I'm a language teacher and this is one thing that I've been asking myself lately and I don't really have an answer to. There's a lot of "rules" in language. I understand a lot of these are implicit and not necessarily anything that someone sat down and fleshed out. That said, some of these rules just seem so darn complex.
For example. In English the third person always gets the S at the end in the present (you say, he says. Or, in the past, the rule is that it gets an -ed at the end (walk, walked). There's also a rule for countable and uncountable nouns (Too much vs. too many). In Spanish, for example, every single subject gets a different conjugation (yo corro, tú corres, él/ella corre) etc. There's even a grammatical distinction made between formal/informal (tú dices, usted dice). And finally, there's of course the gender thing that you see in many (especially Romance) languages - (la mesa, el mar).
Again, I understand that most parts of language learning are implicit. Native English speakers don't need to be told that the third person gets the S in English. They just pick it up. But my question is - how much of language was developed implicitly, and how much of it was it was sort of molded and fleshed out consciously over time? The answer may be, well, none, except in the case of a language like Esperanto, or in the written varieties. But some of these rules (that I listed above) just seem too complex to have come about totally naturally. That or the human mind is smarter than I thought.
Any insight here folks?
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