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

[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.)