Re: History of French

From: Mxsmanic (mxsmanic_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 09/14/04 

Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 20:08:53 +0200

Nathan Sanders writes:

> Children are excellent speakers of their native language, displaying
> far more than a "rudimentary" understanding.

Not so. If adults spoke as children do, they would be considered
woefully incompetent in their native languages. But the mistakes
children make are ignored because they are children. People who claim
that children are fluent routinely overlook this extremely important
fact.

If children were truly excellent speakers, you wouldn't be able to
distinguish between their speech and that of adults. In reality, of
course, it's easy to make the distinction.

> They are essentially
> fluent (only lacking certain subsets of the lexicon) with a more
> complete grasp of phonology, morphology, syntax, sdemantics, and
> pragmatics than a non-native could hope to achieve in the same amount
> of time.

False again. Children actually learn more slowly than adults do. It
takes children a decade or more to achieve any mastery of their native
languages. Adults who apply themselves can reach the same level much
more quickly.

> In America, this is certainly true. Children come into school knowing
> the grammar of the local variety of spoken American English just fine.
> Then their English teachers beat them over the head with rules that
> don't correspond to the speech of anyone around them (often not even
> the teachers themselves!), and through a combination of mind-numbing
> repetition and fear-induced hypercorrection, their grammar changes
> from something fluent and natural to a convoluted, semi-random mess
> that makes Ron Hardin leap for his keyboard.

I've never seen this. What part of the United States have you been
observing?

> There shouldn't be an "if" there. Every person speaks their own
> idiolect; no two are the same.

Unfortunately, the only part of an idiolect that is useful for
communication is the part that correlates with someone else's idiolect.

> How did linguistic communities ever get by without mass
> public education?

To a large extent, they didn't ... they were completely illiterate, for
example. Their language changed rapidly as well.

> How have current cultures without any educational
> system at all managed to maintain any linguistic uniformity at all?

They haven't. Their languages drift very quickly if they are illiterate
and uneducated.

> What makes you think that the variation in native-learned idiolects is
> so vast that communication is significantly impeded, but that
> school-learned idiolects are somehow magically similar enough to each
> other that communication is signnificantly improved?

What is learned at school is not an idiolect, since it is not specific
to an individual. And for the same reason, it enhances communication,
by enforcing greater commonality of language among individuals.

> What do politics have to do with it?

A great deal, unfortunately, as anyone who has lived in Québec, Belgium,
Finland, Switzerland, India, the United States, or any one of many other
countries already knows. 

-- 
Transpose hotmail and mxsmanic in my e-mail address to reach me directly.

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