While I was going over my geneaological research, I began to muse about the languages my ancestors spoke and realized that nobody born in my family since about 1890 has been a native speaker of any language other than English. I think that it’s pretty likely that my great-grandfather Schuler was bilingual in German and English. My grandfather Schuler, referred to by my generation as “Fred X”, may have spoken a little German but probably no more than my grandfather Blanchard who was definitely a native speaker of English and only English. I also think it’s pretty likely that my great-great-grandmother Celestine Didier was bilingual in French and English. I think that my great-great-grandfather Flanagan spoke a few words of Gaelic as did my great-grandmother McCoy but to the best of my knowledge neither spoken any language well other than English. But could they put on a brogue! Practically everybody on my mom’s side could put on a brogue and I think my mom spoke with a very, very faint brogue herself. Perhaps something in her prosody. Or maybe she was putting that on, too. I’ll never know. But she could definitely put on a brogue when she had a mind to as can I.
But that’s it. Everybody else has been a native speaker of English. My dad was fluent as a native in German but that was book l’arnin’. He was a native speaker of English. My dad used to say of my mom that she only spoke English but she understood all languages which is a pretty fair description. She was a great reader of body language, tone, and expression, and a good guesser. However, she only spoke English.
I speak several languages pretty fairly (and read more) but I’m a native speaker of English.
Oh my God. You used the word “prosody.” That practically makes you a linguist all by itself.
I’ve started Spanish, and I love it. I only wish I’d taken it in high school and college, but French and German were required for the major. Funny thing is, German, as I recall, was a breeze, but I don’t remember much of it; French was a grind and I hated it, but I can recall a lot of it. I passed the French and German qualifying exams for the Ph.D., but as I said, the German is gephtttten…
One of the great things about studying Spanish is that it has a perfect orthography (or nearly so). That means that how a word is spelled gives you a pretty good idea of how it’s pronounced and vice versa. Unlike English in which you’ve got to know a lot more about the language to have any good idea about either spelling or pronunciation.
Still, English is an elaboration of a lingua franca and under the circumstances its writing system works pretty well. Knowing how a word is spelled gives you a pretty fair idea of where it came from and what it means.
I am, of course, a native speaker of English. It’s my mother tongue. I took French from grades three through eight. Oddly, although my siblings took it even longer I’m the only one who appears to have gotten anything from the experience. I can read French reasonably well and speak it moderately well.
My dad spoke German around the house. His speech was peppered with German phrases, he sang German songs. I lived and worked in Germany for a while so between my dad, what I picked up on my own, and what I needed to survive in Germany I can read and speak a bit of German
Latin and Greek were required in my high school as well as a modern foreign language. I took Russian. Four years in high school, four years in college, and a natural aptitude for languages has made me pretty fluent in Russian. I can read it almost as easily as I can read English. I think in Russian sometimes.
I took Chinese in college. If I watch a Chinese movie and attune my ear to it, I can understand between half and three quarters of what’s being said. If I listened to the news in Chinese on a regular basis that would probably be enough for me to get back up to speed.
If you can read Latin, you can read Italian and make a reasonable stab at Spanish and Portuguese. If you can read Russian, you can read Polish, Ukrainian, and Serbian or Croatian. You can make a stab at Czech (although it’s a bit more distant). The Slavic languages are closer to each other than Romance languages. If you can read German, you can make a pretty good stab at the Scandinavian languages. Other than Finnish, of course. Finnish is simply beyond the pale. If you know German and English you can make a pretty good guess at Dutch.
Over the years I’ve picked up a bit of Hebrew and a few words in quite a few other languages. I keep meaning to teach myself Arabic but never seem to get around to it.
Keep up with the Spanish. I think learning languages keeps the brain agile.
“I took Chinese in college. If I watch a Chinese movie and attune my ear to it, I can understand between half and three quarters of what’s being said. If I listened to the news in Chinese on a regular basis that would probably be enough for me to get back up to speed.”
I took Chinese via a tutor. He’d take me and his wife to Chinese movies. That was an experience. She spoke Cantonese, but not Mandarian. And, as you know, the difference between Mandarian and Cantonese is not the difference between what they speak in Massachusetts and what they speak in Mississippi. So, there I was, sitting next to a native speaker of Chinese and we were both reading subtitles…mine in English, her’s in Chinese (same written language, etc.)
As for the agility of the brain, I’m 71 and I can use all the agility I can grab onto…
Yeah, the “dialects” of Chinese are actually different languages of the same language family rather than true dialects. More like the difference between Portuguese and Italian than like the difference between, say, the Maine dialect and the Florida cracker dialect.
I took Chinese in college. If I watch a Chinese movie and attune my ear to it, I can understand between half and three quarters of what’s being said.
I’m impressed. I majored in Chinese as an undergraduate and lived there for a year, and you’re describing my listening comprehension on a good day. Of course after over a decade of not studying it I’m pretty rusty.
Weelll, remember that movies are cheating. They’re not like real life. The actors’ articulation is really, really good and they generally don’t have the disfluencies that are common in everyday life. Plus the movies I watch tend not to have a lot of dialogue.
And my reading has collapsed. I used to be able to read pretty well. I read the Thousand Character Classic which ain’t bad for a foreigner. No, I can’t sing it.
I actually have an easier time understanding native speakers than understanding movies. That’s probably because most of my Chinese friends had either hard Beijing or Sichuanese accents. 90% of the spoken Mandarin I learned was either from friends or from strangers I met while travelling.
And yeah, if you don’t keep up with the characters it’s very easy to lose them. When I was in school I was able to read Hong Lou Meng and other classics. Nowadays, not so much. I have started studying Japanese in the last year, though, which has revived some of my memory of the characters.
Dream of the Red Chamber was a bit beyond me.
Is your teacher a man or a woman?
Back when my reading was hotter I could rattle off some Japanese texts in Chinese without having much idea of what the Japanese words were. That was the cool thing about kanji. It’s also part of the reason that Chinese and its dialects, like Arabic and its “dialects” were traditionally treated as single languages rather than language families: common writing system.
Is your teacher a man or a woman?
Neither; it’s a podcast service. I took classes for a while at the local Japan-America society but work travel made it difficult to keep attending.
That was the cool thing about kanji.
Yes. I originally got the idea to start studying Japanese after my father died. He was a big fan of R.H. Blyth, and I inherited his many books of haiku translations – with the originals also transcribed. Hopefully in the next few years I’ll be able to read Basho in Japanese.
Dream of the Red Chamber was a bit beyond me.
I should be clear: I did not finish it! And I had to read it with a dictionary close at hand. But I was able to get through the first couple of volumes, reading the rest in translation. An amazing novel.
The reason I mention it is that there are substantial differences in diction and grammar depending on whether the speaker is a man or a woman. It’s sometimes helpful when your teacher is the same gender as you are.
“Back when my reading was hotter I could rattle off some Japanese texts in Chinese without having much idea of what the Japanese words were. ”
Yeah, one thing that always impressed me was that the Japanese took a writing system developed for a completely uninflected language and adapted it to their, highly inflected, language. Neat trick, that.
Japanese is agglutinative not inflected. Chinese is positional. Otherwise, I agree with your comment. Yes, adapting the Chinese writing system was clever.
Even more clever, I think, was the creation of Hangul by the Koreans: an elegant system of writing, beautifully suited to the language it was intended to represent, that looks superficially like Chinese logographs.
One thing I did when I was studying Chinese was to try to translate some of Blake’s “simpler” poems into Chinese. When I was working on this one
I discovered that the Chinese for ‘wild flower’ is also used for a prostitute. Blake, I thought, would have loved that.