
New Words, New World: What happens when a language is born [audio] - david_west
http://www.radiolab.org/story/91730-new-words-new-world/
======
mattheusser
I don't get why this is so great. Stopped at 14 minutes in. What am I missing?

------
mattheusser
I don't get why this is so great. Stopped at 14 minutes in. What am I missing?

~~~
stan_rogers
This is likely a response to
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10612447](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10612447)

The Nicaraguan Sign Language (ISN)[0] is an incredibly interesting phenomenon,
demonstrating at least that humans will find a way to use language
_regardless_ of whether or not a culture of language exists around them,
provided that they have the opportunity to do so early enough. Does it confirm
that language capacity is innate, that Chomsky's "language organ" (I'm sure he
rues the day he ever used that phrase; he's been trying to clarify what he
meant for sixty years) exists? It's not the only occurrence of this sort that
is known but it's the first that was documented as it happened. (Hawaiian
Creole English also arose among children in relatively recent times, but its
documentation is oblique, consisting mostly of recorded complaints about a new
and obviously unacceptable manner of speaking among "today's youth".)

It's important to keep in mind that these kids were not taught the language,
they developed it on their own because they had no real language. They had
ways of communicating, of course, through _mimicas_ , but fundamentally humans
are unsatisfied with merely making their needs known. Language—the movement of
thought from one skull to another—is a huge part of what we are.

It's a fascinating story, but there are better tellings of it.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language)

------
miguelrochefort
Does this somehow supports the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis?

~~~
stan_rogers
No. If anything, it blows it up. If (natural) language were a constraint on
thought, these kids would have been almost incapable of thought at the
founding of the school. (You really do have to see what the older "kids"—at
twenty-ish—were like, even in the new world, with a halting handle on some
parts of the newly-emerging language and nothing really but _mimicas_ —miming
gestures—to work with.)

