LL-L: "Multilingualism" LOWLANDS-L, 27.OCT.1999 (04) [E]

Wed Oct 27 17:12:33 UTC 1999

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From: Rudolf Maree [rmaree at m3capital.co.za]
Subject: LL-L: "Multilingualism" LOWLANDS-L, 26.OCT.1999 (09) [E]

> > From: john feather [johnfeather at sceptic1.freeserve.co.uk]
> Subject: Multilingualism
>
> Henno quoted a news item about the European Commission wanting us all to
> speak three EU languages by the year 2001 [sic].
>
> Ron responded with his "dream" of people casting the net more widely and
> learning languages from more remote areas.
>
> Three points occur to me.
>
> a. What is a minority language on the world scale? I met an Italian (a
> teacher employed to teach the children of staff of the Italian Embassy in
> London) who asked me why I bothered to learn her language "because only 50
> million people speak it".
>
> b. It seems plausible that there are dead languages with a much greater
> claim on people's time (because they have a significant literature) than
> living "minority" languages. I have recently started to learn Classical
> Greek, and Latin also has an appeal. The "Old" and "Middle" forms of our
> mother tongues have a particular claim..
>
> c. Is it easier or more difficult learn a language closely related to
> one's
> mother tongue than a linguistically  more remote one? I was told by a
> German
> with almost perfect English that French is much more difficult for
> German-speakers because of the lack of common roots of words. She argued
> that English is a good place to start learning both Germanic and Romance
> languages because of our "mixed" vocabulary. I don't really believe that
> this is an important consideration. As soon as we think we recognise words
> in French we find (or don't!) that a lot of them are "false friends".
>
> John Feather johnfeather at sceptic1.freeserve.co.uk

Dear John; some thoughts on your three questions:

A) I would think all languages except English can be classified as
"minority languages". English is poised to take over as lingua  franca of
the whole planet. I'm not too sure about the situation in  Europe but
in South Africa we have definite problems keeping our  other indigenous
languages alive.
B) After having to struggle through Latin myself I have to disagree
with  you. Not only are dead languages not spoken, there are so many
"live" languages on the verge of extinction that it seems a waste
pining after Virgilian and company.
C) Learning Latin vocabulary was definitely made easier because of
roots shared in both English and Afrikaans. Attempting to learn  one
of the "black" South African Languages is nearly impossible.  All the
words are totally strange and the whole structure of the  language is
alien.

----------

From: R. F. Hahn [sassisch at yahoo.com]
Subject: Multilingualism

Dear John,

Your questions are very interesting, of course (as always).   Eons ago we
discussed the same topic in great length on this list.  So I'll try to keep my
response relatively brief (yeah, sure!) and also somewhat personal.  I'll keep
it personal because I have compared notes with other people who have studied a
number of languages, and it seems there is a lot of diversity of experience
and ideas and no hard and fast rule.  Much depends on a person's previous
experience and education and also on his or her attitude and level of
confidence.

I have studied languages that are closely related to my own, and I have
studied those that could hardly be farther removed from my own.  My overall
conclusion is that, using appropriate learning/studying methods, you could
reach your goal in about the same amount of time irrespective of which type of
language you study.  (I am simplifying by disregarding extra difficulties with
writing, especially with scripts such as those for Chinese, Japanese, the
Semitic languages, and also alphabetically based but historical and
inconsistent ones such as those for Tibetan, traditional Mongolian, and
English, or even French.)

