In English, for example, I use sensible with the meaning of  sensitive.

sensible (adj.) late 14c., “capable of sensation or feeling;” also “capable of being sensed or felt, perceptible to the senses,” hence “easily understood; logical, reasonable,” from Late Latin sensibilis “having feeling: perceptible by the senses,” from sensus, past participle of sentire “perceive, feel” (see sense (n.)).

Of persons, “aware, cognizant (of something)” early 15c.; “having good sense, capable of reasoning, discerning, clever,” mid-15c. Of clothes, shoes, etc., “practical rather than fashionable” it is attested from 1855.

and

sensitive (adj.), late 14c., in reference to the body or its parts, “having the function of sensation”, also (early 15c.) “pertaining to the faculty of the soul that receives and analyzes sensory information”, from Old French sensitif “capable of feeling” (13c.) and directly from Medieval Latin sensitivus “capable of sensation”, from Latin sensus, past participle of sentire “feel perceive” (like sense (n.)). 

Meaning “easily affected” (with reference to mental feelings) first recorded in 1816; meaning “having intense physical sensation” is from 1849. Original meaning is preserved in sensitive plant (1630s.), which is “mechanically irritable in a higher degree than almost any other plant” (Century Dictionary). Meaning “involving national security” is recorded from 1953.

Other Middle English senses included “susceptible to injury or pain” (early 15c., now gone with sensitive); “worldly, temporal, outward” (c. 1400); “carnal, unspiritual” (early 15c., now gone with sensual). Related: Sensibleness.

When looking at the meanings of sensible and sensitive in English, French and Italian for example, I think it is clearer why I tend to mis-use the term in English.

In French, sensible is equivalent to the English sensitive. This is the explanation from the Larousse :

• Qui est, qui peut être perçu par les sens : Le monde sensible.
• Qui est apte à éprouver des perceptions, des sensations : Avoir l’oreille sensible.
• Qui est très facilement affecté par la moindre action ou agression extérieure : Être sensible de la gorge. Une dent sensible au froid.
• Se dit d’une partie du corps que l’on ressent, qui est plus ou moins douloureuse : La douleur est moins vive, mais la zone est toujours sensible.
• Qui éprouve facilement des émotions, des sentiments, notamment de pitié, de compassion : Une nature sensible. Être sensible à la douleur d’autrui.
• Qui est particulièrement accessible à certaines impressions d’ordre intellectuel, moral, esthétique ; réceptif : Être sensible aux compliments.
• Se dit d’un appareil, d’un instrument de mesure, qui obéit à de très légères sollicitations : Une balance très sensible.
• Se dit d’un matériel, d’un produit qui est sujet à des variations de prix dépendant de facteurs extérieurs.
• Que l’on doit traiter avec une attention, une vigilance particulière : Dossier sensible.
• Qui fait l’objet d’une surveillance renforcée pour des raisons de sécurité : Vol sensible.
• Qui est facilement perçu par les sens ou par l’esprit : Une sensible différence de prix.
• Se dit d’une émulsion photographique, d’un explosif, d’un matériel, etc., doués de sensibilité.

Whereas French sensitif means sensory or oversensitive in English. As, like Larousse says: Sensitif se dit d’un sujet doué de perception extrasensorielle. 

For some time I also used the term “awful” in its etymological way, i.e. “worthy of respect or fear”, and not with its actual meaning “very bad”. Especially when reacting spontaneously to an awesome situation, it happened that I said awful, not intending it in the modern way, but in the medieval way:

awful (adj.): c.1300, agheful “worthy of respect or fear”, from aghe  an earlier form of awe (n.) + ful. The Old English word was egefull. Weakened sense “very bad” is from 1809; weakened sense of “exceedingly” is by 1818.

Do you also use a word in its etymological way or with the meaning it has in another language? Please share in the comments.

 

In the strictest sense, we all have a mother tongue as we all have only one (biological) mother. – But does this mean that the language our mother talked to us is automatically our mother tongue?

