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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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I'm starting a new thread on a sub-thread developed over in Q&A's "Mongrel Pronunciations":
There, Sparteye brings up one Dr Tsunoda's research on the brain. He's quoted as saying, "I believe that the mother tongue differenciates the way in which people receive, process, feel, and understand sounds in the external environment.... The mother tongue is closely related to the development of the emotional mechanism in the brain. I conjecture that the mother tongue acquired in childhood is closely linked with the formation of the unique culture and mentality of each ethnic group."
There's nothing new here. As early as 1929, Edward Sapir fomulated the same hypothesis: "We see and hear ... very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation."
What do y'all think?
Also, in the January Smithsonian magazine (the folks who brought you Anu Garg in December) there is a piece on language acquisition called "Accents Are Forever." It's pretty widely accepted that a foreign language learned after puberty is learned imperfectly (Noam Chomskey did pioneer work on this theory at MIT). Patricia Kuhl of the Univ. of Washington goes a step farther and suggests that "By their first birthday, babies are getting locked into the sounds of the language they hear spoken."
http://www.smithsonianmag.si.edu/smithsonian/issues01/jan01/phenom_jan01.html
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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That's interesting, when Dr. T. says the mother tongue
affects the way we hear and understand sounds in the external environment. I wonder if he meant non-verbal sounds, as well. I'm reminded of the post or article I read where it gave the different sounds that are assigned to represent a dog's bark, in different languages. There was quite a lot of variation.
Definitely, your mother tongue affects the way you hear language. My Turkish friend taught me to count to ten in his language. Number one is pronounced beer, and of course that's what I thought he was saying at first--he laughed when I told him I didn't have any! I've always been rather envious of those who managed to be brought up in a bilingual home. I think it's accurate that a language learned after puberty will be learned imperfectly (in general). The age where our brains are best-equipped for taking in another language is before the age of six.
A corollary to knowing our mother tongue best, and having more difficulty with one(s) learned subsequently is the way our brains seem to be "wired" for remembering: what we learn first stays with us the longest. Remember trying to
learn lists of spelling or vocabulary words? The words at the top of the list were the easiest to memorize. What's at the end is next-easiest, and for most of us the middle gets lost. That's why I had my children learn to recognize the letters of the alphabet at random: I wanted all letters to have an "equal opportunity", as it were. How many songs can you recall only the first line of? I'll bet everyone knows do-re-mi, and with another second, la-ti-do.
Do you have to make more effort to think of the middle two?
But also, our life experiences affect what we comprehend. A funny example comes from a catalog that advertised Owl brand clothing, made of Goretex fabric. Apparently they had to put in a disclaimer saying that they were aware that Al Gore did not live in Texas! My point is that which I made in another long-ago post: we tend to try to fit new experiences into something that we have a frame of reference for, or an understanding of. I think a great many people were and are not familiar with Owl Goretex, so their minds interpreted it as Al Gore, Tex. (sort of), because the words Al Gore were extremely familiar, and
Owl Gore(tex) was not.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Great question, AnnaS – and thanks for the pointer to that fascinating article. I had not previously heard of Patricia Kuhl’s work, so now have some more exploring to do!
I have little specialist knowledge of this area of study, but it seems instinctively right to me. It’s consistent with what I observe of so many human characteristics: that our brains seem particularly adapted to look for patterns, to the extent that we filter out the redundant data (even ‘interference’, in the context of a second language, in Kuhl’s terms). But I would think that – that’s my pattern!
I’m just reading Describing Language*, and can see a correlation between the description of Malinowski’s and Halliday’s views with Kuhl’s experiments on the brain’s formative phase. In this general survey, Malinowski is represented as stressing the importance of “the meaning of each utterance within the actual context”, quoted approvingly by Halliday as “a context of situation” – this is all, as I understand it, contrasting with another model of speech which views language as a mere code passing information like morse between two terminals.
So if we learn language in our most formative and receptive stage of development, and do so in ways that Patricia Kuhl’s experiments strongly suggests is inclusive of non-verbal and contextual information (as our intuition might have suggested is the case!), then what could be more natural than that this pattern should be repeated in subsequent life? In other words we absorb, with that formative language and accent and vocabulary, a whole set of equally formative “emotional mechanism… closely linked with the formation of the unique culture and mentality …” of the group. I would dispute Tsunoda’s leap to identify this with ethnicity, however: seems to me to be linked logically only to the cultural imprint offered by the adults. This may be the same thing in effective outcome, but can be traced to raising, not race.
Where was the Sapir quote from – is it in Culture, Language & Personality?
BTW, my 13 year old daughter was reading the print-out of the Smithsonian article over supper last night, and said “Cool! I’ve got two language maps in my brain! I spoke Welsh at school and English at home.”
Forgive the ramblings of just an amateur dabbler – I would be fascinated to hear the perspective of more experienced students in this area, and also of La Belle Dame and our other bilingual members.
*For anyone interested the reference was to:
Describing Language
Graddol, Cheshire & Swann
OU Press, 1994
ISBN 0 335 19315 3
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Pooh-Bah
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I'm interested in the subject of at what age an accent becomes "fixed". A friend told me that he had moved a lot as a child and had always arrived with the wrong accent.
Belonging is terribly important when you are young, yet he had arrived in Wales with a Scottish accent, London with a Welsh accent and back to Scotland with a London accent, the worst of all possible worlds.
It is wonderful the way that as you get older a strange accent makes you more "interesting" than "strange" perhaps some small part of us evolves in the way that we find people from new places with (maybe) different perpectives, interesting, rather than a threat to our entire value system.
