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I suspect the Americans will be embarrassed by the Europeans. Well, by everyone else really.

I can speak a passable bit of English and that's it.

My mother spoke English, Polish, French and Latin (well, I don't know that she spoke it so much). My father spoke English, Portuguese, Spanish and some French though was not fluent as my mother was.

My genetics have been useless to me in the language department. My mother graduated from high school back when you had to know stuff to do that and my father was just really, really smart and picked up Spanish and French.

An interesting stroke tidbit. When my mother suffered a stroke that primarily impacted her speech, she first recovered Polish (which she spoke at home growing up and studied in her parochial school) and then started in with a lot of latin and English and then some french. She was all over the place during speech therapy. She was able to first say prayers and sing songs in Polish and a lot of Latin prayers came back to her as well before she got to the English. At that time she was 84 and hadn't really spoken Polish since her parents died when she was 26.

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Valerie Garcia
vals1990@yahoo.com

"Listen, O my son, to the precepts of thy master, and incline the ear of thy heart, and cheerfully receive and faithfully execute the admonitions of thy loving Father, that by the toil of obedience thou mayest return to Him ....." St. Benedict

That's fascinating re the effect of your mum's stroke.

My mother speaks a few, Italian first, English, Spanish, French and a little Arabic.

I can speak a little Italian and Spanish but with an embarrassing accent and bad grammar. I understand them well enough.

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Kathleen

______________________________________________________________________

“Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.”

I speak two indian languages Konkani and Hindi besides understanding a third Marathi.

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Simon

English

I made it through latin 3 in HS, although I don't remember most of it.
Some Spanish, some Korean- just enough to give little kids directions!

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Therese

English; a little German; I used to be able to speak, haltingly, Fijian and the island's worn-dorn form of Hindi they called 'Hindi-baat'; as for Latin, I can order eggs, milk, bread, onions, beef and lamb in any Vatican restaurant. Oh, and eagle; i could order eagle.

chris kirk

I am fluent in the US version of English, can probably be understood in Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand and anyplace else some version of English is spoken. And can also understand most teenagers who claim to speak English

I understand Spanish (mostly) can read it with some level of fluency, I do not however speak it with any skill any longer (lack of practice). 6 years of formal schooling in Spanish.

I can speak a very little bit of Japanese, Vietnamese, Thai, Turkish, and German....but truly not much more then Please thank you, Hello, Goodbye and "Where is the bathroom?" I would probably not starve as I can also order a Beer and food in some of those languages.

I understand Latin but that is also a deteriorating skill. 4 years of Latin studies.


As I have traveled around the world, I learned that I have a small knack of picking up a low level of conversational skill in whatever language was spoken in that area. I also found that not speaking after leaving that country, I would loose most of that skill.

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Bob C

Val,

Isn't English your first language?

Besides English, I speak Malay as a second language and understand a little Chinese.

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Ian DC
Blessed Ever Virgin Mary -- Sanctuary and resting-place of the Blessed Trinity where God dwells in greater and more divine splendour than anywhere else in the universe

English... and American English with a British accent...
French to near-native standard when I'm in practice; traces of British accent and I haven't used it for a while so my fluency is probably downgraded.
Latin for reading and understanding... active use is more dubious, but I can read most Christian Latin pretty fluently. I don't have the vocabulary to read the Classics since they're talking more about tall horses spewing forth men and less about grace.
I can more or less read NT Greek but I'm rusty.
Spanish I can pretty much read fluently but speaking is much harder - I have two years' worth which is probably about the equivalent of US high-school level, but I never took A-level in the subject. At various points it's been brushed up and used for talking to South Americans, at which points in time it's been better.
Italian I can understand but not as well as Spanish. I have a minimal active vocabulary in it for asking directions etc.
I did two years of Portuguese at school but have totally forgotten it (I was only 12 I think).
A smattering of German, which I will probably pick up a bit over the summer working with German tourists.
A bit of Norwegian from Stine, but the children now speak pretty good English, especially her eldest, so I am not being encouraged to learn! I don't think I will ever master the accent, though.
The odd word of Polish - again something I'm hoping to pick up. The odd words largely consist of the Mass Ordinary, which is probably not that useful in conversation!
Very, very basic Dutch (minimal for politeness) - we went on a school trip to Holland.
Numbers and the words for 'dog' 'flute' and a few others in Japanese - from a student friend.
I can ask for coffee in Hungarian. Randomly.
I also learnt some Sign Supported English in school. It's like British Sign Language, but with English syntax so is used by/with hearing impaired people rather than the Deaf (who use signs as a first language).

