Benjamin, ce que je voulais dire c'est que lorsque Porthos croit pouvoir utiliser le fait oral pour, pense-t-il, illustrer et renforcer sa thèse sur l'exceptionnalisme anglais au sein de la sous-famille germanqiue occidentale, il néglige de préciser que l'oralité anglaise est fondamentalement étrangère à la parole romane, quelle que soit la forme écrite des mots prononcés — ce qui réduit la conception exceptionnaliste à ses justes proportions : une vision partielle et partiale. J'évoquais l'anglais des États-Unis uniquement pour accuser davantage l'incongruence absolue qui règne entre l'oralité anglaise locale et la parole romane en général.
Le fait que tel ou tel anglophone utilise plus ou moins de vocabulaire franco-latin ne change rien à l'affaire : le rouleau compresseur de l'oral pulvérise les timides parallèles que l'écrit aurait laissé apparaître.
With an English translation side by side with the above sentence, one can most likely see the similarities and understand what each word corresponds to in English. But without this translation, very few English speakers would be able to understand what is being said. The words are too different.
To test this out, I showed the sentence to and played the sound sample to several people, all native English speakers. Not one of them had any clue what was being said. 4 out of 5 of them recognized "mens", but they couldn't relate to any of the other words. Apparently Benjamin, I'm not that stupid afterall.
Hmm, I'd guess that people who speak a British English dialect will probably understand the Dutch sentence. For example, in Scots the sentence above is "The man cannae live aan breid alane." (without emphasising too much on the word order).
Porthos, your postings are contradictory.
At first you claimed that the cognates in other Germanic languages are unrecognisable to English speakers, yet when Greg produced the list you suddenly admitted that they are:
Porthos wrote:
Sure, you can conviniently find several cognates that are easily recognizable out of thousands of words which make up a language.
But then you decided to dispel that simole fact by producing texts that are much too, like Benjamin said, academic for average English speakers to have a go. I think you are aware that academic texts are always likely to contain many "big" words which will often translate into English as words that are Romance-based.
In colloquial language, British speakers will always use Germanic-based vocabulary for example "begin" and "find" instead of "commence" and "discover". And like Benjamin said, you place too much emphasis on the written language. You need to consider the spoken aspect as well. _________________ Zoriona tximelata bat bezalakoa da: bilatzen baduzu, hegaldatuko besterik ez da, baina gelditzen bazara, dator eta zure sorbaldan jartzen da.
To test this out, I showed the sentence to and played the sound sample to several people, all native English speakers. Not one of them had any clue what was being said. 4 out of 5 of them recognized "mens", but they couldn't relate to any of the other words. Apparently Benjamin, I'm not that stupid afterall.
As I say, you showed it to them, which again is placing too much emphasis on the written language.
You miss the point of oral mutual intelligibility anyway. It's not about recognising individual words — there isn't time for that. It's about hearing and trying to follow it as a whole.
I can think of a number of reasons for why you apparently don't recognise any oral mutual intelligibility at all between 'man cannot live by bread alone' and 'de mens kan niet alleen van brood leven' (which is an inappropriate example anyway, because people don't actually speak like that in real life in English, but I'll stick with it anyway):
1. You may be used to hearing only very very limited variation in English speech, to the extent that you would find many British people incomprehensible anyway — especially those from Scotland and Northern England. So, perhaps if a word isn't pronounced exactly as you're used to it being pronounced, you simply don't understand it.
2. For some reason, you don't want there to be any oral mutual intelligibility between English and Dutch or German. Based on many of the things you've said over the past year, it wouldn't surprise me if you have some kind of internalised desire to see English as fundamentally distinct and separate from other Germanic languages. (Although why this would be, I don't know).
greg wrote:
Benjamin, ce que je voulais dire c'est que lorsque Porthos croit pouvoir utiliser le fait oral pour, pense-t-il, illustrer et renforcer sa thèse sur l'exceptionnalisme anglais au sein de la sous-famille germanqiue occidentale, il néglige de préciser que l'oralité anglaise est fondamentalement étrangère à la parole romane, quelle que soit la forme écrite des mots prononcés — ce qui réduit la conception exceptionnaliste à ses justes proportions : une vision partielle et partiale. J'évoquais l'anglais des États-Unis uniquement pour accuser davantage l'incongruence absolue qui règne entre l'oralité anglaise locale et la parole romane en général.
Le fait que tel ou tel anglophone utilise plus ou moins de vocabulaire franco-latin ne change rien à l'affaire : le rouleau compresseur de l'oral pulvérise les timides parallèles que l'écrit aurait laissé apparaître.
Location: San Francisco, Noord-Kalifornië, Noord-Amerika
Posted: Fri Jun 08, 2007 11:50 pm Post subject:
greg in noord-frankrijk wrote:
Benjamin, ce que je voulais dire c'est que lorsque Porthos croit pouvoir utiliser le fait oral pour, pense-t-il, illustrer et renforcer sa thèse sur l'exceptionnalisme anglais au sein de la sous-famille germanqiue occidentale, il néglige de préciser que l'oralité anglaise est fondamentalement étrangère à la parole romane, quelle que soit la forme écrite des mots prononcés — ce qui réduit la conception exceptionnaliste à ses justes proportions : une vision partielle et partiale. J'évoquais l'anglais des États-Unis uniquement pour accuser davantage l'incongruence absolue qui règne entre l'oralité anglaise locale et la parole romane en général.
