's grammar explodes into adultlike complexity in so short a
time. They are not acquiring dozens or hundreds of rules; they are just
setting a few mental switches." ~ Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct,
(New York: Harper/Perennial, 1994), p. 112
Unfortunately, my books are in storage so I can't look things up right now
on that issue for a fuller discussion.
Martin Ruhlen would also argue that some of the words in Australian are
rooted with the rest of the human language. I posted something on this a
few months back in which Ruhlen believes that the data supports a former
single language. Ruhlen in no religionist, but a famous linguist.
glenn
Foundation, Fall and Flood
Adam, Apes and Anthropology
http://www.flash.net/~mortongr/dmd.htm
Lots of information on creation/evolution