Do You Speak A Second Language?

I've seen 5th graders writing advanced essays in Spanish on dinosaurs.
Surely easier to use paper?

*internet high fives dog latin*

oh how i lol'd

Z S - I think there's a Mandarin thread on ILX.

sadly I only know school/college-level german and french. Ich heisse Kirsten und ich bin dreizen jahre alt. Wie komme ich am besten zum Bahnhof bitte?
Oh and I can say the first few words in mandarin(?) and last few words in Spanish of 'please reserve the front seats for seniors and people with disabilities', thanks Muni.
Would kind of love to speak Japanese.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

On the off chance that there's anyone near central London with a free morning or afternoon who would like to pilot a new English-language proficiency test, ILX-mail me. You'd need to be a native speaker of English and you'd get a £30 Amazon voucher for your time.

saya bisa bicara bahasa indonesia - tidak seratus persen lancar, tapi cukup untuk momong2. darimana* roz?

(* "darimana: meant in terms of a) where are you from? and b) just as a normal conversational gambit - indonesians don't really say "how are you?" to each other very much. i mean, there's a translation for that phrase ("apa kabar" or "what's news") in indonesian, which indonesians use to talk to tourists (even if you don't speak english, most balinese seem to somehow know that "apa kabar" is usually about the 5th and 6th words of indonesian the tourists tend to learn), or perhaps someone close to them, that they haven't seen in months. BUT: usually they ask either "where are you coming from" or "where are you going" instead. which seems intrusive if you aren't used to it but it's just the equivalent of "how are you" - it's not really like you want to know about someone's inner emotional lives when you ask "how are you", and if you're coming from your mistress's house or something, you don't actually have to say so when asked "darimana?", "jalan jalan saja" is fine.

also, i used to be able to speak crappy-but-enough-to-scrape-by thai, but it's been so long since i've been in thailand that about all i can do is count to 10 as a bar trick. neung, som, saw, see, ha, hok, get, bat, gauw, sip... wait, am i fucking that up?

oh saya juga gak bisa ngomong bahasa indo dengan betul atau tepat, karena saya sebenarnya dari Kuala Lumpur. kamu tinggal di Indo dulu ya?

(this feels oddly formal - when I talk to my Indonesian friends, instead of "saya" dan "kamu" I usually use "gue" and "lu/lo", which is basically just urban/young people-speak (derived from Chinese) for "I" and "you".)

love how plurals in bahasa are just the wordx2

Yesterday Brandon Mably (famous knitter) kept asking if I hadn't lived in England or was a native English speaker. My standard knee-jerk but also honest reply: "Watched too much BBC when I was a child." lol. Also, I am just (or maybe was?) very good at languages, especially accents.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Only one obvious joke-vote. Amazing!

love how plurals in bahasa are just the wordx2

actually it's kinda cooler than that - you can just repeat a word and it means something similar but new. for example: jalan = "road" jalan2 (jalan jalan) = "drive/walk around to some places, whatev"

Roz, gue and ku/lo is, yeah, they call it bahasa gaul ("language cool") though it's so common it's almost ubiquitous. is it from originally from chinese? i thought it was batawi (the jakarta ethnic group, and therefore how hip city people talk on tv)

then again i learned my indonesian in a university setting, so a lot of words i use sound sorta ridiculously formal, but at least people understand me. more or less. actually i wont deny it, my indo is fairly shitty for having been here 9 years! but, a lot of expats in bali barely try, so most people cut me a lot of slack for even bothering to be able to hold a stilted conversation

oh yeah, roz: ngga, yang benar saya tinggal di bali sekarang, sudah simbilan tahun disini...

ha, this is awesome, talkin bahasa on ilx :) small world and stuff.

That's called reduplication iirc? (repeating morphemes to change syntax?)

Yep! Or doubling. Apparently Indonesian makes frequent use of it, which is kind of interesting. I learned to associate it with pidgin/creole languages, of which Indonesian is not one.

