zompist wrote: ↑Mon May 27, 2019 3:10 pm
Akangka wrote: ↑Mon May 27, 2019 9:46 am
I have a story where a person get lost in another world. The world is rather primitive, and speaks another language. How long it takes to learn the local language? Assuming the new person is not linguist. Also in the story, it's actually not rare for a person to get lost to this world.
This is a nice example of total immersion with high motivation: your lost person really has to learn. We all learned our native languages like this, but try hard to avoid this situation ever again.
I assume your lost person can find a friendly informant who will spend many hours a day with him (and that there is a lot of passive exposure the rest of the day, plus minor interactions with other villagers).
Googling for stories of field linguists, I found some claims that they'd be able to get by in an unknown language in a couple of weeks. For an untrained person, but one who's not too shy, let's say a couple of months. (For a data point, I learned Portuguese in a week— not fluently, but enough to speak with monolinguals.)
They're not going to be fluent after that period, and they'll still be making amusing mistakes. In fact, many adult learners never get fluent— they stay with whatever level of competence lets them get by with life. Others are driven to keep learning.
The one example I know of off-hand of this sort of thing is the story of Cyrus Hussey and William Lay, who were both sailors on the whaleship
Globe. In 1824 one of the
Globe's boatsteerers, Samuel Comstock, led a mutiny against the captain, but then the mutineers ended up having no plans and a bunch of things went wrong including some of them killing each other, and long story short, in late February, 1824, Hussey, Lay, and some of the other men from the ship (including some mutineers) were on Mili Atoll when the locals attacked and killed all the other men except Hussey and Lay. They were rescued by the
Dolphin just under two years later (about 21 1/2 months), and wrote a
narrative of their experiences (well, had ghost-written, and mostly from Lay's perspective). In those two years they were adopted by local families but mostly kept apart from one another. By the time they were rescued they were apparently fluent in Marshallese, though Lay seems to have been consistently better and faster at acquiring and using it; after the rescue they provided a vocabulary list to a nearby missionary and in the appendix of the Narrative.
I don't know *exactly* how long it took them to become competent and then fluent, though. I see Lay says that about two months after the attack (that is, in April 1824), they were aware that their hosts were planning to take Hussey to a completely different part of the atoll, but had "not...yet become sufficiently acquainted with their language" to understand how far away or most of the details (p. 78). By about three months after that, Lay was evidently able to understand somewhat more complex notions and hold conversations with people ("during the week he remained with us, we became much attached to each other" ... "he told me, that on his return he should pass near the place where Hussey lived", p. 81; "one of the chiefs ... asked [me] many questions", p. 84). He soon states: "Having now gained considerable knowledge of their language..." (p. 86) but doesn't give a time reference, although it appears not to have been *that* long after the events quoted previously took place; the book I have on the mutiny and aftermath (Thomas Farel Heffernan's
Mutiny on the Globe) speculates, apparently in part based on the seasonal chores that were being done at the time, this was August, so a month after the previous quotes. Around the same time, Lay overhears a boy saying in Marshallese that "the chiefs are going to kill William" (and provides the sentence in Marshallese in the Narrative: "Uroit a-ro rayta mony la Wirrum"), and is obviously able to understand it, and his master is obviously
aware that he is or would be able to understand it (p. 87). Several months later, he says "I was often complimented by them for my knowledge of their language" (p. 93). For the rest of the Narrative he simply describes things the people say to him or he says to them with no indication that these are anything but normal conversations. Heffernan also points out that at one point in the Narrative (pp. 137-38) Lay gives a summary of the locals' religious beliefs, which suggests that by the end of the two-year period, at least, he'd achieved a level of fluency sufficient to have complex philosophical discussions (his descriptions apparently match those of later anthropologists, more or less).
Hussey was not as fast at picking up Marshallese as Lay. In about July of 1824, when Lay is evidently able to have simple conversations, Hussey was "not...able to converse with them" and had to use "signs" (p. 140). At about the same time as Lay is mentioning his "considerable knowledge of the language" and understanding things he's not meant to, Hussey could obviously understand
some of what he was being told and was hearing, and provide information back ("I informed them that we could not have been the cause of the sickness, as no such sickness prevailed in our country, and that I never before had seen a similar disease" pp. 141-142), but for instance when listening to a conversation of his master with others he does not "at the time...fully understand" what they are saying (p. 144). Soon afterwards, though, he is matter-of-factly describing conversations he has with his master and others (e.g., p. 147). By the time of their rescue in November-December 1825, he is perfectly able to speak the language with (apparent) fluency (p. 117).
[EDIT: Incidentally, we don't just have Lay and Hussey's word (and vocab and one quoted sentence) to go by here; the senior lieutenant of the
Dolphin, Hiram Paulding, wrote a report of the events of the rescue -- which took place over a number of days (apparently the Narrative is not very accurate about the series of events) -- and Lay and Hussey's "debriefing," and makes plenty of references to them serving as the translators with the locals.]
So for someone with a decent natural talent at languages but no linguistics training, this would suggest at least conversational by 4-5 months, and maybe 6-8 months to become quite skilled if not entirely fluent. 22 months is plenty to become fluent, though, even for someone with less of a natural talent with languages.
