Imperfect learning

Translations

apprendimento imperfetto|unvollkommenes Lernen|apprentissage imparfait

Article

Imperfect learning of a foreign language indicate the process of partial or imperfect acquisition of a language by a non-native speaker. This concept is a rather trivial one, as, in modern contact linguistics, it refers to a phenomenon that easily observed and described. For the ancient world, however, we have no access to the process of acquisition of foreign languages in scribal schools or similar environments, so the results of imperfect learning of a given language by non-native scribes can be difficult to disambiguate from the effects of interference between the different languages mastered by truly bilingual speakers.

Examples

In general, when dealing with grammatical interference in a text written in ancient language, the only way to assess the likelihood that a feature is indeed an indicator of true bilingualism is its frequence in a corpus. For instance, the extension of the so-called i-mutation from Luwian to Hittite in the last centuries of the history of the Hittite language is probably a case of true bilingualism. As the status of Luwian in the Hittite world increased dramatically, the change from /a/ to /i/ of the thematic vowel of the direct cases of common gender nominals, typical of Luwian, extended also to a number of nouns of Hittite, and influenced also former consonant-stems that were eventually reanalzied as i-stems (cf. Rieken 2006). Since this change occurs in a number of nominals that all share some specific features (a-theme or consonant stem) and the affected cases are regularly the same ones, the change seems to be structural and true, and it must have originated in an environment in which Luwian speakers were truly a part of the sociolinguistic environment.

On the other end, the presence of the reduplicated clitic pronouns in the clause-initial prosodic phrase of Hittite, with the same pronoun occurring both in the correct position and in the position it would occupy in Luwian, is sporadically found in the Hittite corpus, and given its obvious redundancy it is more likely to reflect the uncertainty of Luwian native speakers who were trying to write Hittite. The difference with the case of the i-mutation is that the extended i-mutation certainly existed in spoken Hittite, while it is very unlkely that a scribe who wrote the same pronoun twice also pronounced it twice when speaking.

References

Rieken, E. 2006. Zum hethitisch-luwischen Sprachkontakt in historischer Zeit, Altorientalische Forschungen 33, 271-285.