Let’s say you took two people of average intelligence and stranded them on a deserted island. Let’s also say these two folks share a mutual attraction towards the other.*
How likely is it that these two would ever be able to communicate? I suppose the would develop some sort of rudimentary form of communication, but would they ever be able to have a fluid conversation?
Let’s also assume that these two people have no access to Google or books or anything like that.
*I only add the sexual component in because it seems like it would give the couple an extra incentive to WANT to communicate.
Extremely likely that they’d develop a basic level of communication, even if their own languages were totally unrelated (like, say, English and Japanese rather than English and Spanish). They’d start with sign language and gestures, and develop some pidgin combination of their two languages, I think.
I’d start with my name, then combine some low numbers and objects (one stone, two stones; one tree, two trees.)
Since you mention the attraction, my next move is naming body parts. This would hopefully lead to communicating in the language of love - and there’s some advanced stuff there…
Actually, I think not being able to communicate would be a *boon *in developing a romantic relationship. Think about every fight you’ve ever had with an SO - I’ll bet they all started with someone saying something stupid that they quickly wished they could take back. No talking, no mistaken stupid comments, no fighting… more lovin’!
I think they would become very good at nonverbal communication and just *knowing *what the other person is thinking, but I doubt a 3rd language would be invented.
Day 1 on a mission trip to Haiti I was assigned to work with a local carpenter on a construction project. He spoke absolutely no English, I spoke absolutely no Creole. It was amazing how quickly we were able to communicate - not just pointing to a hammer, but even abstract things like ideas and intentions. Humans are pretty remarkable in their ability to communicate, even when sex isn’t involved.
Yes, John Mace points that out as well. In my mind, two people alone is way different the an entire group of people pulling their resources together trying to communicate.
You have two groups of people with no language in common suddenly put into contact who have a need to communicate. They work out a pidgin, a rudimentary combination of the two languages. If they produce a generation of kids the pidgin can then move on to being a creole, which is a full-fledged language.
This has happened multiple times in human history.
Something similar to this is a plotline in Robert Heinlein’s SF classic “Have Space Suit, Will Travel”. An American astronaut ends up in a time-travel incident and needs to communicate with an ancient Roman soldier. The Roman speaks Vulgar Latin, which the American recognizes as sort of a halfway language between the classical Latin of Cicero and whatnot and modern Spanish, both of which he conveniently knows. They are communicating effectively in almost no time. The American helps push this along by repeating his statements in Classical Latin and then in Spanish (or maybe it was the other way around), and evaluating what the Roman seems to be able to pick up and what vocabulary and grammar he uses to respond. The American is soon speaking Vulgar Latin and the Roman probably also ends up with greater language skills.
It’s also interesting because the Roman seems to pick up on the American’s native English (which was the first language he tried) as a barbarian tongue, which it effectively would be from the perspective of Rome in those days. Those wild barbarians of the North beyond the borders of Rome largely spoke Germanic and Celtic languages, and English is a Germanic language.
It’s just that with a group, you have a bigger pool of resources. Also, some folks are going to be more adept to this sort of thing than others. If you just pick two people at random, there’s no way of knowing if they’re going to be particularly good at this sort of thing.
And that’s not even touching on the second generation who grew up in a bilingual environment.
We start with non-verbal communication, sign language, then imitation, and understanding develops. Everybody understands the concept of names, emotional caricatures, and other rudimentary signing. It’s easy to go over to a tree and say “Tree” and then the other fellow says “Glink”. We memorize words and phrases, and we deduct the meanings of verbs. Eventually full spoken communication will emerge.
My parents have a bunch of pics of 5yo me playing with the 8yo Austrian from the hotel room which shared a balcony with ours. Thanks to the two years of German my Dad had, the two sets of parents had been able to determine:
that we were from Spain,
that they were from Austria,
and that both sets of parents were perfectly happy with letting us kids play together.
Meanwhile, us kids had had time to determine that “tag” exists in, at the very least, Spain and Austria.
I don’t have the reference here, but I read a very interesting article tracking the birth of Nicaraguan Sign Language. The first School for the Deaf there opened a few years ago; each of the children had a different set of “home signs”; as soon as they were all put together, they started trying to communicate and therefore building a new language, which incorporated signs added by the teachers but which was distinctly different from the Sign the teachers knew. And talking about it with friends who work in pre-K, they quipped that “it sounds like our first week of every year!” - in their case, the children are supposed to at least be learning a common language, but each knows different words and it takes a few days for everybody to get some common, basic vocabulary.
There is a pretty decent depiction of this - more like the OP of just two people - in the movie “Jeremiah Johnson”. Jeremiah (Robert Redford) “gets” a native american wife, and at first neither can understand the other. But as time passes, each learns bits of the other’s language, and they figure it out.
Unlike the “Darmok and Jallad” scenario, with humans I think there is enough common background that it would not take that long to be able to communicate.
This would hopefully lead to communicating in the language of love - and there’s some advanced stuff there…