McWhorter notes media whistling past graveyard
Or is it more like “letting sleeping dogs lie?”
On the issue of that new statue:
That Proto-German sex toy is fun enough, but it’s time the media stopped elevating things like it as evidence that our species only learned to think abstractly among its subset who, if the lifespan of our species were 24 hours, happened to wander into Europe around 7 PM.
Full article here (including swipes at Steve).
Labels: linkbait
“Proto-German sex toy” is pretty good.
People like this are a real threat to the human sciences. His logic is that attaching importance to the European creative explosion is politically unwholesome. There follows the suggestion that some scratches in ochre from Blombos are really the same as the Euro-bang and that there must have been a bang in New Guinea but no one is reporting on it. Euro-bang also contradicts the assumptions of linguists! None of this kind of talk be acceptable in an undergraduate term paper.
I don’t attribute very much significance to the Euro-bang myself but I hope that I could bring up real evidence and theory, not my own politics, in a discussion. It is shameful when prominent journalists exhibit their inability to separate politics and science.
Herrick — great catch.
To wit: Homo sapiens is known to be about 150,000 years old. According to the latest evidence, humans started their spread out of Africa as long as 80,000 years ago: the source to consult is Stephen Oppenheimer’s magnificent The Real Eve. Uncontroversial is that by 30,000 (or even 50,000) years ago, humans were not only in Europe, but already coating Asia and Oceania, as well as still thriving down in Africa.
Okay: but if this “Big Bang” happened in Europe, then presumably this dramatic mutation did not happen to people beyond Europe. And yet, it is assumed that all human beings are equal in basic mental endowment – and among linguists, that no languages are “primitive.”
..
Is the idea supposed to be that other groups of humans had their own “Big Bangs” independently? Researchers seem to have little interest in charting such: you never read about a “Big Bang” over in New Guinea in the Times or Nature.
…Or is it that somehow, once Europeans started banging, somehow their ideas spread worldwide – with almost bizarre uniformity, coating every nook and cranny – such as all the way across Asia, back down into Africa
Ah. Professor McWhorter is just smart enough to be dumb. The New York Times is frantically gesticulating at him…but to no avail, the own goal has already slipped into the net.
Regarding the assumption of linguistic equivalence by linguists…I have some experience with this. The funny thing is that they will frequently begin by claiming that “all languages are equal in expressive power” and then making some handwaving reference to Chomskyian universal grammars (the Piraha may be an exception to this). But claiming that “no languages are ‘primitive’” because of ostensible equivalence at the universal grammar level is like claiming that all programming languages which are Turing complete are equally advanced.
Yet Brainfuck ain’t no Lisp, and Ebonics[1] ain’t no Queen’s English.
[1] something McWhorter writes a lot about, though he and his mentor John Rickford call it AAVE: African American Vernacular English!
And from his previous post…
The black English cadence is an accent (just as the mainstream English cadence is). Yet Obama did not grow up with it. At 16 and 17 he was in Hawaii; before that he had been in Indonesia. Surely he didn’t pick up the cadences of Oakland in either locale. (Maybe today, with the reign of hiphop, he might have, since “Ebonics” is increasingly a youth “dialecta franca.” But in the mid-70s hiphop’s worldwide breakout was years away.)
Obama himself does not describe “learning to speak like a black American”–it was likely an unconscious process, part of coming to feel part of the culture in his late twenties as he settled in Chicago. Thus there is no claim here that Obama is a phony: people generally do not take on accents deliberately. Many of us have friends who moved to England as adults and have lived there for several years. They wind up with halfway English accents–but not on purpose.
…I knew various black people growing up who, embracing black identity late in high school or in college, started using a black English cadence like their new friends. And they always used that cadence in second-language fashion. You could tell they hadn’t grown up with it, just as few of us could learn a new language and speak it with no accent whatsoever…
…It suggests at least that Obama is a gifted mimic. Perhaps it even correlates with the empathy he has called for in a new Supreme Court judge–which, on that note, was the occasion for more lowbrow verbiage from Steele a few days ago–”Empathize right on your behind”: perhaps an idea for the Republicans’ rap anthem?
