Language Learning / Bilingual / Polyglot Thread

[wylfım]

The most interesting thing I find about Language is how its the operating system of the mind. When you "think", you think in the language you learned as a child. Even when you speak another language, your brain automatically translates the foreign tongue you are speaking into the base language you learned as a baby. Which often leads to hilarious misinterpretations incidentally. More fun, deaf people who learn sign language think in sign language.

The really scary shit happens in studies done on feral children, who never learned a language at all. they were literally high functioning monkeys, completely incapable of rational thoughts or control over their needs and emotions. Worse, how our brains define concepts that have no tangible real world existence is highly dependent on linguistic meaning. There are elements of Asian mysticism that have no good translation into english as an example, while African languages have no translation for concepts like "Time" or "Future". Such linguistic gaps may very well lead into radical shifts in how our minds view the world and our culture develops.

I would disagree by saying that pretty much every single mainstream linguists rejects the strong version of the sapir-whorf hypothesis. At most language influences thought, but it is not necessary to it or to understanding concepts. And with feral children, their issues probably stem from abuse, not lack of language.
As for concepts that are difficult to translate, you can still explain what a word means. Even if it takes you a paragraph to describe it, you can communicate the concept, regardless of if there's a word or not. You can explain to someone what snow is without ever using the word itself. They might not fully understand it like someone who has seen snow will, but the general idea still transfers.

 

[mindlessobserver]

I would disagree by saying that pretty much every single mainstream linguists rejects the strong version of the sapir-whorf hypothesis. At most language influences thought, but it is not necessary to it or to understanding concepts. And with feral children, their issues probably stem from abuse, not lack of language.
As for concepts that are difficult to translate, you can still explain what a word means. Even if it takes you a paragraph to describe it, you can communicate the concept, regardless of if there's a word or not. You can explain to someone what snow is without ever using the word itself. They might not fully understand it like someone who has seen snow will, but the general idea still transfers.

I would counter by saying most linguists are terrified about what the psychological literature on the nature of language and its cognitive function says. This is the problem with having two separate disciplines approaching an issue from opposite ends. Linguists like Tolkein and Orwell (who are more known for their fictional work then their language work) understood the importance of language on cultural development.

Now we could certainly argue that Tolkeins Morghul Tongue and Orwells Newspeak are simply fictional tropes, but they did stem from the hypothesis that there was more to language then simply putting a label on everything. Especially when we consider metaphysical concepts like Freedom, Time, the Future, Heaven, Paradise, etc. They are not like Road, Chair, Apple, Orange, Banana. We can wave the latter in someones face and say "this is what it is!" and the brain will index the information accordingly. But a metaphysical concept like Freedom? Its dependent on subjective definition. And that can be changed. Or even forgotten. And if we forget the word "Freedom", or warp its definition into something else entirely, does our metaphysical concept of "Freedom" exist anymore? I would argue it does not.

 

[millais]

I recently read an old paper on the historical spoken accent of American Southerners. Basically the authors made a detailed comparison between the modern, post-WWII American Southern accent with the accent of English-speaking Brazilian Confederados, whose geographic isolation has insulated their traditional Southern accent from much of the linguistic drift and evolution of the 19th and 20th centuries, supposedly making them an ideal control group representing a close approximation of the historical accent. Unfortunately most of the linguistics terminology went over my head, but from what I understood, the main findings were that the modern American Southern accent has diverged considerably from the 19th century antebellum accent in the increased frequency of rhoticism and contraction of -ing to -in' (I forget the academic term for that phenomenon). So the antebellum Southern accent was actually not so different from the modern American accents of the North and Midwest, and the main reasons for the significant divergence of the modern Southern accent from the American norm was the lack of internal migration from the north and west during the post-bellum decades, combined with big migration of Tidewater and Piedmont Virginians and the associated spread of their prestige dialect/accent features to all parts of the American South during the same post-bellum period. I was not very impressed with the methodology of the research since they had a very tiny sample of size of English-speaking Confederados who they used as the "baseline" control for their comparison. Only like 20 elderly subjects, same number of adults, and less than 10 children, so it's not especially convincing. But because of the decline of English language fluency in the Confederado population, its highly unlikely that anyone today will be able to replicate the study with a bigger sample size.

