Re: How to prime kids to learn 3+ languages?

On 3 loka, 16:55, "John Atkinson" <johna...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote ...



On Oct 3, 5:42 am, phogl...@xxxxxx wrote:
On 2 loka, 19:57, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Oct 2, 10:23 am, phogl...@xxxxxx wrote:

On 2 loka, 16:54, Seán O'Leathlóbhair <jwlaw...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Today, many years
later, they still speak English and French well, and they have
learnt
some other languages, but have forgotten their Arabic.

This might have something to do with the fact that street Arabic,
especially Maghreb Arabic which is reputedly almost as replete
with
French loanwordas as Maltese is with Italian, is no use outside
the
souk: exposure to it won't help you understand much of that
artificial
Esperanto that is called Modern Standard Arabic. If the souk
jargon
had been supplemented with study of MSA, then the kids might have
actually found some use for that Arabic.-

Stick to Celtic.

Let's hear what was actually wrong in what I said.
"street Arabic"
"souk jargon"
"no use outside the souk"
Your epithets read like the worst sort of 19th-century Euro-
superiority ignorant trash. I naturally discount anything you might
have to say about an idiom for which you display such contempt.
But as for the question into which you inserted an insult of me, no,
Maghrebi Arabic would not be terribly useful in Baghdad.
The fact is, that
Arabic language mass media, from Aljazeera to Al Ahram, use MSA, and
another fact is, that MSA is an artificial Esperanto which nobody
speaks natively. The only way how those kids would have been able to
keep their Arabic would have been watching Arabic-language TV,
videos,
and suchlike. But Maghreb souk jargon is no use if you try to watch
TV
or read a newspaper in Arabic, because media Arabic is MSA,
practically a distinct language.-
I don't suppose you've ever bothered to discover what the very first
Arabic dialect of which a competent grammar was written was.
Nor does it interest you that it was probably a native language of two
of the greatest French Semitists of the 20th century, Marcel Cohen and
David Cohen (no relation).

One suspects that the variety of Maghrebi Arabic that you're thinking of
here was rather different from that the children involved learned from
their friends in the souk.

Panu: Obviously, Peter isn't rubbishing you for telling us that that
the variety in question is hardly intelligible outside the street and
the souk, since this is quite likely true. I'm just guessing, but
perhaps he's criticising you for using the word "jargon". Like
"pidgin", this has a perfectly respectable meaning in linguistics, but,
also like "pidgin", it was originally a term of insult, and some
non-linguists still use it as such.

In calling it jargon, I am only adopting the Arab street's authentic
sociolinguistic attitudes. I doubt if Peter has a problem with them,
as he is certainly even more aware of them than I am. His issues seem
to be with me personally.

.

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