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What does Genie’s case illustrate about first language acquisition?
The linguistics textbooks will tell you that the unfortunate case of Genie (feral child) demonstrates that puberty delimits a window of opportunity for language acquisition, past which full language acquisition is not possible. Genie learnt enough English for the first time at 13 to communicate, but her English was never grammatical.
There are plenty of horrors surrounding Genie’s case, and quite apart from the monstrous lapses in ethics around how she was handled, any scientific conclusions gleaned from her are problematic.
Genie was cut off from any linguistic or social input, because her father was convinced she was brain damaged. If she wasn’t before, his abuse guaranteed that she was after. If she was handicapped before, which we have no way of knowing, her ability to acquire language may well have been compromised anyway.
On the other hand, she seems to have developed an adequate command of sign language (itself a political football between linguists and psychologists, while they were belly flopping on their professional ethics all around her). Sign language was the psychologists’ idea, not the linguists’, so we don’t really know how much better her sign language was than her spoken language. In any case, once she was released from the lab to endure further physical and sexual abuse, her command of sign language seems to have been impaired as well.
What have we actually learnt about first language acquisition from Genie’s case? Probably not as much as people like to think. And hopefully, we will never have the opportunity to repeat such an experiment again.
Is there such a thing as “taking things too literally”?
Yes, and there’s a linguistic pragmatics set of principles at work there, over and above the inherent limitations of language pointed out by Daniel Bamberger : see Daniel Bamberger’s answer to Is there such a thing as “taking things too literally”?
The Cooperative principles defined by Grice are a way of making sense of how people don’t take things literally. The underlying understanding, when you’re talking with someone, is that your interlocutor is not being an arsehole, and is not talking to you just to troll you. You assume that what they are telling you makes sense and is relevant. So if their literal meaning comes across as trolling, you try to think up figurative and indirect meanings, which make what they’re saying make sense.
This kind of second guessing of literal meaning underpins humour, figurative language, metaphor, literature, wit, allusion—all the potent stuff in language. The fact that the meaning is indirect in such expressions, and has to be teased out by listeners assuming that you are not trolling them, is a big part of their potency.
And of course doing that teasing out of indirect meaning requires a large amount of emotional intelligence and social context—which notoriously puts autistic people at a disadvantage. But yes, there is a societal expectation that you will use Gricean principles to make sense of figurative language, and if you fail to do so, you are taking things too literally for that social norm.
Is Khalisi a weird name for a baby?
For starters, the proper Dothraki pronunciation is [ˈxaleːsi], not [kʰaˈliːsiː]. That’s not canon from GRRR Martin, because GRRR Martin is a language dolt, but Peterson’s Dothraki is not mere funny-looking English.
Of course, it only matters what you heard the actors say on the TV anyway.
I agree with what Lara l Lord said: Lara l Lord’s answer to Is Khalisi a weird name for a baby?. I’ll add that, because “creative” names are reasonably recent in English, they remain contentious and subject to mockery, in ways that places with a more longstanding tradition of creative names won’t have: see discussion starting at https://www.quora.com/Is-Khalisi…
The mockery of people called Tarquin? Dharma? Neveah? Quest? The mockery of the names of Destiny, Mysteri and Cross, Carlton Gebbia’s kids from Real Housewives of Beverley Hills? It’s real. And it serves a social purpose. You may think you’re an untrammelled individual, and there’s no such thing as society. But there is such a thing as society, and mockery is how it enforces its norms.
See also Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why do English-speaking people often have strange first names?
Can the U0001f4a6 emoji be used to represent semen?
Yes; see Why is the splashing sweat emoji associated with semen?
For evidence that this is happening:
- Definitions offered by the public under: U0001f4a6 Sweat Droplets Emoji
- Urban Dictionary: U0001f4a6
- A boy sends this emoji when he is horny. ” Hey send nudes?? [math]unicode{x1F4A6}unicode{x1F4A6}[/math]”
- A girl would send this to her man, basically telling him that she was wet, while a man would send this to his girl saying that he came. Also it could just mean cum.
Girl (text): Make me wet big daddy[math]unicode{x1F4A6}unicode{x1F4A6}unicode{x1F4A6}[/math] Boy (text): You made me cum so much[math]unicode{x1F4A6}unicode{x1F4A6}[/math]
And, well, Google. Lots of instances where it means sweat. Lots of instances where it means water. And lots of instances where it means vaginal secretions or semen. Disambiguating emoji, such as the eggplant or the tongue, may be present, and they may not.
As a non-Latin script writer, how often do you use Latin script?
It was only when I read Dimitris Almyrantis’ response, that I realised the question refers to the ad hoc use of ASCII romanisations online—such as Greeklish for Greek, Finglish for Persian, Arabic chat alphabet, Informal romanizations of Cyrillic, and so on.
So my answer will be along the same lines as his and Alice Tsymbarevich’s: if you are a writer in a language that doesn’t use Latin script, how often do you switch to Latin script, either as a Romanisation, or as loan words?
- Dimitris Almyrantis’ answer to As a non-Latin script writer, how often do you use Latin script?
- Alice Tsymbarevich’s answer to As a non-Latin script writer, how often do you use Latin script?
I am close to three decades older than Dimitris. (When the hell did *that* happen?) Because of that, I remember a time when Unicode had not yet permeated the world, when any language other than English forced you to jump through hoops of squabbling encoding schemes, and when it truly was much easier all round just to give up and use ASCII.
So how often did I use Latin script for Greek in the 90s? A lot. A hell of a lot. Online, much more than Greek script. And there were norms of Greeklish, and squabbles over the norms, and people able to read five or six different transliteration conventions in the one thread without blinking, because that’s just how it was, and there was never any possibility of standardisation. We didn’t even particularly regard that as a bad thing. And I have a residual affection for it, which Dimitris never had to develop.
