| Re: Is language a factor?
I have had some conversations with a bona-fide Ivy-League philologist about languages. He told me that babies, when they start to vocalize, produce every sound found in every language, and that we "unlearn" the sounds we don't use or hear over time. This results in the difficulty learning to speak a foriegn language later in life. (The problem Japanese have with "r's" is not with the mouth and tounge, but the ears.) French (and German!) often combine a vowel sound plus "eee," as the "u" in our "beautiful." I suppose if we were to strand a European and an American on an island with trumpets, the European might have a slight advantage. Give each one a lesson or two, however, and the advantage would be gone.
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