#english french spanish asl

[freakurodani]

one of my favorite jokes to tell at work is that i know 4 languages, and i suck at all of them

[soulless-bex]

headcanon that percy is smart in a sense that he picks up language really easily, like he just learns them through exposure and stupidly fast, but since he’s dyslexic and has a hard time writing/reading and that’s all schools care about, he never learned the value of his skill

[ri-afan]

Picture it: me, 430 in the morning

I tell my cat that it’s 4 in the morning in French, as one does, and go to tell him I need to sleep.

Except I can’t remember the word for ‘need’ and all that’s coming up is ‘necesito’ which I KNOW is a Spanish conjugation for the word I actually want in French despite not studying Spanish in eleven years. Spoiler alert I guess, the word I wanted was ‘besoin’.

I decide ‘fuck it’ and go to say that I want to sleep instead, ‘cause at this point it’s accurate and ‘voudrais’ has been hammered in for all the time I practiced it saying I wanted tea, except I try and add the word for ‘today’ somewhere in there and get stuck because what’s the word for ‘today’ in French again??

Heddiw? No, that’s Welsh I think.

Hodiau? No, that’s Esperanto.

So I turn to my cat again and ask “como si dice ‘today’ en francés?”

Motherfucker meowed.

Y’all, I thought I lost my goddamned mind for half a second.

[dedalvs]

Could you please talk more about how/why agreement systems develop in language? I always feel that agreement systems are poorly justified in my conlanging

Agreement systems are retained in language because the redundancy strengthens the signal. It's better to think about linguistics systems in terms of "why didn't speakers get rid of this" as opposed to "why did this come about in the first place". Sometimes things happen randomly. They're retained because they're useful.

But like, consider gender in English. We used to have it. Gender was mostly defined by the endings of words. We lost all the endings. We lost some major forms of agreement (consider that French still has different articles). At a certain point, it was impossible to tell if a noun was m/f/n, so of course English lost its gender system. It was no longer useful. In fact, going even further, it was the opposite of useful, because it was totally unpredictable and didn't buy you anything.

As an example of the latter, there's this sign system called Signed Exact English (SEE). It's often (not always, but often) pedaled as a replacement for ASL, because it will "help" Deaf signers learn English. One of the features it retains is the distinction between "a" and "an". English speakers know how to do this instinctively: You use "a" before a noun phrase (not a noun, but a noun phrase) that begins with a consonant sound, and you use "an" before a noun phrase that begins with a vowel sound (so "umbrella" gets "an", but "union" gets "a"). In SEE, there's a separate sign for "a" and "an", and then ASL signs are used for English words like "man" and "old". So then you have to sign:

A MAN

AN OLD MAN

But, of course, the difference is based on the sound of the English pronunciation of the word the sign stands for, so it is quite literally impossible to predict for a Deaf signer. It has to be memorized. Which is an extraordinary task. Basically, all nouns, adjectives, and adverbs (consider "a really old man") have to be dumped in either the A class or the AN class with absolutely no way to predict which will be in which.

This is a great example of a feature that would quickly die in a natural language.

So looking at gender, the question is how useful is it? If it's (a) predictable, and (b) spread across multiple areas of the language, then it's more useful, and more likely to be retained. If you look at Spanish, agreement is present in pronouns, adjectives, demonstratives, and articles. The gender of a noun highly predictable (not 100%, but highly predictable). That's a stable gender system. French is similar, but the gender is less predictable for nouns. If one was going to lose gender first, you'd predict French. Even so, it's still predictable enough that more will probably have to happen for French to actually lose it.

As for where it comes from, if you want to read a detailed account of the development of Indo-European gender, this is an intro. Most of the time it's the incorporation of pronouns or small, generic nouns that become commonly associated with particular classes and are used as modifiers. We've got a pretty good example of the development of noun class in Sarkezhe, season 4 of LangTime Studio. If you want to see it done from beginning to end, check that out.

Hope that helps!

[welcome-to-green-hills]

Wait you saw the Brazilian Portuguese dub and the English dub? I didn’t know that you spoke Portuguese

Hi Hon!❤️✨

I am not fluent, but am learning! (Thank you Duolingo for giving me the basics). I speak more than one language! English and French are just ones that I speak the most here!