What about this friend I had in school, who was adopted when she was 2 and grew up in a Dutch family: would her mother tongue be Swahili because her mum was talking Swahili to her or would it be Dutch, because this was the language the mother who adopted her talked to her?

Usually, mother tongue – or father tongue to be politically correct! –  defines the first language we were exposed to, chronologically speaking, our L1, the first language we understand, speak, the one we grew up with or that our parents (or caregivers) speak with us. And usually people tend to speak this language for a long time.

If we want to define the first language we speak, learn and feel comfortable with, the term first language may seem more appropriate. This first language doesn’t have to be one. In bilingual families it can be two or three: the important aspect to define a language as first language is, that the child uses it on a regular basis, preferably every day from the very beginning. Linguists suggested a few years ago that an exposure of at least 20% of the daily time would be optimal for a child to become (almost) equally proficient in the family languages (but this has changed already and the duration of exposure is not the most important factor of becoming a bilingual!).

If there are more than one first languages in a family, we can also use the term of family languages: these would be for example the language a child talks with the mother, another one with the father, a third one with a caregiver (i.e. at daycare, school etc.), maybe a next one with extended family or locals, a fourth one with friends… Simultaneous bilinguals or multilinguals are exposed to more than one (or two) languages since day one. Successive bilinguals or multilinguals, are those who add other languages after having acquired the first language(s).

Using a term like family languages works if the language situation within the family is stable. And it would also work for extended family would share these languages – But we all know that in multilingual families, the languages we speak at home can vary and the situation can shift. Situations change, we move abroad, we immerse into other cultures and languages and within a bilingual family this can be a reason for preferring one language to another – even if only for a certain period of time.
I personally prefer and use the term of home languages when I talk about the languages a family speaks at home, as there can be other people involved: caregivers, nannies, babysitters etc. can speak another language to my child on a daily/weekly basis and this language would become one of the most important languages for my child.

My languages

Let’s consider my personal language situation: my parents only spoke German with me and my sister, but we were exposed to Italian since day one. We didn’t “learn” it in the conventional, academical way, so Italian counts as our second-mother-tongue or one of our first languages. – Usually, when people ask me which is my mother tongue (or mother language) I answer German and Italian. Both languages are still equally dominant and valuable for me.

If I analyze the different phases in my life, there were phases where Italian or French or German were dominant languages. In one phase (of almost 6 years) I would mainly speak Italian and French (and study Old-French and Old-Provençal, which felt like “living” in this time and period!). During that period I really had difficulties communicating in German and couldn’t form a complete sentence in German.

Only when this linguistic situation changed and I focused more on German and Italian, my German became more dominant for a short period.

English is the fourth language I’ve learned and I didn’t use it very often from age 20 to 34. I did re-activate and improve it when we moved to the Netherlands and our children started attending an English school. At the same time I also improved my Dutch.

In the last 11 years, English and Dutch became the most dominant languages, with German being our family language.

Therefore, my first languages are now German, English and Dutch, with occasionally Italian (the language that still feels like the closest to my heart!), French and Swissgerman (and adding Spanish to the picture which I have a great passive knowledge in but where I’m working on the verbal fluency).

What are my children’s first languages?

From a chronological point of view, Italian and Swiss-German are the “first languages” for all of my children, but only for their first years, because we decided at some point to only speak German with them – while still reading and singing with them in Swiss-German and Italian –, and this changed again when they started attending the Dutch daycare and then an English school.

Today – I should better say “at the moment”…– they consider German, English and Dutch as their main languages, i.e. the ones they are most fluent in. These are their most dominant languages. They don’t feel that confident in Swiss-German or Italian at the moment, but I know by my own experience that this can change if the linguistic situation changes again or if they just decide to talk them more often.

For multilingual children, the linguistic situation within the family and social context changes constantly, and if this happens in their early years, the concept of “first language” changes too, it only refers to the first language acquired, so in strictly chronological terms.