Again, McWhorter is just smart enough to be dumb.
geecee makes a number of disparaging remarks about McWhorter and says:
Yet Brainfuck ain’t no Lisp, and Ebonics[1] ain’t no Queen’s English.
I rather think he misses the point but then so does McWhorter.
Ebonics might not be the Queen’s English, and neither is Chinese, but I know that Chinese in the hands (or perhaps mouth) of a Chinese person of IQ 130 and above can express just as many interesting and complex ideas as similarly endowed people can in the Queen’s English. I have no doubt that Ebonics could do so as well (of course such a community might have to create a lot of vocabulary).
The issue really is how many people in various groups can employ all the sophistication that these languages are capable of. McWhorter uses the claim to obscure the fact that Marvell processors are nowhere near as powerful as Intel’s Nehalem line.
Richard — one is no more capable of discussing spherical harmonics in Ebonics than of implementing GMail in PDP-8 assembly. At some point a quantitative difference becomes a qualitative one.
Moreover — I assume you’re familiar with Huffman codes? Frequently communicated concepts are assigned the shortest codewords. Hence Geneva Smitherman’s “Black Talk” — an Ebonics dictionary — allocates most of its space to words like “bitchslap” and “drive-by” rather than “CPU” or “integral”.
No matter what Ebonics may theoretically be capable of expressing…in theory, theory and practice are equivalent. In practice they are not.
Also Rich — just wanted to point out that’s an overlap/equality argument you’re making. All groups have murderers, not all groups have top universities. One can always point out an overlap between the left tail but that doesn’t mean the distros — let alone the right tail — are equivalent. That is even more undeniable when the sample size is N rather than 1.
geecee says:
Moreover — I assume you’re familiar with Huffman codes? Frequently communicated concepts are assigned the shortest codewords. Hence Geneva Smitherman’s “Black Talk” — an Ebonics dictionary — allocates most of its space to words like “bitchslap” and “drive-by” rather than “CPU” or “integral”.
The vocabularies of some segments of the genepool I hail from is similarly impoverished.
In addition, a PDP-8 or even a PDP-11 is a poor analogy. A better analogy is that some people, even in the same genepool have 90nm technology, while others have 45nm technology, and some have twice as much memory as others and 128-bit memory busses with 8 write buffers, while others have 256-bit wide memory busses with 16 write buffers.
Rich — no personal insult intended, obviously, but ALL of us have ancestors who were illiterates and indeed literally inhuman :) The fact that my great-great-…-granddaddy was a now-extinct primate swinging from the trees with a vocabulary of zero does not have any bearing on whether Ebonics is as practically expressive and elegant as English and Chinese.
Regarding your analogy, I’m not sure what you’re getting at, but you seem to try to be bringing it back to the idea that the distinction is quantitative rather than qualitative — a matter of degree rather than kind. That’s where we disagree.
It gets back to the difference between individuals and populations. Consider two populations with normal height distributions X and Y, with mu_X = 0, mu_Y =1, and sigma_X = sigma_Y = 1. For a sample of size 1, then P(X-Y > 0) > 0 — i.e. there is non-negligible probability that an individual from the shorter group has height greather than the individual from the taller group.
But if you pull out *N* samples, then P(frac{1}{N}sum_{i=1}^N (X_i – Y_i) > 0) starts to approach zero. In other words, anything which is related to the average properties of a *POPULATION* rather than an *INDIVIDUAL* is going to be disjoint and hence different in kind rather than degree.
And a language — like a city, or a nation — is a product of a population, not an individual.
