This week’s reading is about the developmental stages that children go through in order to correctly coin agent and instrumental nouns. In this research, they found out that young children tend to coin simple words like “plant-man” and “fix-man” instead of “gardener” and “mechanic.” From my own observation, I have encountered similar occurrences in the way young Thai speakers coin these agents incorrectly.
Thai is similar to English that agents could be called in many different ways, but only one way is standard. One example is when people asked my 4 year old self what would I want to be. As a big fan of “Bob the Builder,” I would translate the word builder to “คนก่อสร้าง” (Kon-Kor-Sang), which consists of “คน” (man) and “ก่อสร้าง” (construction). The actual word should be “ช่างก่อสร้าง”(Chang-Kor-Sang), which is a coining of “ช่าง” (technician) and “ก่อสร้าง” (construction). The word “ช่าง” (technician) is a word that Thai children are not as familiar and there is a simpler word with a similar meaning. Another example is the word “ladle.” Thai children tend to use the word “ที่ตักข้าว” (Tee-Tak-Kaow), which consists of “ที่” (something that), “ตัก” (scoop), “ข้าว” (rice). However, the standard word is “ทัพพี” (Tap-Pi), which is the word that they will eventually adopt.
Loved your comparison of "plant-man" and gardener, in fact I spoke about it in my blog as well, with comparison to India and Hindi!
ReplyDeleteI would also love to learn more about suffix comparisons (not just in children) across languages, especially languages such as Thai and Hindi and English!
I also really liked the "gardener" and "mechanic" examples, though for different reasons! Both "gardener" and "mechanic" are not direct derivatives of the simpler nouns that children might use for their agent/instrument roots, e.g. using "plant" instead of "garden" or "car" instead of "mechanism" (or "mechanics" in general, I suppose). That kind of complex agent creation does, I think, also have some kind of connection to the general growth of vocabulary.
ReplyDeleteReally interesting post!
ReplyDeleteThe way that Thai children describe a ladle reminds me a bit of Indonesian, which has a bunch of words that are just other words put together that describe something, rather than a specific term for something. For example, the word "pink" in Indonesian is "merah mudah," a combination of "merah," or red, and "mudah," or young - so "young red"!
In my post, I also talked about coining of words/phrases, but in Mandarin. I have been learning Chinese for several years now, but my vocabulary is still very limited, like a child's. So, like a child, I often do not know the "conventional" way to say something, and instead I used my limited vocabulary to try to form phrases that to me sound correct, but are often "unconventional" (and therefore incorrect). I know that they are unconventional when my Chinese teacher repeats my sentence back to me but with a different word order or with different vocab words. So, when I'm trying to speak Chinese, I definitely feel like a child-speaker in Thailand or really in any language in that I also coin phrases to fill lexical gaps without knowing whether or not my phrase is "conventional."
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