sistermagpie | Speaking in tongues

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Speaking in tongues

Today was S's last day in my Saturday ballet class, because she's been transferred back to Germany, which is where she is from. She said she hoped one day to get transferred to India because she speaks Hindi, which I thought was really cool. She said Hindi sounded something like German and English because they're all Indo-Germanic languages.

C, who is also in this class, is from France. So we started talking about speaking different languages and C said that she was much more outgoing about her feelings in English, that she was very shy in French but now sometimes got frustrated speaking to her family or her best friend thinking, "This would be easier if you understood English." She felt she was sort of hiding behind the language but also letting her true self show more...which made sense to me, somehow. I'm sure if I ever finally mastered another language well enough to communicate in it I might feel that way. It also made me think of a discussion about TTT where somebody said it was fake the way Elrond and Arwen switched from English to Elvish in mid-conversation, only to have some multi-lingual people say no, that was very realistic, that they often switched languages depending on the subject. Some things are more easily spoken about in different languages.

So I thought I'd throw this out to the amazingly polyglot people on lj--I know some of you speak more than one language...do you find differences in yourself from one language to another? Do you all often speak English or just write in it? I used to have a bookmark I made that said, "To speak another language is to possess another soul" or something like that--does it seem like that? Does what C said make sense to you?

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I was reading an article recently about the type of Russian that includes all the swear words...what is it called? It was definitely different from the kind of Russian one would be expected to use in polite company, but the article was about how it was very expressive in its way!

It does seem like using a second language would be really helpful for distancing yourself. I could easily read a paragraph that was completely obscene in another language and even if somebody told me what it meant it wouldn't matter. There's a psychological aspect to words in your own language that just doesn't translate.

However, Russian idioms with no equivalent often refer to feelings, customs, motivations. English-only idioms refer more to actions, results, relations.

That is so fascinating--and I can really imagine it fitting the different cultures too. There's probably a lot to be studied about idioms, since presumably you can say these things in either language, it's just a question of which language came up with an idiomatic expression for it.

Ah, that seems to fit it with what a lot of people have been saying. If you grow up speaking both languages it's very different than if you learn one later-or perhaps it's more accurate to say if you start speaking one later. That is, you might learn a language from an early age in school, but only use it regularly when you move to a different country when you're older.

For example, I may speak English most of the time, but I find myself inserting Chinese, Malay, or dialects in instances where they will make my point (in the conversation) more succinct.

That does make sense--and also fits with the idea that growing up as bilingual is a different experience that learning one language and then another, or having the languages separated into what you speak in one place or another. I love the idea of creating a third language that mixes the two together. It's both more personal (since each individual might have a different preference for what expressions they like in each language) and a standard language (because I'm sure some expressions naturally get used by everyone).

I really enjoy the cajun dialect, even those who don't speak french have a great accent and will often season their language with french words like "Ma shaa". One of my nieces is called "Tete dur" for hard head. Actually, that describes most of my nieces and nephews as well as my kids, my husband, my mother-in-law, etc... ;)

What is most fun is the way phrases are said in english which have past down like "raise down the window". My husbands grandmother used to get a chuckle when she'd ask me to "blow the tv" when she wanted it turned off, and I would walk over and blow on it.

Hi, I'd like to comment on the Indian (Hindi?), German and English issue.

I'm sorry that I can't pinpoint what kind of Indian language I'm talking about, but English spoken with an Indian accent sounds remarkably like English spoken with a Welsh accent. The melody of those two versions of English is very similar, and I would guess that some kinds of Welsh and Indian might sound alike to someone who can't understand either of the two languages.

I actually spent weeks following a vintage radio drama before I realised that the "Indian" character was in fact speaking with a heavy Welsh accent.

The similarities between the two for me, are rooted in the fact that they both sound almost musically melodic compared to other varieties of English, RP, for instance, often sounds monotonous and flat, as do some American dialects.

As for the LotR-switches, I found them quite natural sounding, the Arwen ones annoyed me, but then all scenes with Arwen annoyed me, quite unrelated to which language she spoke ;-)
That Legolas and Aragorn have a heated discussion in Elvish is much more believable to me than to have them shout in English. I would assume that all their conversations would be in Elvish unless somebody from a different race was present and part of their conversation, and the same would go for Elrond and Arwen. I realise that would be unlikely in a film like that, but I think that non-native English speakers that are used to watching subtitled films might have a higher tolerance for language switches in films.

I am not bilingual, but have reached the level of knowledge in English that makes me start to switch, and although it is kind of pleasing to start to really think in a different language, there are disadvantages like sounding like an idiot in your mother tongue when you start to spout English words and idioms, either roughly translated, or worse, not translated at all. To people who do not switch, you'll sound affected or stupid, but other switchers will just respond in kind.

