Re: Twin speak

On Mon, Oct 09, 2000 at 03:47:51PM -0400, Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
[snip]
> I wish I knew, too.  :-)  There was a phase during which my younger
> sister (by 2.5 years) was speaking some mixture of Korean and English and
> I was the only one who could consistently understand her, though I was
> Korean-ing and English-ing at her myself.  I was about 8 at the time,
> though, so I don't recall details, and we're certainly not twins (though
> we're very close, and people listening in on certain of our conversations
> have no clue what's going on, what with all the idiosyncratic non-obvious
> terminology like "lemonade," "Blueflame principle," "elthki," etc.).
[snip]

I observed this in two of my cousins, who has taken our local Malaysian
Hokkien-English-Malay pidgin to extremes by incorporating words, phrases,
and even sound effects from video games. Although I can still understand
them if I listened hard enough, another older cousin of mine has no idea
what they're talking about 90% of the time. I also vaguely recall having a
specialized terminology that I use with my father, that nobody else
understands.

My theory is that specialization causes two close people to develop a
lingo "optimized" for communication with minimal fluff; this lingo could
include things we would normally consider as extra-lingual such as sound
effects imitations, etc., and would drop out unnecessary grammatical
baggage. Given enough time, this could diverge enough from its source
language(s) that it might start appearing like another language
altogether.

On a related note, one of those two cousins I mentioned used to speak an
odd form of Hokkien to his brother that their parents could not
understand. There was even a point when *only* his brother understood what
he was saying!


T