Language Replacement

Non-fashion, non-skirt, non-gender discussions. If your post is related to fashion, skirts or gender, please choose one of the forums above for it.
geron
Member Extraordinaire
Posts: 386
Joined: Mon Jul 24, 2017 12:31 pm
Location: Surrey

Re: Language Replacement

Post by geron »

rivegauche wrote: Sun Jan 08, 2023 11:53 pm
geron wrote: Sun Jan 08, 2023 5:42 pm
rivegauche wrote: Sat Jan 07, 2023 11:01 am ....but the likes of "We was stood on the corner" has become accepted despite having no less than two faults....
Bzzzt! That should be "no fewer than two faults"!
;-)
Oh dear. Quite right. I shall just slide under the table ...
Don't do that! Everything else you wrote was spot on!
Grok
Member Extraordinaire
Posts: 2804
Joined: Fri Aug 29, 2008 2:21 am

Re: Comments posted to Quora

Post by Grok »

Regarding English in Sweden....

It was mentioned that by 1945 English supplanted German as the most popular language studied. With English becoming mandatory in school in 1955.

1945 (and the end of World War II) was 78 years ago...getting close to a life time.
Grok
Member Extraordinaire
Posts: 2804
Joined: Fri Aug 29, 2008 2:21 am

Re: Language Replacement

Post by Grok »

Listen for a distinct Swedish accent. The older gentlemen were young fighter pilots during the 1980s.
Grok
Member Extraordinaire
Posts: 2804
Joined: Fri Aug 29, 2008 2:21 am

Re: Language Replacement

Post by Grok »

Again, young Swedish adults.
Grok
Member Extraordinaire
Posts: 2804
Joined: Fri Aug 29, 2008 2:21 am

Re: Language Replacement

Post by Grok »

Sorry guys. I don't know when a video is unavailable until after posting. Regarding my last post...both posts featured young Swedish women who not only spoke English fluently, but lacked distinct Swedish accents.

I have to wonder if some young Swedes are bilingual.
rode_kater
Member Extraordinaire
Posts: 836
Joined: Thu Oct 31, 2019 10:46 pm

Re: Language Replacement

Post by rode_kater »

Grok wrote: Thu Feb 09, 2023 5:06 am I have to wonder if some young Swedes are bilingual.
It's probably quite common, they're probably like NL in that respect. Almost all foreign media is just imported without dubbing, so in the original language, with subtitles. So exposure to foreign languages and in particular, English, starts really early. English is even taught at some primary schools here. Children's cartoons are dubbed though.

That said, Dutch people do tend to overestimate their English a bit. One memorable incident was when we in the Works Councils were writing a formal response to the board of our UK parent and it was written in Dutch and then translated. The word "onrust" got translated to "unrest" (that's what google translate suggests) and that set off all sorts of alarms on the UK side :D. The better translation would be "disquiet". For a moment there they thought we were on the verge of an internal revolt :D

I convinced them that next time they wanted to send a response to the UK board they should run it by a native speaker just to avoid misunderstandings (I was on holiday for that particular incident).
Grok
Member Extraordinaire
Posts: 2804
Joined: Fri Aug 29, 2008 2:21 am

Re: Language Replacement

Post by Grok »

Regarding myself.... I have never been to Europe. I have read a few books by linguists. The SR-71 is a favorite aircraft.

Interesting comments regarding NL, rode_kater.

Linguists list Dutch, Swedish, and English as Germanic languages, a subset of the Indo-European languages. So those languages are fairly similar in the first place.

Linguists have commented that the average person can most easily acquire a second language early in childhood. 7 years of age is a good time to start. When you are that young, your brain is primed to acquire languages easily.

If you start as a teen ager, it is likely you will speak the language with a distinct foreign accent.

For the average adult, it is difficult to master a language unrelated to his own. BTW, the Finns and Hungarians speak languages that are unrelated to Indo-European languages. But some Finns on YouTube speak fairly fluent English. (This has implications for NATO membership).

I don't know the attitudes of bilingual people towards the languages they speak. Is it similar to being ambidextrous? Having no preferred hand?
User avatar
Myopic Bookworm
Member Extraordinaire
Posts: 659
Joined: Mon Feb 07, 2022 9:12 pm
Location: SW England (Cotswolds)

Re: Language Replacement

Post by Myopic Bookworm »

Grok wrote: Thu Feb 09, 2023 3:18 pm Linguists list Dutch, Swedish, and English as Germanic languages, a subset of the Indo-European languages. So those languages are fairly similar in the first place.
Well, they were fairly similar in origin, Dutch and English being derived from a West Germanic ancestral language, and Swedish from a related ancestral language of Scandinavia. But English is highly aberrant among the Germanic group, having absorbed some weird grammatical features from Welsh during the period of Anglo-Saxon settlement, lost a lot of its original morphology partly by merging with the dialects of incoming Danes, and absorbed a vast swathe of Norman French vocabulary after the Conquest. This gives it some advantages as a second language to learn: practically no grammatical gender, very few changes of word form relating to grammar, and a vocabulary which has elements familiar to both Germanic and Romance language speakers. This is to some extent offset by its insanely counter-intuitive spelling system. English is a language that is very easy to speak fairly badly and yet make yourself understood.
Grok
Member Extraordinaire
Posts: 2804
Joined: Fri Aug 29, 2008 2:21 am

