Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2018 January 31

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January 31

Multicultural kids' accent

I met a family of Americans living in the UK, where the parents (surprise!) spoke with American accent. However, the kids spoke with British accent. If the parents were not native speakers of English, I would perfectly understand that the kids would orient themselves to their peer/wide society.

Is that a consistent thing? Couldn't just happen that the kids would decide (consciously or not) to speak like their parents? --Hofhof (talk) 17:57, 31 January 2018 (UTC)

Speaking only as an English resident and teaching some generations of immigrants, I find that the more they are exposed to the English language at home and at school, the more "English" they sound. So if the children had been sent to an English school and listened to English radio and TV programmes and had English friends, they would reflect the sum of their experiences, with the American part being just a small part of their life. No doubt someone will come along in a while with some proper evidence rather than my anecdotal. --TammyMoet (talk) 18:11, 31 January 2018 (UTC)

Entirely original research, but in 1978 I helped take a party of Scouts from east London to Toronto for a fortnight's home hospitality with the families of local Scout Groups. On our return, one of our young Cockneys was speaking with a strong Canadian accent, although he defiantly rejected any suggestion that this might be the case. It lasted for a few days after he got home.

On the other hand, there are presently two American children in my Scout Group who have lived in London for at least three years, attending local schools and with many indigenous friends, and who still have a recognisable American accent. So it seems to me entirely variable. Alansplodge (talk) 20:45, 31 January 2018 (UTC)

Yes, I can confirm Tammy's anecdotal experience. Children very quickly pick up pronunciation from their peers, and school seems to be a bigger influence than parents. I've seen the same thing happen with a New Zealand accent that turned into Scouse within a year of arriving in Liverpool (England). Dbfirs 20:46, 31 January 2018 (UTC)

Two more confirmatory anecdotes. In the 80s, aged about 14, my brother, born in Wiltshire, UK and with a typical accent spent almost a year in St Thomas' Hospital, London where he was exposed to the middle class accent of the nurses and doctors who worked there at that time. He returned home with a marked middle class accent that lasted for many months. My son and daughter-in-law both speak with a slight southern English accent. My grandson born in Pontefract, West Yorkshire, 9 years ago, speaks with a Yorkshire accent as broad as Fred Trueman. Richard Avery (talk) 09:30, 1 February 2018 (UTC)

I'm not having much luck with a reference to back up our anecdotes, but Accent (sociolinguistics) has some slender pickings. Alansplodge (talk) 20:53, 31 January 2018 (UTC)

Also Accents Are Forever: By their first birthday, babies are getting locked into the sounds of the language they hear spoken which tends to contradict our observations somewhat. Alansplodge (talk) 20:59, 31 January 2018 (UTC)

I'm also not finding anything directly, but perhaps threads found in code switching, diglossia, Communication accommodation theory, dialect levelling, etc. None of these are right, but they may lead to the right answer. --Jayron32 20:58, 31 January 2018 (UTC)

Hofhof -- What happens to kids who make a short visit to a different accent area, or who move to a different accent area as teenagers, can be individually idiosyncratic. But children in their preteen years pretty consistently follow the accent/dialect of the children they habitually interact with. If they spoke the same as their parents, that would be a sign that they were pretty isolated from social contacts outside their families. AnonMoos (talk) 02:53, 1 February 2018 (UTC)

Having raised my own children while working in several countries, I would happily bet that those children, with their apparently very British accents, could happily drop into a perfect copy of their parents' American accents at the drop of a hat. Wymspen (talk) 11:37, 1 February 2018 (UTC)

On the subject of accents being adjusted for location, walking through King's Cross station this morning I heard an automated announcement for "the 08:30 Virgin Trains East Coast service to Newcastle", with the last word being pronounced New-cassel. That's King's Cross in London and Newcastle in north east England by the way, not New South Wales, Australia. 86.176.18.217 (talk) 13:40, 2 February 2018 (UTC)

