Tasty (con)fusion!

[cos]

Foreign places have their own styles of tasty food, but even better are their languages. I try to devour them wherever I go, but they can only be eaten slowly - too slowly for me, because there's always more; you can never finish even one.

I pick up scaps of languages and then don't follow up. I can try to learn them when I'm home, and probably really should ... but they're so much different when they're at home. When the announcement on the PA, the signs on stores, the names of things on packages, the snatches of conversation on the street, the names of places, are the kinds of things that let me inbibe the language.

After four days in Cologne last week, and another one & a half now, I'd finally reached the point where I could sometimes understand simple practical sentences. On the train to the airport, when the announcer listed upcoming stations and arrival times, I got most of them, and when he said "nächste Station, Düsseldorf Flughafen" I understood effortlessly (like a lot of German, it's much clearer to English-speakers when written than it is when heard). But now I'm flying home. In 2008 when I got 9 full days in Italy after a week there with the family, I got much further. In both cases, I had help from spending most of my time with someone who spoke both languages - elfy in Germany, magickalpony in Italy.

Five days in Majorca gave me very little Spanish because I spent all that time with my extended family, but I had forgotten how much my Hebrew vocabulary expands when I'm immersed in that kind of environment! Not the same thing as being in a language's home country, but they do bring along with them a little bubble of shared conversation, including a lot of slang. Most amusing to me were some of the newer English-derived informal words that have been adapted to Hebrew grammar, such as:

Legagel: To Google. As in, "gigalti otach" (I Googled you(f))

Letayeg: To tag, on a social networking site. As in, "hoo tiyeg oti" (he tagged me)

And apparently "le`alter", "to alter", isn't even considered slang, but a fully accepted word.

On the cab ride to my hotel for the last night (I stayed one extra night), my cabbie spoke barely any English - and I have almost no Spanish. Which would've been okay, because I had a map with the name and address of the hotel, and he had a GPS map thing. But he happened to mention knowing French, and we chatted in French the entire ride. By the time I got to the hotel, I nearly spoke to the desk clerk in French.

The next day, I stopped at a little bar to buy a bottle of Spanish Casera beer for elfy, except I had forgotten the word "casera", I only remembered that the Spanish drink a lot of this combination of beer with something like lemon-flavored tonic water. The man behind the bar spoke little English, so I tried to communicate what I wanted with the few Spanish words I could call up - "cerveza", "limon", "botelle". He asked, "casera?" and it took a few times before I realized he was offerring me the very thing I wanted! In my hasted to say yes, what came out was:

Oui! ... Ken! ... Yes! ... Sí!

At least I didn't add a "ja" and a "kyllä" in there somewhere before I got to Sí :)

Comments

[catbird.livejournal.com]

I spent roughly 5 years learning French in school (apparently with a horrible Quebec accent according to my mother). 4 months in Japan in a home-study program and, to this day, when I try to speak French Japanese comes out. The languages couldn't be more different but in my brain not-English is now Japanese apparently.

You're 'Yes' story reminded me :D

[notadoor.livejournal.com]

I basically switched back and forth between French and Arabic every year in college (Arabic freshman year, French sophomore, Arabic first semester of junior) and always, always when I couldn't remember the word in one I jumped to the other. My French professor hated it, but my Arabic professor also spoke French, so he was merely amused.

[ladymondegreen.livejournal.com]

This reminds me of how, after coming back from Israel and spending some time speaking French to a friend, I made a sentence that agreed grammatically and with the genders of the nouns in the structure, but which was one third French, one third Hebrew and one third English.

[notadoor.livejournal.com]

"like a lot of German, it's much clearer to English-speakers when written than it is when heard"

Huh, really? I've always found spoken German easier to comprehend, as long as they're not going superfast.

[cos]

Maybe part of the difference is that written German is almost never too fast because you can read it at your own pace? But for example, in this sentence, "Station" sounds quite different from the English word, but is spelled the same.

[roamin-umpire.livejournal.com]

Reminds me of the time mswae was taking a Japanese and a Hebrew class in the same semester. She always made flash cards to study. I was idly flipping through a set of them at one point and noticed one that had no English on it - it was Japanese on one side and Hebrew on the other.

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

I'm totally going to use the appropriate verb form of Legagel in conversation, because that's too much fun ;P.

[cos]

Maybe I can use "lehitgagel" for what's going to happen to ITA :)

[cartographer.livejournal.com]

[like]

[vito-excalibur.livejournal.com]

Ahaha totally. Someone at a party was saying that in your brain there's like the "your native language" bucket, and then there's the "foreign" bucket. And you can sort things out of that other bucket, but if you're tired or in a hurry or out of practice, you're going to start pulling things at random...

[cos]

What was "yes" doing there? I may have my buckets mixed up!
My "native language" - the only one I spoke until about age 7 - is Hebrew. But my English, which is technically my second language and which I wasn't fluent in until I was 8 or 9, is much stronger. ("ken" is Hebrew, and that came out too...)

[kirin]

Yeah, I sometimes mix bits of German and Japanese, the two languages I know just a little of.

So, Hebrew is one of those languages that vowel-shifts for different tenses? Man, that drives me nuts. ;)

And it's always fun to watch other languages assimilating new tech-based slang. I once hung out on a very international chat forum where one of the things you could do if you were a veteran member was slap a "n00b" sticker on the handle of a new user. It wasn't long before I heard a reference to getting "genoobt".

[cos]

> So, Hebrew is one of those languages that vowel-shifts for different tenses? Man, that drives me nuts. ;)

I'm not sure what you mean, but in Semitic languages you have a root (typically three consonants) and fill it in in different systematic ways to generate a variety of words - including nouns, verbs, and adjectives - related to that root. Primarily, to go from a root to a word what you do is add vowels (roots, on their own, have no vowels and cannot be spoken), but there are also some additional consonants in some of the templates. For example, the template for an infinitive verb always prepends "le".

One consequence of this is that Hebrew (and Arabic, I'm pretty sure) is full of un-used word slots whose meanings would intuitively make sense once coined. For any particular root, some forms are used and others aren't, so to make up a new word, you can just fill out an existing root with a currently unused template/form by adding the right vowels and consonants, and you will imply a lot about the word's meaning to native speakers who have never heard it before.

[kirin]

Ah, right, I was momentarily blanking on the fact that root word in Hebrew are consonants only.

Anyway, I was just referring to the shift in internal vowels (in addition to the prepended/appended syllables) between the infinitive and the past tense, i.e. Legagel -> gigalti, Letayeg -> tiyeg.

THe frustration comes from my minimal study of German, where most verbs (weak verbs) conjugate by sensibly sticking things on the front or back, but then there's strong verbs, which also change their first vowel in various tenses.