Language

[DA Baracus]

1 hour ago, Stellaboz said:

As many know, I work for a German company but it's first language is English. Today at lunch I sat with 3 Germans whom were talking in English before I arrived.
Sometimes you hear German obviously but.

Obviously, otherwise you wouldn't have been able to understand their insults

[welshbairn]

5 minutes ago, DA Baracus said:

Obviously, otherwise you wouldn't have been able to understand their insults

Der schottische Narr denkt, er hat ein Land. Er ist ein Schweinehund wie die Engländer

[Fullerene]

2 hours ago, welshbairn said:

Did the Normans keep any Scandinavian words or just adopt French 100%? Weird if so. Incidentally you can still hear a version of Norman French in some of the sleazier pubs in Jersey.

 

I don't think they got rid of any words if that is what you mean.  What I meant is that they spotted a lot of words were missing and there was one other language they already knew that was an obvious one to steal them from.  For example, I don't think they said "Oh no, there is no English word for 'cup' - let's go to Albania and see if they have a word for 'cup'"

[The_Kincardine]

On 1/25/2018 at 14:10, dorlomin said:

If we did not have an adaptable language we would never have gotten past speaking about things like birds and flowers. We are or at least until recently were thought to have a hardwired capacity for certain rules of grammar. But the sounds for each idea are malleable. 

Has this been discredited?  I have 3 bilingual weans and, after my first was born, read Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct (which was an absolute delight) to try and understand language acquisition.  Part of the book (from memory) is that children have this ability to hear phrases/sentences and to unpack the verbal structures and then combine words to make phrases they have never heard before and for those phrases to conform to general grammatical rules.

That seems to me that there's a universal and innate capacity for people to be, generally, grammatical by intuition rather than rote.  No?

[welshbairn]

22 minutes ago, Fullerene said:

I don't think they got rid of any words if that is what you mean.  What I meant is that they spotted a lot of words were missing and there was one other language they already knew that was an obvious one to steal them from.  For example, I don't think they said "Oh no, there is no English word for 'cup' - let's go to Albania and see if they have a word for 'cup'"

Within a couple of hundred years they seemed to dump Danish, Swedish and/or Norwegian for French. Most if not all Viking words to come into Scots and English came directly from the original invaders. I think when they met French birds Scandinavian chat became instantly uncool.

[Nkomo-A-Gogo]

I've been learning Spanish for around 8 months now. I can just about make myself understood but my comprehension is awful. Native speakers go so quickly y no estoy acostumbrado a háblar hablantes de nativos.

If anyone is interested then here is my guy.
He does a 10 part beginners course then every Monday puts a new lesson up using the course as a base.

[elsegador]

17 hours ago, The_Kincardine said:

Has this been discredited?  I have 3 bilingual weans and, after my first was born, read Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct (which was an absolute delight) to try and understand language acquisition.  Part of the book (from memory) is that children have this ability to hear phrases/sentences and to unpack the verbal structures and then combine words to make phrases they have never heard before and for those phrases to conform to general grammatical rules.

That seems to me that there's a universal and innate capacity for people to be, generally, grammatical by intuition rather than rote.  No?

That is indeed the gist of Pinker's book. If anybody's interested there are videos of his lectures on the topic as well. In any case, he makes a convincing argument for language as being an innate 'instinct' in humans, and possibly even being what separates us from other species. The book's a few years old now and I don't know if there are newer theories. I believe that weans start off aping sounds, then repeating whole words and phrases until a later stage of development when they actually begin to manipulate the grammar (unconsciously, of course) and make completely original utterances.

I don't know if yous have noticed this with your own kids, but it's quite typical for a two or three year old to say something like 'I got a biscuit', but a year later they might say 'I getted a biscuit'. Their language development seems to have regressed, but at age two they were simply repeating the word 'got' that they've heard before. Later on, they've learned the grammatical rule that we usually add '-ed' to make the past. So they're taking the base form 'get' and coming up with 'getted', which is smarter than just repeating 'got', parrot-fashion, even though it's wrong. Nobody taught them to put '-ed' on the end, and they certainly never heard their parents say 'getted', they just work it out themselves.

Acquisition of additional languages as an adult works in quite a different way, but might share some of the same phenomena. In my early days of learning Spanish, I would say things like 'He ponido el libro en la mesa', wrongly thinking that the past participle of 'poner' is 'ponido'. With time, once you've either heard the correct version a few times or, alternatively, memorised a table of irregular verbs, 'ponido' sounds just as wrong as 'getted'.

[Menzel]

Cyrillic isn't really that difficult.

[welshbairn]

Georgian can get a bit tricky.

Signature of King Alexander II of Kakheti (ჴლმწიფე ჻ ალექსანდრე)

[Fullerene]

15 minutes ago, welshbairn said:

Georgian can get a bit tricky.

Signature of King Alexander II of Kakheti (ჴლმწიფე ჻ ალექსანდრე)

I've been to Atlanta.  Is this that spaced out guy on Confederation Avenue?

Kind of looks like three people having a cocktail while a woman with big hair walks by with her dog.  Maybe I should stop drinking.

