Language issues

[feuervogel]

Since 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.

Comments

[jon-leonard.livejournal.com]

It's a tough question: The skill of figuring out some meaning from context isn't all that hard (for most people), but it takes practice. It's also a lot easier if you're fluent in some other language.

So the related question is, how reasonable is it to expect people to be multilingual? In a lot of the US, it's pretty close to useless. Saying I'm fluent in the language of every country within 800 miles is just saying I speak English, and it's pretty rare that I even have an opportunity to use anything else.

So, while it would be nice if people could manage to guess meaning from languages they don't speak, it's just not going to be something that everyone can do.

[feuervogel]

I would define a peer as someone who studied a foreign language in high school, not necessarily someone who has a degree in a foreign language. That would be limiting it too much.

I'm always surprised when people can't guess meaning from context. It's something I do all the damn time, you know? That's how I read Spiegel without a dictionary. That's how I read some things in ENGLISH without a dictionary.

[anthimeria]

I know I've already said that I'm deficient when it comes to learning languages--five years of Latin dribbled out of my head really quite quickly. When I was still in classes I could do what you're talking about--derive meaning from context in a number of languages with Latin roots, to the point where I could get the gist of simple things, and maybe subjects if the writing was complicated.

But I can't do that any more.

It's been too long since I used the skill, being that I am also an American and rarely if ever get a chance to interact with people who speak other languages. I can't even read simple Latin any more. I remember basics about the language--no punctuation, sentences end in verbs, the singular and plural of basic noun forms--but that's IT.

Now, I'm extremely language-learning deficient, and even though I know and accept this about myself, it's still frustrating. My brain just does not work that way.

So . . . I don't know. If the peer in question has experience in deriving context from meaning in other languages (I'm really good at it in English, just not in anything else), or is fluent or conversant in another language, then this is definitely a skill you should expect. On the other hand, there's me at the opposite end of the spectrum from you. Have patience.

(On a third hand, I'm guessing most people's language skills fall somewhere between ours. What that means re: deriving from context, I'm not sure.)

[feuervogel]

I had a year of Latin, in 1991/92, so I've forgotten pretty much everything (except the little singsong mnemonic of the present tense indicative and passive verb endings). But I do have a ridiculous vocabulary and a good memory for random trivial crap. This may also help.

(I carried on a basic conversation with an old woman in Japan who spoke no English for a good 5-10 minutes. After taking 2 years of university Japanese 8 years before. When I say my language ability is unusual, I'm not joking. I'm functionally illiterate in Japanese, however.)

I probably do have a biased expectation, because I'm not aware of just how unusual my ability is.

Though regarding context - if people read books, they come across words they don't know. I don't pick up my dictionary at every new word (unless it keeps coming up and knowing exactly what it means would be a huge damn help, or if I need to know what it means because the sentence could be sarcastic and that would change the implied meaning (this is more often a problem in German)). I think most of my friends read SF & F often enough to be familiar with made-up words and can guess from context, so maybe I expect that to apply in mundania too?

I really don't know. It's come up a couple times fairly recently, and I was like "wtf, how couldn't you figure that out? it's not hard..." so I thought I'd ask my people in the internet how far off base I am.

[anthimeria]

Though regarding context - if people read books, they come across words they don't know. I don't pick up my dictionary at every new word . . . I think most of my friends read SF & F often enough to be familiar with made-up words and can guess from context, so maybe I expect that to apply in mundania too?

I'm right there with you on that--it always bugs me when people can't figure out what a made-up word means from context and parts of the word. Spec-fic words always come from somewhere! This is actually where I most often apply my Latin: I can make up words that sound like real English by modifying a related Latin term.

I might be biased, but it's been my experience that people who read a lot of spec-fic tend to be better at things like that. People who read books solely based in the real modern world aren't as good at using clues to derive a whole, whereas that's what we do all the time in spec-fic. (I was the only spec-fic reader in a book group once. They had serious trouble with the fantasy book I picked, and every other book we read was either modern or recent history. Needless to say I wasn't in it long.)

[feuervogel]

Speaking German has been part of my identity so long I can't remember not knowing the language. 21 years! Longer than some people I know have been alive!

But if you can get hold of it, I can recommend Das Paradies am Rande der Stadt, though there's a lot of syntax and structure that could make it difficult, though the hardest part is the transcribed Berlinisch the main character's sister speaks. :P

[feuervogel]

You whipper-snapper ;)

Here's my review of Paradies. I kept stopping randomly and reading (or typing) bits to Ben, translating it on the fly since he speaks kein Deutsch (except, like, Himbeeren and Schinken and Kartoffeln, which are called Erdäpfeln in Austria...)

