What's your first (second...) language, ...your first (second...) from?

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Coëmgenu
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Re: What's your first (second...) language, ...your first (second...) from?

Post by Coëmgenu »

Ceisiwr wrote: Sat Sep 17, 2022 1:12 amSanskrit being another language which is claimed to be mystically innate to humans.
Also Hebrew, Latin, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and likely more...
What is the Uncreated?
Sublime & free, what is that obscured Eternity?
It is the Undying, the Bright, the Isle.
It is an Ocean, a Secret: Reality.
Both life and oblivion, it is Nirvāṇa.
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Deadelectronics
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Re: What's your first (second...) language, ...your first (second...) from?

Post by Deadelectronics »

I guess Spanish is my mother tongue. I speak way more English than Spanish though that I know enough I can live in LATAM countries, but I am more comfortable speaking English. I would like to learn Pali, Thai, and Japanese.
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Eko Care
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Re: What's your first (second...) language, ...your first (second...) from?

Post by Eko Care »

Ceisiwr wrote: Sat Sep 17, 2022 1:12 am Proto-Indo-European isn’t Pali. Pali derives from it, as do other languages such as Sanskrit. Sanskrit being another language which is claimed to be mystically innate to humans.
It seems you speak with confidence on assumptions. How can one conclude on those things? Where have you placed faith on?
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Ceisiwr
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Re: What's your first (second...) language, ...your first (second...) from?

Post by Ceisiwr »

Eko Care wrote: Sat Sep 17, 2022 9:53 am
Ceisiwr wrote: Sat Sep 17, 2022 1:12 am Proto-Indo-European isn’t Pali. Pali derives from it, as do other languages such as Sanskrit. Sanskrit being another language which is claimed to be mystically innate to humans.
It seems you speak with confidence on assumptions. How can one conclude on those things? Where have you placed faith on?
I don’t have faith. It’s evidence based. Abandon a baby in the woods and, if it manages to survive, it won’t naturally start speaking Pali. Stop being so credulous. Commentaries are useful but they aren’t infallible, because the people who made them are not infallible.
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understanding it has the nature of a mirage,
cutting off Māra’s flower-tipped arrows,
one should go beyond the King of Death’s sight.”
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Eko Care
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Re: What's your first (second...) language, ...your first (second...) from?

Post by Eko Care »

Ceisiwr wrote: Sat Sep 17, 2022 10:44 am Abandon a baby in the woods and, if it manages to survive, it won’t naturally start speaking Pali.
Can you prove it?
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Ceisiwr
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Re: What's your first (second...) language, ...your first (second...) from?

Post by Ceisiwr »

Eko Care wrote: Sat Sep 17, 2022 10:55 am
Ceisiwr wrote: Sat Sep 17, 2022 10:44 am Abandon a baby in the woods and, if it manages to survive, it won’t naturally start speaking Pali.
Can you prove it?
Neglected children don’t speak Pali. They can’t hardly talk at all. Babies and children learn to speak through interaction with their parents, or other care givers or just other humans.
“Knowing that this body is just like foam,
understanding it has the nature of a mirage,
cutting off Māra’s flower-tipped arrows,
one should go beyond the King of Death’s sight.”
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Coëmgenu
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Re: What's your first (second...) language, ...your first (second...) from?

Post by Coëmgenu »

This experiment, which is actually child abuse, has been done throughout the ages by multiple different people. The children never learn to speak.

Look up "feral children." Feral children don't exhibit the same brain development that raised children do.
What is the Uncreated?
Sublime & free, what is that obscured Eternity?
It is the Undying, the Bright, the Isle.
It is an Ocean, a Secret: Reality.
Both life and oblivion, it is Nirvāṇa.
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Ceisiwr
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Re: What's your first (second...) language, ...your first (second...) from?

Post by Ceisiwr »

Coëmgenu wrote: Sat Sep 17, 2022 11:28 am This experiment, which is actually child abuse, has been done throughout the ages by multiple different people. The children never learn to speak.

Look up "feral children." Feral children don't exhibit the same brain development that raised children do.
Yes. I had this poor soul in mind

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_(feral_child)
“Knowing that this body is just like foam,
understanding it has the nature of a mirage,
cutting off Māra’s flower-tipped arrows,
one should go beyond the King of Death’s sight.”
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Coëmgenu
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Re: What's your first (second...) language, ...your first (second...) from?

Post by Coëmgenu »

Also one of the Kings of Spain tried it, unless I'm misremembering the kingdom.

He took a number of babies and forbid their nursemaids from speaking to them. He wanted to find out what the "true language" was.

