Re: reality?

Steg Belsky <draqonfayir@...> wrote:

>
>On Sat, 2 Jan 1999 19:02:07 +0200 vardi <vardi@...> writes:
>>> Would you care to expound on that?
>
>>Always glad to expound:) Just as people often have the feeling that
>>they've been in a particular place or situation before (deja vu), so I
>>feel sometimes that there's some inherent or innate aspect of
>>language.
>>That's why I mentioned about my little son: it often seems to me that
>>he
>>already knows vastly more language than he's producing (not a
>>revolutionary idea - the passive command of all learners is greater
>>than
>>their active command). The way he deals with the language he's given
>>seems more than repetition or the simple substition of items in
>>sentences. And as for myself: I grew up in England, basically as a
>>monolingual child, but with an awareness and some knowledge of Hebrew
>>from a very early age. Again, I always felt there was more Hebrew
>>"inside me," and the first time I came here (to Israel) when I was 16
>>I
>>was talking fairly fluently within a few weeks. I'm not talking here
>>about liking languages or being good at them, though I guess that's
>>part
>>of it, but about a deeper connection to languages. That's what I meant
>>by linguistic deja vu.
>>
>>Hope I made some sense.
>>
>>        Shaul Vardi
>
>
>You definitely did....that's sorta the way i felt when i was studying
for
>my Yiddish final - as if the language was somewhere there in the back
of
>my head and i was just "remembering" it or something....very scary, but
>cool.  It's the vocab that's the problem, though :)
>
>-Stephen (Steg)
>
I get that with French sometimes. I think it's a language intuition that
shouldn't come as any surprise; we are human after all. What's eerie
sometimes is that it seems to go beyond just understanding of grammar,
it goes even to a immediate understanding of the character of the
language, however passive. Oftentimes I can't form the right French
sentence, but I can definitely pick it out from amongst wrong ones.




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