You're talking my language.

[cactuswatcher]

25. The classic example of a child being exposed to many languages at once is the actor-comedian Peter Ustinov, who learned English, Russian, German, French and possibly Spanish and Italian, as a small child, because each of the adults in his extended household exclusively spoke a different language at home, specifically to teach him. As an adult he said his reaction as a child was (understandably) wondering why he didn't have his own language.

24. There is, of course, a limit to the number of languages a small child can learn in that each of the different language speakers must have immediate access to the child all the time, and that those people must all understand most if not all of the other languages, so the child has some kind of on-going referent to the babel, as the adults react to each other.

23. I think Ustinov claimed to have learned five languages at once, but again maybe it was six. Without an extended learned family, two languages, one from mom and one from pop, would be about the limit. Eta: Make that three, one from the neighbor kids.

22. Anyone is confused by being introduced to multiple languages at once. Constant correction is needed to sort things out. (Yeah, I began to lose track in grad school when I started studying Polish while I was teaching Russian and still learning Serbo-Croatian. Actually the Russian stayed fairly straight, I'd been studying it for many years. But poor Polish...)

21. If babies weren't capable of discerning and producing every sound of every human language, it would be pretty weird. I guess there could be a language that you could only learn later, but you'd never be able to speak it properly.

20. I suspect that the end of critical period of easy language learning actually coincides with starting school, where masses of new people you meet don't speak new languages, but rather all speak the same language or the same few languages. Switching to a new school in a new country with a different language after that is understandably a challenge.

19. Brain storage. Theories about exactly where languages are stored in the brain are all a bit suspect. The connections that allow you to use new languages may be in different distinct parts of the brain and that may change as you grow out of the critical period.

18. 75% of the world's population speaks more than one language? This certainly wasn't true not many decades ago. And even now I'd guess that 50% of the world's population doesn't speak more than one language with true fluency. I don't and I taught a second language!

17. Mario Pei reported in the 1950's that, exclusive of dialects, there were less than 3000 languages in the world. So why does the vid claim about 7000? The definition of what is a language and what is a dialect is a highly political question. For instance when I was learning it, Serbo-Croatian was a single language under a single Yugoslav government (that also recognized two other languages, Slovenian and Macedonian, as being separate). These days with Serbia and Croatia being independent nations, saying the word Serbo-Croatian can get you into trouble, though the vocabulary and pronunciation differences between Serbian and Croatian are on the same scale of the differences between British and North American English.

16. The languages of native North and South Americans are considered the most numerous. All over the Americas, not just English-speaking North America, native languages have been dying out at an appalling rate. Forced schooling, the end of stone-age life styles, and so on are well known as causes. In the United States the only native language that has shown significant growth in recent decades is Navajo.

15. New Guinea with its mountainous, jungle terrain, is ideal for keeping groups of people separate, which is ideal for the development of separate languages. The languages are so different that there are probably more different families of languages on New Guinea, than anywhere else of similar area on earth.

14. No, there is a language that has five distinctive click sounds. It's the number that is unique. The clicks are used like consonants.

13 South Africa has the most official languages with eleven. The Soviet Union, before it broke up had more (including Russian, Belorussia, Ukrainian, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Georgian, Armenian, Uzbek and others) making their paper money very crowded.

!2. The United States has no official language, although the Tea Party would like to change that. Discussions were held at the time of the of independence about making something other than English the official language, but, rationally, it was decided that would cause too much trouble.

10. Arabic was added to the official languages of the UN in the 1970s. There is whining about English being by far the most used language in the UN, but people use what they know.

9. 13 ways to spell the sound "o" in French. And people wonder why English spelling is such a mess.

8. 50% of a child's education in Luxembourg is devoted to learning a foreign language? No, foreign languages. Though technically Luxembourg is trilingual, Luxembourgish is what most everybody knows from home. They learn to speak and write German and French correctly in school. Add in learning English, as most do, and you are talking about a lot of time.

7. No, 25% of the world has English as one of its official languages. The percentage of people who have been taught some English is much higher.

6. The bible is available in 2000+ languages. Protestant missionaries, obviously, have been very persistent. The Gideon society passes out bibles in about 100 languages. (They gave out New Testaments in US public schools back in my day. I imagine that was stopped long ago. The Testaments contained the Lord's Prayer in a number of languages to demonstrate to the kids the scope of what they were doing around the world. )

5. There are snippets of 12 imaginary languages in the Lord of the Rings, and as Tolkien intended the 12 are much interrelated. None of them approaches the completeness of being as usable of a language as Klingon.

4. Reading Mandarin newspapers requiring 2000 characters. A modern book on Chinese I have suggests learning about 3000.

3. Chinese alphabet? Um, no. As for Chinese having 50,000 characters, it's possible. The book I mentioned in (4.) says a good dictionary will have at least 7000. Unlike what you may have been told, some Chinese words require more than one character. Remember that English has somewhere over 500,000 words the vast majority of which are technical jargon, functionally unintelligible to almost all of us. The words a person uses regularly is more like between 1000 and 10,000 depending on the person, with a passive knowledge of twice as many more. (Some people seem to speak entirely in "four letter" words, but as yet no one has claimed that this represents a different language.)

2. Basque is not known to be related to any other language. However unlike the video says, it is not the only one. Some so-called language groupings are simply geographic shorthands that have nothing to do with linguistic relationships. Historically speaking every natural language including Basque probably is related to similar, but distinct, extinct languages of which we have no record. Do all languages come from a single ancient human language? Who knows. But from the currently available evidence, it would be impossible to prove that to most linguists' satisfaction.

Comments

[mamculuna.livejournal.com]

Yes, lots of questionable claims, for sure! Back when I was in grad school, the critical period was said to end at puberty, when the brain became more lateralized. But what I see now has more to do with development of the pre-frontal cortex. I still think there's a lot of evidence that kids who learn before 10 or 12 can develop native-speaker fluency and abilities, as well as pronunciation, but I've met some who learned as teenagers and were very impressive. Motivation, though, is so strong in those early years. It can probably make more difference than anything physical.

Chinese characters are made up of radicals, or parts of characters. Lots of words do have just one character, and some have only one radical--like "ren" for example, which means "people" standing alone but indicates some human quality in other characters (http://www.commonchinesecharacters.com/Lists/MostCommon2500ChineseCharacters).

[cactuswatcher.livejournal.com]

I don't know more than a character or two of Chinese. I do recognize that character on the top of the page in the link (good, fond of, etc.) has the radicals for woman and son. If I remember correctly the Chinese character for to learn, knowledge, etc. looks a bit like son with a birthday cake on his head. (The related Japanese character looks like son with fireworks coming out of his hat. ;o) )

[mamculuna.livejournal.com]

That character at the top that has the woman and son radicals is one of the few I still can recognize, and that's because it's usually the first word you learn. It means "good" (among other things of course) and is in the phrase ni hao (you good), used as the most common greeting. I might know about five more, now.

I thought I was doing so well back when I was learning and could recognize around 200. I asked my teacher how many her kindergarden-aged child knew--the answer was around a thousand.

I'm glad they aren't talking about how quickly you forget recently learned languages if you don't use them.