I’m surprised this is a point you’re seriously arguing. You seem to be contending that “all it would take” is a wholesale transplantion of vocabulary. Well, then, “all it would take” is a wholesale transplantation of DNA! The former is just about as logistically difficult as the latter. We’re talking about a transition on the level of Flowers for Algernon.
Now, don’t get me wrong — Ebonics is a DSL, highly optimized for rap. The fabled multiplicity of words for snow among the Eskimo may or may not be apocryphal, but no one can dispute the bounty of Ebonical terms for drug dealing, murder, robbery, and rutting. These built-in language constructs allow rapid production of works of great beauty and power, such as “Ante Up” (an ode to armed robbery), “187” (a paean to homicide), and my personal favorite, “Bitches Ain’t Shit But Ho’s and Tricks” (catch the Ben Folds 5 version).
Archeologist Scott MacEachern (seen commenting on McWhorter’s blog) explicitly argued that there is no evidence of ancient Eurasian advancement, and linked this assertion to the IQ debate.
I referenced the Comin paper to him in late 2007, showing that Africa, the Americas, and Oceania have been technologically behind Eurasia for at least 3000 years, and he disputed it on the grounds that the technologies measured weren’t “more advanced,” and that poor countries just don’t have the same infrastructure for finding their advanced artifacts.
He disputes Guns, Germs, and Steel, because, of course, Eurasia never had the technological advantage the book is predicated on. No need to resort to initial resource advantages or the faster longitudinal diffusion of crops or technology, when there are no differences that need explaining anyway. Europeans conquered and colonized because they were uniquely depraved, not because they had advantages.
If being uniquely depraved lets you conquer the world, then obviously it’s an advantage.
Could I take a look at that exchange with Scott ?
Black talk is not just an accent. Blacks of sub-Saharan ancestry have a timbre to their voices no other race has. A Chinese, an east Indian, an Arab, a Pole, a Mexican mestizo–if they have the same accent you can’t tell them apart, but a black even with the same accent sounds different 99% of the time. I used to think it had something to do with the throat or something, but recently I learned that the black African tongue is shorter in proportion to the palata, than the tongues of other races. That might make the difference. In any case, the black “accent” is not just an accent.
Could I take a look at that exchange with Scott ?
It’s this thread. I can just quote the relevant part:
Scott: [W]e would expect that such relatively low intellectual potentials would manifest themselves in a corresponding level of cultural advance, correct. After all, average IQ=70 is a pretty significant level of intellectual deficit: that should manifest itself one way or another. So why are the archaeological and palaeoanthropological records from Africa entirely comparable to those from putatively-more-intelligent parts of the world, over the entire period of modern human occupation of the Earth?
——————————————
Me: You are asking if the historical record is consistent with a lower IQ in Sub-Saharan Africa than other parts of the world? The one attempt I?ve seen to actually quantify this question, measuring the sophistication of technology in each world region beginning in 1000 B.C. until today, found that it pretty much is. Sub-Saharan African populations have consistently trailed Europe and Asia, on average, in technological development for at least 3000 years.
I see no reason to travel back any further since the intelligence difference could have feasibly evolved even in the last 1000 years.
More to the point many factors influence history, regional power, and economic development, and this is as true today as it was in the past, so I am not thrilled about any mono-causal IQ ?theory of history?, nor do I believe viewpoints about genetic differences in traits like intelligence in any way need to be predicated on such a curious idea.
—————————————
Scott: The authors of that study – no archaeologists – made three fundamental mistakes. The first is that they ignored the warnings in their primary data source (Peregrine and Ember 2001): there?s a correlation between the intensity of archaeological research in a particular region and the likelihood that data on archaeological occurrences – including technological ones – will be uncovered. This is not an issue in the Murdockian model that they use, because that model is concerned with living populations. Second, many of their archaeological claims are simply nonsense: two cases at random thus that iron was being used in Asia Minor in the 3rd millennium BC, for example – meteoric iron was, as it was in many other areas, but smelted iron would not arrive until a thousand years later – or that cities existed in Greece at 1000 BC. Third, they rank technological systems that, while certainly different, are not differentially complex.
