Re: Learning a language
From: Peter T. Daniels (grammatim_at_worldnet.att.net)
Date: 06/12/04
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Date: Sat, 12 Jun 2004 12:44:32 GMT
Eugene Holman wrote:
>
> In article <K_yyc.6808$sj4.1473@news-server.bigpond.net.au>, "John
> Atkinson" <johnacko@bigpond.com> wrote:
>
> > "Eugene Holman" <holman@elo.helsinki.fi> wrote...
> >
> > > "John Atkinson" <johnacko@bigpond.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > > "Eugene Holman" <holman@elo.helsinki.fi> wrote...
> > > ><deletions>
> > > > >
> > > > > Is this abolute? I think we would all agree that Tok Pisin is a creole
> > > > > that arose from a pidgin. Depending on the type of Tok Pisin you use,
> > it
> > > > > is closer to or further than English. Although it is a language that
> > > > > evolved largely from a jargonized form of English, it had speakers
> > from
> > > > > the day it could be used as a medium of communication. Whether they
> > were
> > > > > native speakers or not is beside the point.
> > > >
> > > > Whether it had native speakers (speakers who learnt it in in early
> > > > childhood) is *exactly* the point.
> > >
> > > I question this. Is there really any significant difference between:
> > > 1. a native speaker, that is to say, one who learns language X as his/her
> > > first language, and
> > > 2. a public speaker, that is to say, one who uses language X, learned
> > > rather than acquired natively, as his/her default language for all
> > > communication outside of the family circle.
> > >
> > > Living in Helsinki, I am quite familiar with this phenomenon. Our city is
> > > officially bilingual, and abut ten percent of the population has Swedish
> > > as their native language. Nevertheless, the default language here is, with
> > > few exceptions, Finnish, and many Swedish speakers use Finnish in a wider
> > > range of situations and thus have a better command of it than they do of
> > > their native Swedish.
> >
> > Did these Finns speak and hear nothing but Swedish until they reached
> > adulthood, and then travel away from their Swedish-speaking communities to
> > live in all-male communities of non-Swedish-speakers for periods lasting
> > typically 5 years (where they learn and use TP), and on their return home
> > resume their previous life and never use TP again?
>
> Nothing quite that extreme, but there are many cases of families with one
> Swedish-speaking and one Finnish-speaking parent whose oldest child
> attended Swedish-medium school and thus has Swedish as his/her native
> language, but the younger children attended Finnish-medium school, and
> have Finnish as their native language. In practice, they are absolutely
> fluent in both languages, but when it comes to the more sophisticated,
> nuanced, or technical areas of vocabulary and communication, those who
> attended Swedish school *might* be better in Swedish than they are in
> Finnish. A native speaker of English with a fluent and quasi-native
> speaker command of Finnish myself, I would be hard pressed to explain the
> binomial theorum or theory of universal gravity, which I have only
> studied in English and are not things that I frequently talk or think
> about, in Finnish, even though, having studied the subjects in Finnish in
> Finland, I have no difficulty teaching historical linguistics or acoustic
> phonetics in that language.
Yet somehow neither your English nor your Finnish is "creolized."
> There are certainly Finland-Swedes who grew up in monolingually Swedish
> areas of Finland such as Åland or Munsala or Närpäs in Ostrobothnia, and
> then moved to Helsinki as young adults, where they live their lives mostly
> or solely in Finnish. They only use Swedish when they return to their home
> districts for holidays and family events.
>
> Finland-Swedish, at least as spoken in greater Helsinki and greater Vaasa,
> both nominally bilingual conurbations, differs from the Swedish of Sweden
> primarily consequent to obviously Finnish influence in phonology,
> phraseology, pragmatics, and lexicon.
>
> I remain unconvinced that first-generation native speaker influence on
> the development of a creole or semi-creolized variety of a language
> necessarily has a greater impact on its evolution than sociolinguistically
> prestigious public-speaker second-language-speaker influence.
Then you simply do not know anything about the origin of creoles.
There are quite a few books entitled simply "Pidgins and Creoles," and
you would do very well to read at least one of them before continution
along these lines.
Authors include Loreto Todd, Peter Mühlhäusler, Alan Kaye and Mauro
Tosco, and even (a pioneering work) Robert A. Hall, Jr.; the seminal
collection in the field is that published by Dell Hymes in 1971. (You've
apparently skimmed John Holm's small Red book on the topic, but the
first volume of his Green set would be far more enlightening.)
-- Peter T. Daniels grammatim@att.net
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