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Learning a very different word order? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 4930 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes  Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 9 of 13 13 December 2011 at 12:04am | IP Logged | ||
I suppose comfortable is subjective, but I've gone through this with Turkish. For me , as I've learned to combine clauses into more complex sentences, it still boils down to getting comfortable with each individual clause. Once I have those basic rules down, they don't change (for Turkish, in my case). So if I say something like "I can't go with you" (you with go can't I) even if I'm then adding an explanation of why as the second clause, which also would have a set word order - because "I'm not free now" (now free time my there isn't). The fact that I stuck "because" in between them doesn't really change things. In my case, Turkish actually does provide for some freedom with word order, but I don't worry about it, at least not at the stage that I'm at. I'm understood fine with the standard grammatical rules. Does Korean have a lot of grammatical exceptions? R. == 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6503 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 10 of 13 13 December 2011 at 7:58pm | IP Logged | ||
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Let me take the example of Irish, which I studied for a period (until I realized that I couldn't learn a language with such an orthography and 'reduction rules' without having heard the language, except through a speech synthesizer and short snippets on Youtube).
However Irish is a language with a quite important word order quirk: the verb generally stands at the beginning of a sentence, so in practice almost all sentences sound like questions until you have fully adapted to the rule. The rule also means that inversion can't be used to recognize questions, so instead you find an interrogative particle right before the verb (there is also a negative particle, plus some special verbal forms). To accomodate to this system I resorted to two small tricks when I made hyperliterate translations. In these the idea is to use the word order of the target language whether or not this results in a correct sentence in the base language, and with the verb before the subject this resulted in something that distinctly looked like a question in Danish. So I decided simply to add an exclamation sign right after the verb in a positive sentence, which essentially solved the problem. To mimick the question particle I used either Danish "mon" or Latin "num" (Esperanto "ĉu" could also be used, while the closest parallel in English would be the little used "methinks"). This functioned admirably - I soon got accostumed to the Irish word order. In other 'aberrant' languages you have to rely on tendencies rather that fixed rules. Latin is normally said to have a very free word order (which partly is a consequence of the choice of texts used by student of Latin through the ages - genuine texts in Vulgar Latin would look much more 'standardized' than those poems and rhetorical texts which generations of students have been poring over). However there is actually some leeway to choose your own word order, and although many Latin sentences sound better when you put the verb to the end you can't rely on this as a fixed rule. There is also another quirk which you have to use (with caution): in Latin closely knit syntactical units are often split, seemingly just for fun. You have to do this to achieve something that sounds reasonable genuine, but only exposure to genuine texts can over some time teach you to do idiomatically correct insertions. This rule of course also applies to subordinate phrases and structures based on infinite verb forms, which can be organized into absurdly complicated herarchical structures. But this is a point where I don't feel that you should imitate Classical and Mediavel authors to the full extent - a simpler style will be much easier to deal with for everybody including yourself, and simpler structures are actually allowed, even in Latin. In many languages you can resort to rules formulated in terms of a field structures. A field can be occupied, forcing its normal occupant to move away. For instance it is "Jeg kommer i morgen" in Danish ("Tomorrow I come"), but "I morgen kommer jeg" ("Tomorrow I come"). You don't have to have a similar principle in your base language to apply such a simple rule in your target language, and knowing it also means that you easily can see the skeleton when you read or listen. Edited by Iversen on 13 December 2011 at 11:55pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| clumsy Octoglot Senior Member Poland lang-8.com/6715Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4978 days ago 1116 posts - 1367 votes Speaks: Polish*, English, Japanese, Korean, French, Mandarin, Italian, Vietnamese Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swedish Studies: Danish, Dari, Kirundi | Message 11 of 13 21 December 2011 at 6:25pm | IP Logged | ||
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I like the Korean word order, because it's so different.
You have to remember that whatever you do, verb always comes last. With the exception of some colloquial expressions maybe ('nani kore?' in Japanese). 'if' and 'because' clauses are put at the beginning: girl school-to go-because study. boy cinema-to go-if movie watch. And also descriptiove clauses are always put before the noun (just like ajectives) yesterday bought fish = a fish I bought yesterday. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6397 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 12 of 13 21 December 2011 at 8:36pm | IP Logged | ||
so you mix languages in your hyperliterate translations, or is this more of an exception? if i can use several languages to explain the various structures, it suddenly looks 24357x more useful :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6503 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 13 of 13 22 December 2011 at 6:23am | IP Logged | ||
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Mostly those hyperliteral translations are in one language (in my case Danish), but if I find something that hasn't got a good parallel in Danish I certainly don't hesitated to use another language. I also use grammatical markers. For instance you don't have tempus in Bahasa Indonesia, but you can mark that an action took place in the past with "sudah", which literally means "already". But if I can see that it just is used as a tempus marker then I put 'allerede' into angled parantheses: [allerede].
Now, the theme of this thread is 'word order', and apart from inversion an aberrant word order in Danish normally doesn't lead to a change in the meaning so it is without risk to follow the original word order - whichever that may be. And the same applies to English, so when I translate from Danish (which has postclitic definite articles) into English (which hasn't got them) then even English suddenly get postclitic articles: "huset" -> "houseThe". But why use hyperliteral translations at all? I use them massively with new languages where the sentence constructions are unexpected. When you have looked up most of the words and maybe also endings and other grammatical features in a sentence you can write down your 'solution' in the form of a hyperliteral translation. However using a normal translation will be misleading because of the concessions you make in order to make it conform with the language of the translation - which however is irrelevant because this isn't the language you are trying to learn. Making a hyperliteral translation in this situation means that the structure of the original is preserved and you won't be get wrong ideas by looking at it. Naturally the need for any kind of translations disappears gradually as you get accostumed to the features of the target language, and then it will normally be enough just to note down unknown words and intersting idiomatic expressions. But once in a while you may want to study some grammatical feature of the target language in depth, and then the hyperliteral translations come in handy again. An unexpected word ord is certainly one of the things you can illustrate through hyperliteral translations. An example in Modern Greek: "Είδα αυτό το μήνυμα" (I-)saw this the message (hyperliteral) I saw this message (normal) The hyperliteral translation will help me to remember the Greek construction precisely because it isn't in correct English. Edited by Iversen on 22 December 2011 at 6:30am 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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