Re: Teaching a child three languages


Larisa wrote:
Seán O'Leathlóbhair wrote:


Umm, I think that what actually happens is that the individual
speakers, over time, change the language - language change happens
gradually. It's not that children are born and suddenly start speaking
a slightly different version of language X; it's that over the years,
language X changes, and the version of language X that the parents are
speaking by the time their children are born is slightly different from
the version that the children speak by the time they're grown up.

I have a theory on one of the ways that language change happens;
"creative" individual speakers. Both my father and I have a tendency
toward "non-standard" usage, both in Russian (in his case) and in
English (in my case, though I also do it in Russian) - linguistic
playfulness, in a way. I don't do it most of the time - I can sound
quite normal when I need to - but when I'm with friends, in a relaxed
environment, I sometimes sound a bit "different" - on purpose. One of
my friends is also like that, and we can get quite silly when talking
to each other.

Now, if I were a slightly more charismatic person, and people were even
slightly tempted to follow me, I might indeed create a new usage this
way. I think this is how new slang comes about - some linguistically
creative type decides that saying "cool" is too boring, and decides to
start saying "groovy" instead just to be playful - and because he or
she is a charismatic type with lots of friends, the friends pick it up,
and soon "groovy" becomes a mainstream accepted term. Eventually,
either the word enters the mainstream lexicon (like "cool"), or it dies
(like "flivver") - and the language changes.

Larisa, I find this an excellent explanation of how new words, and
words with new senses, get into our language(s). But, to me, there is
no explanation here of how sound changes and grammatical changes take
place. I notice that these are a different kind of change because they
are (more or less) systematic.

You say 'It's not that children are born and suddenly start speaking
a slightly different version of language X' ... but, as I explained,
they really do. I can immediately tell my daughter's speech from my
wife's, and my wife's speech from her mother's. I don't believe there
was ever a time when they spoke exactly the same language, when I
couldn't have told their speech apart. The limiting case is twins and
siblings, whose speech can indeed be very difficult to tell apart
(because the evidence on which they created their languages was so
similar).

Andrew

http://perso.wanadoo.fr/dalby/

.

Relevant Pages

  • language origin, language evolution, evolutionary mutation
    ... The evolution of the Expressive voices into Language ... Vocal expression, animal voicing or speech, is an action, ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Chess Bitch
    ... > Maybe such language is ... > used in the square, and maybe by the 30-year-old women in the square, most ... > of whom, if anything, are even less well-educated than Ms. Shahade. ... > frequently are dismissed for indulging in gender-based hate speech and/or ...
    (rec.games.chess.misc)
  • Re: OT: Some thoughts abouth thinking
    ... >> mean that on the order of 0.5 kg of brain tissue is spent ... >> on processing language. ... >> Based on that line of arguments, I find speech processing by ... In that context, the sense of smell is one of the oldest, as the ...
    (comp.dsp)
  • Re: Large text compression benchmark
    ... language processing applications. ... As this is comp.speech.research I'll answer from the speech recognition ... recognition system is very similar to text compression. ...
    (comp.speech.research)
  • Re: Why do you like Mozarts music?
    ... >>> someone really wants to make a claim for a specific speech dialect ... > good measure, the language he actually spoke, Swedish. ... >> sentence I am writing now, and there are a lot of examples for this ... Beethoven does write complex phrase structures (known obligingly ...
    (rec.music.classical.recordings)