nordmann wrote:

Well, yes. The way we absorb vocabulary and the way we acquire new language skills in particular do not fundamentally change as we get older. However what does change is the level of self-consciousness which can inhibit our willingness to develop linguistic acquisition. And though there are several reasons why this is so and the level subjectively changes anyway from person to person, there are very few of us who escape the effect, even if - as is apparently the case with yourself - one is aware of this effect and consciously takes steps to avoid it.

Which is why your previous claim to be able to quickly acquire comprehension of portmanteau words in a foreign tongue based on recognition of their structure and instinctive comprehension of one element within them only rings partly true, and indeed smacks of retrospective attribution of technique to a process that in fact was much more simple, much more instinctive, and much more in common with language acquisition as performed by a toddler than your claim allows.

The same applies to your "observation" that European languages share a common structure and that this also facilitates the process. The structural parallels are certainly there, and of course they play a role in how quickly one can acquire comprehension of language other than your native tongue. But comprehension, as any educator will know, is not achieved simply through exposure to the material to be absorbed by the pupil. By far the greatest facilitator of comprehension is a pupil's own enthusiasm to learn, and when this enthusiasm is promoted by the pupil also identifying and appreciating an actual and urgent requirement to learn, then the teacher's job is that much easier and the pupil's ability to absorb and retain information that much more pronounced. Material that lends itself to more rapid comprehension helps of course, but it is an insignificant factor compared to the child's own ability to maintain motivation to absorb it.

The initial drive to acquire language by young children is partly related to understanding the world around them, but by far the greater motivation is in their own absolute requirement to be understood - to become initiators of communication and not just participants in the exercise. In other words the very young child quite naturally and instinctively has internalised the process and requires practically no assistance whatsoever from outside in maintaining motivation, developing rules of acquisition, and even developing a consistent regime of self-analysis that allows the whole process to evolve and improve over time. However the latter is also a completely instinctive thing that the child does without even being aware they are doing it, and in fact this is why it works so well. You, as with almost every adult in the world, have grown self-aware enough to be more than conscious of this aspect to learning and now place so much importance on it that it actually inhibits those parts of the process which in fact are the ones that do all the work. This is the problem with too much emphasis on post-event analysis of any process - no matter how much truth and accuracy the analysis contains the work and time used to arrive at any conclusion is work and time a natural linguist (young child) would have devoted to actually acquiring language in the first place. When that analysis contains dodgy conclusions (such as your portmanteau theory) then the waste of effort is even more pronounced.

nordmann, thank you very much for your reply as a whole and I learned a lot from each paragraph in particular.

Comments on your first paragraph:

I completely agree with what you say. I suppose that you in this paragraph also hint to our subjective reasons for the willingness to acquire a language. Perhaps in the same vein as LiR mentioned about her "latin", I had perhaps the same experience about my French and already 15 years old (French was a "main?" course, major? in our school)...
My father's family due to the Belgian language struggle was a bit denigrating for French and as such one has an influence from that from childhood on (my mother was more neutral)...
That said, a bit the same way, as I understand LiR too, the French language teacher (native speaker) (and although he was the scapegoat of the whole class) was able to enthuse me in the French language and culture and from then on I have a lifelong willingness to learn the French language and about French culture...and in the next three years I made an enormous progression in the acquirment of the language, helped by my intentional buying French paperbacks and listening to one of the two TV channels in French that we had access to: "Brussel Vlaams" in Dutch and "Lille" (northern France), in French. The possibility to speak wasn't there yet...even not in class...

Comments on your second paragraph:

Yes, again I completely follow your reasoning and thanks to you in your previous message I became aware, where the fault in my reasoning lay

Comments on your third paragraph:

I already commented in the first paragraph. And yes these common constructions and same words, which most times have also a same meaning, are an aid to acquire a language, but are certainly not the core action of the process of acquiring a language (as you say).

Comments to your fourth paragraph:

nordmann, even in the BBC messageboard time I came in contact with the problems of this question. Even learning for the first time about a certain Noam Chomsky. In that time (the internet of that time: focused on English language words and items) the first entries about Chomsky were not about "language", but more about his politcal views...the first entries painting him as a socialist, nearly a communist ...and only on the second or third page I became aware that he had also something to do with language...
There I learned about the controversy about the learning of a language by children...innate or not innate and everything in between...and perhaps professor Chomsky was a hype in that time...
Seeking again on the internet I found I thought an "essay"...as I understand it, you can now let make an essay for you if you pay money for it...the lazy stupid student...as it is all new to me...nordmann, you, who knows nearly everything...

