Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[dragdeler]

-snip-

[TD1]

Well, humans can learn to speak past a certain age. Their grasp on morphology and syntactic laws is exceedimgly shaky, though, and those learning past the optimum stage tend, at best, to form sentences in much the same way as a child would from then on.

[dragdeler]

-snip-

[TD1]

....
I'm curious as to what source this is from. The only instances of disruption to typical child language acquisition of which I am aware come in early teens or late childhood. Child abuse of the level required to prevent a child from picking up a guardian's language tends to be caught before then, and the cases in which it is not are horrible.

I haven't heard of a case study wherein a human is left so totally isolated for thirty years.

Either way, they could. If only at a basic semantic level. Anything deeper is unlikely, however.

[dragdeler]

-snip-

[Reelya]

"Girl with half a brain becomes fluent in two languages"

Clearly, the number of languages you can learn is inversely proportional to the percentage of brain you have. Homeopathy was right. We can prove this by demonstrating that someone with 0% of their brain left is equally proficient in all possible languages.

[pisskop]

someone with 0% of their brain left is equally proficient in all possible languages.

This is a science fact.

[dragdeler]

-snip-

[Parsely]

These are some strange correlations being made here

[TamerVirus]

These are some strange correlations being made here

The brain named itself ergo the United States faked the moon landing

[Kagus]

These are some strange correlations being made here

The brain named itself ergo the United States faked the moon landing

Checkmate, atheists.

[dragdeler]

-snip-

[Egan_BW]

Still basically humans. It would be neat to do, but wouldn't introduce nearly as much value as bringing non-mammals into the fold.

Non-mammal insight would be amazing, but we're nowhere near able to uplift nonmammals.  We can't even uplift our machines, yet!

Neanderthals were arguably *there*.  I don't know if they'd be useful as thinkers, but surely their perspective would be fascinating.  If we could do a Jurassic Park on them, it would give us a lot of insight into the origin and branching of the human brain.

I don't feel like we've really tried hard enough at teaching them the traditional way to say that we need to "uplift" them through some kind of technology. It's still possible that we could turn whole species into people just by refining our techniques for teaching them language.

Humans very physically similar to us lived for a long time without having invented "society". Why can't non-mammals be introduced to that society as-is, without physical modification?

[Dunamisdeos]

Marina Chapman lived with weeper capuchin monkeys in the Colombian jungle from the age of four to about nine, following a botched kidnapping in about 1954.[6] Unusual for feral children, she went on to marry, have children and live a largely normal life with no persisting problems.

Oxana Malaya was an eight-year-old girl who lived with dogs for six years. She was found in a kennel with dogs in 1991. She was neglected by her parents who were alcoholics. The three-year-old looking for comfort crawled into the farm and snuggled in with the dogs. Her behavior imitated dogs more than humans. She walked on all fours, bared her teeth, and barked. She was removed from her parents' custody by the social services.[citation needed] As she lacked human contact she did not know any words besides "yes" and "no".[14] Upon adulthood, Oxana has been taught to subdue her dog-like behavior. She learned to speak fluently and intelligently

The "ostrich boy" – A boy named Hadara was lost by his parents in the Sahara desert at the age of two, and was adopted by ostriches. At the age of 12, he was rescued and taken back to society and his parents. He later married and had children.

Apparently it is not impossible to learn language past a certain age, according to the Wikipedia link. Ostrich kid was raised by fukkin' birds for a decade and then married and had kids. There is an ideal timeframe in which a child should learn language, but it is not a hard necessary (or a bear necessity teehee ha ha).

It seems that not learning human behavior, including (or perhaps primarily) speech, can have an extremely damaging effect, which can certainly result in a person not using speech or never interacting with other humans in an acceptable manner. However, this may well be caused by the trauma caused thereof and not an outright inability to learn language. The page on Critical Period Hypothesis states that:

Detractors of the critical period hypothesis point out that in these examples and others like them (see feral children), the child is hardly growing up in a nurturing environment, and that the lack of language acquisition in later life may be due to the results of a generally abusive environment rather than being specifically due to a lack of exposure to language.

In short we have evidence that not learning speech within a certain timeframe is damaging and makes learning difficult, but this can be overcome in at least some cases with therapy.

[Reelya]

I don't feel like we've really tried hard enough at teaching them the traditional way to say that we need to "uplift" them through some kind of technology. It's still possible that we could turn whole species into people just by refining our techniques for teaching them language.

Yeah, no. Humans have the in-built ability to learn "language" in an abstract sense. Other animals - they just don't. We don't have to do anything special for humans to learn languages. Humans even without formal teaching will learn all sorts of connections about the world around them in ways other animals just clearly don't.

Other animals, even the smartest ones hit a bottleneck with learning even simple languages, and they fail at teaching this to their own kin. For it to be viable, a chimp would need to learn language and also impart that language onto it's young. No amount of magical-thinking teaching techniques is going to make this happen, chimps just cannot comprehend it. If you teach a chimp 100 signs in sign language but it fails to comprehend how it could show signs to other chimps, then you're at a dead-end with trying to educate chimps: there's no synergy there, you're just painstakingly teaching each chimp what each sign correlates to through rote learning. They don't get the snowball-effect where learning earlier signs opens up a huge world of combining signs and abstraction to learn future stuff much more easily. Chimps can do a couple of combining-symbols things, but they're more like diminishing returns than opening up a vista on how to use grammar to construct more interesting things. Human language manipulation definitely seems like an evolved capacity that is in fact specifically evolved in humans, so there's no reason to expect that animals have that capacity. If they had the capacity, they'd already be using abstract languages long before we got to them.

The only really viable thing we could get without uplifting is some sort of technological communicator that can decode/encode dolphin speech and we can perhaps talk to dolphins in their own language.