Re: Linguistic Agonies


"António Marques" <m.ap@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:437c54a7$0$2160$a729d347@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Ruud Harmsen wrote:
>
>> Special cases exist, like children learning a language from both
>> parents at home, but getting no other exposure because they live in a
>> country where nobody knows that language. So everywhere else, they
>> only hear the language of where they live. Their command of the
>> parents' language will be quite good, native or near native, but may
>> develop some traits that are unusual among native speakers in the
>> country of origin. I've witnesses an example of that).
>
> This is interesting, could you expand it?
> (I've had an example in my family, but not exactly the same, and nothing
> too spectacular.)

I'm more or less an example of this: my family spoke Hindi at home, but I've
always lived in an Anglophone environment (Britain, Canada). Everybody in my
family speaks English. The result is that English is my dominant language;
when I speak Hindi, I sporadically make mistakes. These range from
grammatical contamination from my dominant language (in another thread I
just mentioned that I sometimes pick my possessive pronouns to agree with
the gender of the possessor, as in English, rather than the possessed, as in
Hindi), to random phonological errors that aren't really because of English.

As an example of the latter: sometimes, in a string of speech, I will
transpose the phonological feature [+aspirated] to the wrong consonantal
segment. This cannot be English contamination, since English has no
corresponding distinctive feature (and the mistake I make is not necessarily
going to produce the standard English aspiration pattern); nor do I simply
not know the words in question, since on most occasions I speak correctly.
(It is worth stating that I sometimes make these mistakes in English too - I
have a sort of phonological dyslexia I suppose - but much more rarely; maybe
because I speak English more often I don't notice it as much.)

There are other issues too: I must have poorly sorted out the various
dialects that I've heard (in movies, for instance, or from the Indian
community around where I've lived, most of whom are Panjabi), because I've
come to learn things that are different from the standard language. For
example, the honorific system: when a person is spoken about or directly to,
Hindi uses honorifics and will make the person plural. Panjabi, and I'm sure
some dialects of Hindi, have the habit of using the masculine plural even
for feminine words when they are being honorific. I have somehow learned
this, in an incomplete way: when I speak to my grandmother, I sometimes find
myself using masculine plurals for words agreeing with her. This totally
confuses me, since I realise that there's a mismatch in gender; at the same
time, I feel that the feminine plural would be derogatory. I asked my mom
about this once, and she seemed very surprised that I would think of using
the masculine, so it's either something my dad does or just another defect
in my speech. I don't think it's an English contamination, but it's a flaw.

There are other things as well; Ruud's statement describes me exactly, that
my Hindi is native or near-native, but has traits that are unusual for most
native speakers. The more that I notice these traits, the less likely I am
to speak Hindi, from the embarassment of making a mistake; which gets me
perceived as an outsider to Hindi-speakers, which makes me nervous, and more
likely to make mistakes. The effect is similar to my various L2's, but Hindi
is an L1 for me.

Neeraj mathur


.

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