I have heard some purists suggest that the Geordie pronunciation of Newcastle is the only correct one. Not a proposition that I agree with. Alansplodge (talk) 15:49, 3 February 2018 (UTC)

Well I say /ˈnjuːkasl/, and I expect that you say /ˈnjuːkɑːsl/, and that in the North East it's /njᵿˈkasl/, but more like /ˈn(j)uˌkæs(ə)l/ on the other side of the pond. These pronunciations are all taken from the Third Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, so you may take your choice, and I agree with your rejection of the proposition. Dbfirs 20:52, 3 February 2018 (UTC)

Again, anecdotal: a friend of mine was put into speech therapy when he started kindergarten because he "talked wrong". When his sister showed up a couple of years later, the school discovered identical patterns. The real problem? Dad was from Austria, mom was a Lithuanian-Jewish cockney. They were a close-knit family, and the kids (mostly readers rather than TV watchers) spoke with a blended mix of their parents' accents, rather than the usual Milwaukeean working class accent. --Orange Mike | Talk 16:17, 3 February 2018 (UTC)

• Until I was 4 1/2 I spoke Spanish, and English with a Southern accent. By the end of Kindergarten I had forgotten Spanish, and spoke with a Delaware Valley accent. When I moved to New York City after college, I was code-switching within months after being mocked (regarding my /o/ [ɛʊ] and /ɔː/ [ɒ] vowels) for having a "Southern" accent (Yeah, South Jersey!) μηδείς (talk) 01:06, 5 February 2018 (UTC)

Is there a proper definition of what a human is?

Is there a proper definition of what a human is? Apparently, humans just used to be called “man” traditionally. Carl Linnaeus, who invented human taxonomy, also referred to humans as “man”. So that means the entire genus of Homo, meaning “man” in English, is the definition of human. This indicates the proper term for a person is “homo” and the plural form would be “homines”. Some people think that if it looks like a human, it is a human. But after humans and chimpanzees split into two lineages, the initial humans looked virtually identical to chimpanzees (or, though less likely, orangutans or gorillas). MisterH2005 (talk) 18:00, 31 January 2018 (UTC)

The article Human says

Modern humans (Homo sapiens, ssp. Homo sapiens sapiens) are the only extant members of the subtribe Hominina, a branch of the tribe Hominini belonging to the family of great apes.

The article Homo sapiens says:

Extinct species of the genus Homo are classified as "archaic humans". This includes at least the separate species Homo erectus, and possibly a number of other species (which are variously also considered subspecies of either H. sapiens or H. erectus. H. sapiens idaltu (2003) is a proposed extinct subspecies of H. sapiens.

Loraof (talk) 18:25, 31 January 2018 (UTC)

It's kind of subjective. Normally colloquial categories of familiar mammal groups correspond roughly to taxonomic families. For instance the cats are the family Felidae, the dogs are the familiy Canidae, the horses are the family Equidae, and so on. In the case of the family that modern humans belong to, Hominidae, we tend to refer to this group as the great apes. There's no biological reason not to call this group the "human family", we're just reluctant to do so for purely cultural and narcissistic reasons. If we take the label of "great apes" for the hominid family for granted, then we're basically left with a spectrum of increasing applicability of the term human from primitive apes to our own modern species Homo sapiens. Members of the tribe Hominini start to correspond with what we might culturally label "cave men" and might reasonably qualify as primitive humans. As you mentioned, the genus Homo explicitly designates itself as human and is an even safer use of the term. At which point on that spectrum you begin using the word is more or less up to you. The ambiguity of culturally-rooted terms like "human" is a major reason why formal taxonomy is necessary in the first place. Abyssal (talk) 18:41, 31 January 2018 (UTC)

• The above comments discuss the taxonomic classification of the species. If you want the genus and differentia definition of the concept, Aristotle's was rational animal. There's the story of Plato, who defined man as a featherless biped. The biographer Diogenes Laertius reports that Diogenes the cynic responded by bringing a live plucked chicken to one of Plato's symposia. (This comic disproof is also sometimes attributed to Socrates, see google.) Aristotle's definition is superior, since rationality (at least in the form of conceptional reasoning) is unique to humans, and explains other properties unique to us like higher mathematics, language, storytelling, and so forth. Featherlessness explains nothing about humans. Also, keep in mind that definitions are contextual. They need to be useful at the user's level of knowledge (children might say humans are animals that talk) and field of study (biologists will include and/or exclude various species of Homo. μηδείς (talk) 19:18, 31 January 2018 (UTC)

MisterH2005 -- it's a consequence of common definitions of the "species" concept that if you have an ancestral (extinct) species A which has split into modern living species B and C, then if you trace back B or C through time, there's not necessarily any natural sharp abrupt boundary between B and A, or between C and A. If you arbitrarily define such a sharp boundary, then that logically means that the first organism belonging to species B had parents who belonged to species A!

In any case, it's true that the Chimpanzee-human last common ancestor (CHLCA) probably resembled modern chimpanzees more than it did modern humans with respect to most aspects of gross anatomy and behavioral repertoire, but it's still very dubious whether it could legitimately be called a "chimpanzee" -- it probably didn't knuckle walk (as modern chimpanzees do), and there has been an additional five million years or so of evolution leading along the line from CHLCA to modern chimpanzees. Also the CHLCA didn't diverge into proto-Chimpanzees on one side and members of the genus homo on the other side. In fact the CHLCA diverged into apes which were to adopt knuckle-walking to move on the ground vs. apes which were to adopt bipedalism to move on the ground. The latter line led eventually to australopithecines, and only then to the genus homo, with modern humans rather evolving rather recently. AnonMoos (talk) 03:28, 1 February 2018 (UTC)

In any case, humans must have initially closely resembled chimpanzees. MisterH2005 (talk) 07:26, 1 February 2018 (UTC)

What if it was the other way around? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 08:04, 1 February 2018 (UTC)

All non-human great apes have fur. I’d find it unusual if it was suggested humans never had any fur at some point. MisterH2005 (talk) 09:50, 1 February 2018 (UTC)

Baseball_Bugs -- chimpanzees have a number of characteristics in common with other "Great apes" where humans diverge, both on the visible level and the genetic level (great apes, including chimpanzees, have 48 chromosomes, while humans have 46). The alternative to the hypothesis that the CHLCA resembled modern chimpanzees more than it did modern humans (without necessarily being a chimpanzee itself) is the hypothesis that these characteristics were lost along the line leading from early great ape ancestors to the CHLCA, then regained along the line leading from the CHLCA to modern chimpanzees. This second hypothesis is distinctly "uneconomical" from the scientific point of view. However, there are a small number of isolated characteristics in which modern humans probably resemble the CHLCA more than modern chimpanzees do (such as the lack of knuckle-walking, as I mentioned). AnonMoos (talk) 10:31, 1 February 2018 (UTC)

MisterH2005 -- I really would not say that "humans must have initially closely resembled chimpanzees" (due to terminological issues). Rather, I would say that early ancestors of modern humans along the line leading from the CHLCA to modern humans resembled modern chimpanzees in a number of respects. AnonMoos (talk) 10:31, 1 February 2018 (UTC)

AnonMoos —- The correct term to use for those early ancestors along the line from the CHLCA to modern humans is still “humans” (“classical humans” or “prehistoric humans” is fitting). They are part of the same line as modern humans. Terminology needs to be officially changed to reflect that, AnonMoos. MisterH2005 (talk) 17:46, 1 February 2018 (UTC)

The technical scientific term is "hominin" (or sometimes in recent years "hominan"). Your meaning of "human" would not fall within the common meaning of "human" as used by the great majority of native speakers of English (if confronted with a pre-Australopithecine, hardly anybody would say "There's a human being"). AnonMoos (talk) 23:42, 1 February 2018 (UTC)