Five years in, one of the children said:

Goo-goo aooooigag baaaabmmgaah.

This is flawless Pāli for "Alas, nursemaid, even your kindness is impermanent!"

:quote:

Obviously the poor children never learned any language.
What is the Uncreated?
Sublime & free, what is that obscured Eternity?
It is the Undying, the Bright, the Isle.
It is an Ocean, a Secret: Reality.
Both life and oblivion, it is Nirvāṇa.
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Sam Vara
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Re: What's your first (second...) language, ...your first (second...) from?

Post by Sam Vara »

Coëmgenu wrote: Sat Sep 17, 2022 12:05 pm Also one of the Kings of Spain tried it, unless I'm misremembering the kingdom.
Several people have reportedly tried it, one being King James IV of Scotland. He had two newborns given to a deaf woman who had no speech, and isolated them on the Isle of Inchkeith. He thought they would speak Hebrew.
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Coëmgenu
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Re: What's your first (second...) language, ...your first (second...) from?

Post by Coëmgenu »

Yes. I recall that a King of Spain also abused children in this manner to try to discover the true natural language that humans naturally spoke, but I can't find it at the moment.
It was James’s love of languages, combined with his natural inquisitiveness and empiricism, that apparently led him to conceive of his peculiar experiment: In 1493, the king ordered two newborn babies to be sent to live on the isolated island of Inchkeith to be raised by a deaf mute woman. His aim was to see what language (if any) the children acquired, because with no other linguistic input, he believed that this language, whatever it might be, must surely be the innate, God-given language of mankind.

Language deprivation experiments precisely like this one have a lengthy history—one of the earliest is recorded in the works of the Greek historian Herodotus, who wrote that, in the 7th century BCE, the Egyptian pharaoh Psamtik I sent two infants to live with a shepherd in one of the most isolated parts of his kingdom, on the condition that they never be spoken to. According to Herodotus, the children repeatedly babbled the word bekòs, an ancient Phrygian word meaning “bread,” leading Psamtik to believe (albeit mistakenly) that Phrygia rather than Egypt was mankind’s oldest civilization.

Similar experiments were reportedly carried out by the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II (“But he laboured in vain, for the children could not live without clappings of the hands, and gestures, and gladness of countenance, and blandishments,” according to one account), and the 16th century Mughal Indian Emperor Akbar, who found that children raised in isolation remained mute even as they grew older.
So in this list of pseudo-scientific child abusers, we find at least Psamtik I, James IV, Frederick II, and Akbar I, but not yet an Alfonso of any number.
What is the Uncreated?
Sublime & free, what is that obscured Eternity?
It is the Undying, the Bright, the Isle.
It is an Ocean, a Secret: Reality.
Both life and oblivion, it is Nirvāṇa.
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Sam Vara
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Re: What's your first (second...) language, ...your first (second...) from?

Post by Sam Vara »

Eko Care wrote: Sat Sep 17, 2022 10:55 am
Ceisiwr wrote: Sat Sep 17, 2022 10:44 am Abandon a baby in the woods and, if it manages to survive, it won’t naturally start speaking Pali.
Can you prove it?
Sure. My best proof is that if there were somehow some innate disposition to speak Pali, I wouldn't find learning it so difficult! :)
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Re: What's your first (second...) language, ...your first (second...) from?

Post by Johann »

It's like speaking Dhamma. What ever language one would speak, those blind to it, wouldn't understand. Yet those understand, even if "badly" spoken, clearly understand.

Anybody of yours here speaking Dhamma, understands Dhamma? It's not possible to google-translate it.
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Re: What's your first (second...) language, ...your first (second...) from?

Post by Coëmgenu »

Johannine traditions, generally found in the West and in certain socioreligious paradigms common to the West, have never been particularly close to the Dhamma.
What is the Uncreated?
Sublime & free, what is that obscured Eternity?
It is the Undying, the Bright, the Isle.
It is an Ocean, a Secret: Reality.
Both life and oblivion, it is Nirvāṇa.
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Johann
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Re: What's your first (second...) language, ...your first (second...) from?

Post by Johann »

Common speech seeks neither hold on topic nor meta, not to speak of metta. How close could one be to the Dhamma, and speech in it's terms, when still holding on house and stand?

Maybe good to look how and by what topics get out of frames, yet not meta but downwardly.

Listen and speaking Dhamna requires the abounding of the five evil friends, the Nivaranas, dwelling in a Noble, not in common domain, at least in a bordering one, good householder.
Last edited by Johann on Sat Sep 17, 2022 3:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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