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

[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).