But in general, I loved both version. They were a great story!

[grantaire-lover-69]

The power of having a Hispanic family that have impossibly high standards is being able to manage multiple personalities/identities like a pro. Going to my Grandma's house? Boom, I'm suddenly a Catholic girl that loves dresses and sewing. Dad's house? I'm a carefree and forgetful girl. Mom's house? I'm a straight-A student, with perfect attendance that knows 5 languages and can draw. Honestly sometimes I forget how I really am until I go on social media or go with my friends.

[wutheringheightsfilm]

the knowing how to say thank u in multiple languages number for me is actually more like 10 after thinking about it for more than a minute and a half...

[milimeters-morales]

i have Miles learning/knowing a few more languages because he’s my favorite and because i think he’d like to know them to talk with his friends so Ganke and Judge both teach him their respective languages, but he doesn’t have a lot of time with spider-man and daily life so it’s a very slow process

[bookwyrminspiration]

Existing is cool. We all exist in some capacity.

I hope you do well in the seal of biliteracy test! I personally have another few years before I need to take it, and that will be in French most likely.

Hopefully if I do write a fanfic you will just end up finding it in the wild. Not likely but it could happen

Anyway, I hope that you start to feel more human later.

From⚙️

Existing is pretty cool! And thank you. I have no clue what my scoring is gonna be on that one, because I know my speaking section was...subpar at best, but maybe the other 3 sections were good enough to offset that? Who knows!

At least you know that it's a possibility! I didn't even know the seal or the test was a thing until like a month ago when I got an email like "hey quil sign up to take this test you took enough foreign language credits for it" like...you mean the courses I took...over a year ago??

just because I have an associated in spanish doesn't mean I know what I'm doing

And even if its unlikely for me to find your fic in the wild, I can still hope! I mean, i'll never know whether or not it was yours, but still! But yeah unlikely. I don't read a lot of fanfic, actually. Like 95% of the time I read a fic it's to support a mutual who wrote it, not because I particularly felt like reading fics. Ironic considering I'm a fic writer, but true.

Thank you for the well wishes though! I'm not particularly concerned with feeling human, but I understand and appreciate the sentiment, and I wish the same for you!

[burnt-scone]

It's always the people who write and speak beautifully who apologize after saying the most beautiful words to ever word, "Apologies, English isn't my first language."

Like they'll speak and write better than native speakers. Especially here in the states.

Like don't apologize, your literally better than everyone else in the room. They don't know half the words you just said, and it's the only language they've ever known. You're bilingual, yeah? No? Tri- This is your Fifth language, that you speak fluently?

[signalspells]

10+

Please reblog, I'm curious

[bodythieves]

Have I told you guys I'm multilingual !???? I can't remember ???

[modernmutiny]

If anyone's wondering how my Spanish learning is going (you're not, but I wanna talk about it and it's my blog so....) it's going very well! I held an entire conversation with a 5 year old at my job today for like 20 minutes which is basically A2 fluency and I'm very proud of myself 🙂‍↕️

[riverthebooknerd]

me: THREE YEARS

friend: *trying not to burst into laughter*

me: i spent THREE YEARS trying to learn spanish, and what do i get for it? HOLA, COMO ESTAS BITCH.

friend: well maybe if you-

me: and then GUESS WHAT?? i spend THREE MONTHS ON FRENCH, AND I PICK IT UP REAL FUCKING QUICK

me: WHAT THE FUCK

friend: i mean-

me: I STILL CAN'T PRONOUNCE, LIKE, HALF OF THE SPANISH WORDS

me: BUT FRENCH?? SOMEHOW MAKES MORE SENSE???? FRENCH

friend: i dunno what to tell you, dude

me: F R E N C H

[thalassic-p4rk]

me when i’ve collectively attempted to learn 48 languages (and counting) and so i get this constantly except i know literally nothing else but a word or two in those languages cuz the brain isn’t meant to hold all that information so for me it’s more like

Every single person studying a language when they recognize the most basic word of the language in a text or a video