A dilettante in all things, but especially languages

[muckefuck]

This is my response to franzeska in linguaphiles regarding my command of languages. Since it's something I get asked a lot and generally hate trying to answer, I thought I'd reproduce it here for easy reference.

It's still a bit hard to answer these questions because, as you know, active command of a language degrades rapidly with disuse, so it's hard to predict accurately whether you can still do something you haven't done in a while. I'll give it my best shot, though:

How many languages can you have a casual conversation in? Short answer: Probably about six (Catalan, Chinese, Dutch, English, German, Spanish.) Long answer: I might be able to manage French with a sufficiently patient interlocutor. Last time I tried chatting in Welsh, it was disastrous, but perhaps with a chance to cram ahead of time it would turn out better.

How many languages can you write an academic paper in? I haven't had to write an academic paper in any language for more than fifteen years, so it's difficult to say. Definitely English and German, and probably Catalan and Spanish as well without too much trouble.

How many languages can you read literature in? Short answer: About a dozen. Long answer: I've read short stories and/or novels in all the languages listed above plus Irish, Italian, Asturian, and Low Saxon. Portuguese and Occitan should be no problem, but Romansh is a different story; as I mentioned before, I've got a novel in Rumantsch Grischun that I've never been able to hack through more than a few pages with in the absence of a decent dictionary. I've read short Korean texts before, but nothing of tremendous literary quality. (I have short stories from Hwang Sun-wŏn and Yi Mun-yŏl that I've never been able to get through.) I also studied Old English in college, but I'm not confident in my ability to get the gist of texts I'm not already familiar with (e.g. Biblical ones). Oh, and I can probably read Yiddish--I know the orthography and some of the most vital Hebrew borrowings. (Enough to understand popular songs, at least.)

How many languages do you speak/write on a more or less native level? Only English, I would say. Most Germans figure out I'm not a native speaker after less than fifteen minutes.

How many languages have you studied for the equivalent of a year of high school language (i.e. more than picking up a bad phrasebook, but way less than any of the above)? Armenian, Cantonese, Czech, Modern Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Japanese, Latin, Osage, Persian, Panjabi, Russian, Scottish Gaelic, Swahili, Tibetan, Turkish. A tier below even these I would rank Alemannic, Arabic, Basque, Breton, Finnish, Hebrew, Icelandic, Indonesian, Latvian, Romanian, Romany, Serbo-Croatian, Swedish, Thai, Ukrainian, Vietnamese--as you can see, it's a fairly wide penumbra. What is that, about 30 in addition to the 12-15 already tabulated?

Comments

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

as someone who's pestered you for exactly this, thanks. That's some impressive dilettanting. So what bites you, is it all structural/morphological, or are you swayed by other kinds of cultural production in the language group, or do you fantasize about going to live in the places where the languages are/were spoken? Do you have a Grand Project on the backburner?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I'm too much of a slacker to have a Grand Project and my answer to the other question is "Yes". I'd have to give you a different answer for every single language and it would include excursus on people I've known who spoke that language and books, songs, and movies I know which make use of it. A powerful motivator that you might not expect was my experience with RPGs: I have no patience with bullshit fantasy languages or mangled grammar, so I was compelled to do my research before naming characters, places, and the like. Factor that it, and you can add Ge'ez, Aramaic, Malagasy, Hausa, Somali, Middle High German, Venetian, Ancient Greek, and many other obscure languages to the list.

[franzeska]

Thank you, thank you, thank you! Why people can't even do enough research to make a decent name, I will never know. (Here via vanity googling, naturally. :D)

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

You can do your research and still put together something that is nonsense. Some of my friends (who shall remain nameless despite the fact that they're all here on LJ) tried to name a world "house of blood" in Nahuatl and ended up with "Ezocalco". They had the right roots, but the wrong combining form and didn't realise that "calco" was a locative ("in the house") rather than an nominative form. It took me some research of my own to discover that the correct form would be "Ezcalli". If you haven't worked with a wide variety of languages (and most people I know are too busy learning about other things, like science and history), you won't even know what pitfalls to be on the lookout for when you dabble in an unfamiliar one.