learning standard english as second dialect

While enjoying a funny entry on Language Log (link) about a recent story arc thread on the Non Sequitur comic strip, I came across the following in the commentary:

I took a Russian course in the 1980s, and helped out a classmate who was struggling with the material. He had graduated with excellent marks from an American high school, but I quickly discovered that the reason he couldn't make his adjectives agree with his nouns, or choose the correct noun case, was that he did not know what a noun was.

I spent hours in Canadian grade school, circling nouns, underlining verbs and drawing boxes around articles and squiggly lines under adverbs. I had to memorize and parrot on exams lists of relative pronouns and prepositions.

It fascinated me that my classmate could speak coherently and write essays in his native language without knowing what the components are.

It’s that last sentence that struck me as odd. The idea that a person could not speak or write a language without knowing its grammar (in this case defined as being able to identify parts of speech) does not make sense to me. The grammar of a language has many components: phonology, morphology, syntax, etc. To many of my co-Anglophones, grammar instead means usage, orthography, etymology, and punctuation. This latter non-linguistic view of grammar is a holdover from the days when Latin and Greek were the languages being taught in grammar schools. And, pedagogically speaking, when you’re learning a new language (as an adult), it helps to be able to speak about its grammar using some terms, hopefully from the language grammatical tradition itself. (I have been thinking about this because recently I have been slowly learning Japanese linguistic terms in my Japanese class.) Latin these days has been replaced by General American English in US schools. And GAE is for many speakers in this country a different dialect of English than the one they learned on their mother’s lap.

floppy ears

Thanks to Languagehat, I’ve started to read a Greek linguistics blog, Ἡλληνιστεύκοντος (link) and immediately got caught up in a thread about a rare (Modern Greek) word for the European ground squirrel (Spermophilus citellus) λαγόγηρως which occurs in Suidas. Read about it at Old Man Hare (link). There’s a Bulgarian word for the animal лалугер (variant лагудер) that looks like a loan from Greek. There are minor difficulties such as the γ mapping to the л that could be explained by dissimilation from the second γ (and the dialectal variant has the second γ becoming д). The word analyses morphologically into λαγώς ‘hare’ and γῆρας ‘old age’ hence the entry’s title. Greek λαγώς is usually traced to two PIE roots *(s)lēg (*(s)ləg, *(s)leg) ‘limp, floppy; soft’ and *ōus (*əus, *us) ‘ear’. The ο rather than an ω as in other Greek compounds with λαγώς, e.g., λαγωφόνος ‘har-killer’ , λαγώπους ‘hare-footed’ is not a problem as there are some compounds with ο, e.g., λαγοδαίτης ‘hare-devourer’. Greek γῆρας traces back to PIE *grē ‘mature, rotten’.

mandelshtam et trubetskoj

Mr Verb posted an entry (link) about a passage from a book he’s reading, The Stalin Epigram by Robert Littell.

"I overheard a lady mention what the professor was a professor of. It turned out to be something called linguistics. The lady said that he was famous for figuring out the difference between languages and dialects—languages were spoken by people with armies, dialects by people without."

It’s in the context of Osip Mandelshtam in transit to a correction camp where he would die of an unspecified illness. We’ve all heard the aphorism, and it has been attributed to Antoine Meillet and Max Weinreich, though the latter gave it its first appearance in the literature, and that in Yiddish (link).

So, just who is that professor linguistics supposed to be? Since it’s a work of fiction, I’d like to add my candidate to the offerings in the commentary: Nikolai Trubetzkoy (link). He too died in ’38 and likewise at the hands of a totalitarian regime, this time the Gestapo in Austria, rather than the NKVD in the USSR. And somehow I’d like to fit Jan Baudouin de Courtenay and Mikołaj Kruszewski in therre, too.

foregrounding earwigs

The 20th saw the media frenzied churning over the 40th anniversary of man on the moon (cue the Gil Scott-Heron track, Whitey on the Moon). That set off a long-delayed ruminating nostalgic fugue state in your faithless narrator. I went to David Bromige’s memorial service (link) in Sebastopol on the 5th instant, and while marveling at how few people I knew there, ran into George Lakoff. I said hello and reminded him that I had taken a couple of classes from him 30 years ago or more. I read a short poem of David’s on the death of poetry. Then we all piled into the VW microbus and trundled on off to Saul’s in Berkeley for some sour dills and chicken soup. Black Oak Books next door has gone out of business. This last weekend, I went to Hackenberg Booksellers, because yet another linguist had died. And, so, I looked through stacks of books, some priced and others not. I bought 3 Malkiel monographs and a Burkert Homo Necans.