2nd languages

[kiaer.ts]

À repondre a la question originelle: je parle francais assez bien. En ailleurs, je peux lire la grecque (ancienne) avec l'assitance d'une traduction, commentaire, guide de grammaire, etc. J'ai étudié et oublié le latin.

Where did you get the accents? I bought my computer right here in Canada and it doesn't even have the slightest aigu let alone a circonflexe. I am going to complain to the Human Rights Commission about it.

Windows vale verga.

[Xray]

Spanish I love for its simple orthography written and for the sensous variability in its accents and dialects.

Do you also speak Portuguese? I recall a post you addressed to MSK in Portuguese - about "estrela fivela" (= 'Starbuckle')?

Why do you think you fell in love with English?

I think the sound of English played a crucial role for me. It sounded so much more agreeable to my ears than my harsher-sounding native language German.

Also, I already had a positive attitude toward "everything English" before I started learning the language at the age of ten. This was the mid-sixties, and English, the language of the USA, the world's leading economic nation, was connoted by many Germans with "modern, cosmopolitan, progressive".

And then along came Carol. Carol from California, an 'all-American girl' who had moved with her family to our neighborhood and was going to stay for a few years. Carol was two years older than I (who was eleven at the time); she and I hit it off immediately, and we quickly became friends. I was a frequent guest at Carol's home and thus became acquainted with the "American way of life".

Carol also had a strong influence on my English, for I soon dropped the British pronunciation I had learned at school, and replaced it by Carol's American accent, which I liked a lot better.

My English teacher was quite surprised to suddenly hear me pronounce words like e. g. "never" with a rolling "r" at the end.

Several years later, when I was about eighteen (Carol had long since returned to the USA), an American native speaker asked me whether I had lived in California because my of accent. It was only then that I realized I had picked up the Californian phonetic variant of American English. To this day, I still speak English with this Californian accent.

I love English for its huge vocabulary and varied registers and accents. French I love for the feel of it in the mouth, its diction.

French is often connoted with 'elegance'. From those who don't like French, they sometimes seem to connote it with 'arrogance'.

As for English, one can indeed marvel at its richness of vocabulary. But at the same time, it is also a very 'concise' language which often can express, in one single term and to the point, something for which German would need a whole phrase.

Take the term "Sugar Daddy" for example. In German one would have to paraphrase it cumbersomely as:

"ein wohlhabender, spendabler älterer Mann, dem von einer berechnenden jungen Frau das Geld aus der Tasche gezogen wird."

('a wealthy and generous older man whom a cunning young woman gets to spend his money on her.').

I have even found Kant easier to understand in the English translation than in the German original.

Breaking an issue down to its essentials - somehow the Englsih language seems to be perfectly suited for this task.

I forgot to mention, this is called epenthesis in English and other languages. It happens not only when a word is borrowed but also sometimes to native words due to a language's own internal phonological rules. It involves vowels as well as consonants. For example, the English endings -le (and -er) added to a verb marks repeated or action. Thus:

beat > batter

scribe > scribble

wrest > wrestle

drip > dribble

game > gamble

spin > spindle

The last two show an epenthetic /b/ and /d/ since the sequences /ml/ and /nl/ are not natural in English.

English words do have the sequences /ml/ and /nl/ in e. g. gimlet, hamlet, hamlock, online, inlay, enlarge etc.

As for pronunciation, [ml] and [nl] also can occur at the end of words, as in pummel, channel.

But without the epenthetic /b/ and /d/ inserted in "gamble" and "spindle", one would get "gamle" and "spinle", which would cause confusion re their correct English pronunciation.

So maybe this is more a case of English not having the sequences ml/nl + vowel at the end of a word?

English meanwhile permeates the German language to a high degree. The other day, my daugher told me that an acquaintance has added her to her friends' list on facebook.

She said about the friend: "Sie hat mich geaddet"

English "to add" is 'hinzufügen' in German, but now we have the neologism "adden" (borrowed from English "add") as a German neologism in internet lingo. The same goes for "email" and many other terms.

I have nothing against such language mixture; language purists ignore that to borrow from other languages is a natural phenomenon of language itself.

