[Xmca-l] Re: The Ideal and Nicaraguan Sign Language

[Andy Blunden]

How would you explain then, Carol, how the Nicaraguan children managed 
to acquire such a sophisticated language in a couple of generations?
Are elements of language implicit in social practices? How does it happen?
Andy
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Andy Blunden*
http://home.pacific.net.au/~andy/


Carol Macdonald wrote:
> Hi
>
> I am sorry it took me so long to read the post - I am with Tomasello 
> on this. I don't think this is evidence for LAD. The LAD has very 
> specific reference to universal parameters, and the history of 
> theoretical linguistics in the  last 55 years or so has had to step 
> back and back to parameter setting so the "universals" are more and 
> more abstract. Perhaps a linguist on the site could resolve what they 
> are now.  Phonology has the most developed set.  And how does this 
> relate to communication per se? Can anybody help? Even the notion of 
> verb-ness and noun-ness as universals are contested.
>
> Pidgins arise when people have a need to communicate; then they become 
> creoles.  The children and their caretakers had such a need.  We have 
> no idea how abstract, or signified, when this first began.
>
> In South Africa this happened when mineworkers from all over South 
> Africa needed to have a common form of communication.  It has never 
> developed to a creole, because the speakers have their own Bantu 
> languages, and the need underground is so specific and restricted that 
> there has been no further development.
>
> ISN has had a very strong motivation to develop. Creoles do become 
> languages - Jamaican is a case in point. In my situation, Afrikaans 
> can be regarded as  creoloid, where the mother language - Dutch has 
> been simplified.  The Afrikaners historically has access to the Bible 
> in High Dutch, but we know the Bible deals with a wide range of 
> concepts, so Afrikaans has had to take on board scientific concepts.  
> There is generally a "correct" Afrikaans term, and a related word 
> which can be regarded as closer to English.  Both are included in 
> their lexicon.  The latter characteristic is part of language 
> planning/development per se.
>
> Perhaps I have seen so much in a multi-linguistic environment, that I 
> see this as more fluid. I think this is enough for me now - can 
> someone respond?
>
> Carol
>
> On 14 October 2014 02:46, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net 
> <mailto:ablunden@mira.net>> wrote:
>
>     Mike has drawn our attention to the Nicaraguan Sign Language
>     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language
>     as a counter-example to Vygostsky's claim:
>
>        "that if no appropriate ideal form can be found in the environment,
>        and the development of the child, for whatever reasons, has to take
>        place outside these specific conditions (described earlier), i.e.
>        without any interaction with the final form, then this proper form
>        will fail to develop properly in the child."
>
>     In my opinion, this once-in-human-history event does not
>     invalidate the principle Vygotsky was elaborating. Just like every
>     attempt to say what distinguishes the human being from the animal
>     seems to be faulted by the latest clip from YouTube, all such
>     absolute claims are almost bound to fail at some point. But the
>     principle, illustrated by the fact that children growing up in
>     Russia speak Russian and understand the meaning of perezhivanie
>     whereas we don't, etc., is hardly faulted by NSL.
>
>     The other thing that Mike suggests is that the principle of the
>     ideal being present in the environment carries with it the
>     negation of the idea of the social formation itself being subject
>     to continuous change. Again, I think Vygotsky just takes this as
>     outside the concerns of Psychology. His essay on Socialist Man
>     http://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/1930/socialism.htm
>     shows that in fact he saw the psychology of people as primarily
>     determined by the social formation of which they were a part and
>     he saw that social formation as evolving. He was of course a
>     modern, albeit I suspect a modern with a considerable capacity for
>     irony.
>
>     Now, this raises the difficult question of what Vygotsky may have
>     meant by "ideal." Or, what he thought is a mystery, but what
>     should *we* understand by ideality? It is well known that Vygotsky
>     was surrounded by a number of fellows who were aficionados of
>     Hegelianism, even if Vygotsky himself had never studied Hegel, so
>     it is fair to suggest that the Hegelian concept of the Ideal is
>     relevant in this context, of reconciling "ideal" as the norm in a
>     given social formation and "ideal" as the notion of infinite,
>     historical perfectability. For Hegel, "ideality" expresses both
>     these principles; that is, that any relation contains within it a
>     "gap" which makes it open to perfectability, and that "gap" is
>     ever present, and its existence expresses what Hegel calls The
>     Idea, that is to say, the ever-unfolding spirit of human freedom.
>     Etc. It only requires that the Idea is present for any relation to
>     be mutable. This is deep and challenging philosophical stuff which
>     we don't really need, if we can just accept that "the ideal" does
>     not mean something fixed and final, just an evolving norm:
>     ever-shifting goal posts.
>
>     Andy
>
>
>
>
>
>     -- 
>     ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>     *Andy Blunden*
>     http://home.pacific.net.au/~andy/
>     <http://home.pacific.net.au/%7Eandy/>
>
>
>
>
> -- 
> Carol A  Macdonald Ph D (Edin)
> Developmental psycholinguist
> Academic, Researcher,  and Editor 
> Honorary Research Fellow: Department of Linguistics, Unisa
>
>  
>
>