Now, I realise that such work articulates with your fundamental take on the world – that quantified data, even if erroneous, are better than non-quantified data, even if more accurate. But for this you?d actually have to get acquainted with some archaeological data, not rely on a drive-by on African history undertaken by a bunch of economists. If you take a look at archaeological data? not merely from the last 3000 years, but from the Middle Pleistocene until the historical period?. you will find no evidence for African cultural lag (MacEachern, S. 2006, Africanist archaeology and ancient IQ: racial science and cultural evolution in the 21st century, _World Archaeology_ 38(1): 72-92 and references therein). Jared Diamond is, perhaps, better-intentioned, but he?s also no authority on African history.
Apparently “more accurate” “non-quantified data” show no average technological differences between Europe and Africa in the last 3000 years.
Incidentally, I discussed this on Dr. Frost’s blog a few weeks back. Cross-cultural stereotypes about sub-Saharan African sexual behavior are at least 2000 years old, but consensus stereotypes about SSA intelligence seem to arrive later, about 1300 years ago (Frost argues the ‘low status’ association goes back earlier, but agrees with my general point).
The Comin paper indicates (p 50, Table 5) large African lag at 1000 BC, but much narrower lag at 0 AD, which could fit in with the dearth of intellectual stereotypes about Africans at the time. The gap is bigger than ever prior to the Age of Exploration:
20 percent of the income difference between Europe and Africa is explained by Africa?s lag in overall technology adoption in 1000 B.C., 8 percent is explained by the technology distance in 0 A.D., and 78 percent is explained by Africa?s lag in overall technology adoption in 1500 A.D. This gives a very different perspective on Africa?s poverty compared to the usual emphasis on modern governments. It also shifts backward in time the historical explanations for Africa?s poverty, compared to the usual emphasis of historians on the slave trade and colonialism.It would be nice to see how these numbers evolve between 500AD and 1000AD when views about African intellect emerge.
Well… it didn’t take much archaeological work to find out that ancient Eurasians had technologies like writing and major stone construction.
Hard to see how technological parity for the Subsahara since 2000 BC could seriously be suggested, not to mention Australia. Diamond’s position is about 100 times more defensible than this.
But:
1- “Eurasia” contains more than 3-quarters of mankind.
2- Within Eurasia, there has been wide spatio-temporal variation in technology (and societal development).
3- Make a comparison between South-West Asia (say, from the Iranian plateau to the Mediterranean) and North-West Europe at 1000BC, 0AD and 1000AD. Compare with modern IQ values (
geecee, isn’t it a bit fanciful to imply that the members of the English speaking population are made up only of those who can meaningfully use terms like “integral” or “CPU”? Anyway, the linguists’ generalization applies to the level of grammatical forms which has a much looser relationship with the sophistication of the culture of speakers than their vocabulary does. The change in such features is influenced more by the interaction of internal, unconscious subsystems of language than the communicative intents of it’s speakers. Here’s Pinker summarizing this point.
Linguists have documented vast amounts of variation, and have a good handle on many of its causes, but the causes are internal to language (such as phonological assimilation and enhancement, semantic drift, and syntactic reanalysis) and aren’t part of any symbolic or teleological plan of the culture. There are Subject-Object-Verb and Subject-Verb-Object languages, and tone and non-tone language, and null-subject and non-null-subject languages, but there are no SOV or SVO cultures, null-subject and non-null-subject cultures, and so on. The variation is just as autonomous as the universals.
And stripped of any PC implications, all the linguists’ generalization about languages being equally expressive refers to is that the subsystems in language tend to trade off in complexity, a language with more complex inflectional morphology tends to have less rigid, complex syntax and vice versa. A language isn’t usually complex or simple along all dimensions. Actually this is only true to a first approximation, McWhorter’s own work concerns how languages can differ significantly in grammatical complexity, though again, this complexity has much more to do with language internal properties than differences in cultural sophistication.
