[Lexicog] When Semantics Doesn't Matter

[Hayim Sheynin]

Dear Bill,

I appreciate your explanation. Your argument is good for some groups.
For example, many Russians in the USA live in self-imposed ghettoes,
when they communicate only in Russian and they laugh: "We already 
forgot Russian and we didn't learn English as yet."
However you can agree that these are extreme cases, and when one 
states, that a German translation of Shakespeare is better than the original
it may mean that either the translator was a better writer or the reader 
hyperbolyzed (exaggerated) his opinion. I heard many  times opinions  of
different people about the excellency of a particular translation, but after
additional research it was clear a reason of an untrue statement. (In most of the cases the opinion depends on esthetic values of the reader, rather than on
linguistic reasons.)

Now, as it relates to the story about your friend of Vancouver, I can tell about several people in my family. My grandparents were Jewish farmers in the Jewish 
colonies in Southern Ukraine (Cherson gubernia) [btw., next to them were German colonies]. They originally spoke Yiddish.
In 1929 they fled bolsheviks' "collectivization" to Leningrad. There they learned Russian, because this was necessity. Between themselves they spoke Yiddish, with the outside world in Russian. I was born in 1938, when Yiddish was spoken only by old people, who spoke with children in Russian. So for all the purposes my mother tongue is Russian. However in 1941 my father was killed, after 1945 my mother became chronically ill, and I was taken to another family (intermarriage family), where the wife was a Russian aristocrat (baroness) and the husband was Jewish (a cousin of my mother). So with my new adoptive mother I started to communicate in Russian, but in several months I already spoke French. So when I was 10-12 old, I read more books in French than in Russian, however my only French interlocutor was my "aunt" the baroness, who spoke French, German and English and read also in Italian and Spanish. Nevertheless I consider my native tongue Russian. From the age 12 I learned
 Latin (myself) and soon was able to compose poetry in Latin, as previously I did in French. In 1972 I immigrated to Israel already with a diploma of Semitic linguist and with ability to speak Hebrew and with knowledge of significant number of Semitic and European languages. I taught in Haifa U. in Hebrew, wrote articles in Russian, German, Hebrew and Spanish. My son in the time of immigration was a year and 10 month old and we (I and my wife) spoke to him Russian. He started his kinder-garden and elementary school in Hebrew. In 1979 we arrived to the USA. My son was 9. Since then he studied in English.
My question is, what is his native language. He speaks Russian well, but he reads in English and Hebrew better. He knows also French, but not to the extent 
comparable to one of the former three languages.
I told my linguistic history only to show that in some special cases exists a possibility of almost equal knowledge of two or three languages. However if the 
person is honest, even in this situation it is possible to determine, what is the native language.  So for my grandparents and parents, it is Yiddish, for me it is Russian, for my son it is English. It is funny, that he speaks with his older daughter (5 years old) in Hebrew, while in the kinder-garden and with her mother she speaks English.

Hayim Y. Sheynin    

billposer at alum.mit.edu wrote:                                  With regard to the question of whether one can know a second
 language better than one's mother tongue, in some circumstances
 the answer is, I think, yes. One such circumstance is when the
 scope of usage of the mother tongue is limited. For example, I have
 a friend who was born and raised in Vancouver. She has no siblings and
 her father died when she was very young, so she was raised by her
 mother alone. Her mother never learned more than a few words of English,
 not even a basic functional command. My friend's mother tongue is therefore
 Cantonese and since it is the only language she spoke
 for several decades with her mother, she is certainly a fluent speaker.
 
 However, her education was entirely in English and she did not live
 in Chinatown or otherwise have a lot of contact with other Chinese
 speakers. For all intents and purposes, she spoke Chinese only with her
 mother, who had limited education and worked menial jobs. She is
 not literate in Chinese. As a result, her vocabulary is severely
 limited. She can talk about the things she talked about with her
 mother - cooking and cleaning and every day life - but has no
 vocabulary for science, business, politics, etc. Since
 she grew up poor, I have found that I sometimes know the names of
 dishes in restaurants that she does not if they are things that her
 mother would not have made at home. She is unable to understand
 much of the content of Cantonese radio broadcasts, and once was turned
 down for a job in a small business because her Chinese was inadequate.
 
 It is true that she is a native speaker of English, having learned it
 as a child, but it seems clear that Cantonese is her true "mother tongue".
 Nonetheless, she is much more capable in English.
 
 This is a somewhat extreme case, but I've encountered similar
 cases in immigrant families, and I think that something similar is
 often found with speakers of dying languages. As a language dies,
 it often happens that the range of situations in which it is used
 contracts until it is used exclusively in the home, perhaps only
 with the mother or only with grandparents, which results in speakers
 who are in a sense fluent but only control a certain portion of the
 lexicon and a limited set of styles and registers.
 
 Bill
  
 
     
                       

       
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