But nevertheless this "essay" summarizes the problems that I had with the Chomsky affair...
https://ivypanda.com/essays/language-acquisition-a-critical-discussion-of-innate-and-learning-approaches-introduction/
As I understand it, you are also, as I, a "more or less" (we say: min of meer ) adept of the "learning approach"?...

And I understand your analysis of a child that wants primordially to communicate with the outer world, especially the narrow world around it and that that is the greatest incentive to start to learn the language that it hears around...?

And you are also right that for the adult there are many inhibitions to acquire a new language, inhibitions that a child doesn't have, as it in its innocence, without preconditions, "rolls" into the situation? Or it has to be that his parents or inner circle make preconditions?

But I still want to warn, as I already said,  (and even admitted that one as an adult learns the language in the same behaviour as a child) that without a long "exposure" to the native environment, one can never learn another language in all its aspects and intonations, as I already explained to MM for the Flemish dialects...and I suppose it is the case for all languages...
I mean and think that without being a relatively long time into a community and communicate thoroughly with that environment, one is not able even with all good intentions to learn in depth another language.

And yes the "openness" for foreign languages is perhaps stimulated by living in a small language community as the Dutch one or for instance the Danish one of Nielsen at the crossroads of big entities as the French, German, English language groups? Big language communities due to history as for instance Spanish spoken allover the world and due to that fact, as I already experienced (especially the older ones) not wanting to speak another language as they are that conviced of the value of their own mothertongue.

Paul.

What I know about language in most respects could be written on the back of a stamp - however two points to make. First words of the first folk starting out fascinates. For instance the MMM sound for mother and the AHH sound that pings up in many languages in the word for water.... and possibly an UM sound for 'me.'  There must be many others. Does the study of linguistics cover this aspect? I did  a programming course in a University Linguistic department - aprox 100 years ago.

Having no flair for languages I can mimic the sounds very convincingly - even to the dialects in languages I do not know; a skill and  that must be used with great care... it has landed me in several buckets of trouble. Parrots get away with it people like me, don't.

Priscilla wrote:

Having no flair for languages I can mimic the sounds very convincingly - even to the dialects in languages I do not know; a skill and  that must be used with great care... it has landed me in several buckets of trouble. Parrots get away with it people like me, don't.

I also can mimic a lot of sounds as I was during my life exposed to that many different sounding vowels as I suppose you too in the Indian subccontinent. I say vowels as the consonants don't differ that much. Perhaps only the special consonants that one hears in Arabic even if one don't understand the language?

And MM mentioned his partner who could as I mimic the several Dutch dialects in Belgium. It is really unbelievable how many different sounds there exists for vowels. I give an example that MM knows perhaps also...
East-Flemish dialect:

een "vrek" (a scrooge)
although the difference in the sound of the "e" in the West-Flemish "vrek" is nearly not audible, I will hear it, only perhaps because I am a native East-Flemish speaker. Perhaps the native West-Flemish speakers will hear it too.

the same for
een "vent" (a bloke)
and there is the difference in sound even more pronounced. I am nearly sure there even an outsider will hear the difference.

And yes, I had as you also many times difficulties with "blokes", because perfectly bilingual, I mimicked them sometimes without knowing it and they thought I was laughing with them...

Paul.

In the French U3A meeting yesterday one lady talked about not having studied at university.  She's very good at French and mentioned in one secretarial job taking shorthand on the fly into English from her boss who was talking in fluent French (and she thinks her French isn't as good as that of other members of the group!!!).  Yesterday we studied pages from La Peste (Albert Camus) and La Gloire de Mon Pere (Marcel Pagnol).  I found a number of words difficult.  They were both from books that I had read before albeit some years ago so I don't know what my struggles say for the current state of my French!

Some of the other members of the group mentioned using Whitmarsh's "New Advanced French Grammar" when they were students but of course 'new' when people of my age were students isn't necessarily 'new' now.  For Spanish we are currently using 'Nuevo Prisma B1' - there is a course book and an exercises book. For the exercise book I have the CD but when I ordered the course book I didn't even know there was a CD for that book so didn't purchase it.  The teacher did say he could put it on a memory stick for me but I keep forgetting!  We may not get the Zoom lesson tomorrow in Spanish because the teacher and his wife have gone away (I think to visit one of their daughters, her husband and child - still very young and they won't be back until later today.   I don't blame them as lockdown has been eased slightly).  These days there are of course online resources both formal and informal for languages but a teacher can tell a student if the accent one uses is 'off'.  Not that I'd ever pass for either a native French or Spanish speaker.  I don't have the gift of mimicry in that context.