 

[wylfım]

I would counter by saying most linguists are terrified about what the psychological literature on the nature of language and its cognitive function says. This is the problem with having two separate disciplines approaching an issue from opposite ends. Linguists like Tolkein and Orwell (who are more known for their fictional work then their language work) understood the importance of language on cultural development.

Now we could certainly argue that Tolkeins Morghul Tongue and Orwells Newspeak are simply fictional tropes, but they did stem from the hypothesis that there was more to language then simply putting a label on everything. Especially when we consider metaphysical concepts like Freedom, Time, the Future, Heaven, Paradise, etc. They are not like Road, Chair, Apple, Orange, Banana. We can wave the latter in someones face and say "this is what it is!" and the brain will index the information accordingly. But a metaphysical concept like Freedom? Its dependent on subjective definition. And that can be changed. Or even forgotten. And if we forget the word "Freedom", or warp its definition into something else entirely, does our metaphysical concept of "Freedom" exist anymore? I would argue it does not.

That isn't contradictory to what I said though, and I agree. Language influences thought, but it doesn't determine it. If you don't have a word for freedom, you're going to have certain biases in that direction, but that doesn't mean you can't think about freedom in a way that a language with it could. That's really what philosophy is, trying to put to words your brain's "natural" language. No one thinks in human language— hence why sometimes you can know something but not know how to express it.

 

[mindlessobserver]

That isn't contradictory to what I said though, and I agree. Language influences thought, but it doesn't determine it. If you don't have a word for freedom, you're going to have certain biases in that direction, but that doesn't mean you can't think about freedom in a way that a language with it could. That's really what philosophy is, trying to put to words your brain's "natural" language. No one thinks in human language— hence why sometimes you can know something but not know how to express it.

But this gets into the issue of "not everyone is a philosopher", and opens up the door to the concept of collective consciousness and zeitgeist. Socratese believed in "the forms" that were the universal truths independent of thought that everyone knows but does not notice. That is essentially your argument. "Freedom", is one of the Forms. It is an independent truth. We may not know how to quantify it, but it exists. The flip side of this issue is of course Plato's cave. While there is a universal truth, but we are blind too it. And most are too stupid to not stop watching the false shadows to notice the higher planes of reality. Or worse, are FORCED to watch the shadows (the chains) and not allowed to see that there is a reality beyond the cave.

I find Plato's cave to be far more accurate summation of metaphysical reality. Things like "Freedom" may be a separate form of reality we intrinsically know but cannot describe, but if our minds are conditioned to not notice or even know of it, be through language, culture, etc, the, concept may as well not exist. The case of the Feral Children is this on steroids. They may understand basic concepts like food, hunger, cold, heat, etc, things necessary for survival. But anything beyond that are lost. Our brains have a hard code that allows us to survive. When we are hungry we look for food. When we are thirsty we look for water. When we are horny we look for sex. None of these things require words. We naturally know how to do it, and can do it without thinking. But complex thoughts, thoughts that could, for example, consider the nature of balance between good and evil, freedom and tyranny, or chaos and order, require a much more fundamental structure.

A Philosopher may be able to individually hit on these concepts independent of an existing linguistic structure, but society as a whole? Doubtful. Most people are not so intelligent as to be able to comprehend methods of reality beyond what they understand.

 

[Red Hood]

Taking Old English in college got me interested in how languages shift and fragment. If you've taken German first there's a lot of familiar territory in OE (Since the Angles, Saxons etc came from what is today Germany) ...that can often trip you up as pronunciation goes, since there was a shift in which English kept the old W sound that we still use and German started pronouncing the identical looking letter as V.