The first language or mother tongue plays an important role in sociolinguistics, as it is the basis for people’s sociolinguistic identity. Terms like native language or mother tongue refer to an ethnic group rather than to the first language. This all confuses families and teachers as, usually, one needs to indicate the “mother tongue” of the children when signing them up for a daycare or school. This is why I always recommend to indicate also the languages that our children are most dominant in at the moment… 

Native speakers are considered to be “authority on their given language due to their natural acquisition process regarding the language, versus having learned the language later in life”.

By concentrating on the natural acquisition process, my native languages would be German, Italian, Swiss-German and Dutch because I did acquire them naturally, i.e. without “studying” them. I did not “learn” them at school, I did imitate speakers and copy sentences. I learnt how to read and write them partly at school – German and Italian.

The fact that someone is a “native” speaker because he or she acquired this language at an early stage, doesn’t really make sense to me. We all need to nurture our languages, learn the different meanings of words, form longer sentences, find out what register to use in different settings, which all takes many years!

Fact is that we are perfectly able to acquire a language in a “natural” way also in a later stage of our life. And if a language we acquired or learnt later in life becomes our most dominant language, i.e. the one we speak most, write in and read, our “first language” or “mother tongue” can become a secondary language and sometimes even be lost… (cfr. language attrition).

In his lecture “English and Welsh” in 1955, J.R.R. Tolkien distinguishes the “native tongue” from the “cradle tongue”. The cradle tongue being the language we learn during early childhood and the native tongue “may be different, possibly determined by an inherited linguistic taste, and may later in life be discovered by a strong emotional affinity to a specific dialect (Tolkien confessed to such an affinity to the Middle English of the West Midlands in particular)” (cfr. pdf of “English and Welsh” by J.R.R. Tolkien)

We each have our own personal linguistic potential: we each have a native language. But that is not the language that we speak, our cradle-tongue, the first-learned. Linguistically we all wear ready-made clothes, and our native language comes seldom to expression, save perhaps by pulling at the ready-made till it sits a little easier. But though it may be buried, it is never wholly extinguished, and contact with other languages may stir it deeply.

My chief point here is to emphasize the difference between the first-learned language, the language of custom, and an individual’s native language, his inherent linguistic predilections: not to deny that he will share many of these with others of his community. He will share them, no doubt, in proportion as he shares other elements in his make-up. (cfr. “English and Welsh” by J.R.R. Tolkien, p.18)

There is so much to say (and write) about this topic! One could add the term of heritage language, which is often misunderstood as a synonym of mother language/tongue… But I’ll stop here.

The predilection of a language is more important than the chronological place it has in our language acquisition history. (Ute)

For me, personally, the language I prefer speaking and that is closest to my heart and I’m more spontaneous in, is not the language my parents talked to me during the first period of my life. What about you? Do you (still) prefer speaking the first language you learnt, or is another language more important for you right now?

If you are interested in this topic and would like to know more about it:

I hold workshops on bilingualism and parenting the bilingual child and consult parents, caregivers and teachers about it.

About the origin of the term mother tongue

“The origin of the term mother tongue harks back to the notion that linguistic skills of a child are honed by the mother and therefore the language spoken by the mother would be the primary language that the child would learn.” However, this type of culture-specific notion is a misnomer. The term was used by Catholic monks to designate a particular language they used, instead of Latin, when they are “speaking from the pulpit”.That is, the “holy mother of the Church” introduced this term and colonies inherited it from the Christianity as a part of their colonial legacy, thanks to the effort made by foreign missionaries in the transitional period of switching over from 18th-century Mercantile Capitalism to 19th-century Industrial Capitalism in India.” (cfr. wikipedia)

Sociolinguist Calvin Gidney started to study language patterns in animated kid’s entertainment after noticing that Mufasa had an American accent, whereas Scar, the lion of the dark side, roars in British English in The Lion King. He analyzed 30 shows and 1,500 characters, and is still working on this project. Together with Julie Dobrow, a senior leturer at Tufts who specializes in issues of children and media, they observed that

“the use of German, Eastern European, and Russian accents for animated villains is likely reflective of America’s hostility toward those countries during World War II and the Cold War. They have continued to find these same accent trends through the past few decades, even as the political and social climate changes and the nation’s zeitgeist is marked by different ethnic and global tensions.”