Edited March 4, 2011 by Xray

[Philip Coates]

Xray,

Interesting post. I was fascinated by your experience of the English language in Germany.

[kiaer.ts]

Spanish I love for its simple orthography written and for the sensous variability in its accents and dialects.

Do you also speak Portuguese? I recall a post you addressed to MSK in Portuguese - about "estrela fivela" (= 'Starbuckle')?

Why do you think you fell in love with English?

I think the sound of English played a crucial role for me. It sounded so much more agreeable to my ears than my harsher-sounding native language German.

Also, I already had a positive attitude toward "everything English" before I started learning the language at the age of ten. This was the mid-sixties, and English, the language of the USA, the world's leading economic nation, was connoted by many Germans with "modern, cosmopolitan, progressive".

And then along came Carol. Carol from California, an 'all-American girl' who had moved with her family to our neighborhood and was going to stay for a few years. Carol was two years older than I (who was eleven at the time); she and I hit it off immediately, and we quickly became friends. I was a frequent guest at Carol's home and thus became acquainted with the "American way of life".

Carol also had a strong influence on my English, for I soon dropped the British pronunciation I had learned at school, and replaced it by Carol's American accent, which I liked a lot better.

My English teacher was quite surprised to suddenly hear me pronounce words like e. g. "never" with a rolling "r" at the end.

Several years later, when I was about eighteen (Carol had long since returned to the USA), an American native speaker asked me whether I had lived in California because my of accent. It was only then that I realized I had picked up the Californian phonetic variant of American English. To this day, I still speak English with this Californian accent.

I love English for its huge vocabulary and varied registers and accents. French I love for the feel of it in the mouth, its diction.

French is often connoted with 'elegance'. From those who don't like French, they sometimes seem to connote it with 'arrogance'.

As for English, one can indeed marvel at its richness of vocabulary. But at the same time, it is also a very 'concise' language which often can express, in one single term and to the point, something for which German would need a whole phrase.

Take the term "Sugar Daddy" for example. In German one would have to paraphrase it cumbersomely as:

"ein wohlhabender, spendabler älterer Mann, dem von einer berechnenden jungen Frau das Geld aus der Tasche gezogen wird."

('a wealthy and generous older man whom a cunning young woman gets to spend his money on her.').

I have even found Kant easier to understand in the English translation than in the German original.

Breaking an issue down to its essentials - somehow the Englsih language seems to be perfectly suited for this task.

I forgot to mention, this is called epenthesis in English and other languages. It happens not only when a word is borrowed but also sometimes to native words due to a language's own internal phonological rules. It involves vowels as well as consonants. For example, the English endings -le (and -er) added to a verb marks repeated or action. Thus:

beat > batter

scribe > scribble

wrest > wrestle

drip > dribble

game > gamble

spin > spindle

The last two show an epenthetic /b/ and /d/ since the sequences /ml/ and /nl/ are not natural in English.

English words do have the sequences /ml/ and /nl/ in e. g. gimlet, hamlet, hamlock, online, inlay, enlarge etc.

As for pronunciation, [ml] and [nl] also can occur at the end of words, as in pummel, channel.

But without the epenthetic /b/ and /d/ inserted in "gamble" and "spindle", one would get "gamle" and "spinle", which would cause confusion re their correct English pronunciation.

So maybe this is more a case of English not having the sequences ml/nl + vowel at the end of a word?

Pummel and channel are borrowings from the French. Gimlet, hamlet, hamlock, online, inlay, enlarge have a consonantal /l/ followed by a full vowel. In the case of gamble, the /l/ itself carries the syllable - there is no actual vowel/ (The sounds /m/ /n/ /l/ and /r/ are all potentially syllabic, as in bottom, button, bottle and better.

The relevant rule coining these -mble and -ndle verbs from native stems was active in Middle English (before 1400) when the infinitive still had the -en ending. Neither the phonological nor derivational rule applies in modern English, so the phenomenon is only found in old native words.

Another example is bumble bee, which comes from humble bee which comes from the verb to hum.

Edited March 4, 2011 by Ted Keer