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kevin wrote:Either way, you would (try to) measure the competency among those who take the test, not the average in the general population, so not sure what the results would tell you anyway.
dEhiN wrote:md0 wrote:I find it pretty exciting from a theoretical point of view too. I am now reading some research on Berlin Russian-German bilinguals and their age-of-onset-related effects are more nuanced than the traditional views of either "L1=L2 but distractions" or "L1 always =/=L2 because biology".
Could you please explain what "L1=L2 but distractions" and "L1 always =/= L2 because biology"? What are the distractions being referred to? Is it supposed to mean L1 influence on L2? If so, then why not say "L1=L2 but influence"? And what does biology have to do with the reason L1 always doesn't equal L2? Wouldn't it just be L1 always doesn't equal L2 (i.e., someone always using L1 means they won't be good or versed in L2)?
linguoboy wrote:[*]The same folks have told me that learners have thanked RTÉ for running programmes narrated by speakers with non-traditional Irish like Manchán Magan (notorious for his stunt documentary series No Béarla) because they find it easier to understand than native traditional Irish. I've had L2-speakers complain to me before about RTÉ running interviews with "an old farmer with three teeth" than no one can understand rather than finding more intelligible speakers.
md0 wrote:What I wanted to mention very briefly is that there are two extreme positions in the field of language acquisition: one that argues that competency in an L2 would have been (and can be) equal to competency in one's L1 if this was happening in a vacuum, but real life outcomes (which show that L2 skills are lower than L1) can be explained by environmental factors (e.g. because adults have simply more responsibilities and things that require their attention in their day-to-day lives). That kind of (non-linguistic) distractions. The other extreme position is that there's a clock in the brain that's counting down to the moment access to the L1 learning mechanism is cut-off (critical period hypothesis) and any language learnt after that relies on different, non-language specific mechanisms and/or* compensation mechanism that try to map features of the L2 to similar-enough features of the L1 and they all come together to explain why L2 competence is not comparable to L1.
dEhiN wrote:Thanks for explaining that! Do you know if there have been any studies done on speakers of two L1 languages who, for environmental reasons, basically end up almost exclusively using only one of the L1 languages for a number of years. I wonder if these speakers' second L1 language effectively whittles away to the equivalent of an L2 language? Or, if, because of this 'critical period', during which they presumably learned both L1 languages, even non-use of one of the languages doesn't affect it in any significant way?
linguoboy wrote:They're aren't, and I'm not sure how there even could be given that it's such an inherently subjective definition. Perhaps you could try to get an idea by looking at Leaving Certificate scores, but that's a weak proxy at most since not everyone tests well, the exams don't cover all aspects of the language, and doing well on a language exam is no indication that you use the language in daily life. At the end of the day, all official Irish statistics on language use are self-reported and thus subject to all manner of cognitive biases.
This is going to be as subjective and variable as any other measure of mutual intelligibility. It's going to depend a lot on which dialects, which speakers, what your exposure to them has been in and out of the school system, etc. So I'm afraid all I have to offer is anecdotes (mostly gleaned from conversations with Irish-speakers in learners' fora and IRL):
Yasna wrote:Does the typical graduate of an Irish-medium program outside the Gaeltacht speak what might be considered "good non-traditional Irish"?
Yasna wrote:I guess it would be better to ask how much exposure these L2 speakers typically get to traditional Irish. For example, will listening to popular Irish-medium TV, radio, and podcast shows expose you to traditional Irish?
linguoboy wrote:You mean like the number of school-leavers who have attended a Gaelscoil?
It's all going to depend on what programmes and podcasts they listen to. There's so much content available in non-traditional Irish these days that it's very easy to not have to ever listen to traditional dialect speech if you'd rather avoid it (much like those dialect-speakers who avoid certain dialects).