[Hillonearth]

15 hours ago, welshbairn said:

Georgian can get a bit tricky.

Signature of King Alexander II of Kakheti (ჴლმწიფე ჻ ალექსანდრე)

Couple of years ago, my team signed a young Georgian guy living in Glasgow who had previously played for Dinamo Tbilisi's youth team.

Sounds strange I know, but even at non-league level you have to get international clearance, which in this case was complicated when the letterhead of the documentation looked like this:

საქართველოს ფეხბურთის ფედერაცია

 

[Cardinal Richelieu]

On 26/01/2018 at 19:13, Stellaboz said:

Ich Weis nicht, cunto.

Ich weiss nicht

[Stellaboz]

Ich weiss nicht [emoji6]

Genau!! [emoji1]

[DiegoDiego]

17 hours ago, Menzel said:

Cyrillic isn't really that difficult.

Cyrillic is a piece of piss, though a lot of signs are in a "handwritten" script where T looks like m, I'd never seen that from my study online so it confused the f**k out of me until I figured it out. I picked up the Georgian alphabet with a bit of effort too, it's beautiful. Armenian though I never really got to grips with, unlike Georgian it has different forms for lower case and upper case. It was only then that I realised how confusing that must be for people learning Latin script.

[The_Kincardine]

On 1/27/2018 at 12:43, elsegador said:

Acquisition of additional languages as an adult works in quite a different way, but might share some of the same phenomena. In my early days of learning Spanish, I would say things like 'He ponido el libro en la mesa', wrongly thinking that the past participle of 'poner' is 'ponido'. With time, once you've either heard the correct version a few times or, alternatively, memorised a table of irregular verbs, 'ponido' sounds just as wrong as 'getted'.

Pinker's book had a section on language acquisition comparing 'native' to 'learned' and his thesis was that you have until the age of 6 to learn a language natively.  After that you can learn the language well but won't have that native facility.  Do you think he's being harsh here?

[Fullerene]

5 hours ago, The_Kincardine said:

Pinker's book had a section on language acquisition comparing 'native' to 'learned' and his thesis was that you have until the age of 6 to learn a language natively.  After that you can learn the language well but won't have that native facility.  Do you think he's being harsh here?

No.  Apparently from birth the human ear can be distinguish between 60 different sounds when somebody is speaking but gradually that shrinks to the sounds that are commonly heard in the language that person has learnt. 

That is one limitation.

The other is the "non-vowel" sound.  This is the sound you make when you can't think fast enough and need to fill the gaps.
In English, it is "er" and "um" but in other languages it is different.
It is the most obvious giveaway that a language is not your native tongue.
Imagine somebody speaking fluent Japanese but still saying "um" and "er" when they hesitate.  Oops.

[dorlomin]

8 hours ago, Hillonearth said:

საქართველოს ფეხბურთის ფედერაცია

"One ring to rule them all and in the darkness bind them"

[dorlomin]

On 26/01/2018 at 20:06, The_Kincardine said:

Has this been discredited?  I have 3 bilingual weans and, after my first was born, read Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct (which was an absolute delight) to try and understand language acquisition.  Part of the book (from memory) is that children have this ability to hear phrases/sentences and to unpack the verbal structures and then combine words to make phrases they have never heard before and for those phrases to conform to general grammatical rules.

That seems to me that there's a universal and innate capacity for people to be, generally, grammatical by intuition rather than rote.  No?

I think there is a long running on going tussle. Over the past couple of decade some have put forward the FOXP2 gene as being a key in building universal grammar in humans. Others argue this strongly. There is a huge amount vested in either side of the argument. 

https://www.nature.com/news/2009/091111/full/news.2009.1079.html

You could probably make a case for either side but I tend to go with language and grammar being innate. Some people link it to something called "behavioural modernity"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_modernity

The apparent rapid appearance of abstract thinking 80-50 000 years ago.

 

[elsegador]

17 hours ago, The_Kincardine said:

Pinker's book had a section on language acquisition comparing 'native' to 'learned' and his thesis was that you have until the age of 6 to learn a language natively.  After that you can learn the language well but won't have that native facility.  Do you think he's being harsh here?

I think that’s generally accepted, but it’s probably not a hard cut-off at 6, but rather a stage of development that we reach where our brain’s underlying grammatical ‘schema’ solidifies. We seem to have a lot of plasticity in our language faculty until that age, and less after. This means that young kids learn fast, but that they also forget fast. I’ve heard of kids that spoke fluent Cantonese aged 5, but as adults remember not a word and are no longer able to differentiate the sounds of that language.

Fullerene’s point about phonetics is an important part of it as well. It’s very difficult as an adult to learn the difference between, say, Chinese ‘x’ and ‘sh’ sounds.

Nevertheless, you can still achieve a very high level of competence in a language without being ‘native’. And most interactions in English involve one or more non-native speakers. Most of the time they understand each other just fine.

[Sergeant Wilson]

22 minutes ago, elsegador said:

 

Nevertheless, you can still achieve a very high level of competence in a language without being ‘native’. 

...by shouting and pointing.