[Gerardo]

Spanish, somewhat different to Hanoi's and Fluffy's.

[mgoetze]

German. (I did spend substantial parts of my childhood in the unfrench parts of Canada, however.)

[pooltuna]

Gerardo, on Jun 24 2010, 08:54 PM, said:

Spanish, somewhat different to Hanoi's and Fluffy's.

What are the most common Spanish dialects. I think Castillian and Catalan are the only 2 of which I vaguely aware. Although for all I know Catalan could be as different from Castillian as Portugese is.

[gwnn]

Friendly advice: don't say 'Catalan is a Spanish dialect' in Barcelona.

[hanp]

lol, very true Csaba.

[Aberlour10]

When I visit South Poland I like to talk in Silesian language with older people, it sounds so fancy to me.

[Fluffy]

pooltuna, on Jun 25 2010, 01:19 PM, said:

Gerardo, on Jun 24 2010, 08:54 PM, said:

Spanish, somewhat different to Hanoi's and Fluffy's.

What are the most common Spanish dialects. I think Castillian and Catalan are the only 2 of which I vaguely aware. Although for all I know Catalan could be as different from Castillian as Portugese is.

I am not a big expert, but argentinian is easilly differentiated, and so is mexican. But for the rest of south america, they all sound more or less the same to me.


Unsurpisingly Cuban and the one from Cannary Islands sound almost the same.

Catalan is different enough that anyone speaking any kind of spannish will not understand properly talking with a Catalan speaker.

[Winstonm]

My first attempt at language was baby babble, but it soon became apparent to me that I was the only one who understood what I was trying to say, so I abandonded baby babble for simply babbling in English.

[helene_t]

pooltuna, on Jun 25 2010, 02:19 PM, said:

Gerardo, on Jun 24 2010, 08:54 PM, said:

Spanish, somewhat different to Hanoi's and Fluffy's.

What are the most common Spanish dialects. I think Castillian and Catalan are the only 2 of which I vaguely aware. Although for all I know Catalan could be as different from Castillian as Portugese is.

There isn't really a generally accepted distinction between the meaning of the words "language" and "dialect". Often the word "dialect" is used with a political connotation, e.g. if I say that Bornholmian is a dialect of Danish whereas Norwegian Bokmol is a distinct language, it has little to do with linguistics but just expresses that I believe Bornholm belong (or should belong) to Denmark politically whereas Norway does (or should) not.

OTOH when a region has it's own language council that stipulates an official orthography, it is generally considered a language rather than a dialect.

Somehow American English is rarely referred to as a language not as a dialect. Is it so that British English spelling is generally accepted as "correct" in the U.S. ?

[gwnn]

How do Chinese people learn to read and write at school? They have as much as 30k letters in the alphabet; it must take some time and diligence. I'm not trying to make a joke, I am really interested.

[blackshoe]

Perhaps not "correct", but "acceptable".

[Lobowolf]

helene_t, on Jun 24 2010, 07:05 AM, said:

Roger Penrose made an interesting point in "The emperor's new mind". He said that it is a prevailing idea in the literature on consciousness that language is a prerequisite for consciousness, and that that is probably due to the fact that most of it has been written by philosophers, who are a sort of people that think a lot in words.

Recommended reading related to this point for fans of literature in general and/or Shakespeare in particular:

Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, by Harold Bloom

[Rossoneri]

gwnn, on Jun 26 2010, 01:45 PM, said:

How do Chinese people learn to read and write at school? They have as much as 30k letters in the alphabet; it must take some time and diligence. I'm not trying to make a joke, I am really interested.

It does take a lot of time and diligence, hence the younger generation of Chinese Singaporeans are getting disinterested in learning it properly. (Which, IMO, is a shame.) One of the head teachers in my alma mater warned us last time that the amount of time we set aside for studying Chinese should be equal to the amount of time we set aside for ALL the rest of our subjects, so studying Chinese was equivalent to studying 8 other subjects...I definitely spent a lot of time memorising phrases and idioms and remembering how to write words! Even then, I would probably be very happy if I knew half the words in the dictionary.

That aside, Chinese characters are usually made up of different parts. These parts have all evolved from pictograms used in ancient times so there is usually some reason why a character is written as it is. So you can have words which have the same pronunciation but written slightly differently based on the context. Think of it as putting prefixes and suffixes on root words. So it is not that easy, but not that hard either.

[y66]

Quote

Unable to sleep, the poet Marie Ponsot lay in a hospital bed one night last month trying to figure out what it was that she no longer knew. A few days earlier, she’d had a stroke. Her brain had been ransacked. Poems that she had been reciting from memory for the better part of a century had disappeared. She cross-examined herself: What, she asked, have I lost?

Of course she could not answer. “You can’t say what you don’t know,” Ms. Ponsot, 89, said last week. “So I thought, let me go back to the earliest thing I ever knew by heart.”

It was not a poem, but the Lord’s Prayer, which she had learned as a child in Queens. “I thought, Oh yeah, I’ll do it, Our Father,” she said. She did not get past the first phrase.

“ ‘Our Father’ — and that was it, period,” Ms. Ponsot said. “Then I thought, I was living in France in 1947, I learned the French ‘Our Father.’ Sure. I launched into that very confidently. ‘Notre père qui.’ Couldn’t get any further.”

She remembered that the Spanish mystic Teresa of Avila had written a meditation on the prayer. An image came to her of a page from the Roman missal; she could, she said, see the page’s border, but not the words. Then it arrived whole, in Latin: Pater noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum. She tried to translate the Latin to English, to reverse-engineer her memory, like a computer hacking itself. “It was getting sticky, until all of a sudden it popped into my head,” she said. “In English.”

