A blueprint in the brain?Could any

A blueprint in the brain?
Could any linguistic information
conceivably be innate?
There are very deep and restrictive principles that determine the nature
of human language and are rooted in the specific character of the
human mind.
Chomsky, Language and Mind
Young children must learn . . . the set of linguistic conventions used
by those around them . . . for any given language . . . The human
species is biologically prepared for this prodigious task . . . , but this
preparation cannot be too specific, as human children must be flexible
enough to learn not only all of the different words and conventional
expressions of any language but also all the different types of abstract
constructional patterns . . . It thus takes many years.
Tomasello, Constructing a Language
It is relatively easy to show that humans are innately predisposed to
acquire language. The hard part is finding out exactly what is innate.
People have indulged in speculation about this for centuries. Over
two thousand years ago the Egyptian king Psammetichus had a theory
that if a child was isolated from human speech, the first word he
spontaneously uttered would come from the world’s oldest inhabitants.
Naturally he hoped this would be Egyptian. He gave instructions for
two newborn children to be brought up in total isolation. When
eventually the children uttered the word BEKOS, Psammetichus
discovered to his dismay that this was the Phrygian word for ‘bread’.
He reluctantly concluded that the Phrygians were more ancient than
the Egyptians.
Nobody takes Psammetichus’s theory seriously today – especially as
the few reliable accounts we have of children brought up without
human contact indicate that they were totally without speech when