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When your own language sounds weird? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6585 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 9 of 19 19 December 2014 at 5:25pm | IP Logged | ||
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It's not that strange. Our native language is produced by our subconscious; our conscious mind doesn't (necessarily) know the rules. So when we stop and think about a certain phrasing and try to analyze it with our conscious mind, it doesn't have access to the rules that the subconscious used to produce it. It's probably related to the phenomenon where you say a word enough and it stops sounding like a word? Sausage. Sausage? Sausage. Sausage sausage sausage.
I just found that "sausage" is much harder than "phlebotomist" to say three times fast. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6600 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 10 of 19 19 December 2014 at 6:34pm | IP Logged | ||
He said that that that that that man said was correct. (quotation marks are needed though) Try this too. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 5062 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 11 of 19 19 December 2014 at 7:26pm | IP Logged | ||
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"Could you put a little more space between 'fish' and 'and' and 'and' and 'chips' ?"
For some reason jamais vu tends to happen to me with English monosyllables, like "fork." Fork? Fork, fork fork....sounds wrong...but never with words like "actually" or "debatable." If you don't object to the usage of the slangy "a whole nother" but consider "nother" to be an unacceptable word, you can also spell it "a whole 'nother." But it seems to me that if you're writing a piece whose tone is compatible with an expression like "a whole nother," it would also be the kind of piece where you wouldn't be worried about pedantic quibbles of how to punctuate slang. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4775 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 12 of 19 20 December 2014 at 9:53am | IP Logged | ||
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I often say things in Russian that sound not just weird, but outright ungrammatical to me, and not even in the prescriptive "split infinitives are bad, m'kay" way. The combination of strict agreement rules between the words in a sentence and a relatively free word order facilitates situations where if you start producing a long sentence without really having thought about how you'll finish it you end up realizing that what you said in the beginning doesn't agree with what you need to say in the end (and if you're drunk, this may happen even with short sentences). The gendered inanimate nouns can also be a source of confusion - you may start out talking about something using the pronoun "it", only to realize that the object you're talking about can only be referred to with feminine or masculine nouns.
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| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5012 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 13 of 19 20 December 2014 at 11:50am | IP Logged | ||
Yes, that's a valuable point, Ari. I think a common exemple of such a disharmony is the difference between 10 years olds who read a lot and those who don't. In class, they all need to write their exercises correctly. The non-reader has very little "feeling" for the language, so they consciously struggle with application of the rules and algorhytms. The readers just use their intuition based on large experience. However, they may often struggle when asked to analyze the constructions. And there come the dull moments, which I still remember 15 years later, when the child is forced to write correct things by the rules, which are however never used in reality, and therefore the conscious and subconscious clash. It feels like "Why am I having a worse grade for writing better than a moron? 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7208 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 14 of 19 20 December 2014 at 12:51pm | IP Logged | ||
Sometimes in writing, it's the computer that gets it wrong. Does your word processor complain about, Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6585 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 15 of 19 20 December 2014 at 2:09pm | IP Logged | ||
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Since we're apparently doing this:
"Jack while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher". Or, with killjoy punctuation: "Jack, while John had had "had", had had "had had". "Had had" had had a better effect on the teacher. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6706 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 16 of 19 20 December 2014 at 4:36pm | IP Logged | ||
Portmanteau: "a travelling case having two halves joined by a hinge". 1 person has voted this message useful |
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