Language Development
Language Development
[Megan and Cueball are looking to the left at a baby with dark hair. The baby sits on the left side of a table in an elevated baby chair.] Megan: He's only 1, so he still mostly speaks proto-Indo-European. Megan: But we've heard a few Germanic words already, so Old English can't be far off. Baby: *Melg- Baby: *Pl(e)hk- Cueball: They progress so fast!

Megan and Cueball are having what could appear to be a typical conversation about her child's ability to learn languages really fast. But the comic mixes up the concept of learning a language and the development of languages over time. The joke comes from the a conflation of two different things.
The conventional meaning of language development is the process by which infants begin to talk, that is to understand and produce intelligible speech. The field of language acquisition (sometimes called... language development) seeks to understand how baby humans are able to rapidly comprehend, internalize, and begin producing a new language so rapidly.
Instead of starting with babbling , the first stage of normal language development, this baby's form of "language development" seems to be the linguistic form: going through all of the theoretical stages of the evolution of the English language, from Proto-Indo-European to Germanic to Old English.
In comparative linguistics and historical linguistics , Proto-Indo-European is a theorized common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Proto-Germanic is a reconstructed language formerly spoken in Iron Age Scandinavia. It developed out of Proto-Indo-European and is the proposed common ancestor for all Germanic languages . Old English would have developed out of Proto-Germanic. Modern English developed out of Old English with many additions from French (which comes from a different branch of the Indo-European language family). This parody of language development parallels the discredited theory of recapitulation in embryo development, sometimes expressed as "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny", in which a developing animal embryo (ontogeny) was once thought to go through stages resembling successive adult stages in the evolution of the animal's remote ancestors (phylogeny).
In linguistics, reconstructed words from proto-languages are commonly marked with an asterisk (*) to show that the word forms are not attested by any historical sources but created as a proposed ancestor word. The baby says the Proto-Indo-European roots that the words "milk" and "please" are derived from. Obviously, the speakers of Proto-Indo-European did not speak in roots, but used words made from the roots, so the way the baby talks does not reflect any stage of development of the proto-language.
Some sounds babies make are hard to interpret. [ citation needed ] However, humans have a tendency to recognize known things and patterns. They see what they want to see and hear what they want to hear. Thus, a parent familiar with Proto-Indo-European may falsely hear their baby speak Proto-Indo-European by misinterpreting unintelligible sounds.
Perhaps this is an alternate universe where every baby has to gradually develop their language skills along a historical path rather than a child-developmental one, until they reach the ultimately developed modern language of their parents (in this case Modern English).
There have been alleged language deprivation experiments where newborn infants were not exposed to any spoken language in order to find the "natural human language", in the days before ethics review boards would have forbidden such cruel treatments. Such experiments are known today to be a source for psychological problems at least. Alleged outcomes in the apocryphal sources range from the deprived children imitating other sounds in their environment, to them dying.
In the title text, Randall describes a 2-year-old child as speaking in iambic pentameter and in Elizabethan English, a meter and dialect of modern English used by Shakespeare more than 400 years ago. The Terrible Twos are a colloquialism referring to the developmental tendency of two-year-olds to have more temperamental behavior, as the child's developing assertion of autonomy and self-identity clash with other expectations of behaviour, before hopefully acceptably balancing their assertiveness with social normatism. The toddler's quote of "forsooth, to bed thou shalt not take me, cur!" would roughly be equivalent to "Indeed, you shall not take me to bed, you dog!" in less archaic English.
[Megan and Cueball are looking to the left at a baby with dark hair. The baby sits on the left side of a table in an elevated baby chair.] Megan: He's only 1, so he still mostly speaks proto-Indo-European. Megan: But we've heard a few Germanic words already, so Old English can't be far off. Baby: *Melg- Baby: *Pl(e)hk- Cueball: They progress so fast!