In my experience, with English and French you can talk to most people. When that fails, Spanish has helped in the past, but there are some times when you end up talking to a Hungarian girl in a mixture of Latin and English while she replies in Latin and German. Hand signals are very useful at these times!

Anyway, I think that's probably a summary of everything I know. Seriously, though, in most cases my knowledge is pretty darned basic. Even my Spanish is only about what you'd need for going on holiday, booking a hotel room etc.

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Jules Xx


What will become of sinners?

Ian

Do Malay and Chinese have the same roots? Are they similar? Do they use the same script?

I am very interested.Many North Indian languages have the same root Sanskrit- which makes it easy to learn
South Indian languages are of a different family-eg Malayalam.Tamil Kannada
I understand that European languages descend from Latin though I am very confused exactly how
Does German have Latin connections?
And what about Nordic languages,Norwegian,Swedish Finnish?
Quite fascinating

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Simon

Simon,



Not English.



No.



Finnish (Suomi) is Ural-Altaic and is related to Hungarian, Turkish and Mongolian. Norwegian and Swedish, like English, are Germanic languages.

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James Daly

"It is the Lord." (Jn 21:7)

I speak only my native Tagalog (Philippine language) and conversational English.

I can read and sing Spanish comfortably, but not speak it.

I am so bad at learning other languages. I spent quite a bit of time in Germany but learned only some polite expressions and the words for various foods (potatoes, butter, bread, piaeapple, etc.)

I was forced to speak Spanish while in Mexico (throwing all the annoying rules of verb conjugation) because my English husband, who made me believe he could speak Spanish, turned out he couldn't. Turned out I knew more Spanish than he did, poor chap. (He said he learned it while working in an SF steel-forming shop with Latinos.)

But in France, Miles was in his element, speaking the language (Normand, anyway) like a native. God rest his soul.

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Pax et bonum,
Marie

JMJ

Hi, Simon,
No. Malay's root is Austronesian while Chinese's is Sino-Tibetan. Chinese use character word pictures while ancient Austronesians (including most Philippine languages) used (now extinct) an alphasyllabary closer to your own Brahmic script.

Something to do with how the tradewinds blew.

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Pax et bonum,
Marie

JMJ

Thanks very much for your replies


I found this script very difficult to begin with -thankfully I was still in school.The Chinese script seems much more difficult

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Simon

Simon,

I have always been fascinated by how many English words can be traced back to Sanskrit - or rather, common Indo-European roots. There are certain common changes and substitutions - for example, p sounds becoming f sounds - but once you spot these and get used to it, you can see how 'pere' and 'father' are closely related, and so forth. I found a good website on it at one point, but have I ever been able to find it again.......

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Jules Xx


What will become of sinners?

Julie,



Try searching under Grimm's Law (which is what you're talking about).

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James Daly

"It is the Lord." (Jn 21:7)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_vocabulary

At first I never thought they were so connected

the connection
The discovery of Indo-European first started with a British judge named William Jones who was stationed in India in 1780. Jones, a bright fellow with classical training in Greek and Latin, had determined to master the ancient Sanskrit tongue. He wanted to brush up on native Indian law codes--many of which were written in Sanskrit script--before administering British law in the region.

Jones was shocked to discover a regular pattern of similarities between ancient Sanskrit words and ancient words in classical Western languages. Here are some examples:

Meaning:
Sanskrit
Latin:
"three"
trayas
tres

"seven"
sapta
septem

"eight"
ashta
octo

"nine"
nava
novem

"snake"
sarpa
serpens

"king"
raja
regem

"god"
devas
divus ("divine"
)
Other Sanskrit words were similar to Greek terms. For instance, the Greek word trias ("three") is close to trayas and tres in the chart above. The Greek word pente ("five") is close to Sanskrit panca ("five"), and so on. Jones began systematically charting the similarities, finding literally thousands of such parallels between Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin. He presented his findings on February 2nd, 1786, to the "Asiatick Society in Calcutta." He declared boldly that Sanskrit had

. . . a stronger affinity than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which perhaps no longer exists.§
What Jones had uncovered, without realizing it initially, was the existence of a lost mother tongue, what scholars call proto-Indo-European--a single, ancient, prehistoric language that led to the development of many languages in Europe, India, Russia, and the Middle East. It required nearly ninety years of comparative linguistics to fill in all the gaps.