LiR, I know that I can easely seek it all on internet, but what is a Zoom lesson?

BTW. Gift of mimicry or not, but I guess from the experience with my broader circle, that if you were two years or less among the natives and you would be obliged to speak the "native" you would exactly "speak" as them (the Spanish) including I am nearly sure the "dirty" words...

Kind regards from Paul.

In this context Paul  Zoom is a piece of software that can be downloaded and by which online meetings between attendees in different locations can meet.  It's purpose is similar to that of Skype

LadyinRetirement wrote:

In this context Paul  Zoom is a piece of software that can be downloaded and by which online meetings between attendees in different locations can meet.  It's purpose is similar to tjat of Skype

Thank you very much LiR,

Paul.

I recall LiR that you recently said something about the "musicality" of French. But I wanted to add now, but even more than French you have the Italian language which is nearly a language to sing operas in...

I did once for another, I think French, forum a search for the reason of that musicality of Italian.

And I came to the conclusion that it was because nearly every word in Italian ends on a vowel.

But now I see that there seems to be other reasons too...

http://www.scuolaromit.com/en/the-musicality-of-the-italian-language/


https://www.quora.com/Why-does-almost-every-Italian-word-end-with-a-vowel
https://www.quora.com/What-do-the-vowels-at-the-end-of-Italian-words-represent

Kind regards from Paul.

Comparison Italian song with English translation



The lyrics in Italian and English
https://www.liveabout.com/nessun-dorma-lyrics-724333

Paul.

I hope this is an appropriate place for this query.  I was wondering if anyone knew the origin of the term "a wise general knows when to retreat" - which I understand to mean that when making an argument a sensible person would know when to halt the flow of words if one wasn't getting anywhere (if anyone can express it more eloquently please do so).  Searching on the internet hasn't brought any results.  I realise this may not relate to the topic of the thread as appropriately as, say, a query about why Italian and Spanish are 'romance' languages which have many words which end in vowels whereas French is a 'romance' language and seems to have less such words - at least ones where the vowel is pronounced as a separate syllabus.  Sometimes I have a query which I feel may not be weighty enough to merit its own separate threat but to which I'd like to know the answer if there is one.

LadyinRetirement wrote:

I hope this is an appropriate place for this query.  I was wondering if anyone knew the origin of the term "a wise general knows when to retreat" - which I understand to mean that when making an argument a sensible person would know when to halt the flow of words if one wasn't getting anywhere (if anyone can express it more eloquently please do so).  Searching on the internet hasn't brought any results.  I realise this may not relate to the topic of the thread as appropriately as, say, a query about why Italian and Spanish are 'romance' languages which have many words which end in vowels whereas French is a 'romance' language and seems to have less such words - at least ones where the vowel is pronounced as a separate syllabus.  Sometimes I have a query which I feel may not be weighty enough to merit its own separate threat but to which I'd like to know the answer if there is one.

The first query relates to the origin of an idiom, not language per se. It sounds very much like something Sun Tzu might have endorsed, though I think the nearest he got to it was to advise a wise general never to advance purely to covet fame and to retreat with courage when required.

The second query can be answered simplistically by pointing out that in Latin very few words end with a vowel too, until of course they are then conjugated to indicate their grammatical context in a sentence. When Latin became "vulgar" - which means only that the language, while still depending on Latin for the bulk of its vocabulary, became more and more subject to grammatical rules imported from non-Latin languages - then the form of the word retained was naturally the one that best suited the accents, stresses and grammatical constructs of the imported tongue.

French is rated a Romance language on the basis of the high percentage of words with a Latin origin that had been retained by a population who had already developed a vulgate tongue even as they were nominally Roman citizens, which then became influenced on more than one occasion by proto-Germanic influx. An important change, one of the final big linguistic leaps in the formation of a recognisably "French" language and traced back to Frankish influence, was the abandonment of a requirement to conjugate word endings or to position them in various places in a sentence in order to be made sense of. This was probably also what finally did it for a requirement to employ vowel endings. It happened originally in only one of the two great language groups in Gaul that were co-existing in the wake of the end of Roman rule, but happened crucially in the northern group so for reasons of subsequent historical events was bound to become the predominant driver of linguistic development there from that point onwards.

