~Irregular verbs are like bassoons for five year olds~

[kaberett]

It was once, several years ago at this point, my intense displeasure to be party to a conversation in public space in the house I was living in at the time, where I was doing housework -- and actually, I say "conversation", but what I mean is "a middle-aged white guy who was a guest of one of my housemates was holding forth about his expertise in child language acquisition".

Astonishingly enough, he was wrong about everything. In particular, he literally claimed that children should be taught Esperanto instead of a natural language like French, because it's completely unfair and unreasonable to expect children to memorise tables of irregular verbs before they can have a conversation with their friends, and Esperanto doesn't require them to do that! It is, he said, ridiculous -- you give five-year-olds recorders, not bassoons.

(1) That isn't even how child language acquisition works (very different to language acquisition post-11, and third & subsequent languages are much much easier than the first couple),
(2) The reasons you don't give five-year-olds bassoons are that (i) they are extremely expensive, (ii) they're twice the height of most five-year-olds, and (iii) five-year-olds do not have the lung capacity because unlike violins where it is possible to make 1/8th-sizes at standard pitch by changing the tension of the strings the same cannot be said for a wind instrument,
(3) Actually giving 5yos recorders is preposterous, because while they're very easy to get a sound out of they're very hard to get a nice sound out of, see also "why on earth do we teach children to draw with wax crayons",
(4) There is absolutely no benefit from teaching children a constructed language rather than a natural language, especially not one that is not only so heavily based on Indo-European but the Romance family while claiming to give people an introduction to ~every language ever~,
(5) ... dudebro you just claimed Mandarin and Cantonese were IE languages I am so done with this conversation, please stop mansplaining linguistics to me and please for crying out loud stop encouraging schools to teach children Esperanto.

If you have ever heard me loudly exclaim bassoons are NOTHING like irregular verbs, you now know why.

Comments

[cosmolinguist]

Oh man, fuck that guy.

Also, I love that icon. :)

[onyxlynx]

1. Your post sat right down with Ta-Nehisi Coates' post about French this morning.
2. And yet we learned irregular verbs even if not according to language academy rules.
3. I am in favor of children learning language as early and as often as possible.
4. If the little ones are going to learn a constructed Romance family language, what's wrong with Latin?

Your pontificator reminds me of the line in I think Gaudy Night about finding Lord Peter Wimsey in the quad laying down the law to somebody.

[fyreharper]

Ooh, thank you for the link!

[onyxlynx]

You're welcome!

[birke]

That is terrible. Terrible. I'm so sorry for several-years-ago you. Also for any kids whose education he influences.

[silverhare]

Not often do I get to hold up my linguistics degree to gain points on the internet, but I feel totally good about holding up my linguistics degree right now. Why do men think they know more than you, even when you have just said that you have a degree in the fecking subject? *sighs*

[oursin]

I know nothing of the current politics of Esperanto, but what looks more and more like being one part of my Enormous Amorphous Research Project is the general interest in 'auxiliary' languages in interwar British progressive circles. The whole point being that, Esperanto or Interlingua or Volapuk or Basic English, they were about an easy to learn, logically constructed, AUXILIARY language, not a replacement for native tongues but something to enable easier international communications. As far as I know advocates were not proposing teaching them to infants (even if they wanted children to learn them s part of the educational system) instead of whatever their parents spoke.

[dreamfracture.insanejournal.com]

But what instrument is most like a mansplaining middle-aged white guy?

[ysobel]

My immediate answer is either sacbut (because of the name and hi I'm twelve) or kazoo.

[silveradept]

Sackbut, perhaps, but it would have to be played poorly to count, as sackbuts and their descendants, trombones, are capable, in the right hands, of producing nearly any tone to fit the any harmony (that is within their range, of course).

Kazoos, even played well, might still work.

[azurelunatic]

Slide whistle.

[cxcvi]

Vuvuzela. Big, loud, and obnoxious.

[rmc28]

And only one note.

[corrvin]

The piccolo. It's incredibly easy to play, as long as you don't care if you're way too loud, shrill, and terribly out of tune with everyone else.

*source: I was a piccolo player, but not like that I hope.

Some people Fail Linguistics Forever.

[milkymoon]

Wow that is really horrible linguistics. Children pick up languages astonishingly quickly and absorb the rules of human language naturally. It's different to adults learning it, as you've said, as the mechanisms for absorbing the rules of grammar and syntax need to be done in a more systematic way, rather than the quick, intuitive absorption small children use.

There is a really good criticism of Esperanto here. It's really NOT a universal language when they've simply taken the vocabulary of three Indo-European language branches (Romance, Germanic and Slavonic) and passed it off as though it's a universal language, even though there are loads of languages - even in EUROPE - that belong to different language families! (And honestly. Was he actually claiming MANDARIN and CANTONESE were Indo-European languages? *facepalm*)

Re: Some people Fail Linguistics Forever.

