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http://software01.archive.org/stream/languageinaction00inhaya/languageinaction00inhaya_djvu.txt

So, I had a great deal of back-and-forth messaging with another KMC poster today who has English as their 2nd language.

The amount of miscommunication fairly astounded me; I began searching for sources that illustrate the value of truly and fully learning a language.

I thought immediately of an excerpt I had read years ago that was written by a man named Hayakawa. He is gone now, he happened to be a U.S. Senator, but, years before that, Hayakawa ALSO happened to be a linguist of some repute.

I found part of the article I had read years ago contained in a Google books document preview. That led me to discover the URL given in my first post.

Leads to a treasure show of linguistic articles. Hopefully I'll have the chance to explore some of them with people ...




In the meantime, I stumbled across something that seems rather remarkable to me, and it is this paragraph, and to help people understand what is being talked about IN this paragraph, I googled the word likeliest to need defining below and gave a link to google images of the object in question ...


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"... 6. A picture in the magazine Life (October 28, 1940) shows
the backs of a sailor's hands, with the letters 'h-o-l-d f-a-s-t'
tattooed on the fingers. The caption explains, 'This tattoo was
supposed to keep sailors from falling off yardarm.' ..."

The yardarm excerpt struck me as rather remarkable because it gave significance to the following image. I think I saw this on someone's Facebook page and labelled it accordingly for my records.

I looked at the tattoos on the hands and thought:
"This must be some modern adoption of 'Thug Life' or the like, re-casting this popular children's hero as a hard street man, capable of taking anything life dishes out at him".

I never suspected the real history this may actually reflect, that this might be something even MORE suited to a bygone era than, say, the 1990s or today's modern era ...

Miscommunication, especially in text, is also a major issue between people who are fluent in the language. "Learning a language fully" is not really possible, as languages aren't monolithic concepts that everyone has to submit to. Taking English for example, the differences between regions within countries can be so significant that it is hard to understand each other.

In my experience, a non-native speaker who has learned the language, once they have reached a certain level, tends to speak a rather clear and broadly understandable version of the language, albeit with oddities partly based on the differences in their native language (for example, Germans will have an issue with "w" and "v", as well as "th" and "s" in English (however, for example some British accents, as well as AAVE I believe, will pronounce a "th" more like an "f". A similar, but native, differentiation to what most people might consider a standard version of English), Japanese and Chinese people with "r" and "l", French people with everything, etc.