88 Before Agriculture
evolved than another. The popular idea that some languages are ‘primitive’ is false.
Each language has its own sophistication, but all share a basic level of intellectual
achievement.
The Khoisan languages, which may have the most direct links to the birthplace
of language itself, have been despised by Europeans as ‘the chattering of monkeys’.
In reality, the Khoisan use about 85 per cent of all language sounds. This is not to
argue that their languages are more complex or can therefore achieve greater intel-
lectual heights than those of other peoples. The point is that they are not less com-
plex. There is no relative simplicity of language. The underlying faculty for
language, the hard-wired component of the human brain, is universal: an ultimate
equality of opportunity.
11
The brain struggles when it comes to thinking about thinking. Being able to speak,
however, may have much in common with other kinds of human natural poten-
tial – to have arms, for example, or a particular arrangement of nerves. Noam
Chomsky, the most influential modern theorist of language, has described an
important implication of the similarity between the capacity for speech and other
capacities:
No one would take seriously the proposal that the human organism learns through
experience to have arms rather than wings, or that the basic structure of particular
organs results from accidental experience. Rather it is taken for granted that the physical
structure of the organism is genetically determined.^16Chomsky makes this self-evident observation to support his proposal that the
underlying feature of language – the thing in every human brain that makes lan-
guage possible – is also a physical structure that is genetically determined. Chom-
sky situates the source of language, the piece or pieces of the brain that make
language possible, alongside other faculties that are inherited rather than learned.
In the same context, he goes on to ask: ‘Why, then, should we not study the acqui-
sition of a cognitive structure such as language more or less as we study some
complex bodily organ?’
According to Chomsky and other researchers, the speed at which a child’s
vocabulary grows, and a child’s ability to use grammatical rules, are not influ-
enced by teaching. Studies have found that attempts to correct children’s gram-
matical errors by repeating the correct form back to them are unsuccessful.
Researchers looking at cases where parents corrected their children’s English
found that this correcting ‘had no effect – if anything, it had an adverse effect –
on the child’s subsequent development’. This research, and the discovery that
children do not respond to being taught correct grammar, is discussed in Steven