 

[UselessRubberKeyboard]

I remember being baffled by learning Latin in school. The idea of declensions for nouns seemed utterly insane to me - like, how many different versions of the word do you need for the word 'table'. IT'S A TABLE. Just say whose table it is or what's on it, for fuck's sake. Amo amas amat FUCK OFF.

And then I met Slavic languages.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank my Latin teacher from the bottom of my heart, and to apologise profusely for being an absolute twat in her class for two years. Mrs Cassidy, you are a star amongst women, and I'm not surprised you were so bloody bad-tempered, having to teach dickheads like myself about the basics of half of the world's languages that are so logical it should be damn obvious why they work they way they do (if only I'd shut up complaining for once and had actually thought about it). You were right, and I was wrong. You were kinda cute, too.

I still can't remember the word for 'table' in Latin, though.

 

[Webby's Boyfriend]

I love Latin. It is my favourite language. I can read it a bit, too, I also have some books written in it.

The declension system is more elegant than using only prepositions. Latin is not even that crazy with it, Hungarian has over 30 cases and Finnish has 15.

The Finnish genitive is marked by -n and the inessive (inside something) by -ssa, while the plural is marked by -t in the nominative and -i in all other cases.
tyttö -> girl
tyttön -> girl's
talo -> house
talossa -> in the house
kirja -> book
kirjaitta -> without books

What is also funny are noun genders. In Latin, a table (mensa) is female. Meanwhile, a stone (lapis) is male, while a star (astronomical, not celebrity) can be male (sidus), female (stella) or neuter (astrum) depending on the synonym selected for it.

And yes, those gendered nouns influence how people perceive those objects. Spaniards described bridges with stereotypically male attributes (towering, dangerous, strong) and Germans with female ones (elegant, gracile) because of the genders of their words for bridge (puente [sp], brücke [ger]. When Russian artists drew weekdays as people, the gender of those anthro versions correspondended to the genders of the names of those days in the Russian language.

Still, I wonder: How can an inanimate object like a table or something immaterial like Friday have a gender? Why should it? Though, I know those noun genders evolved in PIE somehow out of the habit of marking the subject in a sentence with an -s and the object with an -m.

 

[Crunchy Leaf]

I remember being baffled by learning Latin in school. The idea of declensions for nouns seemed utterly insane to me - like, how many different versions of the word do you need for the word 'table'. IT'S A TABLE. Just say whose table it is or what's on it, for fuck's sake. Amo amas amat FUCK OFF.

And then I met Slavic languages.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank my Latin teacher from the bottom of my heart, and to apologise profusely for being an absolute twat in her class for two years. Mrs Cassidy, you are a star amongst women, and I'm not surprised you were so bloody bad-tempered, having to teach dickheads like myself about the basics of half of the world's languages that are so logical it should be damn obvious why they work they way they do (if only I'd shut up complaining for once and had actually thought about it). You were right, and I was wrong. You were kinda cute, too.

I still can't remember the word for 'table' in Latin, though.

It's 'mensa'.

I took Latin in school too, and German, and Ancient Greek, and I'm not a fan of declensions either. Especially in Greek and German, which have like eighteen different words for 'the'. What's so wrong with one, man?

 

[Webby's Boyfriend]

Ancient Greek has "only" 17 and German "only" 6 different forms of "the". They change with declension between gender (male, female, neuter), number (singular, plural) and case (nominative, genitive, dative, accusativ). German has 16 possible combinations, since it only distinguishes gender in the singular. Greek has 36 because it also has the dual number but that is seldomly used (only for natural pairs like twin siblings, a pair of shoes, two arms, two legs etc.). It also has the vocative case which only affects male words ending in -s in the singular.

Classical Latin (that one used around 1 AD) did not have any articles but in Middle Latin, sometimes the demonstrative pronoun "ille" was used as definite article. Originally it was used to point to somebody or something far away, akin to English "those". "Ille" is the masculine singular nominative, it showed over 14 different forms like illa, illo, illi, ilud etc. That is where the French articles "le" and "la" come from.