Le fait que tel ou tel anglophone utilise plus ou moins de vocabulaire franco-latin ne change rien à l'affaire : le rouleau compresseur de l'oral pulvérise les timides parallèles que l'écrit aurait laissé apparaître.
That's exactlyl what I was thinking while I was reading the list of English-French cognates. "Raisin" in French actually sounds quite different from "raisin" in English. (And doesn't "raisin", by itself, actually mean "grape" in French?)
Some people think Porthos (and others) should find the similarities between the written English words and their German counterparts obvious, but I have to defend Porthos on that point. I suspect that many of us here spent a lot of time in their early years comparing texts of foreign languages with the translations into your native language and, if they are related, learning the patterns of changes. I think that to people who haven't had that experience, the similarities between the words will not be so obvious. In my case, when I was a kid, I used to listen to Mahler's lieder and follow along with the German text, which had the English translation right next to it. It was a great learning tool.
Last edited by Deborah on Sat Jun 09, 2007 1:33 am; edited 1 time in total
I suspect that many of us here spent a lot of time in their early years comparing texts of foreign languages with the translations into your native language and, if they are related, learning the patterns of changes. I think that to people who haven't had that experience, the similarities between the words will not be so obvious. In my case, when I was a kid, I used to listen to Mahler's lieder and follow along with the German text, which had the English translation right next to it. It was a great learning tool.
You're right, I did. Whenever there was an instruction manual for something, or information on the box of something, it was usually written in many different languages. I remember noticing from an early age that the Dutch version was the one most similar to the English, so that was the one I used to read alongside the English translation most often. I can remember doing this almost as soon as I'd learnt to read, which must have been when I was about 5. After a while, I'd often just read the Dutch version, and only look at the English version when I found I word that I didn't know.
I used to go on Dutch websites quite often, and I remember sort of being able to understand them — or at least, I believed that I was understanding them. I remember once posting a link to a Dutch website on a message board once, and being surprised when people replied that they couldn't understand it — because I'd assumed that all English speakers could sort of read Dutch like I sort of could.
Unfortunately, I seemed to lose that ability when I was about 13. However, I've recently started learning some Dutch, and it all seems strangely familiar — it almost seems like a kind of forgotten childhood play language to me, rather than a 'foreign' language, as such.
That's exactlyl what I was thinking while I was reading the list of English-French cognates. "Raisin" in French actually sounds quite different from "raisin" in English. (And doesn't "raisin", by itself, actually mean "grape" in French?)
Absolument !
Fr <raisin> = An <grape>
An <raisin> = Fr <raisin sec>, <raisin (culinaire)>.
Deborah basically answered the question I intended for Porthos.
Location: San Francisco, Noord-Kalifornië, Noord-Amerika
Posted: Sat Jun 09, 2007 1:43 am Post subject:
greg in noord-frankrijk wrote:
Deborah wrote:
That's exactlyl what I was thinking while I was reading the list of English-French cognates.
Deborah basically answered the question I intended for Porthos.
Oops! Sorry. But when you asked Porthos what the difference was between the two lists, I thought the answer you were looking for was that the German list consited primarily of very basic, commonly used words -- or at least words for commonly seen/used/talked-about things in our daily lives, while the French list included a lot of abstract nouns and other "lofty" words
I still claim that an English speaker has less difficulty in understanding texts in Romance languages than in other Germanic languages.
If you chose proverbs and such language, but if you would find very everyday things probably this wouldn't be the case.
Dit is een nieuwhuis, dat in een oude straat is.
Esta es una casa nueva, que está en una calle antigua.
een is pronounced exactly as "an" in English
nieuw exactly as "new"
huis as "house"
For an english-speaker who can't speak another language, which would (s)he understand?
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For one, unlike Romance langauges that tend to share similar syntax, so that the word order is more or less the same between Romance languages, English has a very different syntax from Dutch and German.
the verbs to the final place doesn't occur in English, but many syntactic differences exists between English and the Rmance languages, for example the noun & adjective/adverb, also the way to construct verbs in English is very similar with Dutch and German, not as in the Romance ones. (Of course, anyway the germanic and romance languages are related as well!!)
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We don't have multiple genders.
All the romance languages have genders for all the nouns, but Enlish havn't this.
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But most importantly, our cognates we share with other Germanic languages are often unrecognizable, while those we share with Romance languages, which do abound in numbers, jump right out at is with the same or similar spelling.
As the other people have explained you, you better listen them as well, not only to read them, as the germanic languegs' pronunciations will be much more intelligible for the monolingual english-speaker than would be the romance ones. You must know, as English-speaker, that the orthography doesn't awlays represent the pronunciations!!!