Quote

Was remembering the Pater Noster that night in the hospital a moment of awakening? Ms. Ponsot grinned, perhaps at another unduly fancy thought.

“It allowed me,” she said, “to go to sleep.”

Doux rêves?

From a story about Ms. Ponsot in today's paper.

[mgoetze]

gwnn, on Jun 26 2010, 01:45 PM, said:

How do Chinese people learn to read and write at school? They have as much as 30k letters in the alphabet; it must take some time and diligence. I'm not trying to make a joke, I am really interested.

I think you can count the number of people worldwide who have 30k characters in their active vocabulary on your fingers. Chinese literacy statistics count anyone who knows 500. Realistically, you need 2500-3500 to do stuff such as reading newspapers.

I can currently read and write about 80.

Oh, BTW, forget about pictograms. Chinese is more a phonetic language (just not a very good one) - see John DeFrancis, "The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy" for details.

[NickRW]

helene_t, on Jun 26 2010, 12:38 PM, said:

Somehow American English is rarely referred to as a language not as a dialect. Is it so that British English spelling is generally accepted as "correct" in the U.S. ?

AFAIK there is no official reason. I guess it is a question of identity. For example, Scots (i.e. something akin to English - not Scottish Gaelic) is recognised by some as a separate language - but the Scots are a bit full of themselves about being Scottish first, British a reluctant second and definitely not English in any way, shape or form. Whereas our friends across the pond no longer suffer under the rule of Westminister so don't feel the urge to assert themselves so much.

Anyway, to answer the OP, my first and only real language is English. I can make out a few words in French, German, Russian and Esperanto - but have never really worked on learning any of them properly. Oh - and there was a spell where I travelled a lot to Holland in connection with my work - but the Dutch all said anyone trying to learn Dutch must be crazy and the people I worked with spoke such good English that there really wasn't any point in trying - something to do with the BBC providing so much better television they said.

Nick

[helene_t]

NickRW, on Jun 28 2010, 03:44 AM, said:

Oh - and there was a spell where I travelled a lot to Holland in connection with my work - but the Dutch all said anyone trying to learn Dutch must be crazy and the people I worked with spoke such good English that there really wasn't any point in trying - something to do with the BBC providing so much better television they said.

This is not my experience at all. Sure, most people in Amsterdam understand if you ask "which way to the van Gogh Museum?" in English and many may even be able to give directions, and if you work in an academic institution people will be happy to speak English at meetings for the sake of a single foreigner since they hardly know the professional lingo in Dutch anyway.

But most people find it hard to have deep conversation in English, and if you go to a private party or some social thing like a bridge club, people around you speak Dutch. Very few Dutch employers (especially, but not only, outside academic areas) are able to conduct a job interview in English. After having been in the country for two weeks I got into some troubles that required a three-our interview with two policewomen. At that point my German/Dutch hybrid language might have reached 50% Dutch so it was obviously quite exhausting, but very good practice!

I really found it essential to learn Dutch quickly as I would have been totally isolated without it.

Fortunately Dutch is very easy to learn if you already speak some other Germanic languages. And the first place I lived was in a shared household with some young people most of whom spoke no English at all and most of whom were unemployed like me, so I was kinda exposed to it 24/7. After 6 weeks in the country I never used English anymore when talking to Dutch people.

[NickRW]

helene_t, on Jun 28 2010, 08:50 AM, said:

This is not my experience at all...

Well, I worked with computer people - you'll find that people who are not English native speakers who work a lot with computers do learn English - because so much of the documentation and training material is in English - or at least that has been my experience the world over - even in France where some of them speak English very reluctantly.

I guess it also kinda helped that the company I was working for was Unilever - which is Anglo-Dutch in origin - and they had an explicit policy that international communication has to be in English. In other words - if you wanted to work there - and wanted to climb the slippery slope - you spoke English. The first place I got sent to was Hungary - I kinda expected them to speak a bit of Russian (spitting while doing it) and some German - well I found that they did speak quite a bit of German - but the computer folks had really very good English.

Also I had no problem with English at Dutch airports - or in the Hotels - in Rotterdam or Gouda - which is where I often was. In fact the only place I found myself in need of Dutch was when I was trying to buy something for a headache one day - eventually gestures got me what I wanted. Guess I had a rather cocooned view - with a secretary booking the taxis and hotels and all manner of support like that.

Nick

P.S. Hungarian is a weird language.

P.P.S And they had about the weakest tea I've found anywhere - and the coffee shoulda been licensed - talk about getting a 30 minute buzz and then falling asleep.

[Aberlour10]

helene_t, on Jun 28 2010, 03:50 AM, said:

This is not my experience at all. Sure, most people in Amsterdam understand if you ask "which way to the van Gogh Museum?" in English and many may even be able to give directions, and if you work in an academic institution people will be happy to speak English at meetings for the sake of a single foreigner since they hardly know the professional lingo in Dutch anyway.

This recall me on a small test I did some years ago in Hague. I walked there around with my girlfriend and at one point I asked somebody in german language about the way to the beach in Scheveningen. I got the answer, but very very unfriendly.... so I decided to try it several times, rotational in german and in english. The result seemed to be clear, its still better to use english there

Robert

[gwnn]

NickRW, on Jun 28 2010, 04:44 PM, said:

P.S. Hungarian is a weird language.

Yes:)