It seems that still today, Slavic and German accents are still the voices of choice for “bad” characters in US and UK.

It seems that this is related with the age and training of the showrunners who “make the decision on the basis of what was popular and successful in the shows they grew up watching” (Rosina Lippi-Green, author of English with an accent).

Stereotyped use of language seems not to be an industry-wide norm, “accent signaling is a more subtle form of ethnic stereotyping” and we all observe this not only in cartoons, movies, video games, but also in TV shows, and in some online forums and social media in general etc.

I grew up in Italy and I noticed from a very early age, that not only villains and odd professors had the typical tscherman accent, but Germans were constantly ridiculed in shows, movies etc. People would make fun of their accent, of their “not fluent Italian” and of other clichés related to German–ness.

I didn’t take it very well to see my friends make fun of Germans while growing up in Italy in TV shows, movies, cartoons, TV commercials etc.. I remember that when show masters stereotyped German actors and actresses, I used to cringe.

I suppose that like many other children growing up abroad I don’t like stereotypes… For a long time I thought that I am the only one feeling odd when it comes to this topic, but the study mentioned above confirms that “language tropes can have far-reaching consequences, both for kids’ perceptions of those around them and their understandings of themselves.”

If in the 90’ies children “used TV as a key source of information about other ethnic groups, as well as about their own ethnic and racial identities”, I think nowadays it’s the internet.

When it comes to language fluency, people tend to “make judgements about their peers’ intelligence and education levels based on language characteristics”.  Those using standard language are generally considered as being smarter than others, and they are treated better. Certain accent are “better” than others. There exists a non-written hierarchy of languages and accents that are a clear distinctive feature.

We should not underestimate the impact on children whose home language is stereotyped by the host society and media, because they “see the correlation between evil and foreignness, between evil and low socioeconomic status” and they will be more prone to internalize negative perceptions of themselves or other groups!

What Lippi-Green suggests to take entertainment as a “spoonful of sugar with a sour aftertaste for in-the-know adults —TV and movies “take [bias] and pour concrete over it,” she said. “They etch it in.”, and that children learn through repetition (“You show them a pattern, you keep showing them that pattern … of course they’re going to assimilate that”), should be extended to internet in general.

We can’t shield our children – and ourselves – from cultural biases, but we can learn to be(come) media-literate viewers.

As for our children, Dobrow suggests “if a parent or sibling or caregiver is there with a child watching television or a film, this … can make anything into an educational experience”.

– What do you think about this topic?
– What are the stereotyped languages where you live?

(to be continued…)

Posts and studies mentioned in this post:

Why do cartoon villains speak in foreign accents?

Children and television

What for people who grew up in one culture – let’s call them “monoculturals” – can seem like a lovely way to celebrate many cultures, to taste different foods and get a visual impression of what that other culture can look like, and a taste of it if food is involved, a “hear” of it if music is played, is a very difficult time for someone like me or my children who grew up abroad, never lived in that country we’re asked to represent, and only have a temporary experience – during holidays – of what life looks like, tastes and sounds like in that country.

Of course, one can “chose whatever country they have any kind of relation with”, and so my children once dressed up as Dutch, as German, as Italian, as Swiss, but we always cringe at the thought to have to chose.

8 years ago, when my son struggled with deciding which country to represent, I told him what I tell now all internationals who come to my talks and workshops, and their children and teens: you don’t have to chose! You are all of them, so combine them in your very unique and fantastic way!