[kaberett]

I did in point of fact say "and it's so strongly Romance-influenced!" and he was all "WELL ALL LANGUAGES TAUGHT IN SCHOOLS ARE IE" and I was all "... wow you do know that Mandarin is increasingly routinely taught right because like MAJOR ECONOMY" "THAT'S INDO-EUROPEAN"

Re: Some people Fail Linguistics Forever.

[milkymoon]

*brain explode* Clearly misinformed then - how the HELL is Mandarin an IE language?!

Re: Some people Fail Linguistics Forever.

[alexseanchai]

*head go boom*

[jenett]

I have opinions! As a former bassoonist *and* as someone who was handed a recorder at 6, I think.

My original musical training was via the Orff-Kodaly method, which is now somewhat out of fashion, but basically started with the premise that you give kids exposure to written music, and you give them exposure to listening to music (with guidance, so that they learn to pay attention to things like pitch and tempo and different rhythms) and you do some other stuff (like learning what different instruments sound like, and why that might make a difference to what the music does).

And eventually, you start having kids do the things on the paper and the things with the singing back or whatever for the same songs, and their brains will start putting it together, which is really cool.

The comparison to the way that children pick up language naturally is very intentional.

The reason that the method uses recorders is that recorders are cheap, they come in plastic (so good for young children, because a) they're hard to break and b) they don't need a lot of picky attention) and yet, they do both varied pitches and sustained sound, so you can do more with rhythm and harmony.

And yes, the fact you can't get bassoons in child sizes (also, the degree to which bassoons require a number of secondary skills, like fiddling with reeds, is - well, if you made a MMORPG out of music, bassoons would be the set of quests that have you grinding in the bamboo forests to get a rare drop of quality cane with a high failure rate on the manufacture. Which is not, in fact, a good thing to subject anyone who isn't sure about this music thing to.

(There's a great infographic from the Metropolitan Opera orchestra blog about reeds for the curious, too.)

As to Esperanto: my mother's parents were very active in the peace movement after WWII (they were refugees, as was my mother, who was born in 1936, so a teenager in the post-war and living in the UK by that point), and I know that a lot of the argument they made at that time was basically "Yes, it's a constructed language, but it's a constructed language that is reasonably unfair to *everyone* who is trying to learn it" with a side of it not being directly culturally tied to people who might feel they won, lost, or were otherwise having strong emotions about the whole thing. Which is a totally different reason to teach or not teach it, but at least marginally more sensible to my way of thinking.

[kaberett]

Esperanto post-WWII: sure, if you are focussing on Europe. In a global economy that increasingly draws on languages frmo outside IE...? Really, really not any longer something that can usefully be considered "equally unfair", heh.

[staranise]

I have fond memories of the Orff method, although simultaneously I cannot make written music and audible music translate back and forth in my head. :/

[silveradept]

That guy is very wrong, both linguistically and musically. You give five year olds percussion instruments and teach them rhythm and cadence, and you let them sing to understand melody and pitch (and, not coincidentally, to let them understand language better). That way, they use what they already know to build new knowledge, instead of forcing them to learn the abstraction first.

[cxcvi]

And now you've just reminded me of the way a teacher I had when I was 8 taught rythym. "Tea, coffee, coffee, tea."

[sebastienne]

dishwasher, coffee, coca-cola, coffee | coffee, lemonade, tea.

[jelazakazone]

I have to add: my children learned to play violin before recorder and I cringe every time they get the recorders out because they will invariably make some awful noise with the damn thing whereas I have never felt that way about the violin.

[azurelunatic]

Twelve pre-Twinklers with their adorable tiny violins can be tuned out.

Twelve pre-Twinklers with slide whistles, on the other hand...

[jelazakazone]

LOL. Indeed.

[azurelunatic]

They make slide whistle lollipops. Caitlin's mom thought it was music-themed and cute.

[naath]

Having been handed a violin at a young age... I disagree. Violins are really easy to make really *awful* noises with - violins are much easier to play in tune *if you can hear whether you are in tune* than recorders; but when you *can't* (I can't). Urgh.

I think the main issue with the humble recorder is that children are expected to play in unison on instruments that are not all tuned the same... which is just inevitably going to sound awful. Recorders sound best in small groups of different-sized instruments; but few children will be handed anything other than a descant (cheap, wildly available, fits into small hands).

Learning languages is really really hard; and yet, amazingly, children the world over learn to speak their first language remarkably fast and well! It's nothing like struggling to remember tables of irregular verbs as an adult. Maybe the way that kids are happier to make mistakes and just plow on is a big part of it; probably also important is the total immersion that most children have in the language(s) that they are learning.

[shanaqui]

I have read like one linguistics book in my life and I'm more of an expert on child language acquisition than this guy.

[davidgillon]

it's completely unfair and unreasonable to expect children to memorise tables of irregular verbs before they can have a conversation with their friends

And yet so many of them seem to manage! *headdesk*