Before Jones, earlier scholars had long ago noted that many languages shared such similarities. It was no news, for instance, that Romance languages shared cognates with each other. Spanish caballo (horse) was a cognate for Portuguese cabalo (horse), Italian caballo (horse), Provençal caval (horse), French cheval (horse), and English cavalry (horse-riding troops). Scholars had long known that all these words ultimately came from the vulgar Latin term caballus (horse), and that French and Spanish and other Romance languages had developed from Roman provincial speech--with some voiced /v/'s changing to unvoiced /b/'s, or some hard velar stops (/k/ sounds) changing to aspirated <ch>'s. Likewise, Germanic languages like Low and High German, Frisian, Dutch, Swedish, and Norse shared many cognates with each other in much the same way, tracing their origins back to a proto-Germanic tongue in prehistoric times.

What astonished linguists was that Sanskrit had cognates to more than just Latin and Greek words. Philologists found that Dutch, German, Old Norse, Gothic, Old Slavic, and Old Irish had similar patterns of words with Sanskrit. These cognates had a related meaning and they also sounded similar to each other either in terms of vowels or consonants (or both!). For instance, consider the words for "father" and "brother" in a variety of Indo-European languages:

"father"
"brother"
pitar (Sanskrit)
pater (Latin)
pater (Greek)
padre (Spanish)
pere (French)
father (English)
fadar (Gothic)
fa∂ir (Old Norse)
vader (German)
athir (Old Irish--with loss of original consonant)
bhratar (Sanskrit)
frater (Latin)
phrater (Greek)
frere (French)
brother (Modern English)
brothor (Saxon)
bruder (German)
broeder (Dutch)
bratu (Old Slavic)
brathair (Old Irish)
It's hard to escape the conclusion that these words must have come from a common source--especially if you chart the words out on a map of where each language is spoken. In the case of the words for father, a linguist can almost visually see the unvoiced /t/ sounds changing to voiced /d/ sounds as people migrated westward across the map, and then these letters changing to <th> as they moved north through Europe along the Germanic branch. In the case of the words for brother, the same sort of linguistic change is occurring with unvoiced /t/ and voiced /d/ sounds, but another pattern is happening simultaneously with voiced /b/ and unvoiced /p/ sounds. Multiply the examples above for a few thousand other words, and the evidence looks fairly air-tight.

All that remained for scholars to do was (1) to trace what rules governed these changes linguistically--a task taken up by Jakob Grimm and later Karl Verner, and (2) to reconstruct as far as possible what this original language must have sounded like and how it functioned. This is tricky, given that proto-Indo-European is a prehistoric language existing before the written word, but not impossible given the wealth of linguistic information we can garner from surviving languages today. (To be continued...)

§ qtd. page 27 of Robert Claiborne's Our Marvelous English Tongue: The Life and Times of the English Language. New York: Times Books, 1983.

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Simon

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Simon

http://www.zompist.com/euro.htm





It is very fascinating to see the links

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Jo ... ologist%29

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Simon

Ian,



Actually, gibberish was my first language and I've retained a fair bit of fluency in that.

But, yes...American born and daft about language. I will admit though, that I understand English very well. I just can't pronounce words correctly unless I've heard them spoken and sometimes spoken multiple times before I get it.

I also have a theory, based upon nothing, that people who are good in music can pick up languages more easily and I can't discern different sounds in music very well...not tone deaf, it's a little hard to explain. Although my father had no particular gift for music that I know of and only an eighth grade education but he was just plain smart. My mother studied piano for ten years.

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Valerie Garcia
vals1990@yahoo.com

"Listen, O my son, to the precepts of thy master, and incline the ear of thy heart, and cheerfully receive and faithfully execute the admonitions of thy loving Father, that by the toil of obedience thou mayest return to Him ....." St. Benedict

Val, I speak and understand passable Spanish, and my only training was 3 years in high school, ending 22 years ago. When I have attempted to learn German and Russian, I picked them up quickly but dropped them when the need passed. I am naturally decent at both learning languages and at imitating accents. I have a talent for memory.

