Re: Mandarin demonstratives (Re: Charyan novel! (was: Re: [CONLANG] I'm back!))

On Wed, Jan 09, 2002 at 10:53:18AM -0500, Adam Walker wrote:
[snip]
> These pronouns don't feel possessive to you?  Then this construct is even
> weirder than I thought.  Mandarin is so baroque.  So you'd lit-trans that as
> "At me here" and "At you there"?  That makes my skin crawl.  I'm going by
> the reluctant explination my tutor gave me when I freaked over that
> construction (she didn't realize I was having an epiphany) and the mistakes
> my ESL students make in their spoken English.  (They tend to do *other*
> interesting things in written.)
When ESL students mistakenly say things like "at my here", I doubt it's
because they're transliterating a possessive from Mandarin -- I think it's
more that they have an inadequate/incorrect understanding of the English
possessive. I've personally observed similar mistakes arising from the
fact that they
(1) don't know English well enough to substitute the proper phrase for
    _zai4 wo3 zhe4 li3_, and
(2) they have been told it is incorrect to say "at I here" or "at me
    here", and
(3) from their limited experience in English, "my" is another form of the
    1st person pronoun that seem to be used in places where "I" and "me"
    are not allowed
and so, they mistakenly conclude that "my" seems to be the word that might
work in that particular situation.

That's my take on it, at least. Disclaimer: I am not a trained linguist.


T

--
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