All that said, I think that examining how language usage relates to population differences is an area deserving more attention and badly needs release from PC restraints. I’m personally curious if emotive dimensions of personality differences in the black population might contribute to their penchant for coining memorable, pungent sayings, “I ain’t no nevermind” and the like, and if there are differences in how the mental lexicon is organized in this population that makes them more disposed to recognize polysemy, a central feature of black language poetry and humor, like in the yo mama joke “yo mama so stupid when she heard it was chilly outside, she ran and got a spoon.”
imply that the members of the English speaking population are made up only of those
Sirrah, I spy abuse of a quantifier. The mark of a good discussant is one who can state his opponent’s position in terms his interlocutor can agree with. :)
What I stated (not implied) is that population level manifestations of culture — such as language, or industrial development — are related to (and bounded by) the average traits of a population. This does not mean that the members of the English speaking population have uniformly high IQ. It does mean, however, that said individuals are unlikely to preponderate among the ranks Ebonical.
And stripped of any PC implications, all the linguists’ generalization about languages being equally expressive refers to [is] …
The primary thrust of “no language is primitive” is similar in form, intent, and analytical depth to “no person is illegal” or “no one is stupid” or “there is no such thing as race”.
It’s a statement of faith meant to bait you into a response so that you can be pounded with “racist!”. It’s on the same plane as “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy”. Basically a way to frame a scientific question in Marxist/egalitarian/religious terms.
McWhorter is not *as* guilty of this as others, which is not to say he’s not guilty.
A language isn’t usually complex or simple along all dimensions. Actually this is only true to a first approximation,
Indeed. The state of comparative linguistics is roughly: “defining equivalency down”.
Languages are indeed multivariate things — any reasonable featurization of a language would include things like its vocabulary size, the number of written works in the tongue, the ease of learning, speaking, and understanding, and of course the aggregate properties of its originators and speakers.
And such analysis would reveal that low IQ groups are hardly likely to avail themselves of the infinite recursive depths that their mother tongue theoretically makes available to them. Monosyllaby is what’s on the menu.
I’m personally curious if emotive dimensions of personality differences in the black population might contribute to their penchant for coining memorable, pungent sayings
This is likely to be a promising angle of attack. There might be some good stuff in the various analyses of how the East Asian psyche relates to East Asian languages. E.g. did the East Asian propensity/knack for awesome feats of memorization go a little overboard with all those Chinese symbols? Would a more systems driven Westerner have invented a tongue like that?
Interesting kinds of thoughts. H-bd probably affects macrohistory to a degree far greater than we currently appreciate.
Along those lines I remember thinking…perhaps the relative ease with which Europeans and South Asians pick up new languages is related to the number of different languages in a 100-mile radius in their evolutionary environments. Conversely, said linguistic diversity based selection pressure may not have been as strong in East Asia.
Razibowitz knows a lot more about the history of language than I do, and had some counterargument to this hypothesis that I forget.
polysemy
My all time favorite is “read books, get brain”.
A Chinese, an east Indian, an Arab, a Pole, a Mexican mestizo–if they have the same accent you can’t tell them apart, but a black even with the same accent sounds different 99% of the time.
I agree that blacks definitely have a particular ring to their voice, but I’d actually disagree a bit on whether the others all sound the same.
The differences may be more subtle, but I do think that East Indians have a slightly higher pitched and faster talking voice. East Asians are also higher pitched, but in a different way.
I don’t think the differences are *huge*, but I believe that if you hear enough of them you could tell the difference.
“but a black even with the same accent sounds different 99% of the time.”
Well, not 99%:
“Grogger was able to take these phone interviews, purge them of any identifying information, and then ask people to try to identify the voices as to whether the speaker was black or white. The listeners were pretty good at distinguishing race through voices: 98 percent of the time they got the gender of the speaker right, 84 percent of white speakers were correctly identified as white, and 77 percent of black speakers were correctly identified as black.”
