Someone who knows how to cut and paste could probably move this thread to:
Language Acquisiton
Language acquisition belongs to the field of psycholinguistics, something Chomsky is working on now. Maybe he has tired of political activism.
Newton made all his great discoveries at a very early age, Mozart was a child genious. Babies acquire their first language effortlessly.
Why can't we?
Einstein was finished at 30 and I think Chomsky is too.
They got old, that's all.
There was a program on the TV a couple weeks ago about autism. One of the guys was a young Englishman who has "photographic memory". He remembers numbers graphically, as figures (not symbols), and calculates by joining the figures in his mind then "reading" the resulting curves.
Maybe you saw the program...
He essentially can do everything in his head a trained human can do with a slide-rule: calculate - or remember - 'π' to one thoudand decimal places, extract square roots, do powers, calculate prime numbers, not to mention multiplying and dividing...
He didn't suffer from all the concommitant psychological disorders like paranoia and schizofrenia. He had an otherwise normal personality.
Anyway, the sponsers of the program decided to send him to Iceland for a week to see if he could learn Icelandish.
Kind of reminded me of the Berlitz ad: "We can teach anyone any language in just one week!"
Outlandish, I mean Icelandish, bears little resemblence to English, so he wouldn't be able to recognise cognates.
They gave him a very knowledgable instructor, someone thoroughly familiar with Icelandish/English grammar and a long history of teaching her language. She was great. To me, she was more impressive than he was. I could learn Icelandish from her in a week, no doubt about it.
Then he appeared on Icelandish TV and answered questions from journalists, mostly about himself, what he thought of Iceland, did he like it here... He seemed to follow the questions, and answer them, but the producers edited the show so much -- to make the program acceptable for general entertainment -- that I wasn't able to tell how he actually did.
I guess you just had to believe.
The banter was not not rocket science. I mean, he wasn't giving a dissertation on non-euclidean geometry, or even talking about "battered women the men who love them", something you might have heard from any miserable housewife in great detail on the Donahue Show.
So I'm a bit of a disbeliever. I no atheist, I just don't believe in the Pope.
If the Pope's English was any indication of his linguistic prowess, he could speak 2 or 3 languages extemporaneously, maybe a little German, a little Spanish, pretty good Italian, litourgical latin, maybe a little Greek, Polish, of course, but let's leave out our native language. You could say he was familiar with 7 or 8 languages.
Not too shabby!
Everything else he read off a piece of paper.
I guess you could say he could "pronounce" in 101 languages.
All the bragging about him and all the miracles ascribed to him seemed to tarnish his image. Sort of like what happened to Jesus Christ.
Me, my favorite polyglot was Vladimir Nabakov, the author of Lolita. He grew up in a polyglot family, spoke Russian, English, French and German "fluently". I guess he had four parents!
Nabakov grew up in Russia, studied in Paris, moved to the USA as a young man. In fact, he composed Lolita in English and translated it himeslf into Russian, his native language.
Now that impresses me.
Joe
PS
President Kennedy once had the rumor circulated that he could read 1,200 words a minute. Let's see, in 60 seconds, that would be 20 words a second, something no normal Mensh could do, unless you bought one of those spead-reading courses advertised on television.
It was only after he died that the truth came out: he could barely read at all. He was "dyslexic", is the term, I think, alot like those child-stars who spent all day on the set. They could barely sign their names.
President Kennedy preferred screwing starletts to reading position papers.
Sorry Kennedy, no pun intended.