Re: CHAT: Synesthesia and conlanging (was Re: The ConlangInstinct)

Grandsire, C.A. wrote:
>
> Nik Taylor wrote:
> >
> > "Grandsire, C.A." wrote:
> > > (hence the fact that most monolingual people are
> > > unable to imagine people thinking in another language than their own)
> >
> > I remember wondering, when I was a young child, about what it must be
> > like to think in another language, or, more to the point, what it must
> > be like for English to be a foreign language.  I knew that people who
> > speak other langs think in those, but it seemed weird nevertheless.
Ha ha ha!  Nik, did you write that?  I can't sort out all the ">"s.  I
had
the exact same fantasy, as a child.  Once, when I was about fourteen, I
made
up a bunch of gobbledy gook that sounded, at least to me, like English.
I
wanted to imagine what English would sound like to a foreigner: lots of
peculiar shlossing, arring, and umbling sounds.  I still remember the
first two
sentences:

        VimMOW, tiver bemble!  Aid chair nih brill voe diPOWN il jevels
        um TUNG gwaith.  Tumb june plibe im prot milsy nih mobeth...

I still even remember what it meant:  "Hello, everybody, I'm here to
tell
you about the marvels of language.  Some people find it very milsy to
mobeth..."

Pardon me, memory has broken down!!

But then, to the hilarity of my family, I'd pronounce it in a western
twang,
a Brooklyn accent, a Charleston South Carolina Accent (copied from my
grandmother), what I imagined was a French accent, a posh British
accent...
and it worked!  The words were meaningless but the accents came through!
And the tone.

I think this is Christophe:

>         I remember having the same thoughts. I even sometimes thought that it
> was impossible and that everybody thought really in French! :)
Have you ever read Huckleberry Finn?  There's a powerfully funny scene
where
Huck is debating with Jim, the run-away slave, about the French
language.
Jim is just beside himself with irritation that Huck would try to
convince him
that some people say "Parlay voos franzy?" for "Do you speak French?"
What
a completely stupid thing to do... why don't they talk like normal
people?
Huck says, well, does a cat talk like a dog?  No.  Would you expect a
cow
to talk like a bird?  Jim says: is a man a dog?  No.  Are the French
men?
Yes.  Then why don't they talk like men?

Ha ha ha!

> > Speaking of which, for you non-native speakers of English, what was your
> > original impression of English before learning it?  Did you find it
> > beautiful or ugly, and what gave it that impression?
I second that question.

>         When I was young, I mostly heard English in songs (every on TV is
> translated in French, and my parents are monolingual). I found it
> beautiful enough, but impossible to hear a single syllable out of it. It
> was simply gibberish for me, a continuous stream of sounds without
> pause. I still have the worst difficulties to understand songs in
> English.
I find it very hard to understand French in songs.  Everything seems to
slur together.  I have to see the person's mouth, and have a context.
I always thought that German would be easier, more DISCRETE, no liaison;
I was wrong; I was wrong, too, about Welsh.  The hardest part of any
foreign language for me is learning to comprehend it spoken.  Reading
it is the easiest, writing it is the next easiest, speaking it
is...okay,
but fairly hard... comprehending a stream of it in a context unfamiliar
to me (like having to listen to someone come and talk about computers
fifteen years ago when I was in Geneva) feels like having  water poured
over me in the early stages of language learning.  Or shooting arrows at
me that fly through my body and never stick in my brain.

Frankly, I have that problem sometimes when I'm listening to English
spoken at learned conferences, where the discourse is Derridean or
Lacanian
critical theory.  Word arrows flying through me, nothing sticking in my
brain.  <G>

Sally

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"The gods have retractible claws."
                                from _The Gospel of Bastet_
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