But I am musically just about tone deaf.

Your theory may be true, I just may be an exception.

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Jeff Stevens

Jules,



Brazilian or European? My daddy's parents were from Sao Miguel island in the Azores and from what I understand it is a slightly different dialect than the mainland.

I've always been confused about your background. Why do I think you were born in America?

You confirm my theory that people with a gift for music learn languages more easily.

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Valerie Garcia
vals1990@yahoo.com

"Listen, O my son, to the precepts of thy master, and incline the ear of thy heart, and cheerfully receive and faithfully execute the admonitions of thy loving Father, that by the toil of obedience thou mayest return to Him ....." St. Benedict

Bob C,



You're way ahead of me on that score. When I went to work for my brother in a call center/phone sales business, I couldn't understand half of what my, mostly early twenties, co-workers were saying. I did learn however, that girls now use the word dude as often as boys did when I was growing up and boys and girls call each other dude....which seems very odd to me.

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Valerie Garcia
vals1990@yahoo.com

"Listen, O my son, to the precepts of thy master, and incline the ear of thy heart, and cheerfully receive and faithfully execute the admonitions of thy loving Father, that by the toil of obedience thou mayest return to Him ....." St. Benedict

Funny you should mention this. I've been pondering over the last few weeks and I think that some of the best acclaimed and memorable singers are those who enunciate their words very well.

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Ian DC
Blessed Ever Virgin Mary -- Sanctuary and resting-place of the Blessed Trinity where God dwells in greater and more divine splendour than anywhere else in the universe

Val,

It would have been European - probably with a Madeiran accent and thus even more incomprehensible. As with Spanish, the Latin American version is easier to understand because the sounds are clearer (i.e. I can imagine how it ought to be spelt).

I think being able to 'pick up a language' by listening to it is related to musical ability, while being able to learn it in terms of structure/grammar is more related to scientific, analytical thinking. I was blessed with both ways of thinking, so the languages come fairly easily... But there are still areas where I struggle, such as pronouncing the 'ou' and 'u' sounds in French, where I can hear the difference but tend to pronounce them the same when I speak myself. And of course I mess up the grammar if I'm speaking fluently, whereas in writing I get things correct. Latin is something that I learnt entirely by an analytical process - which is why I could distinguish 'Dominus, Domino, Domini, Dominum and Domine' before I had ever heard of the dative or ablative. I just sat there with a Latin breviary in front of me and worked backwards from random words I knew.



You probably think I'm American because I come from Jersey. That tends to confuse even the English and French . If you google 'history of New Jersey' you'll get the info.

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Jules Xx


What will become of sinners?

Val,

It's even quicker if you do a Wikipedia search on Channel Islands.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_islands

Duke of Normandy is Elizabeth II's most ancient (and, it is reported, most cherished) title.

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James Daly

"It is the Lord." (Jn 21:7)

I also have a theory, based upon nothing, that people who are good in music can pick up languages more easily - Val

True in my case. I sing in many languages, am conversational in several am fluent in 10 musical instruments.

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Pax et Bonum


Schultzz

Simon,

You will find many words in English that derive from Latin, either directly or through French (the Norman conquest - go us!). However, the grammar, such as remains, is based on the older Anglo-Saxon. Because Norman-French was spoken by the upper classes and Anglo-Saxon (what happened to the Jutes, btw?) by the majority of the population, we often have several words meaning the same thing, or unrelated words for related things. A prime example would be the difference between animal names (pig or swine, sheep, cow) with Germanic roots vs meat names (pork, mutton, beef) derived from the French. The Norman conquest brought many of the 'latinate' words we use, and the rest come from the monasteries if they are to do with religion, or entered the language directly from the Classics during the Renaissance.

For which reason, there is no reason why the English shouldn't be able to master other languages easily... except that English grammar, like that of the Nordic languages, has been greatly simplified so that conjgations and declensions are a mystery. But since many people around the world speak English...

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Jules Xx


What will become of sinners?

James,



Interesting...the only Channel Islands I knew of are off my coast. I'm ignorant.

