Re: History of French
From: Nathan Sanders (nsanders.DIE.SPAM_at_wso.williams.edu)
Date: 09/14/04
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Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 23:45:04 GMT
In article <gicek0tsll78ad9mpsltvjehmfo2vr0omg@4ax.com>,
Mxsmanic <mxsmanic@hotmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
And people who claim that children aren't fluent in their native
language routinely overlook the fact that children are in fact fluent
in their native language.
Some things that English-speaking children can do without even
thinking about it that many non-natives have difficulty with even
after years of study:
-pronounce tense mid vowels as diphthongs
-pronounce /T/ and /D/ correctly
-aspirate voiceless plosives at the beginning of words and stressed
syllables
-lengthen vowels before voiced codas
-velarize /l/ in syllables codas
-flap /t/, /d/, and /n/ in the appropriate contexts
-put adverbial expressions in the correct place
-use the correct preposition after verbs
-treat 1sg and 2sg subjects as plural for the purposes of verb
agreement
-use reflexives and other anaphora correctly
-use modals and verb tense correctly
-correctly interpret scope interaction between quantified expressions
This is just a small list, focusing on phonetics, phonology, and
syntax. Dig further into morphology, semantics, and especially
pragmatics, and you'll find that non-native knowledge can never seem
to catch up to native speaker knowledge (which is why linguists don't
collect data from non-native speakers, unless doing research
specifically on second-lannguage acquisition).
> 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.
The two primary places that non-native speakers can surpass children
in fluency is vocabulary and certain complex synactic constructions.
If you factor those out, transcription of adult speech and children's
speech would be remarkably similar.
> > 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.
A *decade*?!? Children know the sound structure of their language by
age 2, can form sentences by age 3, and can carry on arbitrarily long
conversations with rather sophisticated syntax by age 5. They are
essentially fluent (barring some vocabulary and complex syntax) in
their native languages long before they even start learning the
standard language in school.
> > 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?
The parts which churn out high school students who say "just between
you and I" and "whom shall I say is calling". They're scared to death
of sounding ignorant because of certain maligned aspects of their
native language, so they apply the rules they've been taught (but
imperfectly learned) everywhere possible, when they think to use them.
> Unfortunately, the only part of an idiolect that is useful for
> communication is the part that correlates with someone else's idiolect.
And fortuntely, within a dialect community, there is sufficient
overlap among the idiolects that formal education isn't needed to
enhance communication.
> > How did linguistic communities ever get by without mass
> > public education?
>
> To a large extent, they didn't ...
?!?! Do you think the modern languages of the numerous cultures
around the world without formal education just sprang up out of
nowhere a few generations back?
> they were completely illiterate, for
> example.
Literacy isn't required for first language learning. Children learn
to speak and hear their native language long before they learn to read
and write it.
And numerous languages around the world survive without any writing
system whatsoever.
> Their language changed rapidly as well.
The rate of language change isn't dependent on literacy. Nor is it
dependent on population size. Nor is dependent on the prevalence of
radio or television.
Why do people insist on repeating these urban legends?
> > 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.
Citation?
I've said it before: you should invest in a introductory linguistics
textbook.
Nathan
-- Nathan Sanders Linguistics Program nsanders@wso.williams.edu Williams College http://wso.williams.edu/~nsanders Williamstown, MA 01267
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