This is interesting:

A woman who disappeared in the jungles of north-eastern Cambodia as a child has apparently been found after living in the wild for 19 years, police said yesterday.

The woman – believed to be Rochom P’ngieng, who would now be 27 years old – cannot speak any intelligible language, so details of her story have been difficult to confirm.

There have been several accounts of feral children isolated from human contact before acquiring language skills, including Amala and Kamala, Genie, and others, but very few involving older children that have gone feral and then returned.

For babies, if they don’t get into a language environment before the ‘critical period’ (about eight or so), their prospects for language learning aren’t good. But if they hear language before then, they’re usually okay. Helen Keller is a good example; she lost her sight and hearing at nineteen months (when she’d presumably have been in the two-word stage), but recovered language ability completely with training.

That’s what I expect to happen in this case. She’s already had the wiring for syntax up until eight, so she should be able to relearn language in her home environment.

I have just been dumped with 112 exams to mark. No, that’s the number of exams. So posting will be light.

Until then, here’s a new screed from the English-only crowd.

One nation, one language
How can we be united when we can’t communicate?

Or, how can we be friends unless I force you to speak my language?

Domestically, I weary of the hours wasted in trying to communicate with store clerks, gas station attendants, cab drivers and other citizens who do not speak English.

You spend hours trying to tell them about how they’re taking our jobs and ruining the economy, and all they do is smile and nod. You can tell they don’t understand.

I mourn for the trees consumed in printing multiple translations of U.S. documents, forms, and other publications.

Tree-hugger.

But mostly, I am frustrated by the lack of a common language to encourage interpersonal relationships with neighbors, co-workers, or even the person next to me on the bus.

He wants to start a conversation on the bus? I get that sometimes. They want to talk about the sounds in their heads. Or how wonderful English is. Anything but deodorant.

Yet, how can we be united when we can’t communicate? Communication is numero uno!

I hope he’s kidding.

English is the lingua franca of international business.

Make that the de facto lingua franca. He’s not kidding. He really has no clue.

I’m suprised he’s on the Net at all. Everyone knows it’s responsible for the downfall of the English language.

Hasta luego, mes amis.

Gary: Hi. I’m Gary Tobin.

Aryeh: And I’m Aryeh Weinberg. We’re the authors of a new report about political opinion at universities. For the last several years, we’ve been examining the views of university educators. Why? In a word: influence.

Gary: Everyone knows that young people of today idolise middle-aged academics. We would hate for their impressionable minds to be damaged by being exposed to the wrong kinds of opinions, if you know what we mean. And in our research, we found some startling facts.

Aryeh: Did you know that only 17% of faculty identify as conservative, but 46% identify as liberal? And in the 2004 election, 72% of academics voted for the Democrat John Kerry, but only 25% voted for Bush. It’s like some kind of plot!

Gary: Telling figures indeed. And these are just a few of the facts that show us that university educators aren’t representative of the general public. And for some reason we think they should be, just like every other occupation.

Aryeh: Now you could argue that academics are highly educated, and highly educated people tend to be more liberal than the general population. But we look beyond such simplistic explanations. We think ‘liberal groupthink’ is to blame. You see, when liberalism is entrenched in universities, it has a chilling effect on conservatives’ ability to speak their minds for fear of reprisal. As you have probably noticed from talk radio, Fox News, or family members, right-wingers are sometimes afraid to voice their opinions because… they’re shy.

Gary: Painfully shy. But we’re not advocating quotas or purges. We recommend that universities maintain a balance of liberal and conservative views, of left-wing and right-wing, of informed opinion and ignorance, just as we see in society at large. And we can learn a lot about achieving a healthy balance of views from business and management schools, which somehow manage to have a higher proportion of conservatives than elsewhere in universities. Viva la marketplace of ideas!

Aryeh: We also think that hiring and promotion processes should be free of political ideology.

Gary: Unless that means that too many liberals are getting hired or promoted.

Aryeh: Please download Volume One of our series, ‘Political Beliefs and Behavior’. And while you’re at it, check out our book ‘The UnCivil University‘ in which we make the stunning discovery that liberal academics are anti-Semitic because they’re not pro-Israel enough.

Gary: Won’t you help us to make academia safe for conservatism? Thank you.