Re:Germans decry influence of English as 'idiot's apostrophe...
by int_19h on Wednesday October 09, 2024 @03:10PM
(#41791543)
There is no evidence for "biological inclination" towards certain languages. Take a Spanish kid and raise them on Chinese, and they'll speak it natively just fine, and vice versa.
However, natural languages evolve naturally, which means that they don't just suddenly randomly change, and that change is very gradual. So things tend to get stuck in historically-motivated local maximums that can be very different for different languages because of their different histories.
There are some plausible theories around biologically motivated language features, but this tends to be about the environment - e.g. some sounds seem to be more common in languages spoken in high-altitude areas.
However, natural languages evolve naturally, which means that they don't just suddenly randomly change, and that change is very gradual. So things tend to get stuck in historically-motivated local maximums that can be very different for different languages because of their different histories.
There are some plausible theories around biologically motivated language features, but this tends to be about the environment - e.g. some sounds seem to be more common in languages spoken in high-altitude areas.