Re: OT: Annoying language question

deirdrethecat@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

In a previous job I had a colleague, an American, who was married to a
Japanese woman. Both English and Japanese were spoken in their
household with more or less equal frequency. Their child, who was a
pre-schooler when I left, learned both languages simultaneously and
never, ever, confused the two. It was quite amazing.

The family of Pierre Marc Roget, who devised the first thesaurus, had a custom something like speaking French on Monday, German on Tuesday, Italian on Wednesday, etc. They were Swiss. (I'm sure you can google the details.)

Perfectly multilingual kids are quite common outside the U.S. I've run into urchins in other countries (Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil) that were quite fluent in English including a nearly perfect American accent, but obviously they spoke their native language at home.

I think a lot of that comes from watching American TV shows.

I was at the home of a French colleague trying to speak only French. In the course of some conversation, I said, "...le forêt."

His little daughter giggled and whispered to her father, "Monsieur a dit le forêt." It was as funny to her as if I had wet my pants.

(Forêt is French for forest, and it is a feminine noun that requires the article la.)

I think Chomsky was spot-on when it comes to the innateness of certain
aspects of the human language faculty, ...

The guy was one of the geniuses of the 20th century. It's too bad there's nothing equivalent to a Nobel Prize for linguistics.

- Jim
.

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