Wirt Atmar wrote in part:
> You learned English all on your own, with
> absolutely no help from anyone else.

By "English", do you mean the spoken English language, in contrast to, say,
Spanish? Or, do you mean what passes for grammar as taught in our public
schools? I will defend the former, and villify the latter. I'm sure Mr.
Lalley had a reasonable foundation of basic grammar at about three, and had
mastered the subtleties of the forty or so English phonemes by five or six
(although I will admit that it took me three years of speech therapy to
satisfactorily master my Rs).

Whereas there is a series of books that several of us were exposed to in
college, "English Grammar for Students of" <language>. Yes, your high school
education did not teach you enough about English grammar for you to use that
as a foundation for studying any other language in particular, nor in
general any other language. So, whatever help Mr. Lalley got learning
English grammar, I think we can agree it wasn't enough (even though I'm sure
we disagree on what "enough" might mean).

But given a community where it was useful, he could have mastered several
others at the same age and at the same time, without much assistance from
anyone, least of all College of Education graduates (disclaimer: I have had
thirteen credit hours of graduate work in adult education, such that I
generally know what will be on the exams in the other graduate courses I
have taken). There are anecdotal cases of children picking up languages only
spoken between their grandparents, by simple exposure to their use of it.
That might not have prepared them to ask directions to the Post Office or
embassy in their grandparents' country, but I will put that up against what
I carried away from four years of "public school" Spanish.

That's enough of that for now.

Greg Stigers

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