Howdy Folks,
From talking with many neurodivergent people throughout life, and finding community among those who have a fascination with linguistics…
Are any of you deeply interested in the subject? If so, what first sparked your curiosity? What abilities did you hope to acquire?
To connect with a wider group of people? To read ancient languages, or perhaps to win your favorite scrabble competition in a tongue you can’t speak?
I’m curious, as it feels like language learners form a spectrum of their own. For me, it helps contextualize so many facets of life, and has widened my world of friends and literacy.
Plus, it’s fun to know what someone may be thinking in their native tongue when speaking your mother language.
Living in a foreign country whose language I spoke for 15+ years from childhood gave me a huge shock, when I realized psychology and phrasing play a larger role in communication than just a daisy chain of words.
Makes me wonder how peculiar my own accent(s) / phrasing sound to their respective natives. One of my favorites it when speaking Spanish, is to accidentally declare that you are pregnant instead of embarrassed… Makes the correction twice as effective! Or when a man in German expressing his love for Hummer cars is not actually professing passion for lobsters 🦞
For those of you whose native language isn’t English… Have you had any mismatched moments like this? What funny things have you heard English learners mismatch?
-G
Native English speaker.
I started trying to learn German from a book in second grade (not very successfully.) I took Mandarin and French in high school (for some reason, my brain translates 鸟 as « oiseau ») and some Spanish in middle school + working in a predominantly Latin American immigrant community. (You have to be careful with words like “chaqueta”)
Continued Mandarin study in college - I can read at maybe a second grade level. Took an online Turkish class when I was trapped during COVID, and a Sumerian one later. Dabbled in Korean, but realized the class was being run by a literal cult. Some formal Ancient Greek studies, some work in Wheelock’s Latin.
I can’t speak any of these languages - my brain/anxiety stops me from making words in other languages. But I can read French and Spanish literature (have a copy of Don Quixote I plan to work through one day), and enough Chinese to read children’s literature and menus.
Turkish though - agglutinative languages break my brain. Same with Sumerian, but it’s not like anyone finds it easy to read, barring maybe some U of Chicago professors.
I’d love to be a high level DND monk and be able to read everything. There’s so much stuff that isn’t accessible if you are stuck with English.
Conversely, why aren’t neurotypical people, who also extensively use language in their lives, also curious about it? Is it a disability that impairs abstract thought, or are they too busy cheering on their sports teams or thinking about the love lives of celebrities or something?
I mean, there’s definitely also some neurotypicals that put lots of skill points into languages. I could imagine that auties are more fascinated by the rulesets, whereas for neurotypicals these tend to rather just be a means to an end…?
That’s a great point. The largest reason I’ve heard from monolingual people by choice, is that English is a language that everyone else will learn, and that language only exists as some type of information transport medium. For me, grasping the rules and structure is the fun part!
Before I became more confident in German, to the point where people wouldn’t immediately switch to ENglish when speaking to me… “It will be easier for you” is a very common Germanism that I heard.
The French would stare with daggers, while a Korean colleague of mine was delighted to help me with my absolutely broken Korean. The individual definitely plays a large role, as well as the familiarity between the two languages.
Just about every aspect of linguistics has always fascinated me, even basic phonetics. I didn’t have much opportunity to study foreign language until I was older though, which I still regret. If I started earlier I probably would have gone a lot farther. Despite several years of intense Japanese study, my ability at using it is still poor. I keep practicing what I have even now though.
German is my first language, and also my third. When I started school I had to learn English; over the years I didn’t speak much German and I have forgotten a lot. Now I have started to re-learn German again.
But over the years I’ve dabbled in learning other languages — and not mastered any of them — (French, Spanish, Latin, Klingon, Esperanto, Yiddish); I find the differences in syntax and sentence structure fascinating. Now that I’m (involuntarily) retired and have plenty of time, I should go back and study some more.
Even just the weirdnesses and inconsistencies of English I find fascinating — why do “flammable” and “inflammable” mean the same thing? How can I be “disheveled” or “disgruntled” but not “sheveled” or “gruntled”?
And my boss told me off for being ambiguous on the phone:
“Hello, Kevin’s phone”
“Oh. Is Kevin not there?”
“Yes, he’s not. May I take a message?”
“Can I speak to him?”
“He’s not here”
“But you just said he was!”
“No, I agreed with you that he isn’t here”
“You should say what you mean” …I speak several languages but I grew up speaking only one.
I like spending time far away from my home country because abroad, people tend to be a lot more accommodating to my strangeness as they just assume I am this way because I am a foreigner. I can always ask for clarification, I am never pressured to understand everything right away, and I am never expected to be “a part” of the group. I am allowed - no - I am presumed to be different. Which takes away so much of the burden of masking.
I absolutely adore it. I think the idea of how diverse the field can be, from chinese’s tones and logography, to Esperanto/Farsi/Finnish’s almost Lego like grammar.
I also love learning scripts. For example, I felly know about 5: Latin, Arabic (Farsi too), Cyrillic, and Greek.
What I aim at isn’t fluency, but to be able to read / consume content in that language (including dead ones/conlangs)
Dont even get me started on conlanging/neography.
That’s incredible! Agree with agglutinative languages being amazing. Didn’t know that Farsi had the lego-like structure.
The Persian script is gorgeous. Hope that I can learn it soon. The letters sieve out of my head quite quickly after seeing them. Usually a movie or series can get me rapt into the language well enough to stick some vocabulary words and along with it the script.
Korean was my gateway into scripts outside of the European/Eurasian peninsula. Georgian/Armenian are also quite the rabbit hole, considering their ties to so many ancient empires and wacky-looking orthographies.
The Persian script is gorgeous. Hope that I can learn it soon. The letters sieve out of my head quite quickly after seeing them. Usually a movie or series can get me rapt into the language well enough to stick some vocabulary words and along with it the script.
Since i’m a native arabic speaker, the persian script is the exact same + a few letters, and like one new rule. I use the letters for loanwords, sometimes.
Korean was my gateway into scripts outside of the European/Eurasian peninsula
Nice, asian scripts are very interesting! I love chinese, due to its interesting logography.
Georgian/Armenian are also quite the rabbit hole, considering their ties to so many ancient empires and wacky-looking orthographies.
I knew they were the odd ones out :) They look like they’re based on latin, with a huge mix of other scripts too.
I AM I AM I AM!!!
Not everyone have mother or know what their mother tongue was. An alternative is native language or first language. I find it easy to learn languages because I can easily see logic and pattern in their rules, how word roots or formation of sentences work. Although I don’t have much time to practice, I am fluent in 2 more languages beside my native. I would like to learn chinese writings next.
