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The Effects of Language Learners | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| Vos Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5377 days ago 766 posts - 1020 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Dutch, Polish | Message 1 of 9 24 November 2011 at 3:38am | IP Logged | |||||
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The Effects of Language Learners on the Languages which they Learn:
I was thinking about this briefly the other day. If say a few million English speakers were learning Spanish, and as a result of the gerund in English forming a huge part of the way in which one expresses themself, these language learners then attempt to convey themselves in Spanish with heavy use of the gerund, as they haven’t been studying the language long enough or languages in general to understand that different languages use different constructs to express similar things, so despite the fact that the gerund isn’t as predominant in Spanish and isn’t used in certain circumstances like it is in English, they go on saying things in Spanish relying heavily on the gerund. So then, can by the huge and constant misuse of a particular aspect of a language actually go on to affect and alter the language in question, If the natives of that language are constantly exposed to these mistakes? For if what is correct is merely what sounds right, then surely the more something is heard and understandably acknowledged (I mean here that despite something sounding wrong, what the person is trying to get across is understood) the more correct it will sound, thus making it a valid option in the repertoire of a language, and will either form a sort of equilibrium with the original construct so that there will exist two ways to express the same thing, or one will simply outcompete the other, leaving one known in the back of peoples minds but rarely used. For example the Spanish of Mexico, Central and South America tends to be more similar to English in this respect, for example ‘I was running’ - In Latin American Spanish apparently it’s more common to hear ‘estuve corriendo’, which uses the gerund as in English. However in Spain one would say ‘corría’. Or is it that the Spanish of those countries near America use more similar constructs to that of English, because most people of these countries are exposed to a lot of English and actually know the language themselves, so there is almost like a bleeding over and mixing of constructs. If this were true though, then we should be able to see some Spanish sounding constructions in the English of people from say Texas or California who speak Spanish as a second language, no? If not, is it perhaps that American English is a stronger competitor in an ecological sense than Latin American Spanish, which is why we tend to notice this as a one way effect? Or perhaps this simply comes down to coincidence, and there are other internal reasons and factors for why Latin American Spanish appears to be more similar to English in certain respects than to Peninsula Spanish. Has anyone ever wondered about these things? Or does anyone know of any other examples involving different languages? Actually I think there is a similar case in Dutch due to English, where before in order to in Dutch was expressed as om + verb + te + verb - 'in order to buy a book' - 'om een boek te kopen'. Whereas now despite om... te... still meaning in order to, people use this construction much more frequently to mean simply to, as in the 'to' that English has before every verb in the infinitive. This seems to be a grammatical change in Dutch coming from the 'to' present before every English infinitive (Dutch has no preposition before an infinitive, simply 'kopen' - 'to buy'), due to the presence and exposure to the English language. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6393 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 2 of 9 24 November 2011 at 7:24am | IP Logged | |||||
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I suspect it's more likely that learners of foreign languages affect their mother tongues than the tongues they are learning. Swedish is being heavily influenced by English and I don't think it's because English speakers are learning Swedish. English is heavily influenced by Latin and it's not because the Romans learned English. Cantonese has been influenced by English and ... you get my point.
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 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6514 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 3 of 9 24 November 2011 at 9:38am | IP Logged | |||||
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Afrikaans is said to have got some of its special features from native African nannies, for instance the double "nie" (no).
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| Vos Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5377 days ago 766 posts - 1020 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Dutch, Polish | Message 4 of 9 24 November 2011 at 10:23am | IP Logged | |||||
Yes, I agree with what you're saying and that's what I was touching on further down in my initial post, but is this always the rule? Why is it we don't see these kind of things in the reverse then? That is Spanish sounding constructs in American English since there are many learning the language and the presence of Spanish (so I hear) is quite profound in many parts of America? Or do they exist and I just don't know about them being in the Southern Hemisphere and all. Also to take the example of English and Spanish again, if Spanish can be influenced by English via Spanish/Latin Americans learning the language, yet we don't see the reverse of this (English being influenced by Spanish learnes), does this imply some kind of reslience on the part of English? Or simply an openness of Spanish? I think we'll soon be moving into sociology in order to understand this better... 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6393 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 5 of 9 24 November 2011 at 1:06pm | IP Logged | |||||
I suspect it has to do with two things. First, there aren't enough people learning it yet. Second, just about everywhere Spanish and English are spoken, Spanish is the L (low status) language, and English is the H (high status).
