zompist bboard

When I was reading a few sentences in Chinese characters, I pronounced them with their equivalent German words, so "他们是朋友" was read as "Sie sind Freunde."

And this was on my Mandarin midterm...

In my Egyptian Arabic class last semester, we were working on using the word عاوز "want," and we had to write sentences out using it. Now I took MSA Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, and Persian last semester, and for the most part I was able to keep the Arabic and the Persian straight (though I often would use Egyptian vocab in MSA class, which wasn't necessarily a bad thing), but that day I had only three hours of sleep and I zoned a little. I was trying to think how to write "I want to drink the water."
(أنا عاوز أشرب المية) but I couldn't remember the word for water, then I thought I did and wrote أنا عاوز أشرب الاب . Except آب is the Persian word for water. What I wrote was something like "I want to drink the father."
My teacher was a bit confused.

I also (for some reason) confused the verbs أدرس "I study" with أسكن "I live" and wrote on a test "أنا أسكن في الكمبيوتر" which means "I live in(side) the computer."

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لا يرقىء الله عيني من بكى حجراً
ولا شفى وجد من يصبو إلى وتدِ
("May God never dry the tears of those who cry over stones, nor ease the love-pangs of those who yearn for tent-pegs.") - Abu Nawas

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Kintâr-mi ami, ne-tiçma kâ merokli-mi dosi.

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After ordering a pint of his favorite ale, Robert was perplexed when the barmaid replied that the fishmonger was next door. The Great English Vowel Shift had begun.

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and

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.

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Fight false polysemy! Free hypernymy!

Two things I've noticed frequently recently.

Background: I'm a L1 American English speaker, with 8 years of now-dead French (due to lack of use for the last 10 years), and learning Flemish Dutch for the last 9 months while living in Belgium.


Mistakes:

1) Putting English into Dutch without realizing it. "Ik heb al 40 uren gewerkt, if het niet meer is."

2) Putting Dutch into English, but usually realizing it after the fact. "Yeah, I agree, maar you have to.... er.. dammit. But you have to..."

In these two it's made even more amusing by the fact that I use the accent of whatever the "dominant" language is. "maar" with an American /r/, for example.


3) Flipping French into Dutch word order when attempting to write/speak it: "Aujourd'hui je vais en livre acheter." (also often accompanied by using Dutch instead of French words)

4) Generalizing a rule of "if it comes at the end of a clause, it must be an infinitive" in Dutch. "Als je student zijn..." instead of "Als je student bent...", on analogy of "Je moet student zijn...." and similar.

An interesting mistake I have caught myself making quite a few times is to have spanish verbs agree with 3rd person plural objects instead of with their person singular subjects. I have done this both with first, second and third person singular subjects.

e.g. "El perro mataron las gallinas" to mean "the dog killed the chickens"
or "las canciones que yo cantan" to mean "the songs that I sing"

It is weird since danish doesn't agree with neither verbs or objects, and I don't know where the influence should come from - that makes me think that there must be a cognitive explanation. Such an explanation might be that plural numbers are somehow more salient. or that I am just stupid.

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D'abord on ne parla qu'en poésie ; on ne s'avisa de raisonner que long-temps après. J. J. Rousseau, Sur l'origine des langues. 1783

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D'abord on ne parla qu'en poésie ; on ne s'avisa de raisonner que long-temps après. J. J. Rousseau, Sur l'origine des langues. 1783

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Pisace man Bordonieta. Kore man ko Bordonieta, ak azun nan save kumplecs man se Bordonieta.
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Bearded. Make of it what you will.

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< Cev> My people we use cars. I come from a very proud car culture-- every part of the car is used, nothing goes to waste. When my people first saw the car, generations ago, we called it šuŋka wakaŋ-- meaning "automated mobile".

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Ahmie K-[ay]

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