Today, we had a presentation from Ms. Aoki about Universal Grammar (普遍文法), a theory of grammar and language acquisition developed by Noam Chomsky (ノーム・チョムスキー). You can read a short introduction to Universal Grammar (普遍文法) in Japanese on Wikipedia here.
After the presentation, I mentioned an exhibition in Germany which shows the faces of various human ancestors. You can see a slideshow here: Faces of our Ancestors.
We read the textbook from page 23 – 26, with explanations from Ms. Aoki and Ms. Takeuchi.
What were the key points of today’s lesson?
The Basque people live in the Pyrenees, the mountains between France and Spain
the Basque country (image from Wikipedia)
Because the Basque’s live in the area as the Cro-Magnon cave-paintings, perhaps the Basque language is a remnant of the Cro-Magnon people?
Lascaux cave painting (image from Wikipedia, click to see a larger one)
Human beings all began to develop language at about the same time: 30,000 years ago. Why? It’s a mystery.
Even remote peoples developed their own languages, e.g. the Ainu, whose language is different from Japanese, and has some similarities with European languages.
Full-blooded Ainu are lighter skinned than their Japanese neighbors and have more body hair.[22] Many early investigators proposed a Caucasian ancestry,[23] although recent DNA tests have not shown any genetic similarity with moderncaucasian Europeans.
Japanese and Korean are, like Basque, unrelated to other languages.
Recent studies of cognates show that the world’s languages may be related, despite their differences.
There are many theories which try to explain how language began. Some of these theories have funny names: Bow-wow theory, Ding-dong theory, Pooh-pooh theory, Yo-He-Ho theory. (Actually, only the Bow-wow theory is genuine; the others were made up by Bill Bryson.)
“For a long time it was believed that language was simply learned.” (Bryson, 1990, p. 25)