Languages

[blackshoe]

Perhaps not "correct", but "acceptable". :D

[Lobowolf]

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]

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]

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.”

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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 :D

 

Robert

[gwnn]

P.S. Hungarian is a weird language.

Yes:)

[PassedOut]

P.S. Hungarian is a weird language.

Yes:)

Like Finnish.

[OleBerg]

P.S. Hungarian is a weird language.

Yes:)

Like Finnish.

Yes, quite peculiar that these two languages are related to each other, but not to any other scandinavian or european languages.

 

But Finnish is definitely more weird. They have this word:

 

Jäääärne

 

which desribes a property ice can have, on the border of ice/non-ice terrain. (Or something like that.)

[gwnn]

Finnish and Estonian are fairly close (but not really mutually intelligible) but they are quite far from Hungarian. However, the vowels are similar as are the logic of the languages (agglutinative and with no genders). I know the words for 'hand' and 'blood' are the same and a few others.

[shyams]

Isn't Hungarian most akin to Kazakh or some such Central Asian language?

[gwnn]

That's one theory but not the most widely accepted one. Anyway there is a marked Turkic element to it. According to conspiracy theorists, there was a conscious decision of Hungarian linguists some time in the early 19th century that from now on Hungarian is a Finno-Ugric language with some Turkic elements as opposed to vice versa and they burned the books (and their authors??) that stated otherwise. I am not sure about this last part, though. It does not take a PhD in linguistics, however, to see how really weird a language it is :lol:

[junyi_zhu]

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.

Not that difficult. First, there are about 5K to 6K daily used characters. Second, at elementary schools, kids just learn about 10 to 20 characters in each lessons. So kids can pretty much read newspaper after grade 2 or 3. Of course, there are a lot of quizes by the teacher to test whether the kids still remember the new characters. To me, Chinese characters are simpler because I can memorize the shape better, not the order of English characters to form a word.

 

Chinese speaking is relatively simple. Many foreigner can speak good Chinese after staying there for a few years.

[junyi_zhu]

That's one theory but not the most widely accepted one. Anyway there is a marked Turkic element to it. According to conspiracy theorists, there was a conscious decision of Hungarian linguists some time in the early 19th century that from now on Hungarian is a Finno-Ugric language with some Turkic elements as opposed to vice versa and they burned the books (and their authors??) that stated otherwise. I am not sure about this last part, though. It does not take a PhD in linguistics, however, to see how really weird a language it is :lol:

What's the relationship between Hungarian and Hun?

[gwnn]

In current theory, none, according to legends, there were two brothers, Hunor and Magor, one of whom started the Huns and the other the Magyars.

 

My dad's cousin is a relatively big nationalist and he said that the relationship is evident and the languages are related. And that the Hungarian marauds in the 9th and 10th centuries were because they were trying to get back what Attila lost in the 5th century, which is supposed to be rightfully theirs and these treasures were in monasteries in France and that's why the Hungarians attacked Western Europe several times. I am skeptical about all this but he is quite convinced. Apparently there are Chinese and Korean linguists who are currently researching the Hungarian language and try to trace it to something in the Eastern Asian area. I haven't read about any of this, I know that wikipedia dismisses anything similar to this post as pseudoscience.

[Gerben42]

As a latecomer: Dutch, but after 7 years in Germany I am sometimes struggling to find words, especially for technical stuff.

[junyi_zhu]

In current theory, none, according to legends, there were two brothers, Hunor and Magor, one of whom started the Huns and the other the Magyars.

 

My dad's cousin is a relatively big nationalist and he said that the relationship is evident and the languages are related. And that the Hungarian marauds in the 9th and 10th centuries were because they were trying to get back what Attila lost in the 5th century, which is supposed to be rightfully theirs and these treasures were in monasteries in France and that's why the Hungarians attacked Western Europe several times. I am skeptical about all this but he is quite convinced. Apparently there are Chinese and Korean linguists who are currently researching the Hungarian language and try to trace it to something in the Eastern Asian area. I haven't read about any of this, I know that wikipedia dismisses anything similar to this post as pseudoscience.

That's interesting. I actually don't know whether Hun has a strong relationship with "Xiongnu" in China. They certainly sound very close. Hun was so powerful in the early Han dynasty and the Han emperors was forced to send the princess to them for peace. Later, they were defeated by Han and divided into two parts. The southern division merged into Chinese in a few hundred years. Actually Jin Dynasty was destroyed by them. Still, they actually appreciated Chinese culture and later completely merged into Chinese. Now I think some north Chinese with the family name Liu can easily have Xiongnu's blood, because many of them adopted Liu as the Han name because they also think they are descendants of Han emperor (because of the marriage of Xiongnu's King and Han princess).

The northern division ran to central Asia and later, nobody really knows where they went.

 

A similar story happened again in Tang dynasty. Tang defeated Turks and Turks divided into two parts. The western part also ran to central Asia and nobody really know where they went later. Nowadays, some think Turkey can have a strong relation with the Ancient Turk.

[Rossoneri]

Csaba, I find it interesting that you asked about the difficulty of Chinese. I have heard that Hungarian is one of the most difficult languages to learn in the world!

 

Although I did find one similarity Hungarians have with the Chinese - we put our surnames before our first names.