Re: Learning a language

From: Eugene Holman (holman_at_elo.helsinki.fi)
Date: 06/12/04 

Date: Sat, 12 Jun 2004 15:38:01 +0300

In article <40CAF2BC.17CE@worldnet.att.net>, "Peter T. Daniels"
<grammatim@worldnet.att.net> wrote:

<deletions>
> >
> > Why? Both are confronted with the same task. The adult fluent second
> > language speaker with an already elaborated grammar - or fixed strategies
> > for elaborating grammar - probably has a greater chance of influencing
> > others with his/her usage than a child elaborating a grammar does.
>
> Add language acquisition to the many topics in linguistics of which you
> are ignorant.

Having earned my living teaching and publishing in (historical, computer,
Baltic-Finnic, sociolinguistics) linguistics for more than thirty years,
and being the former student of several linguists of renown, including
Frederick Agard, Charles Hockett, James Marchand, Herbert Kufner, Wilhelm
Schmidt, Yuri Rozhdestvensky, Lauri Posti, Erkki Itkonen, Raimo Anttila,
Pertti Virtaranta, Robert Austerlitz, Kalevi Wiik, Nils Erik Enkvist, and
Fred Karlsson, I will consign that remark to the garbage bin where it
belongs.

Theories in the humanities are necessarily generalizations which often
show their weaknesses when confronted with empirical data. I am
questioning the alleged primacy of the role of the native speaker in the
elaboration of creoles from pidgins, something which any legitimate
scholar is allowed to do. Although native speaker input is obviously
important, prestigious second-language speakers of pidgins and
semi-creoles obviously also play an important role in their elaboration.

There is nothing ignorant about pointing this out. In the elaboration of
Afrikaans, for example, foremen giving orders to their workers in what was
still regarded as "broken Dutch" were in a far better position to
determine what the norms of emergent Afrikaans would be than the mixed-race,
often ***, children of Khoisan women and their broken-Dutch-speaking
lovers/meal tickets.

Regards,
Eugene Holman