Re: Learning a language

From: Peter T. Daniels (grammatim_at_worldnet.att.net)
Date: 06/12/04 

Date: Sat, 12 Jun 2004 12:52:30 GMT

Eugene Holman wrote:
>
> 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,

You were at Cornell about the same time I was??? (Then how did you
manage to avoid Robert A. Hall, Jr., the first linguist to take an
interest in pidginization?)

> 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.

Language acquisition was not a significant field of study in linguistics
in those days (though Chas Hockett bristled when years later I suggested
they didn't take acquisition phenomena into account -- but the topic is
barely mentioned in his textbook).

> 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.

"Prestigious [second-language is redundant] speakers of pidgins" is an
oxymoron. As has already been pointed out, "semi-creole" is a disfavored
term not used in the subfield.

> 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.

And no one, except perhaps you in your misuse of terminology, has
suggested that Afrikaans is a creole.

I have to assume you're not Guy Tops, a Belgian grad student at Cornell
in my day, who liked to insist that Afrikaans was the best language of
all because it was so regular. (Dutch with the hard parts taken out.) 

-- 
Peter T. Daniels                       grammatim@att.net
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