How do we know what those words mean? (About translation and interpretat
July 14, 2019 7:38 PM Subscribe
I find myself thinking today about the process of learning foreign languages, particularly early on, when there isn't any sort of infrastructure to fall back on. How do we do it? How did we do it in the distant past?
I'd love to read any accounts or information about how this all came about. I imagine past a certain point you kind of just have to point and ask the equivalent of "What do you call that?" I'm particularly interested in learning how people handled languages from radically different societies… Asian languages often appear to lack articles, for instance. Any insights, academic explorations, or popular histories of this kind of thing are most welcome.
I'd love to read any accounts or information about how this all came about. I imagine past a certain point you kind of just have to point and ask the equivalent of "What do you call that?" I'm particularly interested in learning how people handled languages from radically different societies… Asian languages often appear to lack articles, for instance. Any insights, academic explorations, or popular histories of this kind of thing are most welcome.
You might like Stephen Fry’s Planet Word documentary series.
posted by bananacabana at 2:45 AM on July 15, 2019
posted by bananacabana at 2:45 AM on July 15, 2019
It may help to realize that we've had language as long as we've been a species. So there were always people who knew the neighboring languages and could teach you.
In the historical era, some of the earliest written materials are vocabularies intended to teach Sumerian to Akkadians.
But sure, people have often been thrown into a situation where they have to start from scratch. You can generally start with the nouns (point to stuff!) and easy-to-demonstrate verbs ("eat", "walk", "fall"...). If you have a bunch of people doing this, you get what linguists call a pidgin, with a simplified grammar. You generally omit inflections, articles, and anything else that's not shared by the languages involved.
posted by zompist at 4:16 AM on July 15, 2019 [1 favorite]
In the historical era, some of the earliest written materials are vocabularies intended to teach Sumerian to Akkadians.
But sure, people have often been thrown into a situation where they have to start from scratch. You can generally start with the nouns (point to stuff!) and easy-to-demonstrate verbs ("eat", "walk", "fall"...). If you have a bunch of people doing this, you get what linguists call a pidgin, with a simplified grammar. You generally omit inflections, articles, and anything else that's not shared by the languages involved.
posted by zompist at 4:16 AM on July 15, 2019 [1 favorite]
Keywords that may help you find scholarly literature on this (at least, how it's done at present) are "second language acquisition" and "linguistic field methods" or perhaps also "language documentation." You'll probably also be interested in Morris Swadesh and the Swadesh List.
posted by karbonokapi at 12:02 PM on July 15, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by karbonokapi at 12:02 PM on July 15, 2019 [1 favorite]
Oh, also WVO Quine and the "Gavagai" problem
posted by karbonokapi at 12:04 PM on July 15, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by karbonokapi at 12:04 PM on July 15, 2019 [1 favorite]
If the two languages are reasonably close, as English vs. French, or Russian vs. Polish you can work it out because of the similarities and can pick up pretty much all of the other language because of common root words and grammatical structures. Pointing, saying a word and looking an enquiry will do the trick.
However if the two languages are extremely dissimilar as in Chinese vs. English, the easiest way for someone to learn the language that is completely foreign to them from scratch is to have a kid in that country. The kid grows up bilingual and can handle the two unrelated languages. It takes less than ten years, although the first four or six years are going to be really, really hard. By the time the kid is about eight they are going to be able to handle the nuances of both languages and communication and social interactions to provide explanations like, "She's mad at you, Mom, because she thought you were going to come back yesterday to buy the sandals."
Without a translator the foreigner will probably only be repeating back phrases without knowing exactly what they mean or how the grammar in those sentences work, and will have picked up single words, but they will not always get the inflection or the pronunciation right, let alone be able to construct more than a few simple one word substitutions in those phrases they have learned. It may take many decades to have a decent working grasp without developing fluency. But once you have kids who grew up knowing both languages your problems are over.
This is seen constantly with adult immigrants who arrive not knowing the language - they may spend a decade barely picking up a smattering, but as soon as there are kids in the family able to chatter away in the new country's language the parents' ability to pick it up and the opportunities to practice at a comfortable level takes off. People often freeze up trying to speak to adults and strangers, but speaking to their own child is usually well within most people's comfort level. Of course some will choose not to learn and insist that their children only speak the parents' language to them, but the opportunity is there.
There was an island once where two groups of adults speaking different languages ended up together in close proximity. Their kids learned to be trilingual, speaking whatever language was necessary for the adult they were speaking to, but among themselves spoke a language that was completely consistent across the island and had elements drawn from both of the adults' languages. That language took a single generation to develop and became the primary language of the island with only some of the old people speaking the two original languages at all after enough years. I wish I remembered which languages and which island this was - my source for this is a library book on the development of languages returned long, long ago, and a quick internet search didn't bring it up for me. But something similar happened in northern Australia when a creole form of English and an aboriginal language were combined to produce a new generation that speaks a new language called Light Warlpiri.
posted by Jane the Brown at 5:57 PM on July 15, 2019 [1 favorite]
However if the two languages are extremely dissimilar as in Chinese vs. English, the easiest way for someone to learn the language that is completely foreign to them from scratch is to have a kid in that country. The kid grows up bilingual and can handle the two unrelated languages. It takes less than ten years, although the first four or six years are going to be really, really hard. By the time the kid is about eight they are going to be able to handle the nuances of both languages and communication and social interactions to provide explanations like, "She's mad at you, Mom, because she thought you were going to come back yesterday to buy the sandals."
Without a translator the foreigner will probably only be repeating back phrases without knowing exactly what they mean or how the grammar in those sentences work, and will have picked up single words, but they will not always get the inflection or the pronunciation right, let alone be able to construct more than a few simple one word substitutions in those phrases they have learned. It may take many decades to have a decent working grasp without developing fluency. But once you have kids who grew up knowing both languages your problems are over.
This is seen constantly with adult immigrants who arrive not knowing the language - they may spend a decade barely picking up a smattering, but as soon as there are kids in the family able to chatter away in the new country's language the parents' ability to pick it up and the opportunities to practice at a comfortable level takes off. People often freeze up trying to speak to adults and strangers, but speaking to their own child is usually well within most people's comfort level. Of course some will choose not to learn and insist that their children only speak the parents' language to them, but the opportunity is there.
There was an island once where two groups of adults speaking different languages ended up together in close proximity. Their kids learned to be trilingual, speaking whatever language was necessary for the adult they were speaking to, but among themselves spoke a language that was completely consistent across the island and had elements drawn from both of the adults' languages. That language took a single generation to develop and became the primary language of the island with only some of the old people speaking the two original languages at all after enough years. I wish I remembered which languages and which island this was - my source for this is a library book on the development of languages returned long, long ago, and a quick internet search didn't bring it up for me. But something similar happened in northern Australia when a creole form of English and an aboriginal language were combined to produce a new generation that speaks a new language called Light Warlpiri.
posted by Jane the Brown at 5:57 PM on July 15, 2019 [1 favorite]
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by btfreek at 8:27 PM on July 14, 2019