Also, when you say the word "jalan" all I can think of is this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyndakiGbaw

Turkish has that doubling thing. One purpose it has is to make an adjective into an adverb. So yavaş = slow, yavaş yavaş = slowly.

Those are interesting results.

In fact this has been a v v interesting & informative thread on many levels.

Roz, gue and ku/lo is, yeah, they call it bahasa gaul ("language cool") though it's so common it's almost ubiquitous. is it from originally from chinese? i thought it was batawi (the jakarta ethnic group, and therefore how hip city people talk on tv)

yep it is Betawi but gue-lu was originally from Hokkien. Gua-lu is also pretty common among KL-ites, but over here it codes not so much as "cool" but urban poor/low class.

Yep! Or doubling. Apparently Indonesian makes frequent use of it, which is kind of interesting. I learned to associate it with pidgin/creole languages, of which Indonesian is not one.

plenty of Malay/Indonesian ethnic languages are pidgin/creoles though - Betawi, for one is creolized-Malay, influenced heavily by the Malay used by Chinese, Dutch and Portuguese settlers.

the doubling of words is interesting. There's changing the meaning of a word (like jalan2), and plurals (teman = friend, teman2 = friends). And then there's words like "masing-masing" which only exists in its doubled form (and is kind of hard to translate. sort of means "individually" or "each", but it's not quite either of those either).

plenty of Malay/Indonesian ethnic languages are pidgin/creoles though - Betawi, for one is creolized-Malay, influenced heavily by the Malay used by Chinese, Dutch and Portuguese settlers.

Oh, yeah... but the presence of reduplication in Indonesian/Malaysian isn't a result of the creolizations. It's a common feature of the Malayo-Polynesian language family. Sorry, I wasn't very clear with that statement.

maybe I'll just keep kicking this thing until it becomes a general topics in linguistics thread.

That would be fine with me. I love to read about this stuff, even though I have no formal education in it.

Maybe we could ask a mod to add "Rolling Linguistics Thread" to the title?

i'd totally post in a rolling linguistics thread - it's a trip growing up american and never even needing or wanting to learn a fergn language, then actually having to. plenty to talk about! plus, holy shit, the trolling that could be done

that's what i'm afraid of
1000 posts to come up with a name for a thing that has already been named for decades
i guess i'll just have to put up or shut up <-- lord love a phrasal verb

I did it again. One of our pages asked me in Spanish if we had any storytimes yesterday morning and I shouted out "nai!" (nothing, in Japanese) to a roomful of expectant families. Why do I do that?

It seems to be a thing. In Cornish class last night, this woman started a sentence in Cornish, got distracted by a word she stumbled over, then finished the statement in German. If you learn other languages as an adult, they get filed in the same place as "other language" rather than differentiated.

Yeah, when I was struggling for a word in Spanish, there were many times when all I could come up with was the Japanese word... like ten years after I'd quit studying Japanese. Where does it come from?

In other news, the newish John McWhorter book "What Language Is (and What It Isn't and What It Could Be)" has some really interesting stuff relating to adult language acquisition and the effect it has on languages worldwide, particularly those used as lingua francas. Also is a good attempt at getting across a concept that is very difficult for an English-only speaker to grasp: English in the context of the world's languages is not a typical language at all, so it is not a great model for getting a sense of how language itself works. Namely that it's comparatively regular and predictable grammar gives the illusion that language is (or needs to be) far more orderly and systematic than most of them historically are.

Is English orderly and systematic, though? When I study other languages, I always am struck by the sense that it really isn't. The only thing that's easy to use about English is how much things like word endings have worn off. That one only needs to grasp for one form of a word to say "with" as opposed to 6 in Cornish.

I think in Europe it might actually be Latin that gives more of the impression that languages are regular and orderly.

But I do agree that English isn't typical at all. That it's a bodged together language itself.

yeah, compared to French the rules for English are incredibly erratic. French has a maddening number of tenses and rules but once you learn them they're incredibly consistent and reliable. English, not so much.

