Chinese as the universal language (#205, Topic L)

Emily Bazelon has an interesting essay in Slate, an online magazine, reproduced in yesterday's Washington Post. Entitled "It's All Chinese to Your Toddler," the essay's theme is that "human capacity for language is innate," a view first expressed by MIT linguist professor Noam Chomsky and recently reemphasized in Yale linguist Charles Yang's new book, The Infinite Gift: How Children Learn and Unlearn the Languages of the World. One of toddlers' innateness to languages, in my view, is their intuitive logic to word formation, sentence construction, and grammatical structure. In one of Chomsky's books I read a few years back, he had an example where a toddler formed the past tense of catch with catched -- a perfectly logical deduction: if the past tense of a verb -- say, watch -- is formed by adding -ed to that word, why not catch and catched? (Stephen Pinker, in his 2000 book, Words and Rules , used hold and holded/held as an example -- a toddler's reference point, in this case, might be fold.) Adding -ed to form a verb in the past tense is, in Chomsky's words, a form of universal grammar -- that is, it is both innate and logical; forming the past tense of catch as caught and of eat as ate is, in my view, arbitrary rules forced upon a toddler. Another point, made by Bazelon, is that the verb be and its variations is frequently omitted by a toddler -- and, in Chinese, the verb be does not exist. To identify such an omission as "thinking like a speaker of Chinese," as Yang argues, is, in my view, preposterous. A better argument, in my view, is that the speaker -- not necessarily a toddler -- is using his/her innate logic. It is a rare day when a TV anchor -- any anchor -- does not say "This just in" -- short, simple, straight-forward, and effective -- and no verb of any kind is needed. And, of course, in Chinese, as I have posted earlier, the verb form does not change whether to indicate a present tense or a past tense (one infers by using auxiliary words), and the verb be does not exist. These were reasons for Leibniz (1646-1716) to propose Chinese as the univeral language, when he first learned the Chinese language's beauty and simplicity via letters sent to him by Jesuits. Since Chinese is rapidly becoming a must language (a page-plus article in WP 8/26/06 is entitled "With a Changing World Comes An Urgency to Learn Chinese"), perhaps it is time to reopen Leibniz's proposal. Any takers? Let me hear from you by posting a comment to this entry.