Re: History of French

From: James Kanze (kanze_at_gabi-soft.fr)
Date: 09/14/04 

Date: 14 Sep 2004 22:09:21 +0200

Mxsmanic <mxsmanic@hotmail.com> writes:

|> 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.

I think it would help if you tried to establish exactly what you mean by
"children". Someone mentionned four year olds -- I know that I've heard
native four year old French speakers who used "les chevals" as the
pluriel of "le cheval" -- no native adult speaker, or for that matter,
one over seven or eight, would consider that correct.

The key, of course, is that there isn't a dicotomy children-adult, or
for that matter fluent-incompetent. There is, instead, a gradual change
to a varying level of competence. 

-- 
James Kanze
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