tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Feb 10 10:35:23 1999
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Re: New to the list
: ja' K'ryntes:
: >I used to be pretty good in Spanish but last time I tried to use it I kept
: >constucting sentences using the Klingon grammar patterns. *sigh* So many
: >languages, so little time.....
:
: That's what happened to me as well. Strangely, once I reached a certain
: level of comfort with tlhIngan Hol, I stopped getting its grammar mixed in
: quite so much when I tried to use other languages.
:
: -- ghunchu'wI'
What about vocabulary?
When I started studying Hebrew after several years of Russian, I found that occasionally if the newly learned Hebrew word didn't come immediately to mind in a conversation, I would automatically substitute the Russian word. Years later when learning Turkish I would do the same, only then I substituted Hebrew words for Turkish. It didn't help matters any that my Hebrew teacher also spoke Russian (she was an Israeli whose husband was born in Russia) and my Turkish teacher understood Hebrew (she was a French and Ladino-speaking Jew from Istanbul who had lived a year in Israel). Although my teachers didn't always notice my error, we certainly confused the rest of the class!
I always thought it odd that my brain would supply the missing word not from my native English, but rather from the last foreign language I learned. I'm sure Lawrence can supply the psycho-linguistic explanation for this phenomenon.
Since I've never had the occasion to try to speak Klingon, who knows what words will eventually come out of my mouth?
--
Voragh
Ca'Non Master of the Klingons