the vagaries of language
Aug. 17th, 2008 06:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
merrycaepaI've noticed before that it doesn't take much exposure for me to pick up an accent. After two weeks in New Zealand, I'd picked up recognizably kiwi lilt. Sit me down in front of the BBC and I'll start to emulate the mannerisms and accents of the presenters.
But there is apparently nothing like full immersion in another language to decidedly twist the way I think and talk.
Typically, I'm a motormouth. I go a hundred miles a minute and my vocabulary is formidable. My dad has been "gently suggesting" that I "slow down and enunciate" since it became apparent that I wasn't going to grow out of it. Which is to say, about twelve years.
I've been in Istanbul for two and a half days and I cannot bloody speake de English to save my life.
It's insane. I can write like usual, think like usual, but somewhere a wire connecting my brain and my mouth has come loose, and now I sound like my host mother - like a Turk speaking English as a second language. Crazy tenses, exacting prepositions, lots of "umm" and "ah" and you-know-what-I'm-trying-to-say gesticulation. The next door neighbor's son-in-law, a New Zealander, is in town, and it took me for-freaking-ever to regain the ability to make normal, English-to-English conversation with him. I swear he thought I was a blathering idiot when he asked me where I was from and in response I stammered, I gestured wildly, and finally said "Kansas. Is in the States."
And of course my Turkish is somewhere between "ape" and "idiot," so it's not like I've got that to fall back on, either. My host family is a fan of full immersion, which in practicality means that they jabber away in Turkish and I smile and nod a lot and generally don't have a clue what's going on. They could be talking about their plans to sell me to a passing circus for all I know.
I want Farscape's translator microbes. John Crichton had it so easy...
I know a few words of lots of languages, and keeping them straight is like herding cats, especially when I'm tired. In response to a question over whether I had laundry, my response was something like, "Si - shit, I mean, evet....tessekular [thank you]..."
But there is apparently nothing like full immersion in another language to decidedly twist the way I think and talk.
Typically, I'm a motormouth. I go a hundred miles a minute and my vocabulary is formidable. My dad has been "gently suggesting" that I "slow down and enunciate" since it became apparent that I wasn't going to grow out of it. Which is to say, about twelve years.
I've been in Istanbul for two and a half days and I cannot bloody speake de English to save my life.
It's insane. I can write like usual, think like usual, but somewhere a wire connecting my brain and my mouth has come loose, and now I sound like my host mother - like a Turk speaking English as a second language. Crazy tenses, exacting prepositions, lots of "umm" and "ah" and you-know-what-I'm-trying-to-say gesticulation. The next door neighbor's son-in-law, a New Zealander, is in town, and it took me for-freaking-ever to regain the ability to make normal, English-to-English conversation with him. I swear he thought I was a blathering idiot when he asked me where I was from and in response I stammered, I gestured wildly, and finally said "Kansas. Is in the States."
And of course my Turkish is somewhere between "ape" and "idiot," so it's not like I've got that to fall back on, either. My host family is a fan of full immersion, which in practicality means that they jabber away in Turkish and I smile and nod a lot and generally don't have a clue what's going on. They could be talking about their plans to sell me to a passing circus for all I know.
I want Farscape's translator microbes. John Crichton had it so easy...
I know a few words of lots of languages, and keeping them straight is like herding cats, especially when I'm tired. In response to a question over whether I had laundry, my response was something like, "Si - shit, I mean, evet....tessekular [thank you]..."
