Anders:
>I think that nothing of our language is innate. I. e everything has
>to be learnt.
Yep. Me agree. Language is a highly abstract form of communication
and couldn't possibly spontaneously generate into existence without
some other less abstract stage to have nurtured it. In other words,
spoken language was probably well developed by the time it first
existed. This is why I keep mentioning sign language as a logical
"proto-language" intermediary. But I digress because no one listens
to poor ol' moi ;)
Anyways, as for numerals, I don't think that we are fully aware
of how old numeral systems are. I'm convinced that numeral systems
were in existence in at least some languages for at least the past
20,000 years... However, this timeframe is often much too large
for many people to dare contemplate so it's hard to muster approval
on this thought.
At any rate, while I'm sure that the need for numeral systems was
less of a necessity the further back in the past we go, I think
that the concepts "one", "some" and "many" are much more basic to
human languages. Even languages without established numerals
systems *still* have words like these so why should we expect any
different from prehistoric languages? We need to throw away this
antiquated bias that makes us think that we somehow grunted our
way through language like in that movie... What was it called?
"Quest for Fire"?
As for whether numbers are ultimately "nouns" or "adjectives"...
this is just babbletalk. A number is a number. In reality,
a number always qualifies some other noun unless you're talking
algebra.
- love gLeN
_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at
http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp