Jane's Jottings

When we learn another language, it teaches us things about our mother tongue, too. Early learning in our own language is by rote, that is, by memorization. It is only once we have a good foundation of the basics that we are able to move on to contextual learning.

It is therefore only as an adult that I have recognized some English words are compound words, and have broken those composite words into their separate parts. A classic example of this is mermaid. As a child, I learned that this word represented a creature that was half woman and half fish, but no-one ever broke down the word itself to “sea maid”. Even when I learned French – my first foreign language – I never associated that mermaid was a maid of the sea, from the French word for sea, la mer.

I reflect that the creation of language is so much more intellectual than the learning of an already-established mother tongue. The creation involves logic and reasoning. The learning, initially, is just memorization. It is interesting to contrast and compare other languages with our own language to see how the creative process worked when other languages were formed.

I have seen the creative process at work in a simple example from one of my children. When our youngest son was almost three years old, he didn’t know the word for ankle, so to tell me that his ankle was hurting, he told me his leg neck was hurting. I found that fascinating and personally very educational.