From Paul Kail, Visiting Professor, University of Szeged, Hungary
The idea that languages evolved to adapt to children’s limited cognitive abilities may make sense if the only language you are familiar with is English (18 January, p 30). English has virtually no inflections, and is extremely easy to learn informally. But the same cannot be said for other languages.
Czech, for example, has seven cases, three genders and various different forms of declension for each of these alternatives. To use a simple preposition such as “in”, a Czech speaker needs to know what case this preposition takes, the gender and declension of both the noun and adjective it refers to, and the ending that these both take, given all these variables. None of this is intuitive, logical or necessary.
It is not clear how any of this survived the need to be learned by children, nor that it has evolved to be simple. You report Morten Christiansen’s argument that children’s limited perceptions and memory “force them to focus on the basic ‘building blocks’ for further language learning”. But to learn a language like Czech one needs an attention to detail, not an overview.
In Czech, many words change form completely, depending on their position in the sentence. A general idea that, for example, pes means dog does not help much when the child needs to talk about three dogs (psy), five dogs (psu), or beside the dogs (psech).
Advertisement
If words typically used by children were easier to learn or more regular, this would at least suggest some kind of pressure on the structure of the language coming from children. However, in Czech at least, the words for kittens and puppies are irregular and even harder.
Prague, Czech Republic
