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

Don Blaheta <blahedo@...> wrote:

> The interesting thing, though, is how differently other people
> experience it.  I know people that can converse fluently but have the
> darndest time trying to write---they get bogged down in the grammar
> (does it end in -=E9, -=E9e, -ait, -ais, -ai, ... lots of homophonous
> suffices in French!)  Others have no problems with production, but can
> only understand the slowest spoken dialogues.  I wonder if these
> orderings are consistent across languages for each person?  If they're
> the same for their L1?
I'm quite fast in my L1 (Spanish), both spoken and written. With spoken
English I have a hard time producing sentences, because I have no real
practice these days, and fast songs and accents are hard to grasp; but
I have no trouble writing. French I know almost nothing about, and I don'=
t
like it in general (sorry people) -- too many vowels, and no simpleness
of form like the one English has to compensate. But I can understand
written French usually (I read Christophe's pages without translation
and think I got most of them right). No spoken French for me -- too
fast and too much liaised (is that really a word?); I get only the
last, stressed parts of those long polysynthetic strings :).

As for Portuguese (I think someone mentioned it in relation to Spanish),
I understand most of it if people speak clearly and not too fast or with
a weird accent. I guess most of what one has the chance to hear in Argent=
ina
is from the southern parts of Brazil (Rio Grande do Sul and such), and th=
at
is more influenced by Spanish. I have no idea what European Portuguese so=
unds
like. Same for Italian: the standard dialect I can understand easily (mor=
e
so than Portuguese), and read it more or less. But in either case I can't
write anything. I don't know the orthography, and there are important
differences in basic lexicon (e. g. Italian _finestra_ vs. Spanish _venta=
na_).

Now, Castilian Spanish is somewhat hard too when people talk fast (which
seems to be a feature of many Spaniards). And it's difficult to properly
mock /T/'s and apical /s/'s. ;)


--Pablo Flores
  http://draseleq.conlang.org/