Language Acquisition - Essay Example

Language Acquisition Language Acquisition Introduction Language changes and develops constantly with time to adapt to the users’ needs (Altintas, Can & Patton 2007, p. 378). In WWI and WWII, English developed with technological advances since new products and experiences were coming into existence and needed new words to refer to and describe them. The developments included lexical, phonetic, spelling, semantic and syntactic changes and they caused languages perceived as high-status to spread and stabilise at the expense of low-status languages. This paper will discuss how soldiers in WWI and WWII changed the way English was formed with particular focus on the letters they wrote letters to their families back home. Through the wide use of letters as the key form of communicating with family and friends and the communication they had between themselves in the trenches, a myriad of words and phrases came into common use. The impact of the overseas involvement of the military on the English language was already evident by 1914, which had remarkable differences with the English of the Elizabethan age (Taylor 2011, p. 75). With the war a meeting point of numerous nationalities and people brought together under stressful conditions, German had a significantly different influence with its loanwords to English that mainly refered to vehicles and weapons (Altintas, Can & Patton 2007, p. 392). Both WWI and WWII were eras of language creativity that portrayed soldiers as having a genius for coming up with slang and terms. For instance, the way some sentences were structured in WWI can be associated to older forms of English while WWII English is more related to the present-day English. A particular example is “is not the sorrow of a child when it loses its doll a very real and great grief?” (If You’re Reading This 1915, p. 130) written by Eric Lubbock to his mother. Although not to say the question is structured wrongly, changes occurred in WWII that suggest what the structure could have been in the 21st century. For example, Mick wrote to his parents and asked “This is incalculable, but it may just as well be incalculably small as incalculable large, so why worry?” (See attachment WW2 Letter to Dad). Going by this new structure, it can be deduced that Lubbock’s question could now read “is a kid’s sorrow not a very real and great grief when it loses its doll?” In an earlier letter, Lubbock had written another letter in which he told his parents he would have no regrets if he “falls” in battle. Essentially, by fall he meant die. However, even though the soldiers may have come up with the term to save their loved ones back home from the stigma of death, the term is commonly used in present-day English to mean die especially in the military and police fraternity. This is also a representation of how the soldiers changed the development of English. In the same letter, he also tells his parents not to allow things get “black” for them should he fall. In this sense, black is what earlier English termed as gloom. However, the term black is also still commonly used to refer to gloom. Most of the words the soldiers developed and used in letters were descriptions of their unfamiliar circumstances and environments, their war experiences, fears, desires and emotions (National WWII Museum 2014, p. 1). Further, the two wars were fought by the first armies that can really be refered to as literate and, given their large number it is evident that the letters they wrote influenced notable changes to language. The influence was mainly from interactions by soldiers both on the Western Front as well as the in the Middle East campaign. After the wars, they introduced the new terms they created in the war to the general population. The spelling of words before WWI, a period in which the number of literate people was relatively fewer, cannot exactly be said to have been standardised because languages did not have fixed orthography systems. This is supported by the letters archived from WWI and WWII which suggest that the soldiers spelled words according to the influences of regional pronunciations and, to some extent, personal preference. By the letters the soldiers wrote home and those that they received, they helped develop and spread the use of terms that were only limited in use before the war began. For example, the term “scrounging”, which was used to mean foraging for food, gained widespread use but before the war it was typically a derivative term of a northern dialect (Onion 2012, p. 9). Another term “binge”, also came into wide use to mean overindulgence in alcohol but before the war it was only used in Lancashire. Souvenir was a French term that replaced the English term “keepsake”, which were used to refer to mementos the soldiers exchanged with the locals. Other common words and phrases that originated among the soldiers and their experiences and are still used with the same meaning include barrage, camouflage, conk out, D-Day, May Day, and fed-up (Onion 2012, p. 9). However, it is imperative to not that the soldiers used the words descriptively with regards to what they saw, their experiences and environment, but they formed a trend of developing English. Hence, the continuous invasion of English by new words meant that lexical changes included borrowing words from other languages as well as losing or recycling some old words to give them new meaning (Altintas, Can & Patton 2007, p. 391). The different words used by the