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Valerie Garcia
vals1990@yahoo.com

"Listen, O my son, to the precepts of thy master, and incline the ear of thy heart, and cheerfully receive and faithfully execute the admonitions of thy loving Father, that by the toil of obedience thou mayest return to Him ....." St. Benedict

I guess I am an exception too. I have some modest musical talent but little aptitude for languages.

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David L (CA)
"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.” - Groucho Marx

So am I - an exception. I can sing and pronounce Spanish words that amaze native Spanish-speakers, but can't form a complete, grammatical Spanish sentence of my own.

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Pax et bonum,
Marie

JMJ

Very interesting thread. I learned that Val has Polish in her. Combined with the Portuguese blood, that can make for a feisty woman of staunch Catholic faith LOL (that is said with much affection). I would say that the Azoreans from Sao Miguel island do not speak a different dialect, but rather that their Portuguese has a different accent, almost French sounding. But the Portuguese from the mainland and the other Azorean islands understand those from Sao Miguel without problems--they just comment right away on the accent.

I speak English as a first language, picked up Spanish, dabble in Portuguese thanks to my Azorean parishioners, and am conversant in cussing hahaha (only when speaking with other priests about the faithful who drive us crazy).

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Sincerely in Christ,
Fr. Angel

I am reminded of some rather amusing instances when my supposedly fluent French has been perfectly well understood by the clergy but confused other people. Mainly due to familiarity with other languages, including Latin, I suspect. One example would be accidentally using the made-up verb 'ascendre' (to go up). The French use 'ascension' (noun), 'ascenseur' (noun meaning lift/elevator) and the verb 'descendre' (to go down). However, for some reason, to go up is 'monter' (to mount, I suppose).

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Jules Xx


What will become of sinners?

I was fairly fluent in PL/I. Does that count? Also JCL. And pretty good in SuperWylbur(tm). I used to have fun in APL, but I've pretty much forgotten that. The year and a half before I retired I was working on J2SE (Java 2 Standard Edition), but I never really quite got the hang of it.

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Kent Wendler

Julie,



They're in the garden (Kent).

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James Daly

"It is the Lord." (Jn 21:7)

Fr. Sotelo,



That's how I remember from hearing my father talk to my grandmother. As I understand it, there is a strong Flemish influence on Sao Miguel but I have no idea what that means language wise. I didn't hear Azorean Portuguese spoken from the time of my father's death in 1979 until last year when the company did a sales project in New England and all the hispanics were confused as to what language people were speaking...and by the fact that my last name kept coming up. My real last name is quite common in Portuguese.

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Valerie Garcia
vals1990@yahoo.com

"Listen, O my son, to the precepts of thy master, and incline the ear of thy heart, and cheerfully receive and faithfully execute the admonitions of thy loving Father, that by the toil of obedience thou mayest return to Him ....." St. Benedict

I speak English, Tagalog, Ilocano.

My French is rusty and Latin almost none-existent having not used it since high school. My mother and I used to go to the Latin mass when I was little when we lived in England.

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Ryan V

Here in India English is used mainly for official communication ie to send letters mail and things like that.
It is often times full of cliches and I often find it dull compared to how native speakers write
Masses in India are in the local languages
Many parents in my state are demanding that the Govt fund schools that teach in English.The opposition says that that teaching in English is anti national
English as a medium of instruction in goan schools

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Simon

Basic and some iterations of C and Pascal. Just to make it interesting, I think I studied those on three different operating systems/platforms - DOS, UNIX, and VAX.

As to human languages... English (USA), I retain some high school French, which helps me understand slightly more than the smattering of Haitian Creole that I speak, and college German which has sadly into disuse fallen.

Never took Latin, for which I hope Sister Catherine (RIP) eventually forgave me. Did have regular exposure to the basic Mass parts as a kid, choral Masses later, and other chant since - so I know those bits. Occasional challenges in pronunciation (Italinate v. Church Latin).

A bit of long-ago Sesame Street Spanish, sometimes attending my parish's Spanish-language Mass, Spanish-language hymns worked into the rotation elsewhere, and some understanding of root words and context allow me to pronounce words not too badly and even understand some of it (especially if I'm reading the Missal or listening to the Priest)

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Rob