And the common meaning of “human” is a flawed one. Looking like a human should not be the criteria for being classified as a “human”. That line of thinking leads people to make assumptions such as that porcupines and hedgehogs are related (they’re not). As for if Australopithecus led directly to Homo, it may have or it may have not. But if it did, then its members should be called humans, not australopithecines. MisterH2005 (talk) 04:32, 2 February 2018 (UTC)

Humans are not naturally experts on porcupines and hedgehogs, but they're experts on humans, at least as far as recognizing what is a human being and what isn't one. Also, your negative-relativistic method of word definition is highly-dependent on historical accidents. If you define as "human" whatever is in the line of descent from the last common ancestor of modern humans and the most-closely related living species, then if homo floresiensis had survived to the present day, only those diverging from the last common modern human / homo floresiensis ancestor would be "human" in that case, while if chimpanzees and bonobos go extinct in the future, then all those diverging from the last common human-chimp-gorilla ancestor would be "human" (including those in the line of descent from the last common human-chimp-gorilla ancestor to the last common human-chimp ancestor).

In any case, whatever the merits or demerits of your definition of "human", it is not the one commonly found in dictionaries or used by native speakers of English... AnonMoos (talk) 07:23, 2 February 2018 (UTC)

It depends how they define humans. If people’s criteria for being classified as a human is looking like a human, they’re ignorant. I would define as “human” whatever is in the line of descent from the last common ancestor of modern humans and the most closely related species, extinct or not, that has been photographed, filmed, or videotaped.

On a slightly unrelated note, I find it unnecessary to use distinct labels for the members of the Hominidae family. All of them just seem too similar to one another in body structures. They all should just be called one name instead of us referring to some members as “humans”, other members as “chimpanzees”, etc. MisterH2005 (talk) 11:32, 2 February 2018 (UTC)

Part of being human is participating in human society through language. If you have a healthy adult physical specimen which is anatomically and developmentally normal, but which cannot use language in any meaningful sense, then it can be a fine and upstanding member of its own species, but it is not "human" in any valid and relevant sense of the word. This applies to modern chimpanzees, and presumably also to the first few million years of human ancestors after the CHLCA. A number of people have speculated that the onset of behavioral modernity corresponds to the final development of modern human language (modified from an earlier form of language which was not fully structurally equivalent to the forms of human language spoken today). AnonMoos (talk) 00:00, 3 February 2018 (UTC)

I’m not sure if I’d take the use of language into consideration. According to a BBC article, “There are actually several suggested definitions for the human genus – and an astonishingly broad range of opinions over what does and does not belong within it.”: http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160111-what-is-it-that-makes-you-a-human-and-not-something-else

Although “human” and “person” may not be entirely synonymous, it’s a logical idea to grant legal personhood to the other members of the Hominidae family, and doing so has the ability to lead to reclassifying chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans as “humans”. There’s a ban on using great apes for experimental research in Sweden, the home country of Carl Linnaeus: http://www.gibbons.de/main/news/0304sweden_ban.html

I can certainly envision Sweden granting great apes legal personhood in the (near or distant) future. MisterH2005 (talk) 06:52, 3 February 2018 (UTC)

That's the "human genus", a loose non-scientific way of talking about the genus homo. For the actual human species, you bet your life that language is extremely relevant! However lawyers may contort their evidence, you would be laughed out of several academic/scientific fields, including linguistics and anthropology, if you tried to insist otherwise. Even for the genus homo, it's quite likely that most of the species in the genus had communications systems considerably advanced over modern chimpanzees, though since language as such doesn't fossilize, the full facts may never be known... AnonMoos (talk) 11:47, 3 February 2018 (UTC)

Applying linguistics to a biological / paleontological situation is always going to be tricky. See species problem. Matt Deres (talk) 13:46, 1 February 2018 (UTC)