A few linguistic thoughts for the Saturday evening
When
I write to this blog, I try to include in each posting at least one
word or a phrase that I have heard but have to verify its exact meaning
and usage from the online dictionary. This way I might learn something useful while I educate others and lecture them on their faults to please me.
Pretty much every single Finn up to about ten years older than me who I know is able to speak English well enough to survive in an English-speaking country. (Of course, this may be due to a very biased sample of acquintances.) English is taught in schools from the third grade all the way to the end of high school, the percentage of students not taking it or starting it later being so small that is irrelevant. And of course, there is the omnipresent television and other media, and these days the Internet to educate the youth.
But I'd still like to think that I write and speak far better English than most Finns. I believe my main weakness is using prepositions incorrectly. They are hard because Finnish is an agglutinative language which doesn't use prepositions at all but instead modifies the end of each word for the same effect. I am sure I constantly make mistakes of writing "to" instead of "in" after a verb that requires the latter, even though to me both versions just feel the same to me unless I remember the exact rule which sometimes seem totally arbitrary. Many of the sentences I form probably sound unnatural and have a stilted structure. Last, I bet I often use wrong idioms, although sometimes it's a small funny joke to translate a Finnish idiom to English literally.
And I am sure that I make many more errors that I am not even vaguely aware of, resulting from the structural differences betweem English and Finnish. One embarrassing error that I keep constantly making in spoken word is to use "borrow" to mean "loan", since in Finnish these are the same word and the surrounding words establish which way the object in question changes hands. Then there's the difference between "do" and "make", also nonexistent in Finnish. The word "also" seems to have a totally different spirit than the Finnish dictionary equivalent word "myös", so I probably use it incorrectly. And so on.
My wife, who is a native English speaker, is quite a stickler for good language and grammar, so perhaps I should have her proofread each posting before I put it out. (I have many times seen her go get a pen and correct some ad or poster that contains some grammatical error. Oh, I love her so much.) But living around here, you have to accept that most people are recent immigrants and thus write English pretty bad, so that you can't expect the nuances such as the difference between "accept" and "except" to be fully understood.
In school, I always had difficulties with other languages as Swedish and French, both of which I took but have since then practically forgotten. No motivation, I guess. But I always seemed to learn English like a sponge, almost effortlessly, the same way I seemed to learn Finnish. In addition to what was taught in school, I have learned English primarily from reading instead of hearing and speaking. This has two interesting consequences. First, I have sometimes (especially when teaching) come to a situation where I try to use a word which I have never actually spoken or heard being used (the most recent example I can recall being "benevolent"), and then realize the dead end I have put myself in and try to make an on-the-spot guess for the pronunciation.
Second, many times I have noticed a native speaker accidentally using a homophone instead of the correct word, e.g. "come hear", in places where it is clearly not a typo. I would hazard a guess that this mistake reveals a fundamental difference in the way the brain handles the English language for a native speaker and for someone like me who has learned the English primarily from written texts. It's a very interesting error, since I don't think I would ever make this error any more than write "door" when I mean "moor" (except as a typo), which are as different words to me as "here" and "hear", which are the same word for a native speaker in one important sense. Could any native English speaker remember and explain how, before you learned to write, did you conceptualize the difference between "hear" and "here"?
Speaking of pronunciation, it's interesting to watch the spelling bees on TV, since the Finnish schools don't have them. (Before seeing them on TV, I remember that Charlie Brown often participated in them, with depressing results.) No, this is not because of some socialist idea of children competing being a bad thing since "everybody is special", but because such competition wouldn't make much sense in Finnish. First, the Finnish language doesn't have such a vast mass of foreign words whose irregular pronunciation would be a challenge. Second, in the main body of the language, spelling and pronunciation are pretty much one-to-one. When my wife started learning Finnish, pretty soon I could just say a word and she could always spell it from that alone. (Well, always, after I learned that I still unknowingly use the pronounciation of the regional dialect of where my family is originally from, e.g. saying more of "miäs" than the correct "mies" (a man).)
Another difference between these two languages is that the same texts tend to be much shorter in English, and even ignoring that, it's much easier to form long complex rambling sentences in English so that they still remain readable. Both languages, of course, allow creation of ambiguous sentences, especially if you try to use any kind of modality and restrict its effect only to some part of the sentence. The rules for using commas are also quite different.
By the way, "townie" is the most difficult word that I can think of to translate from English to Finnish, in any context in which I have ever seen this word actually being used. I would really hate to have to translate any paragraph in which this word conveys important information about the meaning of that paragraph.
Pretty much every single Finn up to about ten years older than me who I know is able to speak English well enough to survive in an English-speaking country. (Of course, this may be due to a very biased sample of acquintances.) English is taught in schools from the third grade all the way to the end of high school, the percentage of students not taking it or starting it later being so small that is irrelevant. And of course, there is the omnipresent television and other media, and these days the Internet to educate the youth.