The whitest-sounding black person I know is a very dark-skinnned African-American woman from inner-city Baltimore who is nevertheless 1/4 white and 1/4 Native American… I wonder if there’s a correlation between non-black ancestry and not having a typical “black voice,” when other variables are controlled for. Might be an interesting study!
Jason,
That’s just measuring how sensitive (or intelligent) the listener is.
“Black talk is not just an accent. Blacks of sub-Saharan ancestry have a timbre to their voices no other race has”
This is true. I am a gifted mimic with a physically pan-European look. I have convinced people – in Britain – that I was a middle-class Brit. I could do it again if I lost my self-consciousness. I can do any regional American accent. But I could never do a black accent. For that you need a black throat, or tongue, or whatever.
My former singing teacher told me she thought that blacks had a different vocal apparatus than whites or Asians.
Make a comparison between South-West Asia (say, from the Iranian plateau to the Mediterranean) and North-West Europe at 1000BC, 0AD and 1000AD. Compare with modern IQ values
Merry Christmas. The numbers from the paper have been transformed into “TechQ” scores for comparison with modern IQ scores.
Paper indicates:
Currently Africa = 1.7 standard deviations behind Europe. (2.2 SD behind W Europe)
1500AD Africa = 2.9 SDs behind Europe. (-3.3 SD WE)
0AD Africa = .7 SD behind Europe. (-1.1 SD WE)
1000BC Africa = 1.9 SD behind Europe. (-1.8 SD WE)
The differences may be more subtle, but I do think that East Indians have a slightly higher pitched and faster talking voice. East Asians are also higher pitched, but in a different way.”
You could be right about that. The black voice is immediately and strikingly unique. The particular timbre of other races may differ but more subtly. For instance, I have noticed a certain musical, tinny, slightly higher note, to the voices of Asians and American Indians, even when their accents are entirely American. Sure enough, many of these languages are “tonal.” I read once that east Asians still speaking their own languages, tend to have perfect pitch in the musical sense.
but a black even with the same accent sounds different 99% of the time.”
Well, not 99%:
“Grogger was able to take these phone interviews, purge … 98 percent of the time they got the gender of the speaker right, 84 percent of white speakers were correctly identified as white, and 77 percent of black speakers were correctly identified as black.”
Maybe it depends on familiarity. I get the voice 99% of the time. Some of the ones I’ve identified are very nearly “white” sounding, and i can imagine a lot of people would not pick up on it. Maybe it’s because of where I’ve lived all my life (mid-Atlantic urban area.)
Jason: noticed the words South, West and Asia in the very snippet from my post that you quoted? :)
The hypothesis is that technical / social development at any given point in time can be loosely predicted from differences at 1500BC, and/or from current IQ data. My point is that Intra-”Eurasian” (to use your term) dynamics suggest otherwise. I may be wrong, but given the evidence I’m aware of I’ll need to see some pretty hard data before I change my mind.
The primary thrust of “no language is primitive” is similar in form, intent, and analytical depth to “no person is illegal” or “no one is stupid” or “there is no such thing as race”.
Disagree. Only a superficial reading of “no language is primitive” can be incorporated into a PC narrative, taking it in the precise meaning that linguists are attributing to the statement it conforms to just what you would expect from HBD assumptions. Given the differences in average intelligence of different linguistic groups, you would expect that if there is equal grammatical complexity across these groups than the ability to have these grammatical features and the mechanisms of their variation should be decoupled from intelligence, which is what the linguists have claimed. So “No language is primitive” by no means implies “no one is stupid.”
Ebonics is a DSL, highly optimized for rap.
