LL-L 'Language proficiency' 2006.08.08 (01) [E]

Tue Aug 8 15:42:20 UTC 2006

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L O W L A N D S - L * 08 August 2006 * Volume 01
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From: 'Kevin Caldwell' <kevin.caldwell1963 at verizon.net>
Subject: LL-L 'History' 2006.08.07 (08) [E]

> From: Paul Finlow-Bates <wolf_thunder51 at yahoo.co.uk>
> Subject: LL-L 'Language proficiency' 2006.08.07 (02) [E]
>
> From: R. F. Hahn
> Subject: Language proficiency
>
> Speakers of English have a particular problem in that English
> proficiency is
> increasing very fast around the world, which makes it easy for them to
> be "lazy"
> (i.e., assume a "why bother?" attitude). ...
>
> Regards,
> Reinhard/Ron
>
> Not just "why bother?"; often "what do I learn?". If somebody's native
> language
> is Dutch, Finnish, Mandarin or Thai, and they take it into their head to
> learn
> another one, you don't need to be a mind reader to guess what they are
> going to pick.
> So, to reciprocate, English speakers just have to learn Dutch, Finnish,
> Mandarin,
> Thai, Urdu....

For Americans, the answer to "Which language do I learn?" is increasingly,
"Spanish."

Kevin Caldwell

----------

From: Heather Rendall <HeatherRendall at compuserve.com>
Subject: LL-L 'Language proficiency' 2006.08.06 (05) [E]

Message text written by INTERNET:lowlands-l at LOWLANDS-L.NET
>Ron writes about Scott's comment , "use it or lose it" is somewhat right,
I believe, but I'm not sure you
lose it altogether, as I have said here several times before (and I won't
repeat all those examples).<

Have I asked before whether forum members have come across people who have
reverted to their 1st (mother/baby) language following a sever
illness/stroke?

I have been amassing examples for the last 2 decades and am fascinated by
the fact that a sever head injury or stroke can cause one's current
language to fail totally and a long unused 1st language to re-establish
itself.

I say 1st langauge advisably as there was an excellent example in an
obituary in The Daily Telegraph some years ago of a diplomat who spoke in
excess of 10 languages but following a stroke reverted to a language no-one
could recognise for some time. Eventually it was realised he had reverted
back to the Mandarin of his babyhood, having been born in China to diplomat
parents ( English speaking) but with a Mandarin speaking amah.

When my mother was in hospital two years ago, there was a gentleman on the
the ward, who had had a severe stroke and despite having lived in England
since 1945 now only spoke in the German of his childhood. All his English
of nearly 60 years had vanished ( had become disconnected)

Which might point to the fact that we do store our different languages
separately - with connections and cross overs that can be lost/ become
unconnected

Heather

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From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Language proficiency

Kevin (above):

> For Americans, the answer to "Which language do I learn?" is increasingly,
> "Spanish."

Quite so, daddy-o!  In fact, the word "bilingual" is now well on its way to
meaning "English and Spanish."  Here in the West at least it's pretty much a
completed process.  I used to "complain," "bilingual in *what*?"  But few people
share this ... attitude.  So "bilingual" in employment ads no longer requires
elaboration unless it involves other languages.

Heather (also above):

> I say 1st langauge advisably as there was an excellent example in an
> obituary in The Daily Telegraph some years ago of a diplomat who spoke in
> excess of 10 languages but following a stroke reverted to a language no-one
> could recognise for some time. Eventually it was realised he had reverted
> back to the Mandarin of his babyhood, having been born in China to diplomat
> parents ( English speaking) but with a Mandarin speaking amah.

Are you sure you didn't confuse this with something I told you a while ago?  In
brief, it involved a professor of mine, a Mongolist with a strong Turcology and
Tungusology background whose only "weakness" had been that he didn't know Chinese
in his professional career and thus had to rely on others in this regard.  When
he was in his 90s and dying of cancer, I and others visited him and/or took turns
in watching him as he had no family around here.  When he was delirious he began
to mumble in child-like Mandarin.  He had been born in Manchuria as a son of a
German-Russian Tsarist diplomat and his Finnish wife.  He spoke German with his
father and Finnish with his mother, but he spent most of his time with his
Mandarin-speaking amah.  When he was about four or five years old things began to
become dangerous in Manchuria and he and his mother were sent to St. Petersburg.
 It was there that he first learned Russian and became preoccupied with it, but
he still spoke German with some relatives and Finnish with his mother, would also
speak Finnish during his summers in Finland.  At the age of six or seven they
visited his father in Manchuria where a surprise ended up in disappointment: his
father had arranged for his amah to visit from the south, but he was no longer
able to communicte with her beyond a handful of words.  Soon after his and his
mother's return to St. Petersburg his father back in Manchuria was murdered by
either thieves or rebels, and he never returned there.  He met a few Chinese
merchants when he was doing field work in Mongolia, but he could not really
communicate with them unless they knew some pidgin Mongolian as some did.

Last week, my friend who, as I have mentioned, has been trying to retrieve and
improve his mostly passive childhood Yiddish told me that after a stroke his
grandmother completely reverted to Yiddish, had forgotten her English (after many
decades of using it) and was addressing everyone in Yiddish as though they should
understand it (including nurses and doctors).  But she did respond to English,
thus still retained it passively, though her responses were all in Yiddish (which
she had brought as an immigrant from Ukraine).

I also noticed that my maternal grandmother reverted fully to her Lower Silesian
German dialect after her stroke.  She had always had a strong accent and also had
always used many dialect words, but now she spoke full dialect as though she was
back in her home area that she had left almost fifty years earlier.

A long time ago I spoke with someone that worked in an American assisted living
facility for the elderly.  She said that this linguistic phenomenon wasn't
unusual, that she had come across it quite a few times.  Recently I spoke with a
group of people that volunteer in mostly Buddhist-run hospice facilities that
cater to people of all sorts of backgrounds.  Since this includes AIDS and cancer
patients, some of them were not very old.  One of the volunteers said that this
linguistic phenomenon sometimes occurs with such younger persons as they are
approaching death and enter a delirious stage.  I am not sure if narcotic drugs
contribute to this or are in large part responsible.

Heather, I suggest you get in touch with similar facilities that care for people
of diverse background (which shouldn't be too hard to find in Britain) to see if
similar things have been observed there.

I believe it's a well-known fact that, as we age, we tend to lose more or less of
our short-term memory and retrieve long-term memories.  My grandmother sometimes
didn't remember what happened the week before or even just moments earlier, but
lots and lots of details from her childhood came back to her.  I myself now
remember some early childhood events more vividly than I did earlier in life.  I
assume this has something to do with the linguistic phenomenon.

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron

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