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Nuances in languages lacking natives | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| guesto Groupie Australia Joined 5743 days ago 76 posts - 118 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 1 of 9 12 March 2010 at 5:59am | IP Logged | |||||
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You know that ever so common situation where you write/say something in a foreign language and the natives tell you "it's grammatically correct, but we don't say it like that" or "technically you could say that, but it sounds weird, only a foreigner would say that".
Does this situation exist in a language that lacks native speakers and is spoken/written predominantly by non-natives? For example, Esperanto, Latin, some revived language like Cornish, etc. If it does, how do they decide on what the nuances are? How can non-natives come to "feel" the difference, in spite of the fact they all may have different native tongues? If not, does that make it significantly easier to learn, since once you've got the grammar rules, everything sounds fine? In a natural language you can know the grammar to death but still give yourself away by your word use, syntax, etc. Would this mean these languages are "less rich/expressive"? 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Blunderstein Triglot Pro Member Sweden schackhandeln.se Joined 5420 days ago 60 posts - 82 votes Speaks: Swedish*, EnglishC2, FrenchB2 Studies: German, Esperanto Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 9 12 March 2010 at 9:44am | IP Logged | |||||
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There are a few people who were raised with Esperanto as the mother tongue. Usually, they were raised with at least one more language as well. Often, the parents both speak Esperanto and met at an Esperanto convention or something similar.
From what I've heard, these "native speakers" do not have an advantage over those who learn Esperanto well later in life. In other words, it's not that hard to learn to master the nuances. I'm a beginner myself, so I can't testify from personal experience. As for Latin and Cornish, I don't know. My guess: new ways of expressing nuances are being developed. Perhaps I'm misinformed, but I think I've read about families raising their kids in Cornish. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Captain Haddock Diglot Senior Member Japan kanjicabinet.tumblr. Joined 6770 days ago 2282 posts - 2814 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek | Message 3 of 9 12 March 2010 at 11:47am | IP Logged | |||||
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You probably could gain high enough proficiency in Latin or Classical Greek to get that sense of nuance that a very
advanced, near-native learner has. However, I doubt a language like Cornish has enough materials for anyone to learn it that well. If the language were truly revived, it would be a different language than the original Cornish because of that, much like modern Hebrew is a separate language from ancient Hebrew.
Yes, although (with the exception of Esperanto) it's a shortcoming on the part of the learner rather than the language itself. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6472 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 4 of 9 12 March 2010 at 12:37pm | IP Logged | |||||
Part of what makes Esperanto so easy is that you don't have to worry about that. There are of course ideal styles in literature and personal preferences, but people can't enforce those.
By encountering different speaking/writing styles, you will find that some ways of expression are more elegant than others, simply because they use less words, use less general-purpose words like "thing" or make use of the genius of the language better. You don't have to be a native speaker in order to feel the power of a poem over a scientific description. Also, Esperanto just lends itself very well to expressive use because of its structure and because you are free to recombine words or change word types as you see fit, without having to conform to a norm. Many advanced Esperanto speakers claim that they can at times express their thoughts and feelings better in Esperanto than in their native tongue. This is why I'd say Esperanto is just as expressive and rich. There are still many different ways of saying the same word in Esperanto. The difference is that they are derived logically, so that you can understand the nuances just by looking at the word parts. Here are some examples from the word field "frighten": to frighten = timigi (make afraid) to startle = ektimigi (to make afraid suddenly) to scare = fortimigi (make afraid and cause to leave) to terrify = timegigi (make very afraid) If you're not used to an agglutinative language, building things like for-tim-igi seems daunting at first, but it's actually easy and even a fun thing to do because Esperanto is so regular. And it saves you the time of learning new word roots and their implied meanings. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6013 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 5 of 9 12 March 2010 at 5:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
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"Nuance" is usually a matter of idiom, and there's more of that in the record of a language than you might expect -- you just have to look for it.
In the 60s, the idea of Systemic Functional Linguistics was developed, and at its core was the notion that there's more to language than structural grammar, but that this extra meaning was rarely arbitrary -- hence "systemic". Things that are dismissed with a shrug and "that's just how we say it" are more often than not part of a consistent pattern. If you approach any language from an SFL angle, then you view a sentence-level pattern as being a combination of smaller patterns. It seems to me that building a new sentence form out of the basic principles results in something more natural than if you just alter sentence-level structural rules. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6441 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 6 of 9 12 March 2010 at 10:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
More natural phrasings are suggested on occasion by Esperanto speakers, in my experience. Some things do sound weird, or have more common alternatives. I haven't seen patterns related to native languages in these corrections, but they do seem related to what is conventional in spoken Esperanto. Nuances are similar to more natural phrasings - they exist, partly in a systematic way and partly as defined through over a century of use, and people correct each other on them on occasion. They're not all decided a-priori (though some were, by Zamenhof). Regional variation has been a relatively minor issue, as has variation over time, but not entirely negligible. The variation I've seen within Esperanto strikes me as significantly less than the variation I see within English. The issues raised seem more minor in Esperanto than they are in languages mainly spoken by native speakers, in my experience, but do exist. You come to 'feel' the differences just as you do in any other language - by becoming sufficiently accustomed to and adept with the language. The role of native speakers in most languages strikes me as being filled in Esperanto by those who speak the language well enough to be normative (and secondarily, by any pair of speakers where one speaks it much better than the other one does and both are willing to let the weaker be corrected - the same happens among non-native learners of national languages). 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| cordelia0507 Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5840 days ago 1473 posts - 2176 votes Speaks: Swedish* Studies: German, Russian | Message 7 of 9 12 March 2010 at 10:45pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Following from the well-informed comments by Volte and Sprachprofi:
The more I hear about Esperanto the more it appeals to me. It seems like a language based on the k-i-s-s principle, a very elegant kind of minimalism and almost unlimited possibilities for developing, growing and refining the language. Unlike regular languages for which none of this is normally true... How people can say it's "dry", academic, politically charged or lacking in culture I really don't know! To tie this in with the question: It seems that you can be as "nuanced" or straight-forward as you want to, based on your skill level. The other great thing is that everyone is on a level playing field since there are almost no native speakers. Hence you haven't got one group of people for which the communication is a challenge, mine-field or trap of potential mistakes --- and another group that can participate in the conversation with no effort or risk whatsoever! What's there not to like about this? 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6705 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 8 of 9 13 March 2010 at 12:04am | IP Logged | |||||
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It may be seen as an advantage not to have a bunch of natives hovering over you like vultures, waiting to see you stumble and fall. And learning languages without natives could be a way to achieve that. Finding the right level for corrections must be a problem for those who study with a teacher, mentor or in a group. Getting corrections all the time is as problematic as never being corrected.
But there is a more fundamental problem, namely how to get your target language activated if you never hear it spoken by native or nearnative speakers. Personally I learn languages best by getting a solid vocabulary and then using this to work my way through genuine texts/audio clips or TV programs. Having listened to something that interests me in a language that interests me is enough to set my head spinning in that language. But I don't feel that hearing the pathetic outpourings of other beginners has any positive effect on me, - not because of the risk of picking up errors, but because I instinctively try to avoid listening to something that doesn't sound like I know it should sound. I get the creeps when I hear an actor putting on a show or getting sentimental or dramatic - but listening to somebody who has problems formulating even the simplest sentence is even worse. It is not like the Purgatory of Dante, but like the bottom of Hell. Edited by Iversen on 13 March 2010 at 12:10am 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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