The Kitten on the Roof

Every day, my daughter and I take turns, sometimes one of us and sometimes the other, feeding the kitten in the barn. We feed it in the barn, because that's where we want it to live. But the kitten has other ideas. The kitten has discovered our house, it knows that we live there, and if we do not allow it to live in the house, it has decided to live on the house.

It all began a couple of days ago, right before the last round of rainstorms. It was fairly hot and sunny, and I was merrily taking pictures of butterflies and hummingbird moths. 

The hummingbird moth would not sit still, and the yellow butterfly led me on a merry chase.

And as I was chasing the butterfly, I thought I heard a faint meowing in the background. I could not tell where it was coming from. My daughter came home from school and found me in the front yard filming the yellow butterfly, and when she went to feed the kitten in the barn that day, the kitten was nowhere in sight. She had to go looking for the kitten and made it follow her to the barn where the cat dishes are.  That evening we drove to the post office, and when we returned, I saw the kitten curled up on the roof, under the eaves of the extension on the house.

That night it rained. I was sure that the kitten could not possibly have stayed up there all night. Surely, it would have had sense enough to come down and take shelter in he barn. But yesterday afternoon, when I went out momentarily, the cat meowed at my very plaintively. Could the cat have stayed there all night long? Might it be unable to get down on its own?

  I was almost ready to go back inside to get the ladder, when I saw that it was slithering down the small maple tree to the ground.

So, clearly, not a helpless little kitten at all. I stopped worrying about it at once, and when I went to feed it in the barn after dinner, I did not worry that the kitten did not appear for its supper. I went for a nice stroll down the path to the twin pines, and still there was no sign of the kitten.  Reporting on this to my daughter on my return to the house, I heard this: "The kitten doesn't know where the food is. You have to show her that the food is in the barn." And my daughter went out to find the kitten and lead it to the barn,

We feed the kitten in the same spot at the same time every day. You expect me to believe that the kitten doesn't know where the food is? It was probably on the roof that whole time, with a bird's-eye view of  me walking to the barn with the cat food in my hand.

That reminds me of a student at Rice who was enrolled in my class, but hardly ever attended. One day, during the class period, he went to the linguistics office to ask where I was, because he wanted to discuss his grade with me. The secretary told him that I was just then in class, since this was the regular period for when the class that he was enrolled in met every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He was totally surprised to learn this. There is stupid, and then there is feigned stupid. The kitten knows.

A few days ago, Bow shared with me one of his random thoughts. החתול רשע. "The cat is evil." I asked him why he thought the cat was evil. (It was before the kitten was seen on the roof.) He replied: אל תשאלי. "Don't ask."

"You Know What I Mean"

Sometimes Bow wants to communicate one thing, but he says something else. For instance, he wants to go outside, but he will spell out "Give me a blanket." Or he knows that it's almost time for dinner, and he is impatient to be served, and he spells out "Give me a blanket." Or he is just upset over something, and does not have the words to express it, and he spells out "Give me a blanket."'

Bow with his old Blanket Last September

In every such case, I take Bow at his word, and I give him a blanket. Sometimes this upsets him, and he attacks the blanket in frustration, biting it. However, at this point, his attacks on the blanket are very gentle, because he knows that he is not getting a new blanket till Christmas, and the winter months are fast approaching. Bow can be moody, but he is not stupid.

Bow with his Current Blanket

I was speaking to another primatologist the other day, and she said: "We have this rule: if they can express what they want clearly by any means, then we respond to that."

I didn't know what to answer. That sounds so kind and liberal and caring.  Has she ever tried raising a bilingual teenager in a monolingual country? I wondered. But I could not say that. So I just said:  "Well, that was not the rule in my parents' house when I was growing up."

She smiled. "So you are just following the pattern you were raised with?"

Yeah. It works. The other way may work, too, for purposes of communication, but it undermines language. Because, let's face it, we don't use language because that is the only way to communicate. We use it because it is a very sharp tool, and unless you use it to communicate, it will not stay sharp. It's use it or lose it. I know, because I've been there, and I am still there. I am a language warrior.

Ping and the Snirkelly People

When I was six years old, I was placed in a classroom where only English was spoken, and I was a monolingual Hebrew speaker. Because I had no choice, I picked the language up very fast. But if I had had a choice, the process would have been much less efficient. Learning a new language is not about the desires of the language learner. Holding onto an old language is the same.

I remained fluent in Hebrew, because my parents spoke to me only in Hebrew. I acquired perfect American English, because my classmates and teachers spoke to me only in English. Nobody would give an inch, so I was the one who was forced to give way. Language is not about communication. It is first and foremost about power.

http://hubpages.com/hub/How-to-Learn-a-Foreign-Language-Issues-in-Second-Language-Acquisition-and-Pedagogy

The more you accommodate the language learner, the less effective the process.

I did see, a year after I learned English, an example of parents who took a different course with their children. In order to help them adapt, the parents spoke only in English to the children at home. This actually delayed complete acquisition of an American accent and fluent English grammar, but within about a year of the implementation of this policy the children were no longer willing and/or able to speak Hebrew anymore.

In our household, communication was not king. Language was king. If you meant one thing and said something else, it was the thing you said that was responded to. If said in the wrong language, it was not acknowledged at all. And that's the only way to hold onto a specific language, when there is another, alternative way to communicate which is equally as effective.

If nonverbal cues are good enough to communicate everything, why use language at all? It was only during my college years that I encountered people who said one thing, when they clearly meant something completely different. It was not even a question of lying or deception. It was more like an extreme case of mixed signals. A person was talking fluently and grammatically about one subject, while all his nonverbal cues were pointing to the fact that he was thinking about and asking for something completely different. It was not that I could not read the nonverbal cues,  I just thought anyone who behaved that way must be insane.

Bow is not insane. He knows what he wants. And I know what he wants. And he knows that I know that he knows. But all the same, language is about power, and I cannot give in.

"You know what I mean," does not work in my house. And that's also why my daughter can still speak Hebrew when nobody else in this county does. It takes will power!