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As humans, when we read, we don't read each individual letter, but only the first letter of the word and the last. So for recognition of cognates, the most important letter by far is the first letter.
If you too quickly read like scanning, then you don't take sufficinet time /effort /concentration for notice this thinsg. I can't read quickly, but always slowly and many times I must read two times for know what's written (also in french, it doesn't make a difference in which language).Maybe it's why I see immediatly cognates, or at least quite easily. Also, I hear spoken or discussed those things I'm reading, I don't mean that I always say the texts, but then I'm obligatory thinking about those words, sentences, converstaions, so written etxs for me are also spoken (mostly, not always). So, basically, I can't imagine that you separate the written and spoken this way : this is a big difference between how you / I search for those language cnnections.
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Honestly, could you recognize these two "very visible" Indo-European cognates?
Pater - Vader
Padre - Father
Pere - Vater
I can't answer you as I knew them, so I cna't delete this knwoledge from my brain to know .
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For instance, I would know to switch "P" to "F/V", and I would know the consonant shift Spanish underwent when evolving from Latin, which was "T" ---> "D". But these small letter changes amount to very big differences,
Written differences. very often in Du & Ger, a written D will be spoken as T, and a V will sound as F. Those are partner letters and the T / F are without voice, it''s the only difference. I don't refer dialects, or only certain people, but the standard languages.
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Spanish and French grammar is also far more similar to each other than English is to Dutch and German, which have very distinct grammar systems.
I don't agree. I can speak all those languages, and I think that if you will learn some Du & ger grammar that you will get a *very* big surprise!!! tohse languages maybe look as so different in the other orthogrpahy and such things as the verb place, but after you will overcome this initial impression and form a new opinion. Sometimes if i'm bit day-dreaming Dutch sound exactly as English. Also German has many sounds as in English.
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I the great Porthos have suddenly been enlightened with this great revelation, unbeknownst to the rest of the world's academia.
Please can I get your autograph (I will sell it for 82371 dollars on Ebay!!)
I suspect that many of us here spent a lot of time in their early years comparing texts of foreign languages with the translations into your native language and, if they are related, learning the patterns of changes. I think that to people who haven't had that experience, the similarities between the words will not be so obvious. In my case, when I was a kid, I used to listen to Mahler's lieder and follow along with the German text, which had the English translation right next to it. It was a great learning tool.
Location: San Francisco, Noord-Kalifornië, Noord-Amerika
Posted: Sat Jun 09, 2007 3:59 am Post subject:
Deborah wrote:
I suspect that many of us here spent a lot of time in their early years comparing texts of foreign languages with the translations into your native language....
I wonder how many times I was interrupted while I was writing that sentence?! And it won't help to correct it, since it's been quoted a couple of times. Always proofread!
As I say, you showed it to them, which again is placing too much emphasis on the written language.
As I already mentioned, I also had them listen to the sound samples on the internet.
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I wonder how many times I was interrupted while I was writing that sentence?! And it won't help to correct it, since it's been quoted a couple of times. Always proofread!
Ha, don't worry. I'm guilty of the same thing, as I never really concern myself with grammar, or spelling on forums such as this, when I'm writing at lightning speed.
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Dit is een nieuw huis, dat in een oude straat is.
I must admit, that I could understand this sentence rather easily even without reading the Spanish translation. But I'll try to explain something to you which perhaps will clarify our two very different perceptions with regard to Germanic languages. As a native Romance speaker, you see similarities/contrasts within Germanic languages from an outside, more distant perspective. You're "outside the bubble, looking in" as Uriel put it. This allows you to see more of the similarties between the two, while for us, they are less clear. An English speaker looks at the above sentence, and wouldn't have a clue what is being said, especially if he pronounced it according to English phonetics. Another thing is that we are all a bunch of intellectual nerds on this forum, who love abstract social sciences like linguistics and economics that the typical person finds exhaustingly boring. We know to consciously re-route syntax in various languages, and we know about the historical evolution of many languages, and we naturally correct what appears to us as seemingly subtle differences between langauges when trying to understand them. But to an average person who doesn't know about, say for example, the High German consonant shift, many words that we would recognize right off the bat look like complete gibberish.
To you, the difference between English "th" and German/Dutch "d" appears to be a very subtle difference, but for us, that completely alters the word. Granted, this applies more to the written form than the oral forum, but still, written language is in many ways, just as important as oral language. You need to be able to read in order to do just about anything. Most people I know here learn a foreign language for occupational purposes, such as dealing with clients or business partners in foreign countries. Much of their communication is in the form of e-mails and the like, if not the majority of it, and with that being the case, written language skills are just as important, if not more important than the oral skills.
I'm sure my perceptions of Romance language similarites/contrasts are rather different from yours, as again, I'm looking at with the advantage of being removed at it, so that I see them with greater clarity and the similarities are more apparent for me than they would be for you. To me, Spanish and French probably seem more similar than they do to you, because you're a native French speaker. Perhaps someone understands what I'm saying, and could explain it better for you.
