Re: Who's Missing ..?

TOG@toil,chateau.murray@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx, <chateau.murray@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 16 Aug, 23:07, Timo Geusch <tnewsSPAMME...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

You'd be surprised how often people guess either South African or
Scandinavian...

The only ones who tend to get it right are people who've lived in
Germany.

They're the ones who recognise the shape of the head, presumably?

But yes, you've grasped the essence of it, which is that the utterly
crucial years for absorbing a nationality, a culture, etc, are the
childhood years. One can become totally bilingual, take citizenship,
whatever, but the brain is being programmed in a human's early years.
It's more than mere language that is absorbed, though.

You miss out on all that childhood behaviour, etiquette, games, crazes,
relationships with parents, interaction with adults, TV shows, popular
kids' culture. It's not a matter of birth (as I said twice, although the
iFrog is in denial about this). It's environmental, at an utterly
critical time in a human being's development.

I'd suggest that someone who moves to a foreign country while an infant,
or at any rate aged younger than maybe three, will grow up utterly
assimilated, no matter what their place of birth, race, colour, or even
their mother's tongue. Unless, of course, they're sort of locked away at
home all the time. Past childhood, it's different. Your brain has been
hard-wired elsewhere.

Perhaps you'd care to give us all some reliable sources for the above as
whilst I'm sure that 'Sigmund Murray' is a respected psychologist in
La-laland, the rest of us might need something a bit more 'solid' insofar as
your assertions go. Much as it pains me to point it out to you, 'beating
up on Des' doesn't appear anywhere in the sources I've checked out.

A quick google gives me ..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_assimilation

.... which, wiki's alleged inaccuracy notwithstanding, doesn't mention
anything about being 'hard-wired'. There _is_ a nice chapter in a book
I've mentioned before, David Crystal's _The Cambridge Encyclopædia of_
_Language_ [1] on bilingual children, and as my first French word was
spoken before I even went to primary school, I could (but won't) claim to
be in that category.

I did find this ..

http://minilien.fr/a0khvg

... which states ..

'Early language development studies show that children need to hear the
language by the time they are 6 months old to ever have the possibility
of being able to speak it without an accent'

... but my personal experience (both concerning myself and others I know
here) appears to disprove this, for I don't have a foreign accent when I
speak French, and I didn't hear the language until later than six months.
That article doesn't seem to go into 'cultural hardwiring'; at least on the
first couple of pages, which is all I read.

What I'm trying to say is that you're making yourself look like a complete
fuckwit (not that you'll find anyone on UKRM to agree with that, but then
you could claim that the Sun revolves around the earth and everyone else
would agree, on condition that the person disagreeing with you is called
'Des') by making assertions based on your own opinions, and presenting them
as some sort of scientific 'fact'. You haven't provided _anything_ other
than your own opinion.

Not even anecdotal evidence, relatively worthless as it may be. Nothing.
Just 'this is the way it is, 'cos I said so'.

And you expect any non-Clique member to take that seriously ??

I can cite lots of such cases. A bloke whom I knew when I lived out in my
old flat (Julien, and he used to ride an SV650 .. I believe I mentioned him
here on UKRM at one point 'cos we rode out to an abbey near Versailles one
day, and an old *** in a car almost ran him over, 'creeping' forward at
the lights until I started hammering my fist on his bonnet), and whose
girlfriend I tried to (and almost managed to) shag. He was from the
Ukraine, and arrived in France at the age of ten. He speaks _completely_
accentless French, and no one (not me, not the others he knew, not even his
girlfriend) _ever_ managed to 'catch him out' culturally. Watch my lips:
_ever_. I corrected his French a few times, but I do that with native
speakers, too. Hmm, lemme think... ah yes. A Hebrew teacher at the
school, Ruth. Born in Morocco, went to live in Israel at the age of
fifteen, came to France maybe five years after that. Again, accentless
French (well, Morocco _is_ a former French colony), but more importantly,
culturally indistinguishable from any of her colleagues. How about
Mohammed ('Momo'), a former colleague from my days in IT? Born in Mali,
came to France when he was (IIRC) fifteen. He has a strong African accent
when he speaks French, but his cultural 'assimilation' is flawless.
Armand, a bloke from the Synagogue where I used to go when I lived in the
VIIth. Moroccon, he attended yeshivot in Fez and Jerusalem.
_Breathtakingly_ erudite, speaks Hebrew, Arabic, French, English and
Judeo-Spanish, and his French has the accent typical of North African Jews,
but on a cultural level, he's as French as my SO who was born and brought
up here.

These are all anecdotes and as such, they are necessarily to be treated as
unreliable, but at least they're a step up from the completely unfounded
opinions that you've been trying to pass off as fact, and then going off on
one when I dispute them.

Feel free to provide some hard data, instead of just 'I'm TOG, you're Des
and so I'm right and you're wrong, nyar nyar nyar-nyar nyar!'.

D.

[1] http://minilien.fr/a0khve [2]
[2] the cover of mine looks like this.. http://minilien.fr/a0khvf
--
des | 'trop d'la balle, j'kiffe grave!'
.

Loading