> And how would you do it with two or more languages?
Hey, I dunno; I didn't design the language faculty, intelligently or otherwise.
I seem to recall reading somewhere that kids raised in thoroughly bilingual environments take a little longer acquiring language. If this is so, presumably part of the reason is that they have to figure out (somehow) that two codes are involved, and then they're only getting half the input per day in each.
You could argue that one of the ways they figure out there are two codes is that the merged data set of the two doesn't "compute" with the machinery they've got. But who knows what they do then? Some Gestalt-ish thing based on rhythm and phonetic inventory that enables them to sort what they're hearing into two separate acquisition projects? Your guess is as good as mine.
> How do Poto and
> Cabengo fit into all this?
One would dearly like to have a fuller description of their language, or at least a bigger repertoire of their utterances.
I've known twins (and very close non-twin sibs) who did something similar, though not perhaps as extensive. From what I've seen the "secret language" is really just a secret lexicon -- i.e. it contains a lot of made-up secret-code words but doesn't differ much structurally from the language they hear around them.
P & C seem to have had minimal (and bilingual) linguistic data supplied, and apparently they went a bit farther afield. But some of the items the Wikipedia article cites are pretty clearly derived from the German grandmother ("liba" = "liebe"). In other respects the short Wikipedia sample of their utterances reminds me of a pidgin.
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Michael Smith mjs at smithbowen.net http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org