Prowler wrote:People from smaller countries with less commonly spoken languages: do your countrymen often overstate their language skills? A lot of Portuguese people think Portuguese are some of the biggest polyglots in the world. But, from my experience, the only foreign language I see Portuguese people actually speaking fluently is English. Some middle aged people will speak French fluently but that's it. A lot of Portuguese people also overrate their English skills as well.
A lot of Finns do the opposite, being fluent in English and at least more or less capable of understanding Swedish but only saying they speak Finnish. Then again, in Finland being "fluent in English" doesn't really take into consideration pronunciation. I mean, I consider myself fluent in English but my pronunciation is still pretty Finnish-ish especially with certain vowels and /h/ being all over the place... and sometimes I make no sense, but the same happens with Finnish too and tends to be connected to my mental state (like, I make less sense when I'm depressed or whatever).
But of course there are probably also Finns who actually don't speak anything except Finnish, yet claim to speak English, Swedish, Russian, German, French, etc. Such people almost certainly wouldn't know that any languages other than those even exist, so I doubt they'd claim to be able to speak Archi or Warlpiri or whatever.
I've never come across any people like that myself at all, though.vijayjohn wrote:Maybe in a Scottish or northern English accent or something?
Yeah, probably, or maybe it's just my Finnishness making me hear things.
vijayjohn wrote:I have no idea, but I can't really complain when I myself live on a street called "Del Mesa Lane..."
Hmm, "of the table"? I don't get how that's weird or anything, but then my Spanish (assuming it's from Spanish) is pretty bad, so if there's some slang meaning or something that I don't know...
vijayjohn wrote:Oh, sorry, I forgot to delete that after writing it in an earlier draft of that post!
vijayjohn wrote:Probably because it's a hell of a lot easier to find information on that sort of thing in Russian than in Kazakh and possibly also because Russian is co-official with Kazakh in Kazakhstan, in addition to surely being by far the most widely spoken language in the region for which such information is readily available.
But the results are
about Russian, not
in Russian. It's practically all about how
Russian adjectives work, with only a few results about Kazakh. However, googling the same "comparative and superlative adjectives in [X language]" about at least any other language of Central Asia will at least
try to show results about that language. Kazakh is the only one that will show results about Russian, so it can't be that it's a "regional language" or whatever.
What it seems like is that Google doesn't want people to learn Kazakh, or even suggests that the only language spoken in Kazakhstan is Russian (and/or that the Kazakh language doesn't exist and "Kazakh" is just another name for Russian), which is exactly what Russia wants (presumably especially now since Kazakhstan has announced the beginning of de-Russification of the Kazakh language) and as such seems like a political move in support of Russia. Or maybe I'm just paranoid, but...
I mean, of course googling "Kazakh language" will get results about Kazakh; same with "Kazakh adverbs", "Kazakh colour terminology", etc. However, "epistemic modality in Kazakh" will show results about both Kazakh and Russian, with "Russian" bold in the results about Russian as if the search had been "epistemic modality in Russian". So I'm not sure what to think, but I do have a feeling that there could be some pro-Russian manipulation at play.
Linguaphile wrote:Have either of you maybe seen some version of this tale?
I haven't either, but also like Vijay said, I've seen similar things before in cartoons and stuff and probably read (or as a kid been read to) some weird ass stories, etc. And well, there's also at least Howl's Moving Castle, so yeah. But hahaha, that video was hilarious even though I could only understand a couple of words here and there; tons of obvious false friends, etc. and gnomes are always funny.