Cladistic language concepts

[John Hewson]

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Dear Professor Ghiselin,
        I was thinking when I wrote that note how badly seals perform on
land compared to their speed and agility in the water. But I was also
thinking that a puffin was a good analogy for a trilingual: puffins are
excellent underwater swimmers. Unlike gannets, who dive from a height into
the water, puffins dive from the surface and pursue their prey. They nest
on land, and dig burrows to protect their young; as Jacques Cartier noted
on his first voyage to Canada, if you put your hand in the burrow "they
bite like dogs". A puffin can also trek across the ground much faster than
a penguin!
 
        Not all bilinguals are equally at home in both languages. In fact
the vast majority of Canadian bilinguals these days speak either French or
English as a mother tongue and the alternative as a second language. I
have often heard conversations on the street where one participant is
speaking French and the other English, each comprehending the other
perfectly. This is even more common in writing, especially between
university colleagues: I write in English to all my francophone friends
and they write back in French to me. There's also a lot of linguistic
literature on so-called code-switching, where bilinguals often switch back
and forth in mid sentence, since for most bilinguals some topics are more
easily dealt with in one language or the other. Anglophones in Quebec, for
example have their own different dialect for talking politics or
education, using either French terms or unrecognizable English calques of
French terms or phrases.
 
On learning a second language a bilingual has acquired the ability to
function in a second community where otherwise he would be "like a fish
out of water". I think the amphibian is a better analogy for the bilingual
that the hermaphrodite. I can speak French, but I only use that skill when
I am in a francophone community; I can also swim (a skill which I also
learned originally at school), but I only use that skill when I get into
the water. It seems that acquiring the ability to adapt to a different
milieu or medium is common to both. JH
 
 
John Hewson, FRSC                               tel: (709)737-8131
University Research Professor                   fax: (709)737-4000
Memorial University of Newfoundland
St. John's NF, CANADA A1B 3X9