Re: OT: Speech Therapy (was Re: Re: Slightly OT: French as a second language)

Late, late reply, but....
In a message dated 11/23/01 2:07:42 AM, dnsulani@ZAHAV.NET.IL writes:

>On 22 Nov, Josh Roth  wrote:
>    (quoting an earlier post of mine)
>
>> >    Try having the Yemmenite parents bring you their sons for speech
>> >therapy because they (the kids) speak Hebrew like all the other Israelis
>> >around them
>> >and not like the rest of their family!
>> >    Usually I try to talk them out of it, but one time I couldn't, and
>> >I
>> >ended up having to try and modify the poor kid's dialect to conform
>> >to family standards!
>>
>> Did it work?? How old was he? He must have resisted.
>
>    The kid was about 6 years old IIRC. He didn't (dare to) resist. (The
>father
>was a rather dominating character). Of course it didn't succeed! The kid
>spent
>all day in school, surrounded by standard Israeli Hebrew, not the Yemmenite
>variety. Then he went home and played with the neighborhood kids, all of
>whom
>spoke standard Israeli Hebrew. If he watched TV or listened to music, it
>was
>in standard Israeli Hebrew. He was in an overwhelmingly non-Yemmenite
>environment. How was he to _need_ to aquire a Yemmenite accent? Parental
>wishes alone are not enough!
Yes, I guess that's inevitable. It is sad that whole ways of speaking may
just die out, but how could you prevent that unless you manually separate
people of different ethnicities, which of course is bad for other reasons....
And I have to correct what I said earlier. I HAVE heard Yemenite Hebrew. I
just never realized it. There are several songs by Ofra Haza and others that
I always thought were in some form of Arabic, but then I got some lyrics a
few days ago, and surprise, it was Hebrew all along! It's quite a beautiful
way of speakinrs and Torah reading and such.

>>That's kind of cool in a
>> way, that such things can happen in this world :-)
>
>    "Ethnic"  therapy can indeed be cool! (I remember an Ethiopian
>girl I treated last year. In order to practice her speech, she used to
>describe
>to me how to make all sorts of Ethiopian delicacies. (I should have taken
>notes!)
Wowzers. You're making me want to be an Israeli speech therapist! I wonder
what it's like for an Ethiopian learning Hebrew - very difficult of course,
from what I've read, but the languages are distantly related - I wonder if it
helps even a little bit.

>    However, although teaching a person to change his/her accent is
>an accepted part of a speech-language pathologist's mandate,
>I usually relegate such cases to low priority.
>There are too many other speech/language problems that can seriously
>interfere with a person's ability to communicate or can seriously affect
>their ability to succeed in school to worry about trying to replace a
>perfectly
>good phonological system with a different one. Vanity is not usually
>a good enough reason for therapy.
Good point.

>Dan Sulani
>--------------------------------
>likehsna rtem zuv tikuhnuh auag inuvuz vaka'a.
>
>A word is an awesome thing.
Josh Roth
http://members.aol.com/fuscian/eloshtan.html

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