Facehuggers are pretty damn cuddle-fixated.
Usually baby animals look cute but yeeesh, that’s an ugly furturtle.
Thank you for the cite that I think had cross posted. That is the full version of what I was thinking of.
Beyond language how would the group develop culturally without a model?
It takes one generation. When people from varying countries with varying languages come together, they end up speaking a pidgin (a simple, non-syntactical language). Their kids develop a fully syntactic creole.
I think the language would be recognizably human – there are some universals that seem to operate with switches – adjectives and nouns agree or they don’t, and many other switches that I’ve forgotten.
I’m sure there would be the concepts of a leader or leaders – that seems pretty instinctual. In-groups and out-groups seem to be everywhere there are humans. Maybe they’ve done this experiment with chimps already? Sexual jealousy seems pretty universal in humans and some primates, but not others (bonobos, for example).
Put kids together with varying language and they will still play, maybe just side by side at first.
Eventually they will communicate in some rudimentary way.
More time and they will find a language together.
Noam Chomsky argued that there was a universal generative principle underlying all languages.
I’m not sure that is much accepted these days. But I do suspect that the human brain has some sort of evolutionary development that predisposes it to create language in a social environment?
I agree a group of children raised with no human adults would develop their own language. But they’d have a very simple culture compared to any modern group. This is the basis of Joseph Henrich’s books: that what’s most special about humans is not our language but our development of cultural practices, and the ability to transmit them to others in a group and to the next generation. Through history, new inventions and discoveries are rare, but because we are able to learn from others, they only have to happen once. From how to make fire, to how to knap flint, the invention of slingshots and then bows and arrows, which plants are safe and nutritious to eat in a given area and how to process those that aren’t in order to make them safe, to religious and marriage practices that aid group survival. Even supposedly primitive groups have incredibly complicated culture - he makes the point that intelligent and educated European explorers have fairly often starved to death in places where native peoples were living and thriving, because they lacked the necessary cultural knowledge to survive. It’s just impossible to work it all out for yourself in the time available.
These kids raised by aliens would have no idea of making and wearing clothes, of making fire, cooking, finding and preparing food, any of the basics we take for granted. Perhaps they wouldn’t need them, as the aliens would keep them in a safe environment, provide food, and maintain them at a comfortable temperature. Would they have an idea of religion? Animism seems pretty common and untaught in children - the idea that every object has a soul. The kids would have the normal human drive to learn and model themselves on older kids and adults, and the aliens would be those adults. So they’d probably take on a lot of aspects of the aliens’ culture, whatever that was.
Only if they were exposed to it and able to comprehend it.
I’m suspecting the humans would be placed on reserve. Humans seemed very early on to be able to form tribal hunter gather groupings. I can imagine an alien intelligence setting up food availability with increasing demands to be gotten if nothing else as an experiment to see what this ancient form of life was capable of. Just given food might not make their pets as happy as having to strive a bit for it.
I think language development would entirely be determined by how much need the group had for cooperation. Animals in a zoo have no need for communication, but hunters or shelter builders would.
Humans are intrinsically social creatures. Even if there is no need to cooperate, and no need to compete for food and shelter, there will still be a need to socialize, and competition for sex.
Oh for sure. What human could be happy without something to work towards? But the aliens are going to have so much influence here, you can’t answer the question independently of that.
Something else I was thinking about: parents have to potty train kids. What would happen in the absence of parents? Would they realise at some point that it’s tidier to ‘go’ in a specific place? On the other hand, if they are living on a nature reserve and not wearing clothes, it isn’t such a problem to just pee wherever you are.
And would these kids work out how to have sex, once they went through puberty? I have no idea how obvious it is if you haven’t been told. Certainly they are unlikely to twig the connection between sex and pregnancy.
This should say “not our intelligence but our development of cultural practices…”
Oh, I agree with that. One of my grandchildren went into day care at 6 months when my daughter went back to work. The facility was divided into before 2 and 2 and older. When he was 18 months old they insisted on putting him into the 2+ group because he had come to totally dominate the under 2 group.
As for the OP, I think that if you had a group of such children of different ages, the oldest ones would create some kind of pidgin or protolanguage among them and, within a very short time, the younger ones would mold it into a fully syntactical language. I would be very curious whether it developed into a highly inflected, free word order lanaguage like Latin, or into an uninflected fixed word or language like English (mostly uninflected) or the Chinese languages.
How these stinkin’ Aliens gonna deal with Teen angst?
They’d be downing alien valium the first time the teen is given the keys to the space ship.
If its a female teen. Well, best drop them off in some junior highschool. And run
I mean, they still had hearing adults around as a model, if not for signing, at least for the concept of language. So not directly equivalent to inventing language sui generis.
Although in your OP’s example, presumably the aliens would also have language, but it’s the “human linguistic rules” that’s the grey area then.
You mean aside from the aliens? Because I think they would strongly model themselves on them.
Absent that? Something like ape culture would likely develop - hopefully bonobos, but more likely, chimps.
I think they’d start by basing their culture on that of the aliens, to the extent they can communicate with them or otherwise perceive it. But it would rapidly shift into something different and more suited for human psychology unless the aliens were quite similar psychologically to us.
Even humans (who obvious have a better idea of what they are doing) have consistently failed to override human nature by imposing some inhuman, ideologically or theologically determined culture on people. Regardless of how determined and ruthless they are. At most you just get people making a surface show of living the “correct” way while doing something very different when they can get away with it.
Really? They couldn’t hear it. They could observe that others were reacting to each other. But they already could experience that they did things and others reacted. Not much of a big additional model that I can see.
Yeah that’s my take. Pinker has already been brought up so think of him here as well: humans are very far from blank slates. My WAG is that human social groupings would stay within the basic template even with no, or even with a different, model presented.
That’s sufficient, I think. Just lip-reading would bring in the idea of repetition and other concepts.
Also, “deaf” is not necessarily 100% no sound , so if any of the cohort had some perception of adult language, that would feed into their development
Yes to the former, bonobos to the latter.