Re: I'm back, sort of

>PS Hanging on to this list is going to fulfill one very practical purpose for
>me during this year - saving my English! I'm amazed and dismayed to see that
>after only one week of speaking mostly German, it's an mental effort to switch
>to English. Has anyone else going to a foreign country experienced anything
>similar? (My Swedish is unaffected, FYI.)
Welcome back, Andreas.  It's good to see you again.

I'm only bilingual (English and Danish, and it might be stretching it to
call me truly bilingual in Danish, especially these days), not trilingual,
but I did have some interesting things happen while I was learning
Danish.  The first one was that when did not know or could not think of the
Danish word for something, my mind would start to put the Latin word into
the sentence.  (I had just finished taking 3 yearsof Latin and one year of
French prior to going to Denmark.)  When I didn't have the word, something
in my mind seemed to be saying, "No, no, *not* you L1!  Use something
else."  So it tried to, with rather amusing results.  (Though I don't think
I ever actually put a Latin word into the middle of a Danish sentence, I
just wanted to.)

I actually did have some trouble with my English grammar on account of the
Danish.  (And that's aside from coming home with a noticable accent on my
English.)  At one point in Venice, I was looking for my companion in a
crowd and a call out, "Melissa, Melissa, where are you?"  (In accented
English.)  Then when I finally saw her, I said, "Oh, there are you."  I
used exactly the same word order for the English as would have been correct
in Danish.  Perhaps this can be largely accounted for by the fact that
English and Danish are closely related languages and are so very similar in
both their vocabulary and their grammatical structure that it was easy for
such a mistake to slip in.  Now that my Danish has gotten rusty, I find
that I will do things like misplace the adverb in subordinate clauses if
I'm not paying close enough attention, but positioning the adverb in its
correct slot in a subordinate clause was something that I possibly never
learned adaquately to begin with.  I know where it goes because someone
taught me where to put it one time, and because I never heard a Dane say it
in ay other way.

Isidora