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Dit is een nieuw huis, dat in een oude straat is.
Esta es una casa nueva, que está en una calle antigua.
Notice the syntax with these two sentences. Ironically, the Spanish word order is more similar to the English one with the exception of the adjective-noun order.
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All the romance languages have genders for all the nouns, but Enlish havn't this.
And to add even more confusion, Germanic languages have a neuter gender in addition to the other two!
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As the other people have explained you, you better listen them as well, not only to read them, as the germanic languegs' pronunciations will be much more intelligible for the monolingual english-speaker than would be the romance ones. You must know, as English-speaker, that the orthography doesn't awlays represent the pronunciations!!!
Well I wouldn't in agree, but in all fairness this is most likely because I'm used to hearing the Spanish cognates which are pronounced much like their French, Italian etc. equivalents.
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If you too quickly read like scanning, then you don't take sufficinet time /effort /concentration for notice this thinsg. I can't read quickly, but always slowly and many times I must read two times for know what's written (also in french, it doesn't make a difference in which language).Maybe it's why I see immediatly cognates, or at least quite easily. Also, I hear spoken or discussed those things I'm reading, I don't mean that I always say the texts, but then I'm obligatory thinking about those words, sentences, converstaions, so written etxs for me are also spoken (mostly, not always). So, basically, I can't imagine that you separate the written and spoken this way : this is a big difference between how you / I search for those language cnnections.
Lol, no Pauline. It's not something unique to me. It's a scientific fact. That's why read so fast. You can change the letter order in every word in a text, so long as the first and last letter in each word remain in the same place, and it will be 100% comprehensible. Our brains just seem to skip over the misplacements of the letters, and we're able to read just fine. I know this applies to your native language, but I'm not sure if it would apply to a language that is not your mother tounge.
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I can't answer you as I knew them, so I cna't delete this knwoledge from my brain to know .
If you're honest with yourself, this is probably a major reason for why a lot of the cognates between English and Dutch/German are so obvious to you. After learning the various cognates, the connection became obvious to me as well. But prior to learning them, they were not.
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Sometimes if i'm bit day-dreaming Dutch sound exactly as English. Also German has many sounds as in English.
Again, this boils down to you being on the outside looking in as a native Romance speaker. All Slavic langauges sound about the same to me because they're all sufficiently different so that I can't notice similarities/differences between them that a native Slavic speaker would. It's only normal that you would think that Dutch and English sound about the same. Also, I've noticed that Dutch and German seem to sound more similar to certain British dialects, but a lot more different with American English. For instance, German has non-rhotic 'r's, and for an Englishman, this would not seem alien at all, but for someone with my dialect, it most certainly would be.
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Oops! Sorry. But when you asked Porthos what the difference was between the two lists, I thought the answer you were looking for was that the German list consited primarily of very basic, commonly used words -- or at least words for commonly seen/used/talked-about things in our daily lives, while the French list included a lot of abstract nouns and other "lofty" words
Unless I'm around people my age, I normally talk exactly as how I write on this forum. I guess I use a lot of "lofty" words.
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Absolument !
Fr <raisin> = An <grape>
An <raisin> = Fr <raisin sec>, <raisin (culinaire)>.
Again, you bring up faux amis. But the semantic differences exist between English and its relatives as well, such as "dog"--->"hund".
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You're right, I did. Whenever there was an instruction manual for something, or information on the box of something, it was usually written in many different languages. I remember noticing from an early age that the Dutch version was the one most similar to the English, so that was the one I used to read alongside the English translation most often. I can remember doing this almost as soon as I'd learnt to read, which must have been when I was about 5. After a while, I'd often just read the Dutch version, and only look at the English version when I found I word that I didn't know.
This brings up another key difference between I as an American English speaker, and you as a British-English speaker. You live within close proximity to other Germanic speaking countries. On all of our boxes, packages, etc, and all of our DVDs, we are exposed to French and Spanish, being that we're in the Western Hemisphere. We're hardly ever exposed to Dutch or German, and we rarely hear these other langauges, so we never really get a chance to be exposed to them or hear them on a regular basis so as to grow up realizing the similarities. On the other hand, we recieve a lot more exposure to French and Spanish. On the few occasions where I come across a manual for a product or the directions on the back of a box in multiple languages besides English, French and Spanish, I will still be able to understand far more of the Romance language instructions than the German or Dutch one. The manuals and directions usually use formal speech, and as such, use mainly Romance vocabulary. This is part of the reason that when growing up, I always assumed English was related to French and Spanish instead of Dutch or German, because the few instances when I was exposed to it, showed me that the two langauges bore very little commonalities, which is what one would logically assume if all they ever read of it were formal directions.
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That's exactlyl what I was thinking while I was reading the list of English-French cognates. "Raisin" in French actually sounds quite different from "raisin" in English. (And doesn't "raisin", by itself, actually mean "grape" in French?)
There are quite a few words that are spelled exactly the same in English and Afrikaans/Dutch/ German but are pronounced very differently.
