Reply #28: Me, too. Had a lot of speech defects when I started school. [View All]

[Igel]

No, not dialectal traits. Real defects. Still can't figure out where they came from. Still get American /r/ and /l/ mixed up from time to time.

Also had two working class parents, one a high school graduate, the other a high school dropout. No reading at home; they didn't even teach me to tie my shoes or how to count to 10.

The school re-tracked me in 3rd grade; by that spring, I was at 5th grade reading level, 4th grade math level. No skipping grades, that was a no-no. Bad for the kid's ego. Instead the rule was to make him sit there, bored with the classwork, and teased by his peers.

The funny thing ... I'm a linguist now, writing my dissertation; not just a theoretical linguist trying to understand Language, but also a translator, one of those linguists that also learns lots of languages. I hope to win the bid I submitted for translating a recent book on the Russian space industry.