- Clara

"But at the same time, badly written Swedish poems/song lyrics/dialogue also makes me cringe infinitely much more."

Oh, I'll second that!

And I think that's part of the reason why sex scenes or porn often sounds more natural in a second language as well. Lots and lots of it is amazingly badly written, really really incredibly cringeworthy, and the purple language that suddenly appears and hijacks the style of otherwise sane authors... Having a buffer of non-native language competence can help you connect with a scene in spite of bad writing in a way that is very difficult in your mother tongue.

- Clara

This is a good demonstration of the way scholars believe that language connects. http://www.bartleby.com/61/indoeuro.html

I have never made that connection between Indian (of whatever type) and Welsh. I have heard Welsh accents, but when I think of an Indian one it's more that very stereotypical Apu-style one.:-)

My friend from New Jersey was constantly mistaken for Irish when she was working in England. Now--are you saying that your mother tongue is German or English?

I'm pretty with you on the Arwen factor in LOTR. I liked her in some scenes better than I thought I would--usually when they stuck to her actual story, but I still cringe at some of her moments. Notably the "ranger caught off his guard" line and the idea that she's dying. WTF?

Anyway, I did think the times they chose to switch into Elvish always made sense and were consistent, and a nice touch.

Ever since this past summer, whenever I'm in aikido class or drinking, things start coming out in French, as it's the first foreign language I've learned to speak (and is now completely associated with those situations), with three others reading under the belt. This is going to make the intensive re-learning of German next year a lot of fun, because everytime I tried to pull up the German for something this summer, it came out in French. (Sprechen sie Deutsch? Nein, ich lese Deutsch, je parle anglais et un peu de francais...) Never mind the odd conversation earlier this fall where out of the three of us, they were speaking German (which I understand some of, but don't really speak), and I was speaking French, with a little English thrown in here and there...

Now, study enough Latin, and you'll start dreaming in it. Really.

Wow! Thank you so much for that link it's wonderful!!

My Latin teacher would be so proud of my if I dreamed in Latin. ::sigh:: Mostly I just mutter "Gallia est omnis..." Six years of it you'd think I'd be better at it! It was very popular in my high school for some reason.

There is something really funny about associating aikido and drinking with French.:-)

I have a whole stack of quotes dealing with why people favoured English, and yes, advantages are pretty much everything. There was an outcry in Hong Kong when they switched to teaching in Cantonese, and the schools permitted to continue in English were immediately sought after. But as a language, English can be painful to learn. I would suck at explaining why without a proper set of terminology, but a linguistics freak/friend (who's spent years in Latin, French, Japanese, Mandarin, Cantonese and obviously English) constantly pulls his hair out at English, so I trust his authority even though I cannot quote his arguments.

The Japanese use 'I love you', and it crops up quite frequently in Mandarin. Cantonese is the taboo zone, probably at least partially to do with how much the spoken version deviates from the written. When I look at Hong Kong serials, for example, shockingly few of them actually have the Chinese equivalent of 'I love you' anywhere, despite the premise being love triangles or what have you. It's simply more of a written phrase than one that feels natural when spoken. They tend to use 'I like you' or 'I like you a lot' or 'I have feelings for you' at the start of relationships, but 'I love you' appears rarely.

I totally know what she means. I'm english, living in France this year, and I speak French pretty well - I can express most things I need to express, and I speak in French almost all the time, with the teachers I work with. In fact there's only one who I speak English with almost all the time. Most of the time, I do fine and I can express what I mean in French, but just sometimes, when I'm really wound up or really unhappy, I have to go back to English just because I can't manage in French. Like the other day, something happened that reminded me of when I'd been assaulted, and I couldn't explain how I felt in French - the words just weren't there.

However, there are some things that I can express better in French, just because the language has a neater way of saying them - little phrases and such things. And with some people I do switch in and out of French, or they do - especially when we're tired and neither of us can keep up the effort in a foreign language for that long.

As far as writing goes, I only write in English. I have a little notebook where I record random thoughts and stuff people say, and unless someone says something in French, everything in there is in English. I can't play with French the same way I can English.

As to possesing another soul, I suppose to an extent that's true. I do feel slightly different when I speak French, just a bit more, well, French. Foreign, I guess. Like I'm not my boring old English self.

I have a Sonja in my class...she's an Anglo-Indian who spent some years working in Britain, it'd be really funny if it was her you met :P We have 'Sonia' in our country, which sounds quite similar.

Yeah, there's generally a proper form and a vernacular form, like English...and there's the very colloquial form, and there's the uppish form. If you learn the language formally, you'll learn the latter. Very confusing.