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2. For some reason, you don't want there to be any oral mutual intelligibility between English and Dutch or German. Based on many of the things you've said over the past year, it wouldn't surprise me if you have some kind of internalised desire to see English as fundamentally distinct and separate from other Germanic languages. (Although why this would be, I don't know).
That is not true one bit. It is true, that I, much like yourself at one point thought that the English were more similar to the French than they were to Germans, most likely because of the strong Francophile sentiment among upper-class British people which is what I primarily associate with when thinking of the British people. Along with the historical connections between England and France via the Normans. In retrospect, I see how foolish that was, but even you as a British person were once guilty of that foolish misconception as well until you visited Germany last year. (I used to rarely ever think of working class ordinary people in England when thinking of "the English" until about a year ago. I had this perception of them being real posh, prim and proper snobs, probably from always watching movies about the British whose main characters were of the nobility and spoke RP) But now I see how England is so very similar to other northern European countries and I don't for one second delude myself into believing that English is a Romance language, or even partly a Romance language. Thankfully I know far more about linguistics now then I did when I was a novice with no previous experience or real interest in linguistics on antimoon.
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In colloquial language, British speakers will always use Germanic-based vocabulary for example "begin" and "find" instead of "commence" and "discover". And like Benjamin said, you place too much emphasis on the written language. You need to consider the spoken aspect as well.
Again, this is yet another difference I noticed between working-class English speakers in Britain vs. the U.S. A lot of regional dialect speakers in the U.K. seem to use far less Romance vocabulary than I would, being a working-class American. They also seem to use a lot of archaic words which fell out of use in "Standard English" by the time it reached the American continent, and a lot of these words bear much of a resemblence to Dutch/German cognates, but I wouldn't see these similarities, because I never use these words in my dialect.
I'm going to conduct a survey of 300 Americans, and ask them
(1) - Which foreign langauge do you think is the most similar to English?
(2) - Now, which of these languages on the list can you understand best? (written, and with some, I'll find a way to provide sound samples online)
I hope to accomplish two objectives by conducting this study. One, I will attempt to prove to you that most Americans believe that English is more similar to Romance languages, and that most aren't aware of the fact that their language is related to Dutch or German or other Germanic languages. I'm willing to bet most people believe that English is related to Romance languages based on previous experience. Even on reputable TV documentaries on the history channel, information such as Although Latin is dead today, the language of the Romans lives on in the form of its descendant languages, known collectively as the Romance languages, including major international languages such as French, Italian, Spanish, and English is being diseminated to the public.
My other objective is to show that English speakers like both Uriel and I, will naturally understand more of Romance languages than they would from Germanic ones, particularly in written form, but in spoken form also.
Here's another perfect example of why an English speaker might not notice Germanic cognates as easily as he would Romance cognates. Often times, English will more commonly use a Romance word for a particular thing, and rarely ever use the Germanic equivalent, because it would just seem awkward. Dutch and German will more than likely retain the use of the Germanic word to describe that same particular thing, and they often do it by forming compound-nouns, which is very different from the English equivalent.
Here's an example that is illustrative of the languages as a whole. Which of the following would an English speaker be more likely to understand?:
Germanic - Kaiserlich
Romance - Imperial
Germanic - Koniglich
Romance - Royal
I am willing to wager my life on the opinion that most English speakers would find the two Romance words far easier to understand than the totally incomprehensible Germanic cognates.
Now, I'm fortunate to know a few things about these words because I know the origin of the words, and I know a little bit about the nature of languages like German and Dutch that most English speakers do not know.
For instance, I know that German derives its word for "Emperor" from the Latin name "Caesar", which in German is "Kaiser". I know that from being a student of history. 99.9% of Americans wouldn't know that.
I also know that German and Dutch have a tendency to make compound words into an adjective, such as a
noun + lich/lijk (like), similar to the "ly" endings in English adjectives. Most people don't know that however.
So I can see that "Kaiserlich" means - "Caesar-like" (emperor-like), and therefore (imperial). But in order for one to figure that out, they must first reduce an advanced vocabulary, technical words into very simple terms, before they can recognize it.
The same for "Koniglich" - literally "King-like" or "Kingly" (a.k.a. "Royal").
But the Germanic cognate is not nearly as obvious as the Romance one, which is what this example so effectively illustrates. There may be many times more Germanic cognates in any given conversation or text than Romance ones, but it is the Romance ones we more readily recognize, so that we understand more of them, than the Germanic ones, even though they're greater in number. _________________ Operation Northwoods - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods
Favorite languages = English/Spanish
Followed by Italian/French/Dutch
Location: San Francisco, Noord-Kalifornië, Noord-Amerika
Posted: Sat Jun 09, 2007 9:59 am Post subject:
Porthos wrote:
Quote:
Dit is een nieuw huis, dat in een oude straat is.
Esta es una casa nueva, que está en una calle antigua.
Notice the syntax with these two sentences. Ironically, the Spanish word order is more similar to the English one with the exception of the adjective-noun order.
How can you say that? Both sentences have only one word order difference -- the verb at the end in the first sentence, and the adjective following the noun in the second (and there are 2 noun-adjective occurrences in the second sentence, so that makes it more different ).