Spanish and Italian however developed along a different trajectory, in both cases the word placement rule persisting a lot longer and therefore the requirement to keep using Latin methods to stress words and/or to distinguish their sense from when used in a slightly different way or in a slightly different part of the sentence also persisted long after it had been removed by Germanic influences elsewhere. Another clue as to why we can attribute this big difference in how the modern languages developed mainly to Germanic influence is in the early vulgate, even when Latin was being spoken, which originally showed strong traces of Celtic influence in all these parts of the empire - Spain, Gaul and the Italian peninsula. The stronger the Celtic influence in regional dialects of Latin the more likely that words conjugated to end with vowels would also survive. In Northern Gaul, as philological evidence indicates, this dependency had already been weakened considerably by the time of the Frankish hegemony in the region, hence the relative ease with which the Germanic absence of any such requirement became, quite literally, an important part of the new Lingua Franca in that region.

Thank you very much for this new essay of yours, nordmann. I learned from it.

Kind regards, Paul.

nordmann is as ever a mine of information and I am grateful for the knowledge he has imparted.

Thinking of some past posts of mine 21.07.2020 my word of the day from Dictionary.com was two words "tinfoil hat".  The url for the article is terribly long and last time I tried to post an overly long link it through the formatting of the website off so I won't copy the link.  The article is long so I won't mention everything - people can do an internet search if they are so inclined.  The feature says "In the 19th century, a tinfoil hat was a kind of party hat...….A 1920s short story, The Tissue Culture King by Julian Huxley featured characters wearing "caps of metal foil" to evade mind control".  The hats supposedly worked as a "kind of Faraday cage" against "electromagnetic waves".  The phrase "tinfoil hat" according to the article became associated with conspiracy theories in the 1980s and synonymous with "conspiracy theorist" in the 1980s-1990s.  There is more to the article but I don't want to break any copyright rules.

LiR,

At the risk of irritating someone - that's a large risk in these days and times, especially when this is not one's first language - then you mention a "kind of Faraday cage" which I don't know what is, and please don't tell me, but the rest of your message led me to associate to another name of almost the same spelling - at least in the first letters.
The above may be interpreted as a political message - my intentions are hereby stated as being beyond internal party politics of any present and/or former member state of the EU.

LiR, up to now and I learned it already on the BBC board, "setting up my tin hat", was for me: "preparing for the flak"?, "crawling back under my stone"?

Nielsen, you let me think again at the European Union...and it is here not on his place...more for in the "café"...but I couldn't resist...and I too beyond internal party politics...

But today national holiday of Belgium and sight this day on a new government after more than a year tribulations between the Flemish soft right party and the Walloon socialist party, today intended to seek for a compromise for the forming of a government for the good of the country...

And yes I had to say first: sight today on a future for the European Union:



The Liberal- Christen-Democrat- Socialist middle, dominated by the Liberals from Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxemburg and France...
https://www.politico.eu/article/emmanuel-macron-mark-rutte-liberal-dream-team-upend-european-politics/

Kind regards from Paul.

Nielsen, I know you said not to tell you but a Faraday Cage or another form a Faraday Shield is a genuine device for blocking electromagnetic fields.  As I have been requested not to explain I won't go into detail but will leave a link to the Wikipedia entry about them and then folk can decide whether to click on the link or not.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_cage

Thank you LiR, I'm sorry but even in - or especially in - uncertain times my tongue unfortunately has a firm place in cheek.

OOPS dear Nielsen  I hadn't seen your E double U...as usual "dur de comprenure" ...

And so we are back to languages....
https://www.lexico.com/explore/why-is-w-pronounced-double-u

Kind regards from Paul.

PS. I once made the eulogy of the EU to bosses of a factory in Aylesbury in the Seventies...not the expected response...but in that time I had not yet "elbows"...perhaps even today still not...
 ...
And yes our Benelux Liberal Rutte cheated perhaps some brothers...but that is talk for the pub instead of this distinguished language forum...

On the Belgian language border thread I mentioned Esperanto.  Esperanto is a constructed language of course but it still has its enthusiasts.  Trying to glean information from the internet I read that the language was created by a man called L L Zamenhof from Bialystock (now in Poland).  Max Bialystock was the name of the character Zero Mostel played in the comedy film The Producers from the late 1960s.  I wondered if Mel Brooks who was the originator of The Producers (or one of them at least) thought of Esperanto when he coined the name for the character.  Though maybe it was just a coincidence.