Obviously, initially it takes time to get used to linguistic structures that
are vastly different from the one(s) with which you had been familiar up to
that point.  Some people want to give up right then, while others take it as a
welcome challenge and thus have an easier time.  A good example of that would
be morphosyntactic characteristics of Uralic (e.g., Finnish, Estonian,
Hungarian) and Altaic (e.g., Turkish, Mongolian, Manchu) languages encountered
by a speaker of a Germanic, Slavic or Romance language.  However, once you get
over that initial hurdle you discover the beauty and relative consistency of
agglutinative systems such as these, and it tends to be fairly smooth sailing
from then on.  A similar thing can be said about an "alien" phonology.  For
instance, we spent several weeks just practicing Chinese tones before we got
to do anything "fun," and some people couldn't even *hear* the differences at
the beginning, leave along produce them.  But this was only an initial
hurdle.  The relative simplicity of Chinese syntax and the virtual absence of
things like affixes made up for it in the long run.  Obviously, a
disadvantange -- or is it an advantage? (see below) -- of very "alien" types
of languages is that you find in them no "familiar" words, words that have
cognates in your own language.  (Of course, Japanese is now riddled with
English loans, but they are not always readily recognizable as such, like a
recent one: _konbini_ < _konbiniensu sutoa_ < 'convenience store', like older
_terebi_ < _terebishon_ < 'television', and _suto_ < _sutoraiku_ < 'strike').

Sure, we all assume it's easier to learn a foreign language that is very
closely related to your own and shares with it lots of rules and vocabulary.
At least it's easier to understand the gist even if you come across previously
unknown vocabulary and expressions.  However, in my own experiences there are
special problems and pitfalls in such cases.  While you approach a very
"alien" language with a more open mind (not even hoping to encounter anything
familiar and always being ready for "weirdness"), you tend to approach the
closely related language with certain expectations and assumptions that are
colored by your own language, and you will constantly fight the inclination to
translate literally from your own language and make up cognates (sometimes
correctly but more often incorrectly), and literally translate idiomatic
expressions.  In other words, interference from your native language is much
more of an issue in this case.  This is definitely a problem among northern
speakers of German trying to learn Low Saxon (Low Geman).  They tend to
understand a fair bit of the language to start with, simply by way of
exposure, and when they try to use it they tend to translate literally from
German, also make up words on the basis of German, ending up with what is
known as _Patentplatt_.  This is of course aided by ages of brainwashing
people into believing that it's merely a German dialect.  I should imagine
that there is a similar problem for English speakers studying Scots.  I have
it with Dutch and Afrikaans, because I perceive them as being so very close to
Low Saxon.   I have made efforts to study them systematically.  Going through
lessons seems like baby stuff and boring to me, because I understand virtually
everything.  So my self-discipline is not what it ought to be.  I want to skip
straight to the "good stuff," and then I discover that Low Saxon interferes,
that if I literally translate certain expressions they come out either
incorrect or meaning something quite different.  It was also a bit of the
problem when I started learning English as a kid (and remember that English
seemed even closer to those of us Northerners who had at least passive Low
Saxon proficiency).  This, to me, seems an even greater hurdle than learning
an "exotic" language.

A long time ago I read some informal (I think German) papers about this, and
the upshot was that after a year or two students who at some institute or
other had studied European IE languages and those that had studied Uralic
languages (Finnish or Hungarian) had made just about the same amount of
progress.

> I was told by a
> German
> with almost perfect English that French is much more difficult for
> German-speakers because of the lack of common roots of words.

I disagree, for the above-mentioned reasons.  To begin with, the going may be
slower in French than in English, but there are far fewer _faux amis_ lurking
along the way.

> She argued
> that English is a good place to start learning both Germanic and Romance
> languages because of our "mixed" vocabulary. I don't really believe that
> this is an important consideration. As soon as we think we recognise words
> in French we find (or don't!) that a lot of them are "false friends".

Well, here I disagree with you and agree with her, probably because you are
looking at French from an English vantage point while she and I look at it
from a German vantage point.  Looking at it from German (and most other
Germanic languages), English appears very much Romanized, and it's the
Romance-derived words and affixes that for us are the problem with English,
not the Germanic base.  Once we have learned English and have learned to cope
with that hefty Romance infusion we have a much easier time learning our first
Romance language, because we recognize so many more words that we would have
had we not previously learned English.

Regards,

Reinhard/Ron

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