Talk:2567: Language Development

Has a small, child-size, stick figure been used before? I did not find a category on explainxkcd. This might be an interesting trivia to add. --198.41.242.129 18:45, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

There have definitely been kids on xkcd before. For example: 1145: Sky Color (but I'm sure there are others). --NeatNit (talk) 20:04, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

That is not a baby. There have been several comics talking about or depicting babies, and lots with kids. The kid you showed there has her own category Science Girl and has thus been used alot. --Kynde (talk) 19:57, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

Other examples are 674: Natural Parenting, 441: Babies and 1650: Baby Kvarts314 (talk)

Yes nothing odd there, but we could of make a category for comics with babies or mentioning babies, but not like a character page... Could that be relevant? --Kynde (talk) 11:56, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

I think it would be relevant. --172.68.110.133 12:36, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

Created: Category:Comics featuring babies --Kynde (talk) 19:57, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

Actually words linguists use when they try to talk in very old languages sometimes sound like the things my little son might say between his first perfectly pronounced single words.--Gunterkoenigsmann (talk) 18:53, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

Someone needs to say “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” 172.70.206.151 18:56, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

Looking at Wiktionary, I believe the child is saying "Milk Please" See also Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/h₂melǵ- Bpendragon (talk) 18:57, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

Perhaps "milk place"?

Hopefully he won't say the proto-Indo-European word for "bear". 162.158.74.26 19:09, 12 January 2022 (UTC)Pat

You mean *hrktos? 20:45, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

Oops. I think a brown one ate my IP address.162.158.187.92 20:49, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

I think you mean Arth? ;-) --Kynde (talk) 11:56, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

The pace of early stage development isn't necessarily an indicator for continued development pacing. I didn't start Proto-Indo-European until I was almost 2, but had completed full vowel shift before second grade. 108.162.237.73 21:20, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

I corroborate this. I hadn't made many full sentences in Proto-Indo-European until around 4, but by 3rd grade I had fully changed to modern english. --172.70.126.215 23:12, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

Though the explanation eventually touches on this (perhaps multiple editors got in there and shuffled this nearer the end) I believe it should really have started with smth about how Language Development (in a child) is being confused/conflated with Language Development (in human (pre)history). It would get straight to the point, I believe. It could then continue to go the further mile in getting into the deconstruction of it all. I'm leaving it unedited by mieself, for now, bc it deserves a lot more text-shuffling and refining than I can promise to do mieself wwwright now, but putting this idea out there to pique the interest of other possible editors. 172.70.85.79 21:29, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

I have done this now. Originally I and someone else both submitted a really long description at the same time and my "merge" in my limited time was just to put my text after his. Now that I have more time, I've gone through and tried to weave the two in a more logical way, and have it starting with the basic explanation of the joke. I'm new to contributing at this level so if someone wants to check it over to make sure it looks good, feel free. Levininja (talk) 00:34, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

"Old English developed out of Proto-Germanic. Modern English developed out of Old English with many additions from French..."
According to John McWhorter, English is the product of Germanic tongues (spoken by Angles or Saxons?) creolized with the local Celtic languages such as the ancestors of Welsh and Cereal plantish. That involved a blending of grammar and some vocabulary. Later came pidginizing with Norse speech of the Vikings, where details like case inflections were blurred or lost. Romance borrowings came yet a bit later, with 1066 and all that Norman Conquest business.
McWhorter's Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English is perhaps worth a read; hope I haven't mutilated the gist of it too much. 172.70.110.245 01:01, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

I second a mention/explanation of the whole "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" idea mentioned above. In biological evolution that turned out to be an error, and it's obviously an error here, too. Mschmidt62 (talk) 02:34, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

If the baby is speaking Proto-Indo-European (with some emerging Germanic) at age 1, and Elizabethan English by age 2, is anyone able to work out by what age they would be speaking our present form of English? --enchantedsleeper (talk) 10:23, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

Elizabethan English is very close to Modern English on the timeline so by a few months they'll speak our English. They would have already started forming their own vowel shifts and other unknown English innovations by the age of 3, possibly predicting the future of English.172.70.218.75 11:55, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

The awesome subtext of this comic--and I'm not sure if it was intentional--is that English-speaking children really do learn proto-Indo-European words first, then proto-Germanic, then Middle English, then Norman French, and so on. Our simplest words are our oldest words, and Pa/Ma are relatively unchanged from a possible pre-PIE language (bc similar sounds appear in Semitic languages). Our most basic words are usually our oldest words. Our pronouns and articles are proto-Germanic, and the next level of complexity are Anglo-Saxon in origin--mostly animal names and common items and actions. Only when we get into complexity do we encounter the French influences, and then newer words or compounds. The reason for this goes back to how languages change. As a new language "takes over" the first words they replace are legal (bc who's running the courts), and high-end goods. Then commercial language shifts, and if there's a religious aspect or educational siestems set up you'll see that come over as well. The hardest things to penetrate are the furthest from the invading speakers' influence: farm animals (why we use Anglo-Saxon "cow" for the animal but French "beef" for the meat from it, etc.) and finally the house. And yes, when you have a couple of parents interested in linguistics, they really do point out to each other the origin of their children's speech. Uh...should I be admitting this? MGoSeth (talk) 15:00, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

Well, as far as cow/beef (and sheep/mutton, etc) that was 'distance from influence' in that the (old-style) francophones of the new ruling-classes rarely concerned themselves with the husbandry side and just used their native term for the eventual food-word whilst the long-standing native anglo(saxo)phone farmers got on with the rearing of the livestock with the animal-word. It wasn't a problem to 'penetrate' the usage but likely more a disinclination to even try, leaving a division of language by context.

In other bits of English, both anglic and francish roots begot 'equal' terms (though at times class-divided as snobbery or inverse-snobbery drove particular speakers to decide to favour particular groups of synonyms) and thus expanded the language with near-duplicates.

While dialects all over retained words even more niche than the farm/food distinction. Many NE-English terms, both basic and more complex, hold over from the era of Viking incursions and rule before even the francofied Nor(th)mans of Normandy as well as prior Celtic terms that survived the germanic and pre-germanic cultural influxes.

More obvious in rural situations (at least for presumably archaic pronunciation, e.g. a ewe being a 'yeow') bc industrialisation and driven population accumulation in the 'new' cities rather mashed valley-by-valley/dale-by-dale differences together into Mancunian/Bradfordian/etc superdialects (with still a few locality-based specificities, like the Thee-Thar/Dee-Dar divide over a few miles of industrial South Yorkshire or the "We was/I were" verb-(dis)agreement up in parts of the North Riding cities.

It's been a while since I studied this, so forgive me if I'm out of date with the latest conclusions, but it was alwaies so interesting how they came to conclusions of what artefacts were what particular age of linguistic 'fossil'. 172.70.91.126 17:20, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

When you think about it, the baby is saying the words for "milk" and "please" in succession, which means it's saying "milk, please" in Proto-Indo-European. The baby is asking for milk.--Yellow Candy 8432 (talk) 18:56, 23 July 2023 (UTC)