It always makes me growl when someone asks me if I speak Indian, because there is no such language. In France, my uncle was writing the name for this Japanese/Indian duo's debut album in Hindi for them, and he asked what languages they sang in. The answer was 'Japanese and Indian.' Meh.

I frankly think LotR is a lot more realistic in some ways than some movies. The subtitled Elvish, for example. As opposed to accented English. :D

Not really...I live in the South where most of Dad's relatives are...and our family is slightly more serious-humourish, eccentric and all...and I take after them. My northie relatives are loud, cheerful and all talk at once, so they make me feel confused and lost...especially when Mum mixes up her languages :D Indian families are interesting when you're a hybrid.

Standard Disclaimer: Indian families you see on TV are not really us! Meep. Though Goodness Gracious Me is very funny.

I wonder if a lot of the words commonly used in porn sound significantly less obscene to non-native English speakers.

Personally, I think it's all about exposure. English porn sounds less obscene to me than German porn, but that's because I've read tons of smutty fic in English and nearly none in German. I don't think I can really compare the level of obscenity unless I've had about equal exposure to both.

i switch between languages depending on subject. i cannot talk about math in any sophisticated way in english and have a hard time expressing myself about my work or childbirth in german...different experiences and parts of my life are thus connected to different languages.

It's exactly the same for me. There are topics I have a very hard time talking about in German, and then I feel awkward about it.

Besides, there's this weird phenomenon of talking to another German in English - and I don't mean on LJ, I did that when I lived in England all the time. Context just sort of defines your default language once you're fluent enough in it to manage, and then you only switch if you have a reason. Then again, sometimes it even happens to me that I remember a specific expression but can't remember which language it was in...

i've had this pet theory for a while that there are two types of bilingual speakers...those that are fluent in two languages independently and those that can think in both simultaneously.

I find this really fascinating even if I'm not sure which type I am myself - it completely depends on the subject, and on my level of exposure to it in the respective language. (I was switching languages like mad when I was working on the Romantics.)

see, i wonder if one can learn to be a better switcher. i never had to exist in both languages for any length of time, so i never had to learn...but i assume i might be able to were i do move back or teach german here ...

"Now--are you saying that your mother tongue is German or English?"

Oh, sorry, neither. I do understand some German as well, but my mother tongue is Norwegian. :-)

I'm afraid I don't know New Jersey American specifically, but I suppose they have quite a distinct R-sound, then?

Yes, it was very nice that they chose to use Elvish at least some of the time. I suppose it might have gotten annoying if they had used more, a bit like with the songs. I'm very glad they kept a few songs in, but then again I'm even more glad they didn't have more. ;-)

I think I'm actually most happy with Arwen in RotK Ext. Not because of her scenes per se, but of how I felt they fitted within the whole of the movie and the wider story.
But Arwen dying? Quite. WTF. And the "off his guard" line is awful. Truly awful. I've been sitting here for half an hour trying to remember where it's from, and then I did, and I feel bad. Ugh.

I can't off the top of my head remember any movies or actors with the exact kind of Welsh accent I'm thinking about, maybe it's old fashioned? But if you've seen "84 Charing Cross Road" I *think* Judy Dench's character is Welsh, and rather lilting when she speaks. And if you've heard Dylan Thomas read, he's got it as well. I suppose an Indian-American style accent might be different from an Indian-British one, though, and that it only happens with Indian-British?

- Clara

Probably. Again, it's probably exposure. I mean, try tackling a subject where half the terminology is in English and the other half in German, and see what that does to your mind... I had the hardest time sticking to one language in the end.

Well, I spent almost all of the lovely southern evenings at the dojo, and they were kind enough to let me train with them, despite my coming in speaking pretty much no French. Then they decided that I needed extra lessons in speaking French, so we'd go out, have a few demis, and they'd make me try to communicate without resorting to English. Two months of that, and, well... :)

I did my bachelor's in Classics. There was never dreaming in Greek, but there was in Latin. Oh, the memories.

Wow, what a great topic for discussion Magpie! Warning: the following will probably be a monster post. Sorry!

I grew up in a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual environment. Till age three German was my primary language (the others: Ukrainian, English, a bit of Polish). But once I started school at 4 1/2, English quickly outstriped the other languages, leaving my volcabulary/grammar basically stopped at 4 years of age, in preference to continuing development of my English. Which is the reason why I generally choose to express myself in English....

In my school French studies, which included some immersion stuff, I got so I could carry on a dining table discussion with native French speakers and have them understand pretty much understand me.