soldiers in their letters in the two wars to mean similar circumstances or things shows that language actually changed throughout the wars. Throughout WWI and WWII, language changed depending on the experiences different soldiers from different parts of the world had (Carroll 2012, p. 41). This can be attributed to the fact that even within the allies and belligerents, there were different nationalities and dialects but communication had to go on throughout the wars. Depending on factors such as their country, region, education level, occupation and age, soldiers knew, created or developed unique sets of words and constructions. When they interacted with others, they picked up new phrases and words from different nationalities and combined them to come up with new ones that were unique and distinct from the way they were used in the original language (Tierney 2006, p. 30). Typically, this contributed towards phonetic developments that involved the concept of changes in sound that gave rise to different dialects of English (Taylor 2011, p. 102). Then, it is also evident that all dialects of every language have rules. However, rather than dictating what language ought to be like, the rules fundamentally give guidance on what it is like, and that enabled English to develop the way it did throughout the wars (Bloom 2010, p. 93). A key aspect during the war eras that contributed towards changing and developing language was code talking (Carroll 2012, p. 69). The code talkers were mainly bilingual American natives who used phrases to refer to things, places and people and then translate them into their native language before dispatching a message. For example, “a pregnant airplane” was used to refer to a bomber, and the phrase was translated into a native language before the message was sent (Onion 2012, p. 12). Therefore, native language among the soldiers moved from being a tool of group identity in society to a facilitator of language development. While some terms narrowed down to take narrower meaning, others widened to have wider meaning. In the same manner, while others were increasingly being associated with negativity, others were gaining positive association (Can & Patton 2010, p. 171). When new words appeared at the war front and adopted by the soldiers, it essentially signified the start of their existence. Further, how such new words were used and what they meant among the soldiers and the recipients of their letters shifted in ways that sometimes caused confusion and consequently, further development (Tierney 2006, p. 44). The situation was made possible by contact with other languages, the cultural environment and the way the form of words was reduced when they were likened to different forms of the root word. For example, the friendly relations that existed in WWI between Afghanistan and Germany influenced the development of language (Adamec 2012, p. 19). On the other hand, when the US joined WWII against Germany, the need to identify saboteurs and spies within the US soon became escalated efforts aimed at suppressing German culture. For the German-Americans, that meant their use of German would be prohibited, including letters to and from their family and friends who were in the war (Shea 2013, p. 57). During that period, German-Americans were forced by circumstances to “Americanize” their language as much as they could and that included spellings and pronunciations (Shea 2013, p. 46). Conclusion It has been shown that language has a unique capability of adapting itself rapidly and efficiently to satisfy new needs. Throughout WWI and WWII, soldiers were brought together from diverse backgrounds under unfamiliar circumstances. As a means of solace, they constantly wrote letters to their family and friends. However, the battlefield provided common ground for the contact of different languages and culture, which inadvertently brought changes and developments to how words were pronounced and written. Such changes and developments are seen in archived letters, and they were spread in the general population when the soldiers returned home. The use of codified words by the soldiers also contributed to language development as new words were coined to disguise secret messages. All these change factors link the letters written by the soldiers to need of developing language to meet changing needs. References Adamec, L 2012, Historical dictionary of Afghanistan, McGraw, New York. Altintas, K, Can, F & Patton, J 2007, ‘Language change quantification using time-separated parallel translations’, Literary and Linguistic Computing, vol. 22, no. 4,pp. 375-393. Bloom, H 2010, Modern critical interpretations, Chelsea House Publishers, Philadelphia. Can, F & Patton, J 2010, ‘Change of word characteristics in 20th century Turkish literature: a statistical analysis’, Journal of Quantitative Linguistics, vol. 17, no. 3, pp. 167-190. Carroll, A 2012, War letters: extraordinary correspondence from America’s Wars, National WWII Museum, Los Angeles. National WWII Museum 2014, A letter home from the war, Author, Los Angeles. Onion, R 2012, Some choice bits of slang from American soldiers serving in WWII, Prentice, New Jersey. Shea, R 2013, German-Americans and World War One, Potomac Books, Washington. Taylor, M 2011, The life and writings of Erich Maria Remarque, The Remarque Institute of New York University, New York. Tierney, E 2006, Kamikaze diaries: reflections of Japanese student soldiers, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Read More