FW: Tata Take Two

[Richard Haly]

>
>> The key
>> is that when they happen to get close to the local culture's kinship
>> terms, they get rewarded with lots of praise and attention.  This feedback
>> loop quickly trains them which sounds to use to trigger these reactions,
>> and indeed typically leads to one of the first assignments of meaning to a
>> sound (connecting 'mama' with mother and so forth).
>

Sorry, the earlier version went off before I was finished with it.
Elinor Ochs writes about language acquisition of her two year-old daughter.
(reference not at hand, sorry). She tells how they would play with finger
puppets and the puppet would say, "Hi." One day a sock falls from the drawer
and lands across the bare toes of her daughter who points at it and sez
"Hi." Now if Elinor Ochs' daughter were in a culture in which
tubular-cloth-over-bodily-extremity meant "Hi" or in a culture (Purepucha
for example) in which flat things - lakes and tortillas, take the same
particle, or ears and hinges on doors, another, then her daughter would have
"learned" something that day instead of "getting it wrong." It seems as
though children constantly invent language (Vico would agree) and adults
shape it into shared forms. I wonder what will happen when all the teenagers
who say "like" followed by a sound and an action - "like she was all AHHHH"
= "she was frightened" - have children....

Best,

Richard Haly