Re: InterLanguage Lapses, was Re: Technical terminology

 --- Christophe Grandsire skrzypszy:

> I beg to differ here. I am quasi-bilingual in French and English, and my
> Dutch is very good too, and I constantly have interlanguage lapses between
> those three languages, some voluntary, some not. And I don't have any
> problem to switch from language to language although I don't have a strong
> foreign accent in any of them.
Ha! I hope to check that soon!

For the rest, I agree with you. Lapsing from one language to another is
something you can get used to. I am not exactly bilingual, but here at home we
have the following situation: my L1 is Dutch, but I am also quite fluent in
Polish and a few other languages; my fiancée's L1 is Russian, but she speaks
Polish as well as I do, and her Dutch is getting better and better. Actually,
we ought to switch to Dutch, but we know each other for nine years now, and we
have always spoken Polish. I find it extremely hard to change languages at this
point.
Since none of us is a native speaker of Polish, this Polish is not "fed"
properly. As a result, it is deteriorating. More and more word we don't
remember immediately in Polish are instantly replaced by a Dutch word. The
result is some awful Polish-Dutch hybrid, in which Dutch nouns are sometimes
even "enriched" with Polish case endings.
That would have been okay if we hadn't had a daughter. I just don't want her to
pick up such a monster, but on the other hand, switching languages just doesn't
work (at least, not longer than a few minutes, at most).

On the other hand, I sometimes speak in some kind of Polish-German creole, just
for fun.

Jan

=====
"Originality is the art of concealing your source." - Franklin P. Jones

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