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journeyman
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journeyman
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I have no research to back my ramblings, but here goes. I am bilingual - German and English. I learned German from my Berlin-born mother, so I speak German with a light Berlin accent. I was born in West Virginia in an area where the natives have a decided Appalachian accent. My father grew up in Minnesota and thus speaks a fine mid-western accented English! So, I spoke Appalachian accented English with my playmates, mid-western-accented English to my father and all other adults, and "berliner Deutsch" with my mother. What to make of this? I have developed a pretty good ear for accents and can mimic people, sometimes unconsciously. Do I have a German "ethnicity?" No more than what my mother taught me - I really am an American (six months of living in France, a country I dearly, dearly love, showed me that). Do I perhaps "understand" my mother better for being able to communicate with her in her native tongue? Yes, I think so. She is no stranger to me, and my father swears that even after 45 years of marriage, during which they have always spoken German to each other, there are still moments when he "can't figure her out."  Am I any better at learning languages because I am bilingual? No! My French, which I learned in high school and majored in in college, is okay (rusty!!!). My attempts to learn another foreign language have been failures. Perhaps I'm a lazy language learner. I do know that speaking two languages besides English has allowed me the pleasure of really getting to know two cultures. I have had experiences and met people by being able to speak with them in their mother tongue that would otherwise have been unavailable to me. But these sorts of experiences are open to anyone who speaks a second language, no matter when it was learned. In short - learn a language and expand your world!
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addict
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LOVE this subject - especially the opportunity to rant on about my own experience with no need to back it up scientifically....
But, a (semi) scientific point first - there is a great book called 'The Language Instinct' by Stephen Pinker that I would recommend if you are interested in this area. According to him the research shows that humans acquire 'grammar' around the age of two or three, and that they acquire grammar regardless of the ungrammaticality (!) of the language spoken to them. To support this he talks of the difference between 'pidgin' - a means of communicating for adults with different native tongues, that has no consistent grammar - and 'patois' where words are adopted from different native tongues by children who meld the whole with a consistent grammar to create a new language. He also compares people who have been locked away from human contact (usually by psychotic parents) until different ages and looks at the langauge they end up learning. Those who learn late apparently never really 'get' grammar, which severely limits their ability to communicate.
(I may have all that wrong, but that's what I remember from it in this context.)
As for the language you speak affecting your character, I 100% believe this. The person I am when speaking Japanese is quite quite different from the person I am when speaking English.
I've also always thought it interesting how the same sentiment may be very easy to say in one language but hard in another:
'I miss you.' 'Tu me manques.' (literally 'you are lacking for me.') Note which person the emphasis is on and you can see why we rough egotistical Anglo-Saxons have taken over so much of the world.
NB It's much much harder in Japanese and I can't even think of a way of saying it that I wouldn't have to check with a native speaker. Damn! NOw I'll have to go and ask...
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Carpal Tunnel
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The person I am when speaking Japanese is quite quite different from the person I am when speaking English.
That's interesting, Bridget. Do you mean that you sort of
mentally adopt their cultural mannerisms as well? I have little knowledge of their culture, so this may not be a good example, but I believe they place a high value on respect, so using that, when you're speaking Japanese would you be extra-careful to ensure that your speech (and mannerisms?) demonstrated respect?
I am delighted that you're posting again, Dearest!
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(Aside: my posting is likely to be very off and on for ages as my real life seems to be taking more than 24 hours a day! So on the board it will be a case of 'not all there' - some may notice no difference!)
Do you mean that you sort of
mentally adopt their cultural mannerisms as well?
I don't think it's mannerisms exactly. It goes deeper than that. But there are some things that are tied into the Japanese language that could be said to be matched in their culture (and incidentally in many cases I think British culture may be closer to Japanese than it is to American, but that's a whole other story!).
For example, the language 'expects' politeness to strangers / members of other groups (cf 'the honourable member for XXX' in British politics, but taken seriously). It 'expects' restraint about self - no need to put in 'I' or 'me' as the subject unless it could be in doubt. So less need to push oneself forward, also possibly more practice at noticing others who do not push for attention?
And it is perfectly acceptable (normal!) Japanese to leave sentences unfinished, or finish with 'but' - there is a whole expectation that people will fill in gaps and make the effort to understand what you meant. This is not vagueness or politeness, this is active listening. I certainly should do more of that in English.
But the point is, Jackie, it's not something I feel I'd need to be 'extra-careful' to ensure I did. It's a change in my internal focus that comes about automatically when I am functioning in that language.
...mindless burble before breakfast. I'll try to think of a really good example on the way to work!
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When I was taking Russian, my teacher explained that the Russian word for peace was the same as the word for world. So she said, when Russians say they want peace, they are also saying they want the world; to understand the language was to understand the people. Isn't this the premise behind political correctness, where language goes the people will follow?
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journeyman
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journeyman
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Note which person the emphasis is on and you can see why we rough egotistical Anglo-Saxons have taken over so much of the world
There is another example that is perhaps even more glaring. In French and in German, and probably many other languages I don't know, one says "j'ai raison" and "Ich habe Recht," respectively. In English we say "I am right." In French and German I claim only to "have a bit of rightness." I never abrogate anyone else's claim to rightness in claiming some for myself as I do when I claim that "I am right."
I was also reminded that in German (and French) I have two pronouns available to me in addressing people: Du and tu (thee) and Sie and Vous (you). I miss that in English. How much more loving and friendly to address a friend, companion, mate as "thee" to distinguish my feelings for that person from strangers.
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