Yasna wrote:It's all going to depend on what programmes and podcasts they listen to. There's so much content available in non-traditional Irish these days that it's very easy to not have to ever listen to traditional dialect speech if you'd rather avoid it (much like those dialect-speakers who avoid certain dialects).
Do traditional Irish and non-traditional Irish essentially exist in separate ecosystems? For example, would it be unusual for a traditional Irish speaker to appear on a podcast done in non-traditional Irish?
dEhiN wrote:It also seems to me that the hybrid language spoken in the schools probably arose out of the externally imposed structure of the schools: that the students have to speak Irish. This creates a forced environment which explains why the students' brains would focus on learning Irish from a semantic level, but not worry so much about grammar rules and the like. They already have a grammar framework from within which to insert this new Irish vocabulary - English. If, in the process, they pick up some Irish grammar rules and remember it enough to use it while speaking, so be it. But if they don't remember at all, or remember wrongly, it doesn't matter because the recipients (i.e., other students) will understand them anyway.
kevin wrote:I don't really listen much to podcasts or other media in Irish, and if I do take the time, I'll probably only bother if I know they will have good Irish, so my impressions are probably biased, too.
[...]
And finally a word on Gaelscoileanna: Some use the word "Gaelscoilis", as if it were a separate language, to refer to the stereotypical bad non-traditional Irish. Of course, that's not the whole reality. I have (online) met Gaelscoil students with great Irish and others who have basically "English with Irish words". It depends a lot on the school, the teachers and of course also the student. But I think it's safe to say that just knowing that you attended a Gaelscoil doesn't give me confidence that you have good, even if non-traditional Irish.
linguoboy wrote:So, I think it may have finally clicked what I find so odd about Indonesian.
For years I've been carrying around this assumed set of linguistic universals, a couple of which can be roughly summarised as:
1. Function words are shorter than content words and often show phonetic reduction.
2. The more frequent particular content words are, the shorter they tend to be.
linguoboy wrote:The result is very disorienting. I'm used to looking at sentences in language I hardly even know and being able to intuit which are the function words or lighter verbs and which are the content words. But this doesn't work at all with Indonesian. I look at a basic sentence like:
Mereka tidak datang karena kematian kakeknya.
and everything seems to have roughly equal weight. Who would guess, for instance, that mereka here is a personal pronoun, tidak is a negator, and karena is a preposition? Compare a version of the same sentence in Welsh:
Ddaethon nhw ddim o achos marw eu tad-cu.
Despite the lack of obvious cognates, I wager y'all would have a better chance of recognising these in nhw, ddim, and o achos, respectively.
linguoboy wrote:For years I've been carrying around this assumed set of linguistic universals, a couple of which can be roughly summarised as:
1. Function words are shorter than content words and often show phonetic reduction.
2. The more frequent particular content words are, the shorter they tend to be.
I'm sure these seem very Anglocentric or at least Eurocentric
Linguaphile wrote:There's this (Estonian):
Oleme kõikide nende aastate jooksul teinud temaga tihedat koostööd.
We have worked closely with him for all these years.
Any clues there? (I'm genuinely curious, since once you know what each word means it's harder to see it from the perspective of someone who doesn't. Although, Linguoboy, you've studied some Finnish so that might be "cheating". There are cognates.)
Linguaphile wrote:On the other hand, in Estonian other sentences have less "recognizable" negators such as mitte, polnud or polekski. And although pronouns can be short like ma, they can also appear in longer forms like minaga, which is just as long as Indonesian mereka (but conveys a bit more information since it means "with me").
Yasna wrote:I realized I haven't been reading enough news articles in Chinese. It's a strange issue for me to have since in the past I overused news articles with languages like German and Japanese. The problem is that mainland news turns me off due to the censorship and propaganda, and Taiwanese news turns me off because of the script (traditional), variety (Taiwanese Mandarin), and the relative unimportance of Taiwan (outside of the political status issue). I've decided I'm just going to bite the bullet and read more from both sources.
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