(no subject)

[botias]

Reading Material:	I Have Landed by Stephen Jay Gould
	+ asst. romance novels and children's books

I notice when people of good will are talking about folks with little or no formal education they often say, "Well, Bob here is fluent in 4 languages." (I'm pretty sure I even caught my hero, Dr. Gould saying something like this about his immigrant maternal grandmama recently.) It's like giving them credit for independent study or something. The thought is nice and all, but the statement is pretty meaningless. It's my understanding that if you are exposed to languages during the proper developmental period, learning them is pretty effortless. How can this be equated with our largely futile drudgery as young adults towards the acquisition by rote of even one additional language? This may be followed by, "and he can name all the flora and fauna in the forest." Well, uh, most of us can name the objects in our environment. I'm not saying Bob is necessarily inferior, and his environment may indeed by more challenging to get a handle on than our own, I'm just saying that evaluating Bob in the context of our own culture says pretty much nothing about Bob either way, whether you give him big points for languages and taxonomy, or call him an imbecile for not not knowing how to order from a restaurant.