FINAL QUESTION

Hi,

On Sun, 4 Oct 1998, Sally Caves wrote:

[...]

> Other people may have gone into conlanging because they are
> bilingual.  Mia's remark stirred my curiosity as well.  How many of you
> conlangers know other languages, and what is the extent of that knowledge?
I can speak English, Tamil, Hindi, French, German, Russian and Finnish
with some fluency, the first two the most fluently, and the last the
least. But in all but English i usually need a dictionary when reading
serious material: be it a novel or scientific material. A pity!  Each of
these langs are mutually so different that i rarely suffer from
"dialectal/linguistic interference". I know a bit of Sanskrit as a default
of my Hindu upbringing.

Since my German is self-taught, i am unable to comment on my own
accent, but i think it's easier for me to understand North Western
dialects of the lang than other dialects. As to Russian, apparently, i
tend to talk in the Moscowian dialect. (The chief difference between
this and the Southern dialects seems to be that the former tends to
palatalize its consonants and front vowels, and unround unstressed "o"'s)
When i began learning Russian by myself, i started off with what
must have been a very phony accent! Later I had the fortune to learn it
for a few months under the tutelage of a lady from Moscow. She was a
profound thinker who was keen to know the meanings of certain esoteric
Indian philosophical concepts in order to translate them into Russian. And
thru these discussions i managed to improve my spoken Russian.

Thanks,
skrintha