I’d say it’s highly optimized for music in general. That’s why white musicians have imitated it in their music for so long.
almost all American black music, from Gospel (which is really a black adaptation of Scottish and English hymns), to rap (eww), leaves me cold. Yeah, I know a lot of white musicians were influenced, but blacks were also influenced. Everybody influenced each other. The only black music by blacks that I really like are some Motown numbers from the 60s, and some of the groups from the 50s.
OTOH, I have heard native African music, real music in the sense of having melody as well as rhythm, that really is quite beautiful. As far as I know, it is native and not influenced, as American black music is, by any other influences.
“almost all American black music..leaves me cold”: let me recommend the black jazz musicians of the 20s and 30s (and the white ones too, of course). Armstrong, Morton, Dodds, Bechet, Fitzgerald, Wilson, Waller, Christian, Ellington…
Armstrong’s West End Blues would be a good place to start.
“almost all American black music..leaves me cold”: let me recommend the black jazz musicians of the 20s and 30s (and the white ones too, of course). Armstrong, Morton, Dodds, Bechet, Fitzgerald, Wilson, Waller, Christian, Ellington…
Armstrong’s West End Blues would be a good place to start.”
You are not the first jazz afficiando who has informed me that I need to be educated. Thing is, I don’t want to be.
Do not like it for the most part.
Most people can find an occasional piece of a genre they don’t normally listen to, that they like and that might be the case with jazz even for me. Indeed, in context (old movies for example) jazz fits. But it can still give me a terrible, down feeling I can’t define.
One reason may be a person’s personal musical notes–some people respond more naturally to certain types of music. It has something to do with most modern music (white, black or any color)being on the downbeat, rather than the upbeat. I don’t understand enough about music to explain this, maybe you know about it, but that’s what the researcher found while writing the book Superlearning 2000. If it’s downbeat, it causes the listener to focus strictly on the physical. Upbeat, it tends to take you out of yourself, to a better place. I don’t know–maybe jazz does that for some people. Not for me.
Superlearning 2000 opened a whole new perspective on the realm of music.
.perhaps the relative ease with which Europeans and South Asians pick up new languages
I was wondering if anyone has come across any evidence about the differences between races in terms of ability in picking up and speaking new languages well.
I’ve got anecdotal evidence. When I was studying Hebrew in Israel, a group of Ethiopian immigrants was housed near us. The kids played with Israeli kids and soon were chattering in fluent Hebrew. Us adults, who were all educated adults, some of us fluent in more than one language, were still struggling with this difficult opaque language after three months. And many of us had a head start with reading and writing it.
That’s been my experience, Diana – that’s Africans pick up languages relatively easily. Unfortunately, I have not come across any rigorous study that proves it. So I was little surprised with the quote I highlighted above that claims that Europeans and South Asians pick up new languages relatively easily (I assumed the writer meant relative to all other groups).
The kids played with Israeli kids and soon were chattering in fluent Hebrew.
And you are surprised by this?
I wasn’t making a point that Africans pick up languages easily. My point was that kids do.
Richard: was I unclear? Yes, the Ethiopian kids played with the Israeli kids and soon were chatting (NOT chattering, ha, it was very hot!) in fluent Hebrew.
The kids played with Israeli kids and soon were chatting in fluent Hebrew
Yes, playing with the natives is the best way to pick up a language. Then you have to learn the grammar.
diana asks:
Richard: was I unclear? Yes, the Ethiopian kids played with the Israeli kids and soon were chatting (NOT chattering, ha, it was very hot!) in fluent Hebrew.
In retrospect, you were not unclear. I came upon the later assertion that one racial group was superior to other racial groups and it seemed to be based on your rather unsurprising anecdote.
I asked the wrong question. I should have asked whether or not the subsequent poster was using your anecdote as support for his bare assertion.
It would seem, in any event, that some populations could be selected for retaining the ability to learn multiple languages into adulthood, although any such observations might be confounded by children on the borders of each language group tending to learn multiple languages and the genetically more able learning multiple languages.