Via GNXP Science Fiction I stumbled on this article in Edge which asks a large number of intellectuals (skewed toward the sciences) “WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE EVEN THOUGH YOU CANNOT PROVE IT?” Well, John McWhorter has a really fascinating response, of which I have excised some relevant selections:
This year, researching the languages of Indonesia for an upcoming book, I happened to find out about a few very obscure languages spoken on one island that are much simpler than one would expect….
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So isn’t it interesting that the island these languages is spoken on is none other than Flores…local legend recalls “little people” living alongside modern humans, ones who had some kind of language of their own and could “repeat back” in modern humans’ language.
The legends suggest that the little people only had primitive language abilities, but we can’t be sure here: to the untutored layman who hasn’t taken any twentieth-century anthropology or linguistics classes, it is easy to suppose that an incomprehensible language is merely babbling.
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Specifically, I would hypothesize that the little people were gradually incorporated into modern human society over time—perhaps subordinated in some way—such that modern human children were hearing the little people’s rendition of the language as much as a native one.
I am one who demands extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims, so I will assume this is a coincidence, but, it is a rather delicious one.
Posted by razib at 01:21 AM