Re: Learning a language

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

Date: Sat, 12 Jun 2004 18:19:17 +0300

In article <40CAFC8D.14B8@worldnet.att.net>, "Peter T. Daniels"
<grammatim@worldnet.att.net> wrote:

> Eugene Holman wrote:

<deltions>
> >
> > 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???

Class of '66 [I graduated a term early, in January '66].

> (Then how did you
> manage to avoid Robert A. Hall, Jr.,

I knew and was on good terms with Bob Hall due to our Friday afternoon
linguistics colloquium, but, specializing in Germanic (Marchand, Kufner)
and Slavic (Liston, the Samilovs) linguistics, as well as general
linguistics (Hockett, Kelly, Franklin, Durbin), I never took any courses
from him.

>the first linguist to take an interest in pidginization?)

What?! Have you never heard of Hugo Schuchardt, the father of
pidgin/creole studies?

> > 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.

No it isn't. Think of all the Tok Pisin speaking clergymen and teachers
that brought modernization to Papua New Guinea. Think of all the Tok Pisin
speaking plantation order-givers, whose commands given in Tok Pisin meant
food on the table for their underlings.

> 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 did *not* suggest that it was a creole. I suggested that creolized
varieties of Dutch were a significant part of the input which resulted in
its elaboration as a language distinct from Dutch.

> 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.)

No, I'm not. Although I do not toally diagree with his characterization.

Regards,
Eugene Holman, Cornell '66

"Far above Cayuga's waters..."