And so he did. He put on a French cap (on aime bien la France chez nous!), an orange shirt (omdat we van Oranje houden!), blue trousers from Italy (perché amiamo lo stile italiano!), hiking boots and a rope (will mer immer gäärn i’d Bärge gönt go wandere!), and I honestly don’t remember what part of his outfit was German (aber das ist hoffentlich kein Problem…). I didn’t take a picture of him, but I remember that other parents and their children were confused and some even quite upset that he combined some European cultures/countries in his outfit. But he felt better!

– He felt better but not “great”. And I know why: because we perceive it as a very superficial way to show what others expect you to show.

Others want to see colors, to smell spices, taste the otherness and have the illusion of “all is fine” and “everyone is different”.

You are expected to celebrate the bright side of that culture and society, the traditional outfits that you may never wear in that country because you don’t live there and you don’t connect the history, the tradition that comes with wearing them, the pride to be part of that culture, because you experience it from the outside, as a well prepared tourist who only visits it during holidays. You may feel you belong for a few days or weeks in a year: you speak the language, know about beliefs and traditions, adopt the values, but for most of the time you’re “the combination of many”.

Like my children I also attended a very international school, but we never had an international day and I am extremely grateful for that.

The reason for this is because when you live internationality, embrace diversity in your daily life, wearing a dirndl means to reduce your identity to only one, often the palest facet of your colorful self of your manifold identity!

I know that what I’m saying here is not shared by most parents and teachers at our school and other international schools, and you may think that I have an identity problem.

No worries, I don’t. I thought for many years that me being not only German but also Italian, French and Swiss – even British to some extent! – was weird, a problem for those who try to put you into boxes, label you with only one label, that I had to silence part of who I was to fit into groups, but I, we don’t have to.

Like TCKs, CCKs, those who honestly and wholeheartedly embrace diversity and internationality, don’t need an international day. They live it every single day of their life.

If you don’t believe me, try to ask the children and teenagers, the adults who thrive among internationals: How would their way to express internationality look like?

I know what my answer is: stop pointing out the differences! Instead of having separate stalls at these international events with Indian – German – Chinese – Nigerian – South African – British – Irish – Italian – French – Dutch etc. food, unite them all on long colorful table and let the truly international feast begin, where everyone eats from all plates without questioning, judging, comparing, pointing out the difference, but simply enjoying.

If you organize games or activities from all those cultures: find out what they have in common, what the children like to play and do, and why – and with games I mean board games or games played in groups without electronic device!

– I don’t like international days because they are only one day (some are a week): I prefer embracing this every single day!

Why don’t we say “amn’t I” instead of “aren’t I”? If we say “am I” why don’t we say “amn’t I”? Isn’t “aren’t I” grammatically incorrect? – I recently had a long discussion with my son about the fact that using aren’t I doesn’t seem right, at least not if we learn that the correct form for the first person is “am”.
Why don’t we use amn’t I instead? This made me curious to look up if this form was ever used and why aren’t I is the current, accepted form instead.

The contraction of I am not in questions is not a logic form for English learners – and teachers: the form I’m not should be Amn’t I ? (with postposition of “I”) in a question.

Why don’t we say “amn’t I” as the the negative form? If in declarative sentences we use the standard form I am not and in questions am I not, and in declarative case, the standard contraction is I’m not, so why don’t we apply this in questions where speakers feel the need for a negative contraction like in “isn’t it” or “aren’t they”?

The contraction ain’t seems to stand for am not and is attested since 1618 (Merriam-Webster). As the combination of two nasal consonants “m-n” is disfavoured by English speakers, the “m” of amn’t was elided, i.e. one of the nasal sounds was dropped to simplify the pronunciation: this reflected in writing with the form an’t. An’t first appears  in the work of English Restoration playwrights (cfr. Merriam-Webster) and in 1695 an’t was used as a contraction of am not in William Congreve’s play Love for Love: “I can hear you farther off, I an’t deaf”, but an’t also appears as a contraction of “are not” in Sir John Vanbrugh’s The Relapse (1676): “Hart thee shoemaker! These shoes an’t ugly, but they don’t fit me”.
Interestingly, the contracted form aren’t for are not appeared in 1675. – In non-rhotic dialects, aren’t lost its “r” sound, and began to be pronounced as an’t.

