Doh! Yes, of course, isn't it obvious, the Basques had been fishing the Grand Banks for decades and no doubt dropped in to Mass. for a quick smoke before heading back to Euskal Herria ...linguoboy wrote:Through the medium of Basque.Viktor77 wrote:But how did Squanto and other natives learn English?
Seriously though, given the batshit grammar of Basque and the double-plus-batshit grammar of Algonquian ...
For instance, if you point to your hand and indicate you want the word, what you'll get back is "your-hand", or if you point to the other guys hand, "my-hand" or "his-hand" etc. You simply can't say "hand" by itself. The nearest you can get is "someone's-hand". And so for most body parts and relationships like "father" etc. That's in Algonquian. In Basque you'd likely get a definitive or case suffix or both tacked on. If I were to pose as a monoglot Cornish speaker, and you pointed to my head you'd get "ow fenn", for your own head you'd get "dha benn", would you ever guess that "head" by itself was "penn"? Basically I can see how this could work for largely isolating languages, but something like an Athabaskian language would be a complete nightmare, I'm baffled how anyone could ever master them, but obviously kids do ... somehow.
In school French, way way back in the day, the class stood when the teacher came into the room, so every class began with an instruction to sit, which is stamped on my memory as a block of sound ( [ase:'i:vu] IIRC ) and would probably still get the correct response to this day, but this is no more than dog training "sit!". I've no idea how to say "I'm sitting" or "you sat" or "may I sit here". This isn't language learning, it's Pavlovian conditioning.
