[Pan-users] Re: OT: English [was Re: Re: freeze, high CPU getting new headers]

[Duncan]

Joe Zeff <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Tue, 05 Aug 2008 09:35:26
-0700:

> You are right, however, that it's wrong, a sentence to end, a
> preposition with.

I never groked this particular part (referring to the subthread) of 
English (or apparently, enough English at all to do well in it), but 
that particular sentence above reminds me of reading direct interlinear 
Greek/English (Greek work order) translations.  The word order may be 
somewhat unusual, but it still makes sense, and indeed, tends to place 
the emphasis (to a native English speaker) on a different aspect of the 
sentence, which can often be quite insightful in itself.

OTOH, Hebrew/English interlinear (Hebrew word order), in addition to 
being right to left, is foreign enough word ordering that unlike Greek/
English, I often have trouble even parsing it, at least without pausing 
to think about it a bit.  Part of it may be due to reading the line right 
to left, but still reading the English words left to right, but that 
doesn't account for all of it.

IOW, I can read and parse Greek word order at real-time reading speed, as 
the phrases may be in a bit different order, thus the turn of emphasis I 
often find insightful in itself, but the words within the phrase are 
close enough to native English word order that it still makes sense.  
Hebrew, OTOH, scrambles up the word order to the point I often have to 
pause and think a bit before I can make sense of it, even after allowing 
for right to left or "mixed" reading direction.

In general however, while I only speak and read English to any large 
extent so can't claim to be multilingual or have the benefits thereof, I 
was exposed to foreign languages and foreign word order even in English 
(due to ESL (English second language) speakers) early enough (from 4 
1/2), that I find I have far less problems parsing sometimes strange ESL 
or direct translation word ordering (or accents) than those around me 
that have mostly heard only native English speakers (or even English and 
a single other language, I've been exposed to many) their entire life.  I 
wasn't aware of the degree to which this was the case until Chariots of 
Fire (tho that was mostly accents), a few years ago.  I found I followed 
the film far better than most around me, who had a real difficult time 
due mainly to the accents.  After that, I began noticing it.

My three years younger sister got lucky, tho.  Apparently the exposure to 
foreign languages that I got from 4 1/2 that lead to my better 
understanding of accents and foreign word ordering, happened for her at 
1 1/2, while she was still in the language-critical development period, 
and she picked up much more than me.  Today, she speaks several languages 
with ease and reads others, and can pick them up far better than either 
my folks or I ever could.  We're convinced that her brain is able to hear 
and differentiate sounds that ours simply don't catch, because we weren't 
exposed to those particular sounds at the right age, and thus our brains 
basically ignore them and we can't "hear" them.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman