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Difficulty of different languages

This makes me think of how English has different words for different levels of dignity of some acts, like
wolf down < eat < dine
shut up < be quiet
German has fressen (nonhuman doing eating, human doing undignified eating) and essen (human doing eating)
Does Japanese take it further? Like having a specialized "Emperor Vocabulary" or "Emperor Grammar"?


At least all of the more recent ones.
I believe that the Imperial Court once used an older form of the language, the one current in the early mediaeval "Heian Period"; but nowadays the Emperor addresses the people, on the very rare occasions when he does so, in a polite form of the recent literary language. There was or is, it seems, an "Emperor pronoun", employed in referring to him, and uttered by Hirohito in his 1945 address; but I think its use has since been abandoned.
 
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Does Japanese take it further? Like having a specialized "Emperor Vocabulary" or "Emperor Grammar"?

I regret I can't provide details as I only have a historical approach to the subject and not a linguistic one (and Craig B have already provided some interesting bits on that subject).

It is an interesting image people hearing the Emperor address in the radio (many of them genuflecting and touching the ground with their forehead -an exaggeration of an etiquette unknown to them-), not understanding a thing and only thinking "this is not good" and the Japanese version of "OMG! OMG!! OMG!!!".
 
As an English speaker, there are some sounds in Czech that I just. can't. make. However, when I apologized in Prague for not being able to pronounce a word correctly, the lady I was speaking to seemed to indicate that there was some disagreement about exactly how to pronounce it anyway! (For Czech speakers, the sound I have trouble with is that rzhch sound). I think you have to grow up hearing certain sounds, or you won't be able to parse them successfully enough to recreate them. I've been around a fair number of Navajo speakers, and never could get a handle on pronunciation there.

Exactly a conclusion reached in the study I mentioned above. Post 49 and earlier
 
As an English speaker, there are some sounds in Czech that I just. can't. make. However, when I apologized in Prague for not being able to pronounce a word correctly, the lady I was speaking to seemed to indicate that there was some disagreement about exactly how to pronounce it anyway! (For Czech speakers, the sound I have trouble with is that rzhch sound). I think you have to grow up hearing certain sounds, or you won't be able to parse them successfully enough to recreate them.

I've been around a fair number of Navajo speakers, and never could get a handle on pronunciation there.

While it is true that early start helps; so does being multilingual. I know of a few sounds in my languages that few can make at first attempts, but I do believe that practise can overcome most of these if desired. I also know people who have terrible command of English and I attribute it to the simple fact that they don't care. McDonald's take out understands the menu numbers very well and much more makes no difference.
 
But "wir fahren gegen Eng[e]land" doesn't mean the same as the other examples. It implies going against England with hostile intent. "Wir fahren nach England" just means "we're going to England." Native German speakers please correct me if I'm wrong.

No, to go "gegen" [a place] is not necessarily hostile. "Gegen" can mean "against", but also "towards". With a time it can mean "at around" ("gegen 9 Uhr" = "at around 9 o'clock").
So you can "gegen Westen segeln" - "sail towards west", and that is not meant as a hostile act at all.

Of course you can move "gegen Englad" and have hostile intentions, but that's not implied in the expression as such.
 
No, to go "gegen" [a place] is not necessarily hostile. "Gegen" can mean "against", but also "towards". With a time it can mean "at around" ("gegen 9 Uhr" = "at around 9 o'clock").
So you can "gegen Westen segeln" - "sail towards west", and that is not meant as a hostile act at all.

Of course you can move "gegen Englad" and have hostile intentions, but that's not implied in the expression as such.
I'm certain that the poster who introduced this into the conversation had in mind this WW2 German song, which seems to refer to hostile acts.
 
Two anecdotes related to topic:

1) The benefit of having been raised bilingually
My best friend at the University of Georgia around 1990 was a Mauritanian/French national - partents both born in Mauritania, he grew up mostly in France, with both Arabic and French as first languages. Ahmed was the most language-talented person I have so far met. A few years later, I visited him in Spain for two weeks, a few months after he had moved there, to take a job in Madrid. He had gone there with no previous Spanish lessons, but by the time I got there, Spaniards would ask him what region of Spain he came from (his accent, apparently, never sounded fully local, but good enough to plausibly be taken as a dialect; his grammar apparently was flawless, vocabulary extensive). Meanwhile, American tourists asked me what country I was from, and asked him what US state he was from, because the American English he had acquired in Georgia was convincing.
Whenever Ahmed got in brief contact with a language, he'd pick up usable bits in no time at all. His German was good enough to chat with my mother on the phone who spoke no foreign language whatsoever, and he even could speak Romanian and Greek.
I have little doubt that his talent is related to his bilingual infancy.

2) I have a list with the phrase "I can't speak [name of the language]" in almost 40 languages, and have a majority by heart. Most European languages (all of the Indo-Germanic family) are rather easy to remember and fairly easy to pronounce. Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian, though not related to the Germanic or Slavic languages, are easy, too (just remembering and speaking a single sentence!). The Indoarian languages of India pose no great challenge, while the Dravidian are terrible. Japanese was one of my first list entries, and while I am unsure I get the tonality correct, I can remember it well and what I say I say fluently. I struggle however with Mandarin and Arabic, and the worst was Korean: While in Spain with Ahmed, we took a night train from Granada to Madrid and shared the compartment with three young Korean women, college students claiming to study Spanish, although Ahmed assured me that their Spanish was even more lacking than their bad English. Anyway, I managed to explain to the girl next to me that I want to learn to say "I can't speak Korean" in Korean; if she could write that down. Sure, she said, and wrote it down - in Korean script. No no, I'd need that in Latin characters. That was a difficult thing to ask from her! She wrote something down ... I read it out load, and she laughed, I spoke it entirely wrong. So I asked her to pronounce it to me - over and over and over again! I tried to write down phonetically what I thought I heard, but (with train noises around), I was struggling hard to identify phonemes. We spent certainly more than one hour trying to get the pronunciation across - and yet I failed. (The only upshot to this drawn-out failure was that she was young and pretty and had her lips close to my ears for a substantial portion of the ordeal... :o)
 
In order that this thread not be derailed any further, I've moved the discussion on language's effect on superstition to its own thread.
Posted By: kmortis


Please do not personalize the discussion
Replying to this modbox in thread will be off topic  Posted By: kmortis
 
I'm certain that the poster who introduced this into the conversation had in mind this WW2 German song, which seems to refer to hostile acts.

I know, and I explained that the hostile character comes from the context, not from the word or expression. It may well be / appears plausible that the poet was aware of the various meanings of "gegen" to include "against" as well as "towards" and thus prefered to use it instead of alternatives like "nach" ("to") or "richtung" ("in the direction of").

"Towards" is the original meaning of "gegen". Example: "Er handelt stets freundlich gegen Fremde" = "He always acts friendly towards foreigners". However, this is somewhat archaic German, as the derived meaning "against" is more prevalent nowadays. In poetic use, you more often find the short version "gen". Example: "Jesus fuhr gen Himmel" = "Jesus drove towards the sky", which is not ambiguous as "gen" solely means "towards".

The lyrics of the "Engeland-Lied" - orginially "Matrosenlied" - was written by Hermann Löns (1866-1914), more than 100 years ago. I am not sure, but find it well possible, that in his time, the original meaning "towards" was more present to German natives than it is today.

ETA: Löns wrote "Matrosenlied" in 1910 according to this site. The words are pre-WW1, not WW2.
 
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Most European languages (all of the Indo-Germanic family)...
Its English name is "Indo-European".

I've noticed a strange thing about myself as I read about Proto-Indo-European and its descendants. When I want to recall a PIE word later, I don't end up directly recalling the word itself; I recall the list of its descendants that I know and the rules for how it ended up that way, then backtrack to the original form. I seem to recall relationships between languages more easily than any one foreign language on its own. I suspect I could more easily learn two related languages simultaneously than just one.

Japanese was one of my first list entries, and while I am unsure I get the tonality correct...
This is the first I've heard of Japanese being tonal at all!
 
Its English name is "Indo-European".
Okay - still mainly "indogermanische Sprachen" in German, although "indoeuropäische Sprachen" is used also.

I've noticed a strange thing about myself as I read about Proto-Indo-European and its descendants. When I want to recall a PIE word later, I don't end up directly recalling the word itself; I recall the list of its descendants that I know and the rules for how it ended up that way, then backtrack to the original form. I seem to recall relationships between languages more easily than any one foreign language on its own. I suspect I could more easily learn two related languages simultaneously than just one.
In college, I took an Italian and a Spanish course at the same time, and got myself confused in both.
I knew a bit Italian - enough to order food, ask for directions and basic polite introduction - from several vacations. Almost lost it when I had to play French-English translator for an Indian friend for several days, before driving into Italy, where I couldn't get rid of all the French in my head.

This is the first I've heard of Japanese being tonal at all!
Oh, it isn't? Well that might explain why I found it easier to pick up an remember :p (I just read that pitch plays a role, but more as defining dialects than to distinguish words)
 
Oh, it isn't? Well that might explain why I found it easier to pick up an remember :p (I just read that pitch plays a role, but more as defining dialects than to distinguish words)

I think that pitch and tone plays about the same role as it does in English. If you get it wrong, people will notice, but most likely still understand (depending on exactly how wrong you get it).
 
I think that pitch and tone plays about the same role as it does in English. If you get it wrong, people will notice, but most likely still understand (depending on exactly how wrong you get it).

Tonal languages (I don't know about Japanese, but certainly Chinese) have two layers of tones. There is the sentence level tone like in:

Do you want a glass of beer?
Do you want a glass of beer?
Do you want a glass of beer? ... etc.

In addition there is a syllable level. Chinese has only about 400 syllables or sounds, but each can have vastly different meanings, dependent of the tone.

Hans
 
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