More recently? There are still domains where ASCII is less hassle for Greek, but they are fewer and fewer, and I strongly suspect most Greeklish these days comes out of Greeks in Latin-script countries, using public lab computers (so they can’t install a Greek keyboard). I see Greeklish in YouTube or blog comments, and in reports of SMS chat; but it’s a lot less than it used to be.
I used to use Greeklish in the subjects of emails whose body was in Greek script, out of worry that the subjects would get mangled. I stopped worrying about that a few years ago.
When I was working at the TLG, I had a lot (a lot) of chat with my Greek colleague there about things we were programming together. He’d type in Greeklish, coz who can be bothered switching keyboards. I would try to type in Greek. But I was codeswitching so much into English for IT terminology (much more than him), that switching keyboards got infuriating for me too; and I’d often just stay in Greeklish.
EDIT: Here’s an example:
Nick Nicholas:
οχι [No]
ειναι front end [It’s front end]
John Salatas:
a den einai tou morphea? [Oh, it isn’t Morpheus’?]
Nick Nicholas:
einai, alla to pilateuw sto TLGMisc [*not script-switched back from front end* It is, but I’m futzing with it in TLGMisc]
οποτε δε χρειαζεται repos [*script switched* So it doesn’t need a …]
depopulation [*autocorrect*]
re population [… repopulation]
Contemporary Greek in general script-switches, in ways like Alice described for Cyrillic, although arguably much more so: foreign names are often left in Roman script now, and increasingly so are English unassimilated loans. Even if my technical Greek were better than it is, script switching for English-in-Greek is just a reality of typing Greek now.
Why is the splashing sweat emoji associated with semen?
For obvious iconic reasons. It is the Emoji that looks the most like ejaculate. Even if it takes some imagination.
And food dye.
[math]unicode{x1F4A6}[/math]
What I find amusing, and of course semiotically inevitable, is how thoroughly this secondary meaning has become conventionalized. You’ll see the Emoji used to refer to ejaculate, without it being disambiguated through additional emoji. Such as, say, the eggplant.
Which are the centers of Hellenism in USA, Canada or Australia. Do they have TV stations in Greek language?
There are Greek Communities in all capital cities of Australia, but the largest communities by a wide margin are in Sydney and Melbourne, and Melbourne is renowned as the main Greek Community.
SBS, the national multicultural broadcaster, has been putting out Greek programming on tv and radio for decades. Radio station 3XY, a rock music mainstay in baby boomer times, has been a Greek only radio station for close to two decades now in Melbourne. There is no homegrown Greek TV channel, but satellite TV and cable TV do a brisk trade in rebroadcasting content from Greece. Antenna has the cable TV channel monopoly.
What is the neutral word order in Modern Greek?
SVO in Standard Greek. The linguist Erma Vasiliou has argued in her PhD that it’s VSO in Cypriot. http://arrow.latrobe.edu.au:8080…“
How much of the Klingon language being spoken today was actually used on the series?
Marc Okrand, who invented the language, was a consultant on all the TOS Star Trek movies. He made sure all the Klingon spoken was canonical, and if the actors flubbed their lines, he retconned them.
Okrand was not involved with the Klingon used on the TV series. As a result, the TV series featured words like wIjjup for “my friend”, where –wIj is supposed to be a possessive suffix. And that’s when the script writers bothered to use the Klingon Dictionary at all.
Be hesitant with TNG for any Klingon utterances you hear that are one word long. Don’t take seriously anything more than one word long.
Answered 2017-04-03 · Upvoted by
, Linguistics PhD candidate at Edinburgh. Has lived in USA, Sweden, Italy, UK.
What is Yevanic?
Yevanic, or Judaeo-Greek, or Romaniote, is the version of Greek formerly spoken by Romaniote (Greek-speaking) Jews. Yevanic language – Wikipedia:
There are no longer any native speakers of Yevanic, or have less than 50 speakers, for the following reasons:
- The assimilation of the tiny Romaniote communities by the more numerous Ladino-speaking Sephardi Jews;
- The emigration of many of the Romaniotes to the United States and Israel;
- The murder of many of the Romaniotes during the Holocaust;
- The adoption of the majority languages through assimilation.
“A few semi-speakers left in 1987 [in Israel], and may be none now [as of 1996 or earlier]. There may be a handful of elderly speakers still in Turkey. There are less than 50 speakers (2011).” Ethnologue, 13th edition, 1996
http://ins.web.auth.gr/images/ME… (E. Vlahou, G. Kotzoglou & Ch. Papadopoulou, Γεβανική: μια πρόσφατη καταγραφή, Studies in Greek Linguistics 36 (2016): 51–65) presents results of a recent study of Yevanic spoken in New York and Yannina, Yannina being one of the main centres of Romaniote Jewry. The speakers are overwhelmingly over 70, with one speaker under 60 (38); they all report using Yevanic only in childhood or in synagogue (Manhattan’s Kehila Kedosha Janina; Yannina’s own synagoge, Kahal Kadosh Yashan, hasn’t had a bar mitzvah since 2000).
The dialect as described in the paper looks to be what you’d expect: Yannina dialect Greek, with a lot of Hebrew loans. Apparently New York Yevanic has some Yiddish influence as well. There are a couple of idiosyncracies in verb aspect, and some Hebrew or Turkish idioms: “I was struck by desolation” = “I am all alone”, “From today, eight [days] with health” = “Have a good week”, the use of dzes < Hebrew yesh? Hebrew ze? to mean “so-and-so”.
Hebrew loans;
axla “good” < ohel, jeuðis “Jew” < jehudi, kesef “money”, samas “beadle” < ʃamaʃ, taleθ “prayer shawl” (in New York, with Yiddish influence: talis).