Editing 2567: Language Development
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==Explanation== | ==Explanation== | ||
− | + | {{incomplete|Created by a AUTOMATON - What the baby hast sayeth? Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}} | |
+ | Rather than learning to speak normally, this baby is going through all of the stages of the evolution of the English language, from proto-Indo-European to Germanic to Old English. | ||
+ | {{w|Proto-Indo-European_language|Proto-Indo-European}} is a theorized common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. {{w|Proto-Germanic_language|Proto-Germanic}} is a reconstructed language formerly spoken in Iron Age Scandinaia. It developed out of proto-Indo-European and is the common ancestor for all {{w|Germanic languages}}. Old English and later English developed out of Germanic. | ||
− | + | In writing, reconstructed words from the Proto-Indo-European language are commonly marked with an asterisk (*). Somehow, the baby seems to actually pronounce these asterisks. The baby says the Proto-Indo-European roots that the words "milk" and "please" are derived from. | |
− | + | Some sounds babies make are hard to interpret.{{citation needed}} However, humans have a tendency to recognize known things and patterns. They see what they want to see and hear what they want to hear. Thus, a parent familiar with proto-Indo-European may falsely hear their baby speak proto-Indo-European by misinterpreting unintelligible sounds. | |
− | + | The conventional meaning of {{w|Language development}} is the process by which infants begin to talk, that is to understand and produce intelligible speech. The field of {{w|Language acquisition}} seeks to understand how baby humans are able to rapidly comprehend, internalize, and begin producing a new language so rapidly. | |
− | + | A field that is normally only seen as tangentially related is {{w|Historical linguistics}}, which studies how languages evolved from each other throughout tens of thousands of years. The {{w|Proto-Indo-European language}} is the theorized common ancestor of all Indo-European languages. When linguists in the field of {{w|Comparative linguistics}} notice similarities in different languages (say English and Germanic), they create theoretical ancestral proto-languages to theorize what common ancestor that the two languages English and German (for example) had in common. Thus the proto-language of Proto-Indo-European has been proposed to explain the similarities between most of the languages in Europe as well as several languages spoken in the Middle East, India, and regions between. | |
− | + | When Megan describes their baby's speech as progressing from Proto-indo-european to Germanic to Old English, she is describing the languages that in the theoretical chain from Proto-indo-european leading up to Modern English today, as if the baby is progressing through the history of language evolution.In doing so Megan seems to be applying {{w|Recapitulation Theory}} from biology to language development. In reality, babies develop their language faculties by mimicking what they hear around them, starting with {{w|Babbling}}. | |
− | + | Perhaps this is an alternate universe where every baby has to gradually develop their language skills until they reach the ultimately developed language of Modern English, belying an ethnocentric implication that Modern English is somehow an intrinsically a natural end-point of linguistic evolution. | |
− | + | In the title text, Randall describes a 2 year old child as speaking Elizabethan English, a dialect of modern English used by Shakespeare more than 400 years ago. | |
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− | In the title text, Randall describes a 2 | ||
==Transcript== | ==Transcript== | ||
− | :[Megan and Cueball | + | {{incomplete transcript|Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}} |
+ | :[Megan and Cueball stand to the right of the frame, discussing their baby, Hairy. Hairy sits on the left side of a table in an elevated baby chair.] | ||
:Megan: He's only 1, so he still mostly speaks proto-Indo-European. | :Megan: He's only 1, so he still mostly speaks proto-Indo-European. | ||
:Megan: But we've heard a few Germanic words already, so Old English can't be far off. | :Megan: But we've heard a few Germanic words already, so Old English can't be far off. | ||
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:Cueball: They progress so fast! | :Cueball: They progress so fast! | ||
− | + | :Baby Hairy: *melg- | |
− | + | :Baby Hairy: *pl(e)hk- | |
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{{comic discussion}} | {{comic discussion}} | ||
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