Re: Ossetian sociolinguistics?

Paul J Kriha skreiv:

Peter T. Daniels wrote:

On Aug 27, 11:03 am, Craoibhi...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

On 26 elo, 08:24, Darkstar <darkstar...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

[...] You can't learn a second language at all. For the same reason that you can't create a human from dead pieces, you'd create a Frankenstein at best. An individualized pidgin. A language is acquired IN VIVO.

There are, and have been, people who have become, say, acknowledged
writers in a second or third language. Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach spoke Czech and governess-French before she acquired her first words in German. Bozena Nemcová's first language was German, not Czech. Elias Canetti won the Nobel Prize as a Germanophone writer, but his first language was Ladino (i.e. the Spanish-related Romance variety spoken by Sephardic Jews in Bulgaria). Theodor Kallifatides is a native of Greece who writes in Swedish. Alexis Kouros speaks, I think, Persian natively, but writes in Finnish. Jurek Becker spoke Polish natively and wrote in German (though, when I asked him, he told he had completely forgotten his native Polish).

You left out Vladimir Nabokov!

And my favoured Joseph Conrad (Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski)
who AFAIR first learned English in his twenties.

Was German the first, second or third language of Franz Kafka?

--
Trond Engen
- vladikafkačnik
** Posted from http://www.teranews.com **
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