 

[Vlad the Inhaler]

tl;dr I need a better hobby because I waste way too much of my life on learning useless things

Really? You don't say. Because I'll put my OCD encyclopedic knowledge of the last 100 years or so of Indochinese history as infinitely less useful. But anyway.

Here's my story. Spanish primary language, but so thoroughly obliterated by English. I also speak passable German. Took two years of Latin in high school, and two years of German at university which improved my grammar and spelling greatly. I've taught ESL classes at community colleges, and find language study fascinating. So this all comes out kinda scattershot.

First of all, I don't care what Italians say, it is ao similar to Spanish that I understand the majority of what I read or hear. Can't speak it at all, probably couldn't even ask directions. Portuguese less so, but still can decipher most of what I read, as long as it's things like signs, menus, etc. I've picked up a smattering of French just by translating French quotes in books and from culinary studies. I can identify writing in Romanian, but that's it.

German is pretty damned close to Yiddish so long as I'm hearing it, and have been able to converse in rudimentary, simple sentences with a Yiddish speaker. I can recognize Dutch, but not much more. I can't tell the difference between Danish, Norwegian and even less Swedish. Could probably decipher street signs and the like. Afrikaans is another world. Some words are just like pidgeon German, but hearing it spoken leaves my brain spinning.

I can identify Finnish when I see it, as well as Hungarian. Completely useless with any Slavic language. Polish I can recognize, but Czech, Bulgarian, Serbo Croat, Russian, I can literally identify about four letters in Cyrillic. Arabic, African, Oriental languages, useless. I tried learning a little Vietnamese, but had to give up as it is a language all about inflection, and I wouldn't get it without somebody to practice.

As far as difficulty to learn, I'd put it at English, Spanish, German then Latin, hardest to simplest. I've never, ever, figured out how to properly place accents in Spanish. Many people have told me it's very simple, but those were always the last words I actually understood once they started the rules. My mother has been a school teacher my whole life, and she gave it up as a lost cause after about two tries. And I'm deliberately leaving out the issue of proper Castillian versus common Spanish, and to hell with Basque, Valencian and other forms. I can't read Garcia Llorca or Cervantea without my Real Academia de Espanol (Royal Academy of Spanish) dictionary.

As has been mentioned before, the primary stumbling block I've heard from students is just too many spelling variants, owing to the great numbet of languages English draw words from. Once, in order to help my students understand better the movements of people that have influenced English, I drew a pretty decent map of Europe and the Mediterranean on the chalkboard and proceeded to go from ancient Greece to the late middle ages. My students were flabbergasted that I drew such a detailed map of Europe freehand, and heard nothing else I said after that. Oh well. The different spellings completely negated any advantage our simple grammar format afforded. Without the stability of learning fixed declensions and conjugation, you essentially have to learn every word as if it had its own rule.

Think about it. The verbs drive and dive. I drive, I drove. I dive, I dove, or is it dived? He drove here and he dived in. And that's just one example. Trust me, that drives them bat shit crazy. Lack of uniform rules fucks with your stress levels in a big way.

So, until I die, I'm going to still love learning about languages. I'm going to have to suck it up and try at least one Oriental language in my life. And it sure as shit won't be Chinese. I'm still pretty pissed all the words I grew up learning like Peking duck and Mao Tse-tung and Yangtze just got tossed out the fucking window. Tough shit, you have to spell them the way we tell you to now, European barbarian.

 

[Crunchy Leaf]

I took Japanese and it's a lot easier than Chinese since there's no tones, and it's the most-easily-accessible East Asian language after Chinese for a Westerner to learn.

Now, I have to ask everyone--do you prefer 'sneaked' or 'snuck'?

 

[wylfım]

I took Japanese and it's a lot easier than Chinese since there's no tones, and it's the most-easily-accessible East Asian language after Chinese for a Westerner to learn.

