Languages

[OleBerg]

Harsh.

 

(In Danish.)

[pooltuna]

English.

 

I think in my case it's most accurate to say English is my second language and I don't have a first. ;)

yeah I have a tough case too. If you assume it is your mother's then mine would be Dutch. If you assume it is your father's then mine would be English. Of course I spent my first 6 years in Venezuela (I speak Spanish fairly fluently but with a child's vocabulary) and I stopped speaking Dutch around the age of 3(and have no fluency). So I guess in fact my first language would be English(Americanized version)

[jdonn]

Pooltuna's obsession with quoting my posts to make replies that have nothing more to do with mine than any others has reached new heights!

[pooltuna]

oops

[pooltuna]

Damn, I exceeded his paranoia level and set him off :blink:

[kenberg]

Pooltuna's obsession with quoting my posts to make replies that have nothing more to do with mine than any others has reached new heights!

Yeah, and speaking of new heights I'll be going hiking in a few weeks.

[jjbrr]

Pooltuna's obsession with quoting my posts to make replies that have nothing more to do with mine than any others has reached new heights!

Yeah, and speaking of new heights I'll be going hiking in a few weeks.

details?

[PassedOut]

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.

 

He, as a mathematician/physicist, thinks mainly in images.

 

I think mainly in words but can also think of some abstract concepts without using words (for example about abstract concepts that I don't have words for). I will then mainly think in some kind of meta-graphical, i.e. something that is semantically close to images not quite images.

I think in words when figuring out what to say or write. But I'm not sure how words could even be involved in many of the things we think about -- and I'm not just talking about erotic reveries.

 

My first wife and I liked to play chess without a board, for example. Don't know how you'd even approach doing that using words. Same with visualizing the opponents' hands at bridge. (Well, maybe that would be possible, but quite awkward.)

[dicklont]

Dutch

I would like to say Frisian, Hollands second official language spoken by many where i live, but it's not.

[matmat]

Yah, I speak Minnesotan. You bet.

you betcha?

[Fluffy]

spannish, but my spannish is different from hannoi's lol

 

I agree with the need of language to be conciouss.

 

I read somewhere that laponians (or whatever the name for the people who live in the pole) have 26 different words/tones for white color, and they differentiate between them. First step is to have a name, then you can identify it (pattern matching)

[junyi_zhu]

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.

 

He, as a mathematician/physicist, thinks mainly in images.

 

I think mainly in words but can also think of some abstract concepts without using words (for example about abstract concepts that I don't have words for). I will then mainly think in some kind of meta-graphical, i.e. something that is semantically close to images not quite images.

I think in words when figuring out what to say or write. But I'm not sure how words could even be involved in many of the things we think about -- and I'm not just talking about erotic reveries.

 

My first wife and I liked to play chess without a board, for example. Don't know how you'd even approach doing that using words. Same with visualizing the opponents' hands at bridge. (Well, maybe that would be possible, but quite awkward.)

I played Chinese chess vocally with my friend when we biked home. Then I realized that I rarely think in words.

[babalu1997]

One time I subbed in a team match.

 

It was a pity substitution, someone had left because of horrrendous results.

 

My lho was a rather good russian player, but his dialogue was peculiar:

 

-- thank you my buddy

-- good luck my bloke

-- my boy bid well

-- yes buddy my dude

 

his partner was polite, but did not sound enthusiastic

 

until the russian explained

 

i am practicing my english buddy boy

[MickyB]

My first language is English, but I generally think in a Canadian dialect called GlenAshtonian.

[Rossoneri]

English is my first language, which comes as a shock to most people here in the UK because I'm ethnically Chinese after all. But then few people know that English is the first language in Singapore. (Although Bolo Santosi would make you think otherwise!)

 

Mandarin Chinese is my mother tongue and so a second language (although I did it in school at the "first language" level). The funniest thing is, a few weeks into my first year, some Chinese coursemates were seated next to me and one of them asked the other in Mandarin what the lecturer had just wrote. I answered the question in Mandarin and the guy next to me said, "You can understand Mandarin!" and I was like "Of course!"

 

So yeah, after coming to the UK, I have had some people thinking I don't understand English well and some people thinking I don't understand Mandarin.

 

Other Chinese dialects I understand, in decreasing order: Hokkien (Similar to Taiwanese, the main dialect group of Singaporean Chinese), Foochow (my mother's dialect), Cantonese (my father's dialect, and I am really hopeless in understand much)

 

I also studied Malay for 2 years so I understand some very basic words.

 

My Malaysian Chinese housemates are proficient in English, Mandarin, Malay and their own dialect, so I really pale in comparison to them...

[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]

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. :D

[Fluffy]

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]

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.