Hues of your mother tongue when speaking another language

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Babbsagg
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Hues of your mother tongue when speaking another language

Postby Babbsagg » 2017-04-26, 17:38

When speaking another language, even correctly, do you notice some habits that seem to be typical of your mother tongue?

For example (in this case, a German speaking English):

A) When not restraining myself, I tend to create long complicated sentences, with lots of commas to make it easier to separate "units" of the sentences, instead of using more than one sentence.
B) I tend to use a lot of adjectives and especially superlatives to describe things (in comparison, BrE seems to like comparatives).
Thank you for correcting mistakes!

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Re: Hues of your mother tongue when speaking another language

Postby Levike » 2017-04-26, 18:11

I get what you're saying. :)

One thing that comes to mind is that in Hungarian you can create a word for anything, in the sense that you can take any noun and just make it an adjective or a verb by adding some ending to it.

Kind of like in English where you could put "-y" to make things adjectives. Although for English I'm not sure how much I can do this and still sound ok.

While in Romanian for example you can't, so you're forced to come up with word arounds like instead of saying that something's "lemony" you have to say "with lemon", 'cause you can't just simply take lemon, add an adjective ending and expect it to sound good.

And another thing is that when speaking German you can leave parts of the sentence that are obvious by context, like you can say "I must out" instead of "I must go out". But usually I say the whole thing, because that's what sounds good to me at the moment.

הענט

Re: Hues of your mother tongue when speaking another language

Postby הענט » 2017-04-27, 7:20

Levike wrote:I get what you're saying. :)

One thing that comes to mind is that in Hungarian you can create a word for anything, in the sense that you can take any noun and just make it an adjective or a verb by adding some ending to it.

Kind of like in English where you could put "-y" to make things adjectives. Although for English I'm not sure how much I can do this and still sound ok.

While in Romanian for example you can't, so you're forced to come up with word arounds like instead of saying that something's "lemony" you have to say "with lemon", 'cause you can't just simply take lemon, add an adjective ending and expect it to sound good.

And another thing is that when speaking German you can leave parts of the sentence that are obvious by context, like you can say "I must out" instead of "I must go out". But usually I say the whole thing, because that's what sounds good to me at the moment.
I think English is quite flexible in this regard. You can make a verb out of Rodney King if you want to.

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Re: Hues of your mother tongue when speaking another language

Postby plengfruit » 2017-04-27, 7:46

I don't really mix my mother tongue with other languages, but my accent/pronunciation tends to fall apart when I'm taken by surprise or stressed while speaking. So for instance my English accent, which I'd say sounds genuine (if not bizarre, being a hybrid of British and American ones), reverts to a thick Polish accent with an emphasis on penultimate syllables and whatnot. Meaning I'd be a really terrible and easy to read spy. :oops:
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Re: Hues of your mother tongue when speaking another language

Postby Osias » 2017-04-27, 13:55

Hues of your mother tongue... my mother tongue being Brazilian, I can only think of

Image
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Re: Hues of your mother tongue when speaking another language

Postby OldBoring » 2017-05-09, 14:22

Osias wrote:Hues of your mother tongue... my mother tongue being Brazilian, I can only think of

Image

Huehuehue

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Re: Hues of your mother tongue when speaking another language

Postby md0 » 2017-05-09, 15:17

I think a sneaky one is using a more analytical syntax.
Eg for an L1 Greek speaker in English, prepositional genitives are more natural than 's-genitives.
I think we are also way less comfortable with noun piles.

Those are probably not very noticeable when we speak an L2 Romance language though.

One thing CyG speakers do in nay language though is word final plosive devoicing (or rather, devoicing of plosives at the end of words). All those times I wrote 'think' for 'thing'... But phonology is so obvious it's no fun :lol:
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Re: Hues of your mother tongue when speaking another language

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-05-09, 23:38

For me, fruit is a countable noun in English (so that e.g. a banana is "a fruit", and two bananas are "two fruits," but a banana and a grape are also "two fruits"), and a piece of fruit means you've taken one instance of some kind of fruit (e.g. a banana, a grape, whatever) and cut it up into pieces, and you mean one of those pieces. This is due to substrate influence from Malayalam.

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Re: Hues of your mother tongue when speaking another language

Postby linguoboy » 2017-05-15, 17:30

English seems to make greater use of infinitives in verbal phrases than many other European languages and we don't mind stacking them, e.g. "Do you want to get him to want to commit to marrying you?" Especially in German, I start trying to formulate a phrase and realise I'm trying to do too much with (um)...zu... clauses and it really would be better to use a full subordinate clause.
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Re: Hues of your mother tongue when speaking another language

Postby dEhiN » 2017-05-24, 3:28

When speaking a Romance language, I sometimes forget to separate a subordinate clause with the equivalent of that. That's because there are many situations in English where it's omitted, and so I don't always see the sentence as a two clauses, only one.

Another case I find specifically with French is that I mix up when to use avoir and être with states of being. Many times I've thought to myself, in French, je suis faim, only to remember it's j'ai faim. I've also found sometimes I'll think j'ai fatigué because of hypercorrection.
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Re: Hues of your mother tongue when speaking another language

Postby Vlürch » 2017-05-24, 18:11

Aside from having a weird ass accent in English, the only thing I can think of is wanting to stick several words together at times before remembering that English compounds don't work like Finnish compounds. On the other hand, sometimes I'll add unnecessary hyphens between words in compounds, or even spaces if it just feels right to do so. I don't always notice it, but even when I do, I'll occasionally intentionally misspell something if my gut tells me it's better that way; I can't think of any examples right now.

With Russian, I drop pronouns whenever I feel like they're unnecessary even if I consciously know that they're actually not supposed to be dropped, but even though for me it's obviously interference from Finnish, I've noticed that some native speakers do this too (online), so it probably doesn't even matter since I don't actually speak Russian, and will never have to if I can avoid it.

Actually, with English, I probably use too many pronouns?

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Re: Hues of your mother tongue when speaking another language

Postby OldBoring » 2017-05-24, 20:06

vijayjohn wrote: a banana and a grape are also "two fruits").

Grape fruita??!!

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Re: Hues of your mother tongue when speaking another language

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-05-24, 23:30

OldBoring wrote:
vijayjohn wrote: a banana and a grape are also "two fruits").

Grapea fruita??!!

:P

Banana!
Four!

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Re: Hues of your mother tongue when speaking another language

Postby dEhiN » 2017-05-25, 8:16

I just remembered an example where my heritage language - Tamil - used to affect my English.

Even though I don't know that much Tamil, there are some words that I grew up saying because my family used them all the time. One example is this one: பனியன் /'banijən/ (although my family says it as /'bænijən/) 'undershirt'. Growing up, I used that word for all undershirts, but especially for a tank top aka 'wife-beater'. Image

I got so used to the Tamil word that there was a time, a few years ago, where I kept almost saying பனியன் even when speaking to other English speakers. Even to this day, I still have to pause and try to recall the proper English name when I'm speaking to anyone who's not my family or not a Tamil speaker.
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Re: Hues of your mother tongue when speaking another language

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-05-25, 12:12

South Asians in general use that word to mean that when speaking English. Other English-speakers use that word, too, but to mean something a bit different.

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Re: Hues of your mother tongue when speaking another language

Postby dEhiN » 2017-05-25, 12:18

vijayjohn wrote:Other English-speakers use that word, too, but to mean something a bit different.

Huh! I didn't know other English speakers even knew the word existed!
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