[corbae.livejournal.com]

I expect the same things, personally, but we both have high language skills and high levels of education.

side note: I have passes for an advance screening of Scott Pilgrim on Wednesday in Raleigh (at the Rialto? I'll need to look up the where) and wondered if you and Ben would like one. I'm going with Katie, my old roommate.

[kirin]

Ooooo... I don't think akiko has much interest in Scott Pilgrim, but I sure do. What time would the showing be?

[feuervogel]

Don't forget Wednesday night is tai chi class.

[steuard.livejournal.com]

I would hope that a reasonably educated person could puzzle out the date/time example you gave (though as you note, some peoples' minds may simply not naturally work that way). One thing to watch out for, though, is that a fair number of readers might unthinkingly assume that any snippets of German they saw couldn't possibly be very important to the plot, which might lead the reader to skip over them whether she would have been able to figure out the basics or not. [Some people treat Tolkien's poetry the same way, and I'll admit that in most cases they aren't all that wrong.]

As for the second example, I wouldn't even assume that people would see the "God and pigs and names" connections. With careful effort, odds are good I'd have a decent guess at that, but to an untrained English speaker's eye the words "Namen" and "Name" look like proper names themselves ('cause why else would they be capitalized?). "Gott" is certainly "God" to anyone who's sung classical music, but many people might think it was a doctor with an advice column. And if someone had decided after a clause or two that they weren't going to understand any of this German gibberish anyway, they might not even notice "schwein" at the end of the quote.

That's a weird site, by the way. :)

[feuervogel]

The site is related to a book called Das Paradies am Rande der Stadt, which is seriously funny. But a lot of the humor in it relies on German culture (and puns: KEIN SCHWEIN is equivalent to "not a soul": kein Schwein is at work today == not a soul is at work today, which ... how the hell do you translate THAT?)

[stormsdotter.livejournal.com]

I studied Spanish, French and Latin in High School and took some more French in college. I have a knack for puzzling my way through things. The German sentence is something about God and True Names, and might be calling someone a pig.

However, I know I am over-educated; I was the only person in the entire Architecture program at both my undergrad and grad programs who spoke French or Latin. I'm especially odd for being under 30 and having these skills.

[intravenusann.livejournal.com]

Okay, so I'm going to have to cast my vote in with "You are expecting too much" since no one else is really saying it. I'm an educated person. I took Spanish for seven years. I can understand it when it's spoken to me. I'm not a douchebag who thinks people should learn English to convenience me and my shitty, shitty language skills (and they are definitely shitty). But none of that makes any blinking sense to me. Except 19:00, because that's 7 pm no matter what.

I'm just happy to be literate and to speak a language that a lot of people in the world speak. I'm very, very, very exceptionally lucky for that. I'd like to be able to speak another language, but I don't. I'd like to have an intuitive understanding of languages. But I am happy to be myself, confident in my intelligence and the fact that I don't have to know/be good at everything.

[feuervogel]

Thanks! I have a tendency to forget that my experience is not the norm (especially where language is involved).

[tiercel]

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).

I wouldn't figure that out. For all I know Juli is a proper name and Montag is the name of a town.

[feuervogel]

Would having it in the context of an event calendar (marked "Kalendar") help?

[tiercel]

Probably. Context is good, especially if there's at least one other listing formatted like that.

[feuervogel]

I should have been clearer in the original hypothetical that there was context that would make it less opaque in meaning.

[smarriveurr.livejournal.com]

I took a half a year of French in grade school, a year and a half of Spanish, then GERMAN GERMAN GERMAN, and some Danish while I was at the Philipps-Uni. If I have it written out in front of me, I can puzzle out chunks of Romance languages based on my smattering of education and latinate roots for English words. If I sound out Dutch, I can follow it somewhat. I can sometimes get the gist of Danish/Swedish/Norwegian/Icelandic. I have provided rough translations of Anglo-Saxon law texts for my GF based on knowing German and English, and with a little help from a German university's online law library. But I wouldn't trust my translations, generally, and I find a lot of people don't see the same cognates I do just because their brains aren't wired. Much like understanding foreign phonemes, your brain might just not be "attuned" until you've had enough exposure.

Hell, on the topic of totally not hearing a phoneme, it wasn't till I took Linguistik at the P-U that I finally got what the difference was between English "sh" and German "sch", or how an umlaut really worked. I found out I'd just been faking it for 6 bloody years!