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Maybe it's a reflection of my circumstances - but this reminds me more of a difference in class than language. I was born to two uneducated parents in a poor,
by ap22213 10y ago
Maybe it's a reflection of my circumstances - but this reminds me more of a difference in class than language. I was born to two uneducated parents in a poor, rural coal town in Pennsylvania and then later married a woman whose parents were educated and wealthy and whose family had been at least upper-middle class for generations.
To me, at times, I feel her and I speak different languages, use different words, have different intonation and expressions and idioms - in both behavior as well as language. My 'pensyl-tucky' accent and manners, mostly worn away from living elsewhere, still betrays to other American English speakers that I may be of a 'lesser kind'. I have no idea of the author's background, but her description of it sounds closer to 'lower class' American - one in which persona hasn't been formed by years of restraint, discipline, obedience, and expectation. Whereas, her husband seems more like he would be from a wealthier, urban American family. And, inferring from his families' fleeing Spain during the Marxist revolution, maybe it goes back a bit.
When I travelled to Paris for the first time with my wife and her family, they asked me what I thought. I told them that it seemed more similar to any American city than that American city would seem to where I had grown up. And, they seemed shocked that I would say such a thing. But, having had to fit into their culture (not the other way around), I sometimes feel like a foreigner.
- rjsw 10y agoMy understanding was that most people who fled Spain were of the left.
- ktRolster 10y agoThe Marxists lost that war.
- sukh 10y agoThank you for writing about this. Unfortunately, study [1] shows that children who grow up in less wealthy households, know 18000 fewer words by the time they are 5 than a child that grows up in a wealthy family leaving a very clear disadvantage early on. [1] The Beginning of Life
- p1esk 10y agoDid you mean 1800 words? Most people will not learn 18000 distinct words during their lifetime.
- rjsw 10y agoThere was a link posted here a while ago to a website that estimated the size of your vocabulary, plenty of HN posters were over 40000.
- jnicholasp 10y agoI'd be interested in that link if you can recall it. I would guess, though, that the website was counting different forms of the 'same' word as distinct words - e.g., jump, jumped, jumping is three words rather than one word with several tenses. Obviously counting this way will multiply the same person's vocabulary several times vs the alternate way.
- zeristor 10y agoI don't know if this is that link, but it fits the bill: http://testyourvocab.com/ http://testyourvocab.com/ It gave me 36,800 I'm encouraged that there are more words for me to learn
- p1esk 10y agoTo illuminate these numbers, the vocabularies of famous English writers range from 15,000 to 30,000 unique words [1]. [1] https://zwischenzugs.wordpress.com/2011/03/06/shakespeare_unexceptional_vocabulary/ https://zwischenzugs.wordpress.com/2011/03/06/shakespeare_un...
- ap22213 10y agoThat's interesting. Why would they learn fewer words? Do the less wealthy just talk less? Or, do they learn other words that are then culled from their vocabulary?
- ktRolster 10y agoMaybe you should try learning a language...you might be surprised what you find.
- allendoerfer 10y ago> Maybe it's a reflection of my circumstances - but this reminds me more of a difference in class than language. I enjoyed the read, but think so, too. Either this or just the difference between European and American. Might be both, since Americas notion of class difference historically seems to be mostly defined by the amount of money one has, due to its protestant history and values (American Dream and so on), while in Europe there are still the old classes (aristocrats, clergy, bourgeoisie and so on), which defined themselves through the things listed as differences in the article. I am on Oliviers side on almost every point and come from a country, which stereotypically is the exact opposite of France.