Re: Language Replacement

Post by Grok »

I recall a post by a fellow from a Scandinavian country (I think he was a Swede). He compared English to Esperanto.
User avatar
familyman34
Distinguished Member
Posts: 115
Joined: Wed Nov 22, 2017 12:55 pm
Location: Waveney Valley, UK

Re: Language Replacement

Post by familyman34 »

rode_kater wrote: Thu Feb 09, 2023 12:01 pm
Grok wrote: Thu Feb 09, 2023 5:06 am I have to wonder if some young Swedes are bilingual.
It's probably quite common, they're probably like NL in that respect. Almost all foreign media is just imported without dubbing, so in the original language, with subtitles. So exposure to foreign languages and in particular, English, starts really early. English is even taught at some primary schools here. Children's cartoons are dubbed though.
I have friends who are Flemish. When the family was young, they watched undubbed television programmes on cable TV in English, French and German. As a result, their children are almost bilingual in English (as well as their own Flemish/Dutch), slightly less fluent in French, and can get by in German.

Most Dutch native-speakers speaking English who have not lived in an English-speaking country are easily detectable from the way they pronounce the /u/ phoneme (they give the vowel in a word like "but" a much more fronted and rounded sound - rather closer to "bert" than "but"). Another sound that is sometimes characteristic is the (terminal) /s/ phoneme; in Dutch the "s" is a Dutch word like "huis" is much more sibillant than in the English "house".
Familyman34
User avatar
Sinned
Member Extraordinaire
Posts: 5804
Joined: Sun Aug 19, 2012 5:28 pm
Location: York, England

Re: Language Replacement

Post by Sinned »

A family friend who is a GP in Belgium claims to speak, Dutch, English, Flemish, French and German with a smattering of Italian. Apparently this is dictated by where she lives and has patients who use each of the languages.
I believe in offering every assistance short of actual help but then mainly just want to be left to be myself in all my difference and uniqueness.
rode_kater
Member Extraordinaire
Posts: 836
Joined: Thu Oct 31, 2019 10:46 pm

Re: Language Replacement

Post by rode_kater »

There's a book Seven languages in seven days which claims a Dutch person can learn to read Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish and Frisian in 7 days. The basis is that all these languages share many words but the spelling and pronunciation have drifted over time. The idea is that you can learn to recognise what groups of letters in one language map to which groups of letters in Dutch/English, after which you can figure out what the word is. After that it's practice. (Obviously, learning pronunciation is much more difficult).

An example is the Frisian fierljeppen. First you turn the Frisian 'f' to a 'v' so you get "ver" => "far". Next you drop the Frisian 'j' and figure that 'leppen' sounds a lot like 'leaping' in English. Hence, it's "far-leaping". Sure, it won't be enough to read literature, but it will get you through much of the newspaper and restaurant menus just fine.

Dutch is just between the English and Germanic languages to make it work. And we need to learn other languages, because who is going to bother to learn Dutch :)
User avatar
familyman34
Distinguished Member
Posts: 115
Joined: Wed Nov 22, 2017 12:55 pm
Location: Waveney Valley, UK

Re: Language Replacement

Post by familyman34 »

rode_kater wrote: Fri Feb 10, 2023 10:17 pm

Dutch is just between the English and Germanic languages to make it work. And we need to learn other languages, because who is going to bother to learn Dutch :)
I did, nearly 50 years ago! I can still read it fairly well although some of the informal/slangy language takes more trouble (e.g. on http://www.rokvoormannen.nl/forum/index.php), but I'm too slow working out what I'm going to say to speak it adequately.

And it's nice to see some SC members also pop up on rokvoormannen.nl !
Familyman34
rode_kater
Member Extraordinaire
Posts: 836
Joined: Thu Oct 31, 2019 10:46 pm

Re: Language Replacement

Post by rode_kater »

familyman34 wrote: Sun Feb 12, 2023 9:11 am I did, nearly 50 years ago! I can still read it fairly well although some of the informal/slangy language takes more trouble (e.g. on http://www.rokvoormannen.nl/forum/index.php), but I'm too slow working out what I'm going to say to speak it adequately.

And it's nice to see some SC members also pop up on rokvoormannen.nl !
Oh wow, someone else who knows that site. I have found it in the past and occasionally stumble across it again. It always feels.... kind of... dead? Or not as interesting as here at least. Maybe it just hasn't got the critical mass or something, I dunno. For me personally it's more that I can express myself better in English than Dutch.
Spirou003
Member Extraordinaire
Posts: 310
Joined: Tue May 12, 2020 6:58 pm
Location: Belgium, Charleroi

Re: Language Replacement

Post by Spirou003 »

I did learn Dutch at school, liked it (so much that I stopped English lessons keeping Dutch) and was fluent at speaking it (but not bilingual). Unfortunately, I've had no more situation where Dutch would come since 13 years now, and I would have difficults to speak Dutch again :(
I now speak only English (in addition to my mother language, French) just because it's the "standard" for working in IT and you hardly find anything that goes deep (as I need) in the details in French
Post Reply