Re: Can't speak his mother tongue.

Hatunen <hatunen@xxxxxxx> wrote
cybercypher <cybercypher75@xxxxxxx> wrote:
Evan Kirshenbaum <kirshenbaum@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote
cybercypher <cybercypher75@xxxxxxx> writes:

Why should it matter what the ancestry of Palestinian Arabs is?
Claiming that Arabic is an ethnic Arab's mother tongue is a
racist and political statement pure and simple.

It seems to be more widespread than Israel, though.

I'm aware of this fact. I wonder what people who make this claim
would consider my son's mother tongue to be: he's half Taiwanese
(ethnic Han Chinese from southern Fujian province) and half
Usonian.

Languages are not intrinsic to specific gene pools.

Finally you seem to have understood my point. Without knowing whether
the Isreali-Arab lt. general had actually been a mother-tongue
speaker of Arabic, assuming that he was just because he is an ethnic
Arab is racist.

There's been
some confusion here about just what consitutes a "mother tongue".
A mother tongue is the first language a child learns.

I wonder what you think you mean by "learns". How well does the child
have to learn it before it can be called the child's mother tongue?
This question is irrelvant for monolingual children, but for
trilingual children, such as my son, it is not irrelevant. He is
considered a native speaker of Mandarain Chinese and of Taiwanese.
He's totally fluent in both and has no trouble speaking or
understanding either. Other native speakers would say that his
command of both language is "perfect". His command of English is not
as good. Even though he started speaking English at the same time as
he started speaking Taiwanese, I have to call Taiwanese, not English,
his mother tongue. I would not trust his judgment about what
constitutes correct English either. He wasn't brought up in an
English-speaking environment. His only real contact with the
language, except for half a dozen trips to the USA to visit my family
and friends there, has been with me, with American dn British movies,
TV shows, videos, and audio media. He's listened to me and my wife
speaking to each other in English littered with Japanese (she's
Taiwanese, not Japanese, but we both lived in Japan for 10 years and
both speak the language much better than I speak Chinese).

I am an
ehtnic/genetic Finn, but my mother tongue is English. My mother
is an ethnic/genetic Finn and her mother tongue is Finn, although
she can no longer speak it much, her daily language being
English.

So what language did your son first learn?

He learned both English and Taiwanese, but in my estimation,
Taiwanese is his mother tongue if only because that is the language
he spoke almost exclusively for the first three-and-a-half years of
his life until he started learning and speaking Mandarin everyday at
preschool and with his mother.

It has nothing to do intinsically with being part Han
or half American.

You really don't read very well at all, do you? I specifically stated
that people who associate ethnicity with mother tongues -- not me,
not me, not me! There, have I said that often enough for it to get
through your blinkers? -- would have the same kind of problem
deciding what his mother tongue ought to be as they do deciding what
my religion is. Everyone I know in Taiwan and Japan assumes that
because I'm an American that I am also a Christian. Yuk! I'm not a
Christian and never have consciously been a Christian. Everyone here
and in Japan assumes that every Caucasian they see is American. They
don't think about other places in the world populated by Caucasians
who are not Americans.

The guy who made the claim was an Arab Arabic speaker. I don't
know whether he was an Israeli Arab.

I've heard
Indian colleagues talk about countrymen "never learning their
mother tongue", and the Wikipedia article says that the term is
also used that way in Kenya and in the early twentieth century
was used that way in Ireland.

I had wondered whether in this case it might have been a
mistranslation of something closer to "ancestral tongue", but I
see that word is commonly translated (and is translated thus in
the Hebrew version of the "first language" article) using the
word for "mother".

There is some justification for such a notion, I would imagine,
but it's certainly not the case that everyone remembers enough of
their first language to be able to speak it fluently. My mother's
first language was certainly Italian, and she had no trouble
understanding it when she was younger, but she made a conscious
decision sometime early in her life that she would never speak it.
Her mother tongue may have been Itlaian because her parents were
illiterate Italian immigrants who spoke virtually no English when
she was born, but when my mother began public school in New
Jersey, like the children of so many other immigrants in the USA,
she decided that English was the only language to speak.

I think ""never learning their mother tongue" disregards the
usual meaning of "mother tongue; if he never learned it then it
is not his mother tongue but rather the language some people
think should have been his mother tongue.

Yes, yes, yes. That was my point.

The son of my Dutch friend in Tokyo used to speak Dutch until he
went to public school there. At age 5 or 6, he discovered that no
one at his school spoke Dutch. He now speaks Japanese exclusively.
His mother is Japanese and both his parents speak to each other in
Japanese. He no longer speaks any Dutch beyond "yes', "no",
"delicious", and a few other brief phrases.

But Dutch remains his "mother tongue".

You are making assumptions that I cannot make. His mother is
Japanese. She spoke to him only in Japanese. She doesn't speak or
understand Dutch, only Japanese and English. I would say that his
mother tongue is probably Japanese, just as I say that my son's
mother tongue is Taiwanese. That's the tongue he spoke fluently as a
child, both inside and outside the house.

The concept of mother tongue needs some revision. Which one is
one's mother tongue, the first language one speaks in --

According to most references.

for my son that
was probably English, and I'd call him a native anglophone solely
because he's been listening to English since birth and speaking
since his first birthday or so, but it's nowhere near as good as
his Taiwanese (southern Min; native-speaker "perfect") or his
Mandarin Chinese; also native-speaker "perfect").

I would also call Taiwanese, not English, his mother tongue.

See. that's where the problem lies; unless you learn two
languages simultaneously, they can't both be your mother tongues.

He learned two languages simultaneously, but he didn't get the chance
to use one of them often enough to enable him to learn it expertly
enough for me to say that he's a reliable native speaker of English.


--
Franke: EFL teacher & medical editor
Native speaker of American English; posting from Taiwan.
"It has come to my attention that my opinions are not universally
shared." Scott Adams.

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Bernama: Gerakan Urges Return To Teaching Science, Math In Mother Tongue
    ... We are all trying to adapt to an international language and in the process ... ones mother tongue is fine but it would come back to square one.Prior to ... pupils inability or porr command of English that they want to rever back to ... > "We feel at primary level the teaching of science and mathematics ...
    (soc.culture.malaysia)
  • Re: Juggling words from around the world
    ... that word in your mother tongue. ... having a word in you language and ... even then using them in English is a little... ... I'm proud to be italian and to speak italian too, ...
    (rec.juggling)
  • Re: Cant speak his mother tongue.
    ... he gave it in Hebrew because he couldn't speak Arabic. ... assumed that the lt. general's mother tongue ... was Arabic simply on the basis on his ethnicity. ... or fifth language, should be inclined to do so. ...
    (alt.usage.english)
  • Re: second language acquisition in 2 1/2-year-old
    ... We speak Japanese at home because ... It's not enough for only one parent to speak the language ... own mother tongue when communicating with the child is very generally ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Is it correct?
    ... >>>Your usage of language, ... >>>idiomatic to American English. ... >> mother-tongue idiomatic usage and consistent grammatical quirks (like the ... >Mother Tongue? ...
    (alt.usage.english)
Loading