The present conversation is a living story. In 2017 when I was invited to speak at the AUSTRALEX 2017"Intersections between oral narratives, traditions, lexicography and new media"(August 28 and 29, 2017) University of South Pacific Rarotonga, Cook Islands, I met a cleaning lady - a Maori - who spoke very poor English, but quite good Maori. As a neurolinguist, dealing with incremental language degradation, attrition, down syndrom, verbal dyspraxia, severe aphasia (Broca and Wernicke), and other types of impairments as well, I thought it would be interesting to hear what happens when a bilingual person with gradual acquisition of first mother tongue Cook Island Maori and second English, the language of the area, if impaired in the Broadman Area 44 and Broca-Zone. This lady had suffered damage two years before through an accident on her left hemisphere of brain injured, and she had severe problems of phonematic paraphasia. The subsequent talk is concerned with the observation and analysis of multilingual patients with Broca's aphasia. One of the two languages, which is preserved as sleeping beauty (Ghil’ad Zuckermann) or dying, is the first to be partially lost at the level of phonetic form (PF). In the lecture we want to provide data and the following context: Firstly, to prove Roman Jakoson's hypothesis on the asymmetry of L1-L2 bilingual language acquisition and a subsequent language loss after an accident. WHICH MEANS THE LAST ACQUIRED WILL BE THE FIRST LOST. We will try to show that the asymmetry between language acquisition, multilingualism and language loss is confessed by questions of the phonological structure of Maori versus English and their prosodic-musical structure. Maori is a central vowel language with syllables belonging to the structure V, CV, VC represents a rather minimal number of phonemes which are easier to parse, and to comprehend, with other words which are easier to produce by the Sesu-Motoric, and easier to interpret by the Conceptual-Intentional interfaces. Maori represents a highly economic and minimalist model of a language on the side of syllable structure. In English, the structure of syllables is - in addition to attested syllabic consonantal patterns - also with a consonant clustering and a consonant attachment at the beginning, in the middle or at the end of the word and shows even syllabic consonant patterns such as [m̩ ], [ŋ̍ ] and [r̩̩ ]. All these are consonants that can be characterized as ‘sonorants’. I will further deal with some other syllabic consonants which can be characterized as ‘obstruents’ such as [s̩ ], [ʃ̩ ], [k̩ ], [p̍ ], [b̩ ], etc. I will study all these various syllabic consonants mainly in simplex words (e.g. camera) if not to the exclusion of complex words (e.g. bottleneck, hustling) which are com- pounds and derivatives. I will therefore explore the subject by going beyond what Jones (1956b/1959) concentrates on. This is also the context of tonal and non-tonal languages. In a second step, we will compare English (a weak syllabic language) and Italian (a rich syllabic language) to show that the tonal languages can license triggering repair of a loss at the level of the PF through the different plasticity of brain and special domains responsible for music in the right part of the expressive brain.

• published: 25 May 2022
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