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Popular misconceptions about languages? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Cultural Experiences in Foreign Languages |  | |
| kieran Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5277 days ago 12 posts - 14 votes Studies: Spanish | Message 1 of 100 12 November 2009 at 6:52pm | IP Logged | ||
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I don't know about you guys, but one that I frequently come across with non-linguists and various simpletons is the misconception that Romanian is a Slavic language and not a Romance language. Can anyone think of any others?
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| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 6937 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes  20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 2 of 100 12 November 2009 at 7:15pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hungarian is sometimes considered to be a Slavonic language by the uninitiated from outside Eastern Europe. The basis is that they fall into the trap of "Well, all those Eastern Europeans talk the same way."
Another misconception that I've sometimes heard is that everyone in the Middle East outside Israël speaks Arabic or is an Arab. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 meramarina Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5748 days ago 1341 posts - 2303 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: German, Italian, French Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 100 12 November 2009 at 7:59pm | IP Logged | ||
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A possible general misconception: When I was a university student, I was told many, many times that the first foreign language is much more difficult to learn that the second one. Often, it was people in the foreign language department who said this, and everyone seemed to believe it without questioning (yes, I did too!).
I doubt that this it is true in any meaningful sense, and certainly not in all cases. If your second foreign language is closely related to the first, it might be so. If not, it seems just as likely to be equally difficult. However, the more languages one studies, the more familiar grammatical concepts become, and the more parallels will appear among different languages. And you also are likely to become a more efficient learner the more you work at it. Maybe that's why this belief was so often expressed. But, if you add to that the confusion produced by knowing several languages--I don't know. Also, consider the work required to maintain several languages and it's not by any means easy. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| MäcØSŸ Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5590 days ago 259 posts - 392 votes Speaks: Italian*, EnglishC2 Studies: German | Message 4 of 100 12 November 2009 at 8:35pm | IP Logged | ||
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Very often Italians misuse the term dialect, referring to Italian dialects as dialects of Italian, while they’re dialects of
different Italian languages (e.g. Milanese is a dialect of Lombard, which is not a dialect). I sometimes hear people saying that English is a romance language and that German has cases because of Latin influence. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 6937 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 5 of 100 12 November 2009 at 9:02pm | IP Logged | ||
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Another one: If you know Sanskrit, you can have a basic conversation with a Lithuanian peasant.
This misconception arises when people misinterpret or fail to understand historical linguistics. Because Lithuanian appears to have been the most conservative* of Indo-European languages in Europe, there arise fallacies that Lithuanian is "old" or more worthy of respect and that it'd still be intelligible to someone who knows an Indo-European language of Antiquity such as Sanskrit. These fallacies are most commonly-held by Lithuanian nationalists or people who are not trained linguists. *"Conservative" in historical linguistics refers to the fact that a language's grammar or phonology has changed little from what has been hypothesized in the reconstructed ancestral language. In the case of modern Lithuanian, its grammar and phonology appear closer to what has been found in attested languages such as Sanskrit or Latin and hypothesized for Proto-Indo-European. A language whose current grammar or phonology has changed relatively much since the days of the reconstructed proto-language or appears noticeably different from that of postulated cognate languages is described as "innovative" or "divergent". While Lithuanian is usually described as conservative, the kindred Slavonic languages are usually described as innovative or divergent (compared to Lithuanian) as these languages' grammar and phonology are less similar to what is observed in Sanskrit or Latin, let alone hypothesized for Proto-Indo-European. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Gusutafu Senior Member Sweden Joined 5302 days ago 655 posts - 1039 votes Speaks: Swedish* | Message 6 of 100 12 November 2009 at 11:18pm | IP Logged | ||
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First, some pet peeves: relating to what Chung wrote, I mention the usage of 'old' in the sense of 'young'. Surely, Akkadian is a much younger language than English. English has developed and aged for thousands of years longer.
Similarly, when people call Latin and Greek "dead" languages. Both languages are studied by thousands of people every minute of the day, as well as spoken in prayers and services all over the world, all the time. They may be more or less frozen, but they are hardly dead until people stop using them. People around here obviously know that Finnish is not Norse, so they think that it is Slavic instead, or at least somehow related to Russian. The most absurd one is this: I had a Russian colleague that had claimed to be able to read Greek. Apparently because it was so similar to Russian. I asked her about it, and she said "sure, I can read Greek, but I don't know the words". It turned out that she meant that she could decode the sound of individual letters. I don't call that reading... Which reminds me, many people claim that this or that name "doesn't mean anything". What they hopefully mean is that it is not very clear what the name means, since it is obvious that very few names are based on a random selection of sounds. The most serious one: that writing is primary, the written language is the actual language, imperfectly imitated by speakers. This is probably what is behind the focus on the "how to pronounce letters", which is exactly the opposite of what is actually happening. The effect is that learning how to pronounce a new language becomes much harder than it needs to be. I could write a book about this (but no-one would read my bitter rants), but it is sad and strange that when learning for example Swedish, students are taught that this letter sounds like that etc, resulting in "god jul" (merry christmas) being pronounced like it's written, which is actually completely wrong. It should be pronounced "goo jul". And similarly with many instances of d and other letters. They were lost in speech several generations ago, but have been revived by middle-class nervousness about sounding proletarian. "It is written with a d, so surely it must be more classy to pronounce it that way". This might sound petty, but imagine if students of French (not only foreigners even) were taught to pronounce every letter. I better stop here... Edited by Gusutafu on 12 November 2009 at 11:30pm 8 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Captain Haddock Diglot Senior Member Japan kanjicabinet.tumblr. Joined 6549 days ago 2282 posts - 2814 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek | Message 7 of 100 13 November 2009 at 4:09am | IP Logged | ||
Gusutafu, you made the same reply to me once, but I think the nuance of English adjectives might be tripping you up. 'Old' and 'young' are evaluated in relation to the present. Akkadian is an old language, Afrikaans is a young language. The terms 'early' and 'late' work the opposite way — Akkadian is an early Semitic language, while Afrikaans has developed much later — so perhaps that's what you're getting at. Perhaps Swedish works differently in this regard. Regarding the main topic at hand, most people (at least in the anglosphere) are far too ignorant about languages to have any conceptions at all, including misconceptions. "English is a Romance language" is a good example, though. Another would be that Shakespeare and the King James Bible are "Old English", when in fact they are early modern English. Certain cultures and circles tend to have their own peculiar misconceptions as well. A lot of Turks believe that Turkish was the original language from which all others spread (!), and I have seen passionate arguments made to this effect on sci.lang. Then there are the hebrewphiles, who like to think ancient Hebrew is related to almost every modern language. (There's even a crackpot "Hebrew origins of Japanese" theory.) Edited by Captain Haddock on 13 November 2009 at 4:15am 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Gusutafu Senior Member Sweden Joined 5302 days ago 655 posts - 1039 votes Speaks: Swedish* | Message 8 of 100 13 November 2009 at 9:40am | IP Logged | ||
No, that's not it. I didn't actually mean that this was a mistake on an individual level, rather a very misleading way of using the word that has gained a foothold. It is true that it is probably less common to talk about "old" languages in Swedish, I like to think that we speak of "ancient" languages instead. Come to think of it, I am not so sure that the adjective "old" is used in English publications either, isn't it more of a colloquial term? In any case, I didn't mean that a person calling Latin old is making a bigger mistake than someone calling America a democracy, it's just the way we've been taught to speak. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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