The Friday Five - 14 Oct ‘22: Languages

[sabcatt]

This week’s thefridayfive is on languages, which feels appropriate for my current circumstances. Also makes me feel like maybe I should crack open my Hebrew textbook or at least try to do some writing exercises this week, before I go back to school and discover that I’ve forgotten everything I learned last month over these past 2 weeks.

1. How many languages do you speak?
One and two halves? (One and two thirds, if I’m being more realistic and less generous.) I speak English (obviously), took French for a few years in middle & high school but have NOT kept up with it, and started studying Hebrew in college, which is currently an ongoing endeavor. My French vocabulary is… not good, but not awful, but my verb conjugation is atrocious (French has TOO MANY tenses and that’s on that), whereas in Hebrew my grammar is nearly immaculate but my vocab leaves… a lot to be desired. I also have a smattering of vocab in various other languages (yes and no in many, one friend taught me how to say “fuck your mother” in Chinese, another taught me manner words in German).

2. What is your mother tongue?
American English. (Which is the better one, for the record.)

3. What is a language that you would like to learn and why?
I mean, I’m actively working on Hebrew, because I want to be able to engage with Jewish liturgical texts in their original form and actually understand what they’re saying.
My idle-thought “I should learn this” language that I’m not currently studying is Spanish, because it’s the most common non-English language in the US and therefore would be the most immediately useful language to know, and also because I’ve read some Spanish poetry (in translation) that I liked a lot and I think it would be cool to be able to read the originals.

4. Does it bother you when people speak a language you don't know in front of you? Why or why not?
Not really, because the world is a big place and I don’t feel entitled to knowing exactly what other people are thinking and saying all the time. However it does make me a bit grumpy if like, it’s a conversation between people I know that I was part of or am clearly hoping to join; in that case, it’s like, come on, throw me a bone, please.

5. Speak to me.

אני לא יודע/ת איך מין לקרוא לעצמי, כי עברית היא שפה שבה הרבה מילים הן או זכר או נקבה, ואני לא אכד ולא אחר. בנימה שמכה יותר, הלכתי לשוק היום ויכולתי לקנות כמה דברים רק בעברית. גם אני אוהב שעברית היא נכתבת מימין לשמאל כי היא נרית כל כך טיפשית ליד טקסט אנגלית שהוא נכתב משמאל לימין.

Comments

[sauronnaise]

(French has TOO MANY tenses and that’s on that)
Few of them are only used in literature and poetry (e.g., if you speak in passé simple and passé antérieur, that's a mistake). You can forget them easily. Problem are the bloody exceptions. As I tell my students, whenever you learn a new rule, watch out for the exceptions. Let a Latin language, with sparse Gaullic/Celtic influence, fraternise with the Germanic folks of the north. It'd be a fun mix, they said. Myeah.

If you want to have fun with verbs, try Kanien'kehá. That language is something else. (I taught a student of mine (I tutor her for French as a second language) a few words in Kanien'kehá, using my language app, she then concluded French was easy in comparison. My trick worked like a charm! And it's always nice to know random words in other langauges.)

[sabcatt]

I DON'T want to have fun with verbs, I want verbs to be simple and easy to understand and construct (TTnTT) so I shall NOT be learning Kanien'kehá, although extremely synthetic languages always seem kind of fun to me (not for me, but for the people who already know them) because I do think it's neat to be able to take all the individual morphemes and mash them together and come out with a single verb that communicates person, tense, mood, action, and even sometimes information about the subject and/or object of the verb. (Again, not for me to actually do, just to know that they exist.)

Listen, I know you're bringing up the "some of the tenses are purely literary" as a like, "so you don't have to use them in normal speech, so you don't really need to learn them!" but you gotta understand, from my perspective ([thinks 3 verb tenses is and should be Enough for Anyone]), the very fact that these tenses EXIST signifies that French as a language has Too Darn Many Tenses. Even if I don't use them, I know they're there, and it Haunts me, it really does.

[sauronnaise]

I had a blast with one of my students trying to make sentences with subjonctif imparfait , subjonctif plus-que-parfait and impératif passé. I might have broken my brain in two. I was about to argue futur antérieur was the most nonsensical verb tense (how can the future occur in the past?) until I realised it's used in daily speech. Gah. I counted and 16 are commonly used in speech. Well, English has 12 tenses. (Tenses that still confuse me up to this day as they aren't identical to French tenses in their useage. On the surface, yes, in practicality, nah.)

Kanien'kehá has lots pronouns (some sources say 35, some say 80. It depends what they count as 'pronouns'). They went hard on that. This, and 80% of the language is verb-based, as it's descripive of what an object/location/etc. does. For e.g., my city's name is Tiohtià:ke. It's the diminutive of Teionihtiohtiá:kon, meaning 'where the group parted/divided ways'. The English translation looks scarier than the original word, as it's longer. Can't beat that endlessly long Māori town name tho.

[sabcatt]

It feels appropriate that you posted this just before Halloween because that list of tenses reads almost like a horror story to me. Forget “boo”, but if a ghost jumped out at me and was like “subjunctive pluperfect!” I would fully scream and run away.