In the context of the world's known languages, yes, English is comparatively simple and orderly. As the McWhorter book (among others) discusses, this is partly the result of a history involving repeated waves of adult language learners adopting the language for day-to-day use. Compare English to Icelandic in terms of history... it is not an accident that the Germanic language spoken by the isolated islanders kept its rich inflection and case systems and the one that faced repeated waves of invasion and rule by non-native speakers lost those things.

So yeah, compared to English, the French verb tenses are complicated. But neither of them have anything on the Navajo verb system. It's beyond the capability of most adults to achieve fluency in at all.

It's probably worth stating explicitly if we are going to be talking about differing levels of complexity in language that all languages are still functionally equivalent. If we are talking about grammar, sound inventories, or lexicon size, we're talking about structural complexity. Higher structural complexity does not make a language or its speakers capable of expressing more complex thoughts or supporting more complex societies, and more importantly, the opposite is also untrue: structurally "simple" languages can express anything structurally "complex" languages can. This false equivalence is so prevalent among people without a linguistics background that generally linguists will just tell you that all languages are equally complex. Functionally, they are. Structurally, some are far more complex than others.

But neither of them have anything on the Navajo verb system. It's beyond the capability of most adults to achieve fluency in at all.

To clarify, most native English-speaking adults with no background in Navajo is who I mean by "most adults"; clearly native Navajo-speaking adults have no problem with it.

I was told as a child that Navajos themselves don't achieve full fluency until they're in their 40s - I have never actually checked this but my mother told me that, and it seems too delicious a fact to want to disprove

wiki makes navajo sound great and head-fking, not feeling like i'd be 100% on this after a couple of weeks of classes:

Like most Athabaskan languages, Southern Athabaskan languages show various levels of animacy in its grammar, with certain nouns taking specific verb forms according to their rank in this animacy hierarchy. For instance, Navajo nouns can be ranked by animacy on a continuum from most animate (a human or lightning) to least animate (an abstraction) (Young & Morgan 1987: 65-66):
humans/lightning → infants/big animals → med-size animals → small animals → insects → natural forces → inanimate objects/plants → abstractions
Generally, the most animate noun in a sentence must occur first while the noun with lesser animacy occurs second.

OYE hispanohablantes -- hice un hilo en 77 para charlar en español
necesito practicar, y uds deben ayudarme en este asunto

私は日本語の一年生です。
Mi studas Esperanton, sed mi estas nur komencanto.
Ego sum ​​Latinis studebat.

this guy
<3 language virtuosos
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CWPfZjRatk

huh that is actually impressive. He's talking in a regional dialect that even I can't speak, not without living there for a few years at least.

AND one of my professors posted this re: code switching, also interesting re: general language sniping and its implications
http://www.ebony.com/news-views/when-you-make-fun-of-rachel-jeantel-you-make-fun-of-us-333#axzz2XSN22JRP

This quiz is fun, to the extent that you enjoy guessing global dialects of English based on audio samples (I do!):

http://qz.com/259129/quiz-can-you-guess-the-accent/

I got some of the tougher ones from being lucky enough to work in a job where I interact with people from all over the world all the time and recognizing their accents.

RIYL word salad, funny translations
http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2014/09/05/the-case-of-the-sinister-buttocks

That quiz was pretty good! I got stumped by one where I wasn't sure if the speaker was S. African with an RPish accent or Dutch with an RPish accent.

I like it when people post those mistranslated signs on Facebook (usually Chinese or Japanese) because I can then try and figure out the intermediate steps which led to the bizarre translation.

I got 10/12, and the two that I missed I wavered at the last second away from the correct answer choice :(

http://www.economist.com/blogs/analects/2014/09/dyslexia-chinese?fsrc=rss

http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2014/09/10/is-chinese-the-best-language-for-learning-math/?mod=WSJBlog

https://www.mcgill.ca/medicine/node/160311