Poto and Cabengo

Twins, L2 cope, virtue ethics, Seachtain na Gaeilge

Back to base

Ciao,

I have far too much energy. It’s not actually a problem; I just try to sound martyred about it so people won’t hate me.

Anyway, there tends to be a long backlog of things I plan to watch on the next — rare — occasion I am tired enough to stay still. Jean-Pierre Gorin’s 1980 documentary Poto and Cabengo has been top of the list for a while. I came back to Dublin from Palermo last weekend, spent the first few days in a flurry of life admin I’d been putting off, then got into bed and thought: it’s time.

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Poto and Cabengo are Grace and Virginia Kennedy, twins born in 1970. A media circus descended on them aged eight when speech therapists claimed they had invented their own language. Gorin’s documentary shows what actually happened: raised by inattentive parents and an emotionally absent German grandmother, the twins had so little meaningful social interaction throughout their childhood that their speech never developed beyond babble. They understand each other because they discuss shared experiences with basically 100% contextual overlap. But their distortions aren’t consistent enough to comprise a systematic language: they say ‘potato’ 16 different ways, suggesting that their processing and production haven’t crystallised rather than that they have landed on shared patterns.

Most of their ‘language’ is a loose approximation of English, with some German in the mix from the grandmother. Gorin makes avid use of the girls speaking, as he does of all the voices, luxuriating particularly in the father’s Southern drawl. The German mother, who learned English on an Allied base, is fascinating in her own right: she speaks with a nearly perfect American accent but twice says ‘mit’ instead of ‘with’. My sense is often that people who learn languages through immersion with L1 speakers end up with a more native-sounding gestalt but certain stubborn mistakes that never get ironed out, while people who learn in formal education arrive at finer-tuned technical correctness while sounding noticeably more foreign overall.

On a similar note, I was struck by how perfect the twins’ prosody was. Mostly it’s English, sometimes it’s German, but there’s never a false note in either. Adult language learners get the individual words right and the prosody wrong; with children learning their first language, it’s the exact opposite. The twins illustrate this especially starkly because at eight they’re doing what most people cease to by then, imitating the music of the adults around them without attaching the right phonemes to it — but you can tell what language any toddler is babbling in before they learn to shape it into recognisable words.

I often wonder if it’s actually true that adults are far worse at learning accents, or if they simply avail of a shortcut that children can’t: using their L1 prosody and close-albeit-no-cigar phonemes for L2 sentences. You can start speaking a lot sooner that way. Children who acquire a native-like accent in a foreign language have spent a long time building a mental model and then attempting to reproduce it by matching the sound, not what they see on the page — i.e. slower than if you’re happy to skip those stages and start speaking sooner with a comprehensible non-native accent. Which is for sure the preference it makes sense for most adults to have. But if we tested adults’ native accent imitation after a similar period of silence and listening-based learning, I suspect the gap between them and children would be smaller than is generally assumed.

(I have to admit I was a little amused when the grandmother, whom everyone else in the documentary says does not speak English well, claims herself that the problem is that Americans do not understand her ‘Oxford English’. ‘My English is too good for mere native speakers to comprehend’ is the sort of L2 cope that people usually reserve for Irish — on which more anon.)

The documentary gets its point across: people were so busy making a freak show of the twins that they didn’t analyse what they were actually saying. But I don’t know that Gorin is hugely interested in the twins themselves, either, so much as in their speech. I found myself wondering at the end: did they like each other? How did they feel about being separated? We see footage of them looking happy in their different classrooms, then we’re told that the family ran out of money and the speech therapy had to stop. As of 2000, Grace was working as a cleaner at McDonald’s, and Virginia as an assembly line worker at a job training centre; both still showed speech problems and mental delays.

What the public gained from the girls remains permanently accessible; you can watch Gorin’s film on YouTube for free. On their end, whatever benefits accrued to them and their family have long since dried up. The world got its case study for permanent use; the family got a return to the straitened circumstances that had produced that case study to begin with.

Does it objectify people to take an interest in their language without being interested in them? I don’t know. Sometimes when I use Irish as literally just a means of communication at events or protests or whatever, people who don’t speak it come up to me afterwards like: oh, your Irish is so elvish, I could listen to you all day. And I’m like … I don’t know, they’re being nice, it’s a compliment, take it, but I don’t know. Is it extractive? I can’t complain if it is, because I got my Irish through extraction anyway; I learned it mostly by listening to people on Raidió na Gaeltachta whom I’ll never give anything back in return. I did so because they were useful for my Irish, not because I was burningly curious about them as people. Was that immoral, even though literally nobody was harmed (no one!) and the only material impact was for there to be one more Irish-speaker (me) in the world?

I would imagine if you asked people: are you happy for sentences you uttered anyway to contribute to the production of an Irish-speaker, most would say: yes. But they weren’t asked. In consequentialist terms it’s probably fine, but emotionally I care about the quality of my attention towards others and of theirs towards me. I care about not instrumentalising people, even people I have in various contexts literally asked who have literally told me ‘Yes, please instrumentalise me in X specific way’, at which point no normal person would think it could even still be instrumentalisation, but anyway. I cannot justify any of this rationally. And when I cannot justify something rationally, nor can I put it well in writing.

To come back to Irish: there is definitely a consequentialist harm in caring about the language without caring about its speakers. The ‘caring’ in question is often useless anyway: claims that celebrities have ‘saved’ Irish by deigning to speak a few sentences publicly, mangled government communications you need to translate back into English to figure out what they were trying to say. But historically there has been plenty of deep, rigorous, genuine caring — much of it coming, for partly nefarious reasons, from early 20th-century Germans — about Irish vocabulary and Irish syntax and Irish phonemes and Irish morphology, and basically Irish everything except actual Irish-speakers. The Gaeltacht housing crisis could conceivably end the existence of Irish as a public language within the next generation. The only people you hear talk about this during Seachtain na Gaeilge are the ones who were already doing so constantly, to the basically uniform indifference of the same English-speakers who will rush out to buy another coffee table book about the prettiest Irish words.

The most extreme case of this is people who complain in English about how anglicised they find other people’s Irish. And look, I would feel incoherent if I only tried to use Irish words while dropping Irish pronunciation and grammar and idioms and all the other things that make up language, and for this reason I try to minimise Béarlachas in my own speech. But the only 100% fool-proof strategy for doing so, as someone surrounded by English, is to speak no Irish at all. Anyone who genuinely wants people to do that — who would rather no Irish be spoken than Irish they regard as corrupted — should consider that a palatalised consonant will never love them back. Nor are human beings guaranteed to, but the chances are higher if you’re not insufferable.

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If you want to send me money — I do get the odd stranger requesting to, raising the eternal question of: are men okay — there’s now a paid tier for stuff I want to keep lower key. Voice notes mostly, maybe the odd more intimate bit of writing. Fair warning that ‘intimate’ means things I find intimate, so it will probably still just be like … etymology.

I have a slightly mad couple of weeks ahead of me — moving to Dublin 8 + many trains + Sweden + Boston + New York + Switzerland (Italian part because of course) + ARIES SEASON STARTS SOON, what will I dazzlingly triumph over and/or dramatically implode this time around, there’s always something — but see you when I see you.

N