Glen Gordon wrote:
> Alex:
>> I use english when I need to comunicate with people which do not
>> know my language; I don't use english for comunicating with my
>> family; I do not dream in english, I do not count in english, I do
>> not make any calculation in English or German. For such kind of
>> things the brain switch automaticaly in the "mother language".
>
> How strange. Maybe the problem you evidently have with language
> acquisition is that you think you have a mother language. Perhaps I'm
> unusual but I can pick up another language like trying on a pair of
> trousers. In French, I think in French. My grammar may not be perfect
> but I don't think in English and convert to French... I just think in
> French.
Glen, I appreciate your thought and you are right when you speak about
switching when talking in another language. From a certain level of
knowledge there is no need to think in the first language for
translating in the second language. It is simply a switch between them.
I accentuated on what I do not do in the other language:
>> I do not dream in english, I do not count in english, I do
>> not make any calculation in English or German. For such kind of
>> things the brain switch automaticaly in the "mother language".
Do you think then a la "quatre-vingt-neuf-dies avec neuf-dies"? If yes,
you are a bit unusual. I have a lot of colleagues here who are from
several countried, most of them have been born in Germany but the
language of their parents is an another as German. They have the same
problem when the make mathematical operation. They make it in the "first
language".
David mentioned that there is not unusual for persons who do not
understand the language of their grand-parents. That is conditioned
true. It pretty depends of external factors where these person lives. I
take my case for instance:
- if my children will remain here in Germany and marry here too with a
partner which is not a speaker of Romanian, then their children will
learn maybe with me a bit the language, but there are big chances they
won't learn it, thus they won't be able to understand my native
language.
- if I decide to go back to Romania and my children will live there,
their children will have no problem with my native language since they
will learn and use it.
In fact this is the very simple problem at all. If an individum or a
little group get lost from its national group, its language will get
lost in time. That is demonstrated in history several times. If a group
is big enough for making an enclave within a new group, their language
will survive too, if not, they become assimilated and that was. Their
language is gone too.
> By thinking of _every_
> language as one's own, not just one's "mother tongue", it becomes
> easier to learn new languages because one can then identify with that
> language. It isn't new; it's already "your" language.
> = gLeN
>
Now , here appears the interesting situation for every one who use a
foreign language. Does anyone of you apply its morphological aspects of
a language to an another language? Do you use diminutive English
particle for building words in French? Do one use the flexionary part of
a language applying to a new learned language? I guess this is an
interesting aspect when we speak about "prefixes and suffixes" which are
"borrowed" from other languages.
Any Slavic speaker using in English "katica" for making a diminutive out
of cat? I guess we usually don't do it, but we speak the learned
language _as it ought, we don't make a garbage mixing it together. These
are facts. Then, how do we apply the linguistic ideas of "Latin prefix,
Greek suffix, Slavic suffix" which have been "adopted" by other
languages? It seems that practically, this does not work very proper,
does it?
Alex