An <raisin> = Fr <raisin sec>, <raisin (culinaire)>.
Again, you bring up faux amis. But the semantic differences exist between English and its relatives as well, such as "dog"--->"hund".
Le but de cette illustration était de te montrer qu'il faut se garder de toute généralisation hâtive. Non, tous les éléments du fonds lexical vieil-anglais parvenus en anglais moderne ne sont pas nécessairement très éloignés de leurs homologues des langues germaniques occidentales contemporaines. Non, tous les vocables anglais d'allure franco-latine ne sont pas forcément de bonnes indications pour saisir le sens de leurs équivalents formels en langues romanes.
Porthos wrote:
I'm going to conduct a survey of 300 Americans, and ask them
(1) - Which foreign langauge do you think is the most similar to English?
(2) - Now, which of these languages on the list can you understand best? (written, and with some, I'll find a way to provide sound samples online)
I hope to accomplish two objectives by conducting this study. One, I will attempt to prove to you that most Americans believe that English is more similar to Romance languages, and that most aren't aware of the fact that their language is related to Dutch or German or other Germanic languages.
Tu peux t'épargner cette peine. On sait déjà tout ça. Beaucoup de gens ignorent même que le français ou l'espagnol sont des langues romanes.
Porthos wrote:
I'm willing to bet most people believe that English is related to Romance languages based on previous experience. Even on reputable TV documentaries on the history channel, information such as Although Latin is dead today, the language of the Romans lives on in the form of its descendant languages, known collectively as the Romance languages, including major international languages such as French, Italian, Spanish, and English is being diseminated to the public.
C'est inévitable. Beaucoup de gens pensent aussi que le Soleil tourne autour de la Terre ou que l'Homme descend d'Adam & Ève.
Les inexactitudes propagées par ces médias pseudo-vulgarisateurs illustrent cependant un point : bien qu'étant une langue germanique tout à fait typique, l'anglais entre complètement dans le champ de la francologie (ou de la romanologie) dans le sens où cette langue véhicule une partie du vocabulaire que le français et le gréco-latin exportent depuis des centaines d'années. La réaction des médias et du grand public n'est qu'une manifestation de surface de ce phénomène profond.
I must admit, that I could understand this sentence rather easily even without reading the Spanish translation.
I hope so LOL!! It's nearly identical at the english sentence!!
Porthos wrote:
An English speaker looks at the above sentence, and wouldn't have a clue what is being said, especially if he pronounced it according to English phonetics.
Of course he would have a clue what's being said!!!! written or spoken, this sentence is 100% intelligible for english-speakers.
Porths wrote:
We know to consciously re-route syntax in various languages, and we know about the historical evolution of many languages, and we naturally correct what appears to us as seemingly subtle differences between langauges when trying to understand them. But to an average person who doesn't know about, say for example, the High German consonant shift, many words that we would recognize right off the bat look like complete gibberish.
I don't know what is re-route syntax and I don't know about the historical evoltuions (only little bit) also i don't knwo the German consonant shift. The connections /diferences etc I've noticed are ones I've seen / discoverd in the languages when i read & hear them.
Porthos wrote:
To you, the difference between English "th" and German/Dutch "d" appears to be a very subtle difference, but for us, that completely alters the word.
Yes, for me, this is a very little and subtle difrence not influencing comprehension at all.
Porthos wrote:
I'm sure my perceptions of Romance language similarites/contrasts are rather different from yours, as again, I'm looking at with the advantage of being removed at it, so that I see them with greater clarity and the similarities are more apparent for me than they would be for you. To me, Spanish and French probably seem more similar than they do to you, because you're a native French speaker.
I don't think it's advatange or disadvantage; I can notice connections & similarities in things *very* well, quickly and cleverly. I can see many simiarities French -Spanish, but many differences as well, particluarly in the pronunciation.
Porhots wrote:
Pauline wrote:
Dit is een nieuw huis, dat in een oude straat is.
Esta es una casa nueva, que está en una calle antigua.
Notice the syntax with these two sentences. Ironically, the Spanish word order is more similar to the English one with the exception of the adjective-noun order.
Of course I notice the syntax LOL!!! For this and the vocabulary I created this sentences and put them for examples. As Deborah wrote, between Du & Eng is 1 difference (verb--> end) between Sp & Eng 2 differences (adjectives after the nouns). It's nothing ironically.
Porthos wrote:
Pauline wrote:
All the romance languages have genders for all the nouns, but Enlish havn't this.
And to add even more confusion, Germanic languages have a neuter gender in addition to the other two!
i wouldn't call such things confusion You say "Germanic languages", but in fact dutch has mostly 2 genders:
Definite articles in dutch De (masculine & feminine nouns)
Het (neutral nouns)
sometimes the de words are referred haar/hem (her/ him) but very seldom, so basically Dutch, as the romance languages, has 2 genders in the basic sense. The way Greg reffered the genders I don't know such things - he's veyr intellectual.