Now, I have to ask everyone--do you prefer 'sneaked' or 'snuck'?

'Snuck' hands down. 'Sneaked' sounds ungrammatical to me. I also prefer "kneel"-"knelt," but I accept "kneeled" as grammatical.
And I took Chinese (got decently fluent in it actually), so that makes us basically linguistic neighbors!

 

[Crunchy Leaf]

'Snuck' hands down. 'Sneaked' sounds ungrammatical to me. I also prefer "kneel"-"knelt," but I accept "kneeled" as grammatical.
And I took Chinese (got decently fluent in it actually), so that makes us basically linguistic neighbors!

I took two years of Chinese in high school. I have consequently forgotten 99% of it.
(Sneaked is the 'correct' form--snuck is wrong, if you want to be a purist.)

 

[This+]

I'm trying to learn German and French on my own after 1 semester of French and a year of German in university. It's not going very well but I try to read some news articles without using google translate as much as possible. German "clicks" more with me since it's closer to English though.

Written Korean (Hangul) is extremely easy to read. It's made so that even "simple-minded people" can master it within a week, and one day for smart people. The problem that comes with such an easy writing system is that there are a lot of homophones, and lots of context is required. Newspapers today still have a little bit of Chinese characters (Hanja) to denote names, and it was even worse in official documents in the past.

There's differences between North Korean and South Korean languages as well. The South Korean language has lots of loanwords from English and other Western languages (for example, "part-time job" in S.Korean is "알바" (pronounced "Arba," shortened for "Arbeit," which means "job" or "work" in German). North Korean doesn't have said influences and is more "traditional." Spelling is also different in some cases as well. "Work" (with the context of Communist "Worker's Party," what would be "labor" in English) in S.K. is "노동" (pronounced "Nodohng") but in N.K. it's "로동" (pronounced "rodohng").

 

[Vlad the Inhaler]

I took two years of Chinese in high school. I have consequently forgotten 99% of it.
(Sneaked is the 'correct' form--snuck is wrong, if you want to be a purist.)

Okay. So I'll toss you some from the worst offenders:

Verb to plea; "Pleaded" or "Pled"

And from Latin, a term which means your trial has proceeded without your presence:

In absentia Or In abstentia

Alright Or All right
Wiggle Or Wriggle room
Anymore Or Any more

Have fun, all.

 

[wylfım]

Okay. So I'll toss you some from the worst offenders:

Verb to plea; "Pleaded" or "Pled"

And from Latin, a term which means your trial has proceeded without your presence:

In absentia Or In abstentia

Alright Or All right
Wiggle Or Wriggle room
Anymore Or Any more

Have fun, all.

for me:
pleaded
in absentia
alright
wiggle
anymore or any more (depending on context— I would say "i dont want to eat any more food", and "i don't want to eat food anymore")

 

[Crunchy Leaf]

Okay. So I'll toss you some from the worst offenders:

Verb to plea; "Pleaded" or "Pled"

And from Latin, a term which means your trial has proceeded without your presence:

In absentia Or In abstentia

Alright Or All right
Wiggle Or Wriggle room
Anymore Or Any more

Have fun, all.

I think of 'alright' and 'all right' as meaning different things. Alright means okay, and all right is all correct, or well.
So
'Professor, what did you think of the answers to my exam?'
'They're alright'--you did okay
'They're all right'--you got a 100
And pronounced differently also.

 

[Webby's Boyfriend]

I'm trying to learn German and French on my own after 1 semester of French and a year of German in university. It's not going very well but I try to read some news articles without using google translate as much as possible. German "clicks" more with me since it's closer to English though.

I speak them both and basically, English is just dumbed down German with a lot of mispronounced French words in it.

That is why the world should use French as a global lingua franca again.

 

[Crunchy Leaf]

I speak them both and basically, English is just dumbed down German with a lot of mispronounced French words in it.

That is why the world should use French as a global lingua franca again.

I'll accept this as long as it's Quebec French.