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Language issues
26 Jul 2010 01:55 pmSince my language ability could be classified as preternatural, it may be possible that I expect too much of other people when they are faced with a foreign language.
After all, I did borrow Sylvain's French-German dictionary (since the teacher had explicitly barred me from bringing my German-English dictionary to class) to look up German legal terms regarding trials (prisoner, defendant, plaintiff, alleged, etc). The fact that a majority of English legal terms are Latinate in origin, and thus share a root with the French, no doubt helped. A lot of English words have Latinate roots (the fancy ones, mostly, since the more vulgar versions have Germanic roots: excrement vs shit), so I can sort of figure out some very basic stuff written in a Romance language.
Then there are all the cognates of German in English: bread/Brot, knight/Knecht, sun/Sonne, hell/Hölle, stool/Stühl (which actually means chair, but never mind that), board/Brett ... the list goes on.
(I'm sticking to Indo-European languages here, and not including, say, Hungarian or Japanese, because they're from different language families, and are quite different in vocabulary.)
I would expect a peer to be able to deduce that, for example, "am Montag 26. Juli um 19:00 Uhr" has something to do with Monday July 26 and 7 pm (19:00). Not so much with, I don't know, "Doch ich sage euch: Gott existiert und wenn ich euch seinen wahren Namen verrate, werdet ihr vom Unglauben abfallen und Gott preisen, denn Gottes wahrer Name ist: KEIN SCHWEIN." Except maybe it has something to do with God and pigs and names.
(That book, though? LAUGH RIOT. Until the ending, which is typisch Deutsch. Kann ich aber unbedingt empfehlen, wenn dir Terry Pratchett gefällt.)
Do I expect too much?
This ramble brought to you by procrastination.
After all, I did borrow Sylvain's French-German dictionary (since the teacher had explicitly barred me from bringing my German-English dictionary to class) to look up German legal terms regarding trials (prisoner, defendant, plaintiff, alleged, etc). The fact that a majority of English legal terms are Latinate in origin, and thus share a root with the French, no doubt helped. A lot of English words have Latinate roots (the fancy ones, mostly, since the more vulgar versions have Germanic roots: excrement vs shit), so I can sort of figure out some very basic stuff written in a Romance language.
Then there are all the cognates of German in English: bread/Brot, knight/Knecht, sun/Sonne, hell/Hölle, stool/Stühl (which actually means chair, but never mind that), board/Brett ... the list goes on.
(I'm sticking to Indo-European languages here, and not including, say, Hungarian or Japanese, because they're from different language families, and are quite different in vocabulary.)
I would expect a peer to be able to deduce that, for example, "am Montag 26. Juli um 19:00 Uhr" has something to do with Monday July 26 and 7 pm (19:00). Not so much with, I don't know, "Doch ich sage euch: Gott existiert und wenn ich euch seinen wahren Namen verrate, werdet ihr vom Unglauben abfallen und Gott preisen, denn Gottes wahrer Name ist: KEIN SCHWEIN." Except maybe it has something to do with God and pigs and names.
(That book, though? LAUGH RIOT. Until the ending, which is typisch Deutsch. Kann ich aber unbedingt empfehlen, wenn dir Terry Pratchett gefällt.)
Do I expect too much?
This ramble brought to you by procrastination.
