Does movie "Savage talk" actually have any foundation in reality?
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6rant6 (
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July 24th, 2012
Watching an old movie.
The Apache keep referring to people by their names rather than saying “you”. I realized that in movie savage speak, people often refer to themselves by their own names rather than, “I.”
Is this phobia of pronouns actually occur when someone first learns a language? Or is this a literary tradition handed down the last 130 years?
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4 Answers
Rojo not know. Rojo think 6rant6 ask great question.
My rather limited study of languages suggests that pronouns are a pretty common concept. I would guess that they don’t use them because they don’t know the English equivalent. It is common for a person who does not know the right word to use in conversation to try to find a workaround, making you sound a bit like the Jeopardy! guy; if you can’t say “bank” or “post office” you’ll end up saying “the place where money is kept,” or ‘Where you go to mail letters.” Your interlocutor may be helpful enough to supply the term for you to add to your lexicon.
Tarzan, another known offender, has as his excuse that he had no formal education in any language more complex than ape-hooting. It’s a wonder that he can grasp the concept of language at all.
Me Tarzan. You Jane gonna get raped.
That kind of language would fall under the category of “pidgins”, a highly simplified version of a major language used for cursory communication. Many pidgins have developed at various times all over the world, and they often dispense with subtleties like gender, verb tense and pronouns. That says nothing about the native language of the speaker.
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