Re: Linguistic Agonies


Neeraj Mathur schrieb:
>
> "António Marques" <m.ap@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
> news:437c54a7$0$2160$a729d347@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> > Ruud Harmsen wrote:
> >
> >> Special cases exist, like children learning a language from both
> >> parents at home, but getting no other exposure because they live in a
> >> country where nobody knows that language. So everywhere else, they
> >> only hear the language of where they live. Their command of the
> >> parents' language will be quite good, native or near native, but may
> >> develop some traits that are unusual among native speakers in the
> >> country of origin. I've witnesses an example of that).
> >
> > This is interesting, could you expand it?
> > (I've had an example in my family, but not exactly the same, and nothing
> > too spectacular.)
>
> I'm more or less an example of this: my family spoke Hindi at home, but
I've
> always lived in an Anglophone environment (Britain, Canada). Everybody in
my
> family speaks English. The result is that English is my dominant language;
> when I speak Hindi, I sporadically make mistakes. These range from
> grammatical contamination from my dominant language (in another thread I
> just mentioned that I sometimes pick my possessive pronouns to agree with
> the gender of the possessor, as in English, rather than the possessed, as
in
> Hindi), to random phonological errors that aren't really because of
English.
>
> As an example of the latter: sometimes, in a string of speech, I will
> transpose the phonological feature [+aspirated] to the wrong consonantal
> segment. This cannot be English contamination, since English has no
> corresponding distinctive feature (and the mistake I make is not
necessarily
> going to produce the standard English aspiration pattern); nor do I simply
> not know the words in question, since on most occasions I speak correctly.
> (It is worth stating that I sometimes make these mistakes in English too -
I
> have a sort of phonological dyslexia I suppose - but much more rarely;
maybe
> because I speak English more often I don't notice it as much.)
>
> There are other issues too: I must have poorly sorted out the various
> dialects that I've heard (in movies, for instance, or from the Indian
> community around where I've lived, most of whom are Panjabi), because I've
> come to learn things that are different from the standard language. For
> example, the honorific system: when a person is spoken about or directly
to,
> Hindi uses honorifics and will make the person plural. Panjabi, and I'm
sure
> some dialects of Hindi, have the habit of using the masculine plural even
> for feminine words when they are being honorific. I have somehow learned
> this, in an incomplete way: when I speak to my grandmother, I sometimes
find
> myself using masculine plurals for words agreeing with her. This totally
> confuses me, since I realise that there's a mismatch in gender; at the
same
> time, I feel that the feminine plural would be derogatory. I asked my mom
> about this once, and she seemed very surprised that I would think of using
> the masculine, so it's either something my dad does or just another defect
> in my speech. I don't think it's an English contamination, but it's a
flaw.
>
> There are other things as well; Ruud's statement describes me exactly,
that
> my Hindi is native or near-native, but has traits that are unusual for
most
> native speakers. The more that I notice these traits, the less likely I am
> to speak Hindi, from the embarassment of making a mistake; which gets me
> perceived as an outsider to Hindi-speakers, which makes me nervous, and
more
> likely to make mistakes. The effect is similar to my various L2's, but
Hindi
> is an L1 for me.

Hi.

I wonder whether the problem could be that, having learned a number of
foreign languages, you know how easy it is to make mistakes. In other words,
is it possible that you're just worrying a bit too much?

Native speakers make mistakes, too, but don't usually worry about (or even
notice) them. The other day, I heard a native speaker of German say *"Das
entspricht in etwa des Salzgehalts im Mittelmeer", which is as ungrammatical
("des Salzgehalts" should have been "dem Salzgehalt", since "entsprechen"
takes the dative, not the genitive) as it is atypical. And yet I doubt
whether this mistake prompted him to question his own native speaker
competence. Now imagine how a newcomer to German would have felt in his
shoes.

Regards,
Ekkehard


.

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