Porthos wrote:
Again, this boils down to you being on the outside looking in as a native Romance speaker. All Slavic langauges sound about the same to me because they're all sufficiently different so that I can't notice similarities/differences between them that a native Slavic speaker would. It's only normal that you would think that Dutch and English sound about the same.
i suppose so.
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Also, I've noticed that Dutch and German seem to sound more similar to certain British dialects, but a lot more different with American English. For instance, German has non-rhotic 'r's, and for an Englishman, this would not seem alien at all, but for someone with my dialect, it most certainly would be.
In some parts of The Netherlands the people have the american R. It's not like French or trilled, but like in English and very rhotic. For me, it's sound absolutly ugly and unpleasnt but those dutch ahve the nasty pronunciation of their language.
Quote:
Even on reputable TV documentaries on the history channel, information such as Although Latin is dead today, the language of the Romans lives on in the form of its descendant languages, known collectively as the Romance languages, including major international languages such as French, Italian, Spanish, and English is being diseminated to the public.
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I also know that German and Dutch have a tendency to make compound words into an adjective, such as a
noun + lich/lijk (like), similar to the "ly" endings in English adjectives. Most people don't know that however.
All 3 have exactly thesame vowel sound. lijk is pronounced as the English "ly" + unstressed K. Very similar with the English. Also "lich" is similar, for sure more similar to listen than between French & Spanish suffix to form the adverbs although written they look to be similar, are pronounced with very different vowels.
To you, the difference between English "th" and German/Dutch "d" appears to be a very subtle difference, but for us, that completely alters the word.
Not for me. In Birmingham, many people pronounce 'th' as /d/. Very often when I speak to people on MSN, they write 'de' and 'dat', instead of 'the' and 'that', because it's one less letter and it represents more closely how they speak anyway.
Porthos wrote:
Pauline wrote:
]Sometimes if i'm bit day-dreaming Dutch sound exactly as English. Also German has many sounds as in English.
Again, this boils down to you being on the outside looking in as a native Romance speaker.
Not necessarily. To me, Dutch often sounds kind of like some English dialect that I don't quite understand. Likewise, when I've heard some English dialects, I have sometimes initially thought that they were speaking Dutch or some other Germanic language until hearing them for a while.
Porthos wrote:
For instance, German has non-rhotic 'r's,
Sort of, but not really like in British Received Pronunciation. In RP, there would be no difference in pronunciation between 'spa' and 'spar', whist in Standard German, there would be, because the final R is pronounced as a kind of schwa.
Porthos wrote:
Unless I'm around people my age, I normally talk exactly as how I write on this forum. I guess I use a lot of "lofty" words.
I find that I use very few Franco-Latinate words in everyday speech — far less so than on this forum, anyway. I actually don't like it when people use a lot of Franco-Latinate words because I find it difficult to understand.
Porthos wrote:
Daniel wrote:
In colloquial language, British speakers will always use Germanic-based vocabulary for example "begin" and "find" instead of "commence" and "discover". And like Benjamin said, you place too much emphasis on the written language. You need to consider the spoken aspect as well.
Again, this is yet another difference I noticed between working-class English speakers in Britain vs. the U.S. A lot of regional dialect speakers in the U.K. seem to use far less Romance vocabulary than I would, being a working-class American.
This is not a phenomenon which affects only working-class people in Britain. I'm not working-class, but in everyday language, I will almost never use Romance-based vocabulary when a Germanic-based alternative exists. Like Daniel, I will always say 'begin' or 'start', instead of 'commence'.
Porthos wrote:
I'm going to conduct a survey of 300 Americans, and ask them
(1) - Which foreign langauge do you think is the most similar to English?
(2) - Now, which of these languages on the list can you understand best? (written, and with some, I'll find a way to provide sound samples online)
I hope to accomplish two objectives by conducting this study. One, I will attempt to prove to you that most Americans believe that English is more similar to Romance languages, and that most aren't aware of the fact that their language is related to Dutch or German or other Germanic languages.
That might be an interesting project for you, but as far as I'm concerned, it is irrelevant what 'most Americans', or 'most Germans', or 'most Japanese people' think about this that or the other language.
It's also unlikely to be fair. Firstly, it would be difficult to ensure that the samples you chose were neutral, and not biased towards one language or another. Equally, as you've mentioned, many Americans can speak Spanish anyway, and Americans in general are far more likely to have done Spanish (at school or otherwise) than German. If you went to the Netherlands, you'd probably find that many people there understand English better than German for similar reasons. Heck, if every American learnt Mandarin Chinese in school for 12 years then most Americans would have some understanding of that language — although it would not be the result of any kind of mutual intelligibility.
I also know that German and Dutch have a tendency to make compound words into an adjective, such as a
noun + lich/lijk (like), similar to the "ly" endings in English adjectives. Most people don't know that however.