So... with this HUGELY definitive knowledge (not!) I have experienced the reality of certain concepts being more expressable within certain languages. My poliglot relatives knew this instinctively and mostly unconsciously - and it is not at all uncommon for them to start off a sentence in - say - German, switch to Romanian, and finish off in Polish. Handy for them, hard on the rest of us!

Sometimes I suspect this happened because they wished to deliberately obscure something spoken (like keeping talk of SEX out of Little Pitcher's Ears.) More often I imagine it was because they preferred to express themselves with colloquialisms and/or catch phrases that were untranslatable from language to language. Translation involves a lot more than changing words/grammar forms around; much of it depends on cultural context which is like the soil you put a particular seed into in order to grow something out of it successfuly. Sometimes you have to be able to literally see out of the mindset of a particular culture to understand the significance of a phrase - perhaps the most difficult thing for a language student to do... though possible for a person who learned an alternative language as a child.

And distinctions can exist even inside language GROUPS, apparently. I have heard writers fluent in both comparing the Slavic language group tongues Russian and Ukrainian compare then by saying that Russian is an excellent language to express analytical concepts, and would be a natural for anyone writing a detective novel. Ukrainian, by contrast, incorporates many words of vivid creative imagerary and would be ideal for writing fantasy/science fiction.

I can't attest to this with personal experience, but this makes sense to me. Linguistically for various reasons Ukrainian (like English) is more of a hodgepodge language, becoming the beneficiary of volcabulary acquired from conquests and trading relationships (with Turks, Greeks, Vikings, Tatars, Swedes, Poles, Lithuanians, Jews, Austrians & Russians themselves). I would guess that there are probably more "foreign" words incorporated into that language...and as such probably a larger available volcabulary in general as well as allowing for more ways to say similar things. All quite useful when writing fantasy or science fiction.

Russian language, arising from a more isolated environment with fewer "outside" influences, may have a smaller volcabulary, more striped down grammar, and probably simpler, more efficient expressions (mere educated guesswork on my part). If true, it sounds to me as though Raymond Chandler might transfer quite effectively into Russian.

My insight into French is that the language follows a cultural tendency to "prettify" things other cultures wouldn't bother with. I keep thinking of the (probably antiquated) polite expression for a woman's monthly menses, "J'ai me fleurs" (right?)meanomg "I have my flowers". Just the existence of such a phrase says two things to me. Therein, a clinical reality is replaced with a poetic one. This implies that one CAN talk about such subjects in public, or else why would there even exist a pretty, polite version? I suspect this elasticity of expression is a lot of the reason French became a lingua franca.

A fascinating long book could be written exploring the means various languages evolved to handle difficult or taboo concepts. There seems to be various ways to do it... leaving only the lucky poliglots among us to pick and choose.

It's so hard to try to wrap my mind around this...I mean, I understand it, but it's hard since I can only imagine it in English. But I'm sure there are expressions in other languages where the English equivalent would sound just as odd because we didn't have one. I'll bet there's a lot of people sure "I love you" is completely universal.

Indian families you see on TV are not really us! Meep. Though Goodness Gracious Me is very funny.

LOL! Gotcha!

In fact, that makes me remember an article about how in a way the most realistic American family on TV was The Simpsons. So it was a show where sometimes people from other countries were like, "Wow, an American family that seems more like mine."

I'm glad to know there is no language of "Indian," because it sounded really strange to me to say it. Guess it's the same thing with "our" Indians--Native Americans I mean. Many nations, no one language.

I frankly think LotR is a lot more realistic in some ways than some movies. The subtitled Elvish, for example. As opposed to accented English. :D

LOL! Can you imagine them coming up with an Elvish accent--I mean, other than saying, "Okay, you elves are going to speak in a very formal English accent."

Clearly, you need to get to work on that.

Oh, sorry, neither. I do understand some German as well, but my mother tongue is Norwegian. :-)

Oh, of course! boggles

I'm afraid I don't know New Jersey American specifically, but I suppose they have quite a distinct R-sound, then?

The way she talks I think she does. Irish accents in general sound more American to me than English accents do, but I never would have guessed she sounded more Irish. It was interesting. I suppose she may have "looked" Irish in some way, though her family background is Swedish, Polish and Austrian, I think.

I'm very glad they kept a few songs in, but then again I'm even more glad they didn't have more. ;-)

LOL! Absolutely. As much as I'd like to see Elijah Wood caper on a table...

I do feel slightly different when I speak French, just a bit more, well, French. Foreign, I guess. Like I'm not my boring old English self.

I think that's definitely part of the fun of speaking another language, particularly since it is almost like a costume you can hide behind. Sometimes you want to take it off because you have something to say you don't have the words for, but other times, like others have said, you can almost be more outspoken because you don't have the same attachments to the language.

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Speaking in tongues

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