--- In cybalist@..., "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...> wrote:
> Gerry,
>
> This is not really a Cybalist question, but if you want to know my
opinion as a linguist, Larry Trask is dead right about Chomsky and
the Chomskyan paradigm. The linguistic ability is of course innate;
neurally hard-wired "parameters" are scientific fiction.
>
> Piotr
Yes, but...
When I learn a language that is more or less related to my native
tongue, I parametrize it. It is a process similar to one familiar to
those who program in computer languages: You watch the facts before
you (the new language, your half-finished program), decide that some
pieces within it are similar, so you take out those pieces,
parametrize them (identify the dissimilar parts within the similar
pieces) which you then call parameters, and replace both pieces with
instatiations of a single copy, with suitable substitutions for what
you identified as parameters.
If this is how your organize your knowledge of foreign languages (and
not all would do that, certainly not someone like Jorge Luis Borges'
Ireneo(?) Funes who remembered everything with total recall and who
gave names to all integers but was unable to understand the simple
concept that integers are ordered; this extreme state of mind
corresponds to a known physiological disorder) you will also know the
shibboleths that distinguishes your own language from theirs.
Example: All final vowels were weakened to <-&> in Danish. So also in
Swedish, except for final <-a>. Therefore a lot of final <-a>'s in
Swedish correspond to final <-&> in Danish. And therefore Danes
trying to speak Swedish will replace Danish final <-&> with <-a>,
which means they will sometimes get <-a> where Swedish has <-&> from
some other vowel (eg. ?*<minna> for <minne> "memory").[But Swedish
today has a tendency to replace final <-&> with <-a> (<timme> "hour" -
> <timma>), making -&/-a a real shibboleth.]
Another example: One evening when returning with a colleague from
Denmark to a job in Holland we saw a lot a bonfires everywhere and my
colleague decided to ask a waiter at a motorway restaurant what the
occasion was; but we didn't know the Dutch word for "bonfire". My
colleague convinced himself that since Danish word for bonfire
is "bål" the Dutch word would be "baal". I had a hunch that this root
was North Germanic (also English, I later found out). The waiter
seemed to agree with my opinion. Details aside, this is the type of
one-second discussion that takes place in your head when you apply
your parametrized language knowledge. Sometimes you overshoot and get
too critical. I've heard Dutch use the expression "Is it possible for
you to ..." for "Can you", presumably because they know that the
translation Du.<kan>=En.<can> doesn't work in the expression "Dat
kan" ("It can be done", ie. "can do", probably a calque from
Spanish "se puede"). Similarly, Danes avoid the English
expression "in full swing" because "i fuld sving" exists in Danish.
Of course, the more distant the language (and language type) the more
you must parametrize.
Personally I have wondered what the linguistic landscape looks like
w.r.to "relatives" seen (heard!) from a native English speaker's
standpoint. I have asked some living in Denmark; most said they felt
French was the easiest language for them to learn; on the other hand
they were also the ones that seemed most uncomfortable living here.
So perhaps this type of "parametrizing" foreign languages is not
readily available to them, owing to the separate development that
English has undergone, which might be why the phenomenon hasn't been
described much.
And I noticed an interesting phenomenon: if a speaker of a language I
hardly understand also knows another language I find it easier to
pick out words when he speaks his own language. Perhaps learning
another language, at least if we choose to parametrize it, also
forces us to analyze our native language, so that what used to be
an "unchipped block" suddenly falls apart in its component parts as
we lose our monoglot innocence?
And: you might argue that historical linguistics, as seen on this
list, is a continuation of that historical parametrizing skill.
Finally: One possible objection: Chomsky talks of hardware, I talk of
software. Yes, but everything in the brain is wetware; the brain has
its time for building and its time to use them rigidly. After a
certain age you can't learn a new language properly. And even if you
can, are you stuck within your language type?
Torsten