All 3 have exactly thesame vowel sound. lijk is pronounced as the English "ly" + unstressed K. Very similar with the English. Also "lich" is similar, for sure more similar to listen than between French & Spanish suffix to form the adverbs although written they look to be similar, are pronounced with very different vowels.[/quote]
"ly" endings in French and Spanish are "mente", "ment", respectively. That looks very similar to me, except the French lacks the final vowel sound, and the first 'e' is pronounced more like a Spanish 'a'.
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Of course he would have a clue what's being said!!!! written or spoken, this sentence is 100% intelligible for english-speakers.
I beg to differ.
Quote:
In some parts of The Netherlands the people have the american R. It's not like French or trilled, but like in English and very rhotic. For me, it's sound absolutly ugly and unpleasnt but those dutch ahve the nasty pronunciation of their language.
Yes that is true. I think that is true for most Dutch dialects, because all the Dutch speakers I've ever heard have a rhotic 'r', which is like American English. _________________ Operation Northwoods - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods
Favorite languages = English/Spanish
Followed by Italian/French/Dutch
"ly" endings in French and Spanish are "mente", "ment", respectively. That looks very similar to me, except the French lacks the final vowel sound, and the first 'e' is pronounced more like a Spanish 'a'.
C'est inévitable. Beaucoup de gens pensent aussi que le Soleil tourne autour de la Terre ou que l'Homme descend d'Adam & Ève.
I don't know very many people who believe that the sun revolves around the earth. And I myself believe that we're descended from Adam and Eve.
Quote:
I find that I use very few Franco-Latinate words in everyday speech — far less so than on this forum, anyway. I actually don't like it when people use a lot of Franco-Latinate words because I find it difficult to understand.
I don't think you find them difficult to understand. Your vocabulary is just as developed as mine, and I don't have any trouble understanding words derived from French.
Quote:
i wouldn't call such things confusion You say "Germanic languages", but in fact dutch has mostly 2 genders:
Definite articles in dutch
De (masculine & feminine nouns)
Het (neutral nouns)
Yes, you're right. I was referring to German.
Quote:
Not necessarily. To me, Dutch often sounds kind of like some English dialect that I don't quite understand. Likewise, when I've heard some English dialects, I have sometimes initially thought that they were speaking Dutch or some other Germanic language until hearing them for a while.
That's because there is much greater dialect diversity in Britain than there is in the U.S., while many of those British regional dialects have retained more archaic language varieties no longer present in standard English that will often be more similar to other W. Germanic languages, such as the word for "heaven" in some British dialects, or the loss of the "th" sound, or the use of a regular conjugation of the verb "to be", which bears more resemblance to German "Ich bin" (I be), vs. standard English, "I am".
Quote:
How can you say that? Both sentences have only one word order difference -- the verb at the end in the first sentence, and the adjective following the noun in the second (and there are 2 noun-adjective occurrences in the second sentence, so that makes it more different ).
I suppose that's because I'm so used to the Spanish adjective-noun order, that it doesn't strike me as odd in any way. You must remember that a typical mono-lingual layperson will try to translate a text word-for-word in his or her own syntax.
Quote:
Dit is een nieuw huis, dat in een oude straat is.
Word for word this would be, This is a new house that in a old street is
The Spanish would be This is a house new that is in a street antique.
"Antigua" would be recognizable as "antique" which is synonymous with "old", the same way Fr. - "ancien" is recognizable as "ancient", which is a fancy way of saying "old" in English. At least I'm able to make that connection. Anyone with a well developed vocabulary and a healthy measure of reason could figure that out also. _________________ Operation Northwoods - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods
Favorite languages = English/Spanish
Followed by Italian/French/Dutch
C'est inévitable. Beaucoup de gens pensent aussi que le Soleil tourne autour de la Terre ou que l'Homme descend d'Adam & Ève.
With a combination of English and Spanish, along with knowledge of the French words "beaucoup", "aussi", and "homme", I was able to understand this sentence word for word. _________________ Operation Northwoods - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods
Favorite languages = English/Spanish
Followed by Italian/French/Dutch
In some parts of The Netherlands the people have the american R. It's not like French or trilled, but like in English and very rhotic. For me, it's sound absolutly ugly and unpleasnt but those dutch ahve the nasty pronunciation of their language.
Yes that is true. I think that is true for most Dutch dialects, because all the Dutch speakers I've ever heard have a rhotic 'r', which is like American English.
i would like to tell you that your comment is very stupid, but when I told Loic this about soemthing he wrote, I was told off!!! LOL!!
Anyway, no, of course only some people, and only younger ones as well in certain regions, I think in the West but I'm not exactly sure. It seems more a female tendance as well, although not exclsuively.
the 2 standard Rs in Dutch are other ones: the one very similar with German and the trilled one. In Flemish, the R is always trilled. In some part sof the Netherlands also, but the German type R is very often pronounced there.
I think that you mustn't conclude such a thing based on "all the dutch speakers you've ever heard". Maybe they all are from the same region and are all young.Probably as well you havn't heard many -evidently insufficent. I think it's true for most amercians that they're blond, female and thin, because the one who visited us on wednesday was this.
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Please can I get your autograph (I will sell it for 82371 dollars on Ebay!!) 
