If I had not learned to write/read at such a young age, I doubt my written English would be comprehensible. My mother's Slavic accent and resulting syntactical fun, against my father's Northern Appalachia issues? Oh, such linguistic joy! When tired, I can speak in such a way that my hubby needs a translator.

I have a difficult time with a a particular sound. "The", that marvelous definite article, is an aspirated "d" with a glottal stop in my speech. If I wrote as I speak? D'cat, d'dog, etc.

Point being... Sort away. Lacking the R is not the worst. Or the oddest. Like all else in the odd deep reaches of our ocean-like brains (where extinct things turn out to live and matter after all).... it'll swim into view sooner or later...

The fact that I was in or nearing puberty before I talked right means that writing skills always have been ahead of my verbal skills. Still are. In all of my languages. It drove my mandarin teacher nuts that I was more interested in the traditional chinese writing than the pinyin.

I still prefer writing over talking. Written words don't have so many accent/phonetic quirks and they never get mean when I need to consult my dictionary.

Most important of all. . . Can I use family dysfunction cycles and town hall meetings as proof that matching languages and accents are no guarantee of communication?

As a guy who has taught a foreign language at the college level since 1983 and who grew up in two languages in a traumatic childhood, I've thought about language and my psychological make up a lot, too, arfie, albeit for different reasons.

My parents were Southern Appalachians who went to South America's war zone as adults. They never became fluent in Spanish, so they never fully understood what was going on around them. As a kid, I was a sponge for language, so I was fluent in 3 months and I understood everything, which was terrifying for me in the war. My parents began using me as their interpreter, too, which meant they took me on more dangerous trips than those other kids took.

I remember my father took me as his interpreter to the bank one day. The bank was in an area that was having lots of fighting. Sure enough, we got caught in a battle, and I was right there on the front line of it when a famous youth movement leader got gunned down. I was 10.

On the other hand, having more language skills, I went on to get a PhD in Spanish and wrote my dissertation on the war I survived. I went back to the war zone and did years of research beyond that interviewing figures in the war in Spanish. When my book was published in 1994, then in 1995 I got diagnosed because of what I learned about myself writing it.

So it's ironic. My language skills got me too close to gun battles as a kid, but then as an adult they were my gateway to getting help for my PTSD. Now I hope to retire in Uruguay near the Brazilian border and become an old geezer fluent in Brazilian Portuguese, too, just for kicks this time.

Language giveth, and language taketh away.

That phenom of children translating for their parents is a Texas tradition. It can be painful to watch. One of my long-running paid side gigs is the "band drives" where graduating elementary students are screened for the band instruments they will learn in Junior High School. My return from my first South American (all Spanish) study coincided with these drives. The mother of my very first client set openly told her daughter to act like she was translating so that they could test my honesty. Nothing unusual. I usually play good gringo, but the child looked so miserable that I asked the mother, in Spanish, if she would prefer Spanish.

Even without that kind of "Education" my languages jump threads all the time. In my psychotic states, I often loose track of which human language I am speaking.

without trying to take over your thread arfie, this topic has prompted a note in my observations of us. we slip in and out of accents almost constantly these days. along with the lexicon that goes with them. even more slip in and out of other languages. to the random listener it sounds like gibberish, but there are those of us who don't speak english. we understand it in a way that is more instinctual that translatable, but very much know it is a language. i inherited my mother's ear for tonality and inflection, unfortunately the brain damage took away the ability for normal types of retention.

from what i read unlike ya'll language came early and easy. i was always told to shut-up cause i talked too much. however i had to compensate for dyslexia and dysgraphia real fast. by 6th grade i was flat out refusing to do any spelling homework, yet still acing the tests. i can't count how often i was in detention. my mom told them to find some other way to punish me. lol nothing worked. they tend to hate it when a kid realizes they are untouchable.

all of this lead me to being able to translate a completely different language- behavior. i see how ya'll describe the events ya'll been through and all the little dots connect. not just with you but with all the people around you and such. i'm not a licensed therapist or anything no. but for me where i envy that ya'll can help translate one spoken language into another, i am happy that i can pick up on subtleties of body ticks and tone of voice and things people don't realize they aren't masking; then take that info using it to often help in a way others might not have thought of.

thanks for letting my splice into your thread arfie.

A very welcome slice it was, Gypsy Hive. Very much in context with the yaddah blah I am attempting to sort. Thank you. A most enlightening take on it.

I don't stand a chance of ever being hired at the United Nations. Whether I am translating engineerese to executese, Southerner to Northerner or one human language to another human language, my most common translation is, "Bullshit. Quit using the words to discredit the message."