Re: Fictional auxlangs as artlangs (was Re: Poll)

---- "Lars Finsen" <lars.finsen@...> a écrit :

> Den 17. des. 2008 kl. 17.36 skrev Paul Kershaw:
>
> > I'm not entirely certain, myself. I would think that Sapir-Whorf
> > might predict that a fully fluent multilingual would have different
>
> > concept structures in each of their languages.
>
> Possibly. And concept structures isn't all there is to it. The
> different ways various categories are treated might well influence
> thinking as well. In translating from English I often notice how
> different the two cultures perceive time. And I often need to
> reformulate sentences where, in English, inanimate objects perform
> actions. It is much easier to grasp or even be aware of distinctions
>
> that are marked in your own language than other ones. And it has
> often startled me the way biglots or polyglots seem to take on a
> whole different personality when they switch from one language to
> another. That may be related to my prejudices about the various
> nationalities, but I'm not sure if this will account for the whole
> effect.
>
I can vouch for the feeling you have that polyglots change personality when
speaking in a different language. I am a polyglot myself (French, English and
Dutch, which I all speak on a daily basis, plus Modern Greek, which I speak far
less often, and Spanish, which I hardly ever speak at all), and I indeed feel
more assertive when I speak Dutch than when I speak English or French. However,
I don't know whether it comes from the language itself, the culture associated
with the language, or from the fact that the person I learned most of my Dutch
from (my husband) is a very assertive person himself, even by Dutch standards
:) .

I must say I also feel more childish when I speak French, and more mature when I
speak Dutch or English. But this might have to do with the fact that I stopped
speaking French as my main language by the time I reached full adulthood,
rather than anything really Sapir-Whorf-like.

> > I've heard many cases of someone who is fluent in two languages
> > saying, "I don't know how to say it in English" not because they
> > didn't have the vocabulary but because the vocabulary didn't
> > accurately reflect the concept structure. After all, that's how
> > some loan words drift over: Schadenfreude being an obvious example.
>
I suffer from this problem a lot. I have a hard time translating things from one
of my main languages to another, because I feel that I usually lose too much
meaning (or create the wrong feeling) when I do a simple translation, but I
can't reach the kind of precision I need without transform each and every
sentence into a full paragraph. There's also the problem that when I speak a
specific language, I also think in that language at the same time, so my mind
doesn't do translations any more and doesn't really connect words from
different languages together by their meaning (except in trivial cases).

The result is that I often involuntarily code-switch, sometimes without even
realising I am speaking another language than the one I should be speaking
(resulting in people looking at me with strange faces :) ).

And I'm not even speaking of the fact that when I don't speak a specific language,
my thoughts tend to be in pure concepts rather than in a specific language,
which means that I can end up thinking up concepts that I cannot satisfactorily
translate in any of the languages I speak!

And the languages I speak are relatively similar to each other. I don't dare to
imagine the mess my mind is going to become once I manage to bring my Japanese
to conversational level! (even Modern Greek, which is still Indo-European, has
already opened my mind to new concepts I hadn't thought of before)

> > Certainly English has the concepts of joy and misery, but it's
> > characteristically German to combine those feelings.
>
> We have this word in Norwegian, too, borrowed from German, no doubt,
>
> but spelt "skadefryd". And here the meaning is the joy over the
> misery of others. I think it is the same in German, actually.
>
The weird thing about this concept is that French humour is mostly based on it
(French people most often laugh at others, not with others, which is why things
like Candid Camera and Funniest Home Video programs have always been very
successful in France), but French lacks a word for the concept. Supposedly it
borrowed "schadenfreude" from German as well, but I've never seen anyone use
it, and didn't know the word before I learned it from English. I think most
French people just lump the concept with the more general concept of "humour
noir", which is a form of humour based on laughing at events and things that
are often considered not laughable, like death, disease, or events like
catastrophes, wars, or even the Holocaust. Schadenfreude can be seen as a
lighter form of this.

The Dutch have a native word for it, of course: leedvermaak, which is more or less
an exact translation of the German word.
--
Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets.

http://christophoronomicon.blogspot.com
http://www.christophoronomicon.nl

It takes a straight mind to create a twisted conlang.