Reply to comment

Yes, it is very amazing. I firmly believe that linguistic ability has a solid biological basis; that is, language is an instinct. It's governed by unconscious rules which are part of our universal grammar. I love linguistics just because it enables one to study modern and extinct languages and see the common rules (semantic, phonological, syntactic, etc.) at the heart of all languages.

Another really fascinating thing is that children will reject unnatural, simplified languages. Past attempts to teach children very simplified language that was constructed by "experts" failed miserably because the language centers of our brains are wired a certain way. Whorf's hypothesis that one's native language influences (even determines) the way one views the world has no real evidence. The particular language we learn does not determine how we process the world around us (i.e. a person whose first language has no word for red will still see light in that wavelength and won't just ignore things in that color). Aside from the need for some type of linguistic input (and barring neurological abnormalities), children don't need anything in order to develop language (albeit reading and writing are a different story). Children are predisposed to language. It's really amazing how predictable (for the most part) and systematic language development is

And on a random note, this makes me think of a project a linguistics major once told me about: a classmate of his made a phylogenetic tree of the world's major languages for a historical linguistics class. That's another fascinating aspect of language: seeing how individual ones have evolved and changed over time and culture.