English is hardly resilient. English as spoken in places like Singapore, Africa and the Carribean is heavily influenced by language learners. However, these constructs don't enter into global English, or American, British or Australian English, because of English's total H status. Everywhere English is spoken, it's the H language. This makes it conservative. So I guess I just gave a bunch of examples of language learners affecting the language they're learning. But that's in communities where just about everyone who speaks the language is a language learner. And these forms are heavily stigmatized and rarely allowed in official usage. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5073 days ago 2237 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 6 of 9 24 November 2011 at 2:27pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The gerund is much more common in Brazilian Portuguese than in Iberian Portuguese. "Estou correndo"(Brazil) vs "Estou a correr"(Portugal). I don't think this is because of English influence in Brazilian Portuguese. I haven't noticed use of the gerund so much in discussing the continuous past tense in either language, English: "I was running". Mostly, I hear the imperfect usage "corria" here, and I think it is safe to say that Puerto Rican Spanish is somewhat English influenced.
Perhaps more common gerund use in the continuous present in new world Spanish and Portuguese has something to do with the state of the languages at the time the Spanish and the Portuguese began settling in the new world, 3-500 years ago. I don't know. I am not a grammarian but there are those here who are and I'm sure that they can and will tell us. I would tend to doubt that influence comes from Anglo learners/second language speakers of Spanish. If that were the case then we'd be seeing a lot more "yo-ismo" in the language too, egad! For more about the influence of English upon Spanish in Mexico, check out Pochismos cultos. A "pochismo" is an anglicism or anglo-usage used by a "pocho". A "pocho" is basically a gringo "wannabe". Joseph J. Keenan devotes a chapter to "pochismos" in "Breaking Out of Beginner's Spanish". Great topic, @vos! Edited by iguanamon on 24 November 2011 at 2:34pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4760 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 7 of 9 25 November 2011 at 3:27am | IP Logged | |||||
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I think it has to do with the Spanish that was spoken by the people that settled in the New World. Since I remember you from the thread about the usage of "vos" replacing "tu" in Argentina, I think the same effect is at play here.
"Vos" was for whatever reason transferred from Spain to Argentina. It died in the peninsula, but flourished in the Southern Cone to become the standard pronoun. A more documented example of such a phenomenon is the one mentioned by Iguanamon in Portuguese: in Brazil, you say "estou lendo", using the gerund of the verb "to read". In Portugal the construction used is "estou a ler", a + infinitive. This is a relatively recent development. So it is not the Brazilian portuguese that changed, it is the language in the original homeland that changed!! Also, in Brazil the conditional is still used for "se" clauses, whereas in Portugal it has been replaced by the imperfect indicative. In Argentina, you see words like "laburar", "snob", "placard", "kermesa"... Italian, English, French, German, which have been part of the standard language since at least late in the 19th century, but not used anywhere else in the Spanish speaking world. In fact the use of those specific words are considered 'argentinismos' by other Spanish speakers. People always ask me what "placard" means, because it's the title of a song from a very famous Argentine rock band and people want to know what it means... Like those, there are quite a few other words, TONS more in the Lunfardo argot. They were not borrowed because of external influence from those languages, but because of immigrants coming to Argentina and for whatever reason the words becoming mainstream. You see an overabundance of English words in transportation vocab (specially rail), and even many towns have English names alongside the railways. It was a rare example of English being spoken in a country where another language was the "dominant" one, not only in terms of population but also status and mobility. Argentina is the only "non-english" nation which has a significant celtic and british component in the population, and perhaps the only example where, since the British were not in control, English as a language was subordinate to Spanish and not the language used for official affairs or even to get ahead. Because the English and Irish immigrants settled in the cities and the prairies, their languages were lost in the flood of Spanish usage around them, and the children of that first generation immediately took up Spanish since it was the language needed to do any business and work in the country. The Welsh on the other hand, settled deep in the south and to this day Welsh survives there. So it happens that the language is changed either externally or internally, but mostly vocabulary it seems. Grammar is much more rare, and such changes tend to be spontaneous and indigenous to each language. Edited by outcast on 25 November 2011 at 3:33am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6393 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 8 of 9 25 November 2011 at 7:28am | IP Logged | |||||
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It's a common tendency for the language spoken in a colony to be more conservative than that spoken in the home country. Taiwan Mandarin is more conservative than Chinese Mandarin. American English is more conservative than British English. So it's not surprising that New World Spanish and Portugese is more conservative than their Old World sisters.
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