Apparently, during that period, the form an’t was used for the 1rst singular and 1rst plural form: I am not/ I amn’t = I an’t and We aren’t = We an’t.

An’t for is not

An’t for is not may have developed independently from its use for am not and are not.

Just to complicate it a bit more: isn’t was sometimes written as in’t or en’t, which could have changed into an’t.  “An’t for is not may have filled a gap as an extension of the already-used conjugations for to be not: Jonathan Swift used an’t to mean is not in Letter 19 of his Journal to Stella (1710–13): It an’t my fault, ’tis Patrick’s fault; pray now don’t blame Presto.”

From an’t to  ain’t

The “a” in an’t must have been a long “a” and was written as ain’t since 1749– with the epenthetic “i”.

Interestingly, when ain’t appeared, an’t was already used for am not, are not, and is not.

Therefore, an’t and ain’t coexisted as written forms well into the nineteenth century:

Charles Dickens used the terms interchangeably, as in Chapter 13, Book the Second of Little Dorrit (1857): “‘I guessed it was you, Mr Pancks,” said she, ‘for it’s quite your regular night; ain’t it? … An’t it gratifying, Mr Pancks, though; really?'”.

In the English lawyer William Hickey‘s memoirs (1808–1810), ain’t appears as a contraction of aren’t; “thank God we’re all alive, ain’t we…”

We can find the contraction ain’t for “am not”

In dialects or regional variants…

I was positively surprised when I heared a Scottish friend use amn’t once in a question and found out that it was quite common. In fact:

The contraction amn’t is a standard contraction of am not in some dialects of mainly Hiberno-English (Irish English) and Scottish English. In Hiberno-English the question form (amn’t I?) is used more frequently than the declarative I amn’t. (The standard I’m not is available as an alternative to I amn’t in both Scottish English and Hiberno-English.) An example appears in Oliver St. John Gogarty‘s impious poem The Ballad of Japing Jesus: “If anyone thinks that I amn’t divine, / He gets no free drinks when I’m making the wine”. These lines are quoted in James Joyce‘s Ulysses, which also contains other examples: “Amn’t I with you? Amn’t I your girl?” (spoken by Cissy Caffrey to Leopold Bloom in Chapter 15).

The more standardized contraction aren’t seems to fill in the “amn’t gap” in questions: Aren’t I lucky to have you around? Although this form is universally used by Standard English speakers today, it was considered “illiterate” by some twentieth-century writers.

But how could amn’t become aren’t?

The form am not contracted into amn’t which, to simplify the pronunciation, became an’t. All happened because in non-rhotic* dialects, aren’t and the pronunciation of an’t are homophones, i.e. both are pronounced without the “r”. So it might be the case of a hypercorrection from non-rhotic dialect speakers that the form aren’t is used instead of an’t: thinking that where there isn’t a “r” we should insert one, people may have started to insert a “r” into an’t which lead to arn’t and by simplifying the pronunciation with an epenthetic e: aren’t, which, besides, already exists as form of the 2nd singular and plural forms of the verb to be and doesn’t sound “wrong”.

The spelling of “aren’t I” started to replace “an’t I” in the early 20th century, and some first examples of aren’t I for am I not appear already in the first half of the 19th century in St Martin’s Day from Holland-tide by Gerald Griffin in 1827: “aren’t I listening; and isn’t it only the breeze that’s blowing the sheets and halliards about?”

Today, the grammatical am I not? sounds stilted, ain’t I? is considered substandard and aren’t I ? is the standard solution adopted in practice by most speakers and taught in school.

*In non-rhotic dialects, the historical /r/ has been lost except before vowels; they include all the dialects of England—except the South West, the southern West Midlands, and parts of West Lancashire—as well as the English dialects of Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and some parts of the southern and eastern coastal United States.

More posts about historical linguistics will follow soon – also about Italian, French, German…