But I'd still like to think that I write and speak far better English than most Finns. I believe my main weakness is using prepositions incorrectly. They are hard because Finnish is an agglutinative language which doesn't use prepositions at all but instead modifies the end of each word for the same effect. I am sure I constantly make mistakes of writing "to" instead of "in" after a verb that requires the latter, even though to me both versions just feel the same to me unless I remember the exact rule which sometimes seem totally arbitrary. Many of the sentences I form probably sound unnatural and have a stilted structure. Last, I bet I often use wrong idioms, although sometimes it's a small funny joke to translate a Finnish idiom to English literally.
And I am sure that I make many more errors that I am not even vaguely aware of, resulting from the structural differences betweem English and Finnish. One embarrassing error that I keep constantly making in spoken word is to use "borrow" to mean "loan", since in Finnish these are the same word and the surrounding words establish which way the object in question changes hands. Then there's the difference between "do" and "make", also nonexistent in Finnish. The word "also" seems to have a totally different spirit than the Finnish dictionary equivalent word "myös", so I probably use it incorrectly. And so on.
My wife, who is a native English speaker, is quite a stickler for good language and grammar, so perhaps I should have her proofread each posting before I put it out. (I have many times seen her go get a pen and correct some ad or poster that contains some grammatical error. Oh, I love her so much.) But living around here, you have to accept that most people are recent immigrants and thus write English pretty bad, so that you can't expect the nuances such as the difference between "accept" and "except" to be fully understood.
In school, I always had difficulties with other languages as Swedish and French, both of which I took but have since then practically forgotten. No motivation, I guess. But I always seemed to learn English like a sponge, almost effortlessly, the same way I seemed to learn Finnish. In addition to what was taught in school, I have learned English primarily from reading instead of hearing and speaking. This has two interesting consequences. First, I have sometimes (especially when teaching) come to a situation where I try to use a word which I have never actually spoken or heard being used (the most recent example I can recall being "benevolent"), and then realize the dead end I have put myself in and try to make an on-the-spot guess for the pronunciation.
Second, many times I have noticed a native speaker accidentally using a homophone instead of the correct word, e.g. "come hear", in places where it is clearly not a typo. I would hazard a guess that this mistake reveals a fundamental difference in the way the brain handles the English language for a native speaker and for someone like me who has learned the English primarily from written texts. It's a very interesting error, since I don't think I would ever make this error any more than write "door" when I mean "moor" (except as a typo), which are as different words to me as "here" and "hear", which are the same word for a native speaker in one important sense. Could any native English speaker remember and explain how, before you learned to write, did you conceptualize the difference between "hear" and "here"?
Speaking of pronunciation, it's interesting to watch the spelling bees on TV, since the Finnish schools don't have them. (Before seeing them on TV, I remember that Charlie Brown often participated in them, with depressing results.) No, this is not because of some socialist idea of children competing being a bad thing since "everybody is special", but because such competition wouldn't make much sense in Finnish. First, the Finnish language doesn't have such a vast mass of foreign words whose irregular pronunciation would be a challenge. Second, in the main body of the language, spelling and pronunciation are pretty much one-to-one. When my wife started learning Finnish, pretty soon I could just say a word and she could always spell it from that alone. (Well, always, after I learned that I still unknowingly use the pronounciation of the regional dialect of where my family is originally from, e.g. saying more of "miäs" than the correct "mies" (a man).)
Another difference between these two languages is that the same texts tend to be much shorter in English, and even ignoring that, it's much easier to form long complex rambling sentences in English so that they still remain readable. Both languages, of course, allow creation of ambiguous sentences, especially if you try to use any kind of modality and restrict its effect only to some part of the sentence. The rules for using commas are also quite different.
By the way, "townie" is the most difficult word that I can think of to translate from English to Finnish, in any context in which I have ever seen this word actually being used. I would really hate to have to translate any paragraph in which this word conveys important information about the meaning of that paragraph.
Hello
Very interesting. I'm a teacher, too.
Posted by Rita Maestra | 10:17 AM
Think of the Finnish word "kuusi"; you probably didn't have any trouble knowing the difference between the two meanings because of the context. I would guess (as a native Finn) that it is pretty much the same case for an English-speaking kid with "hear" and "here".
Posted by Anonymous | 2:07 AM
That wasn't what the writer meant. Several native speakers tend to write for example "here" instead of "hear" or vice versa. This is a mistake foreigners never seem to make.
Posted by Anonymous | 4:28 AM
Probably reflecting our differing degrees of extroversion, I never learned English with such a heavy emphasis on reading as you, Ilkka. Listening and speaking (mostly to myself - when alone) played a much greater role for me than you. Not perhaps entirely surprisingly, I sometimes use a wrong homophone in written text, just like many native speakers. Or it could be something I simply stuck with me from exposure to Usenet articles written by native speakers. (Heh, my Russian teacher at the community college [what institution in the Anglosphere corresponds to our "kansalaisopisto"] where I take Russian courses agreed when I defined the perfect command of a language as being making the right mistakes at the right frequencies at the right times [and _only_ the right ones].)
'Townie' is a new word to me, but the concept had formed in my mind a long time ago. There is no mistaking some "townies" for university students in Hervanta. :)
Posted by Markku | 11:00 AM