lotek wrote:from what I remember it would be quite difficult to do any sort of research on the Fremen, a people that managed to hide its true strength and goals from everyone in the Imperium
Difficult but not entirely impossible, so minimal preparations could be done. After all, even the existence of sacred objects, the crysknives, and their value to the Fremen were known to outsiders, so why not? I guess smugglers would prove a good source of intel on the Fremen.
lotek wrote:Chomsky? I know the name but not sure what he stands for...
Your supposition about Piter's ability to learn a language from minimum data by just listening to it reminded me of Chomsky's reasoning that when babies are learning their first language, the linguistics input they receive is minimal and erratic, and thus insufficient to work out the "system" of the language. Hence, Chomsky continues, the "system" must be already present in the baby's brain
before (s)he is exposed to adult's speech. Of course, it would be easier if the only existing language were English - that would make Chomsky's theory simple and brilliant; but since it happens that people across the globe speak
other languages as well, he had to invent a much more complicated "principles and parameters" theory to account for how his Universal Grammar transforms into a real-life one for any known language, influenced by otherwise "insufficient" and "erratic" linguistic input. BTW, I wonder if it ever occurred to him (or his disciples) to propose that actual languages are
corrupted versions of the Universal Grammar - I think some ideas like that were expressed in the 19th century, claiming that all world languages resulted from corruption of the language Adam spoke.