You and your native language

[aokoye]

I'm a linguistics student but English isn't my main focus in general. I've taken a number of classes that have focused on English, either solely or partially, but my main interests are multilingualism and discourse analysis.

[renaissancemedici]

I'm very interested in etymology. A fascinating glimpse into language, history and how people's mind work and connect things.

[hp230]

In my country we obligatorily study Arabic until the end of high-school (till the age of 18 regardless of the field of studies, although scientific subjects are taught in French).
Having followed a scientific branch in the university, my Arabic studies stopped right there. However, I have always wanted to go deeper. Even after learning my new languages, Arabic is still my favourite.

I kept my relation with Arabic grammar through books, especially religion books. In fact, since Arabic grammar was derived from the Quoran's and ancient poetry's structure, authors always tend to explain the linguistic aspects in order to explain the meaning of the verses...

Unfortunately, my exposer to "good" Arabic is very little nowadays, yet knowing that for example that there are 100 names for "Lion" makes me amazed day after day and eager to discover what's more out there.

[aaleks]

No, I don't study my native language the way linguists do. And I have a very little knowledge about Russian grammar. The only thing I remember from school lessons is cases but to me it's just a theory, I never know what grammar case(s) I use when I speak or write.

[Ogrim]

As regards modern Norwegian I don't study it as such, but as I am in a situation where I don't use my native language very much, I do pay attention to new words or expressions which have come into the language over the last 10-20 years and which would not come naturally to me.

In school we of course studied Norwegian from a linguistic point of view, but not in any depth. We also had to learn to write nynorsk as well as bokmål, and when I started school in the 1970s the Norwegian language conflict (språkstriden) was still very intense, so we would have heated debates about what was "proper Norwegian".

As for past forms, that would be Old Norse I guess. Again, in school we would read a few pages and get a very superficial passive understanding of Old Norse grammar (like the case system), but little time was dedicated to it, and as teenagers most of us were not very motivated for learning it. I regret that today, of course, but I have never taken the time to get really into Old Norse to be able to read the sagas in original.

[lingua]

I'm another one that enjoys learning the etymology of English words. I learned more English grammar taking Italian classes than I ever learned growing up. In fact I hated grammar back then and saw little value in learning it. In my recent Latin studies I've enjoyed seeing where so many English and Italian words came from.

[Cainntear]

I did my language degree with the Open University. There was a mandatory module on English, which was designed as an introduction to linguistics, which I think worked exceptionally well. Basically, it meant showing us patterns in English that we might not have noticed, then telling us what they were called and briefly pointing out ways other languages do things differently.

One thing that I just thought of the other day was this:

"I have an apple," said the man.
"I have an apple," the man said.
"I have an apple," he said.
"I have an apple," said he. <- this construction stands out as poetic, quaint, or old-fashioned. Why? I still don't know.

It’s an old Germanic pattern called “verb second”. Most Germanic languages are primarily SVO order, but not strictly. If you want to shift the emphasis, you can move something before the verb, but then the subject moves after.

Verb second is almost (but not entirely) dead in English.

Compare Shakespeare’s “now is the winter of our discontent” (adverb now before verb) with modern phrases like “now you see” where the subject and adverb both precede the verb.

Some vestiges of verb second remain:
Rarely do I do that
Little did I know

(Incidentally: The origin of there is/was/are/were is in verb second, but as people don’t use verb second much anymore, that’s being forgotten, which is why most of us just use “there’s” with both singular and plural. )

[Axon]

It’s an old Germanic pattern called “verb second”.

I had a feeling you'd know about this! My question, though, is more about why it sounds old-fashioned with the pronoun but not with the noun. Perhaps that's just a reflection of what I was exposed to growing up.

[rdearman]

It’s an old Germanic pattern called “verb second”.

I had a feeling you'd know about this! My question, though, is more about why it sounds old-fashioned with the pronoun but not with the noun. Perhaps that's just a reflection of what I was exposed to growing up.

Still sounds old-fashioned with a noun instead of a pronoun.

"I have an apple," said John.

[Chung]

I don't know if this has been asked before...

We keep studying and dreaming about several languages. But what about our own language?

Do you study it? If so, how do you go about it?

Do you study its past forms and texts?

Clearly it's a lifelong thing, going deeper in your own language (and with it, culture), but are you organized about it, or does it happen randomly and in the course of years?

Apart from digging up some etymological tidbits or similar when something tickles my brain (or if I need to dig a little more when discussing/arguing about some point in usage), I don't study English. When it comes to formal instruction as a schoolboy, I had spelling tests and next to nothing about grammar (basically in seventh grade I got a couple of weeks' worth of lecturing on the parts of speech and names of tenses). Even when we read Shakespeare in high school, any analysis we did was confined to the literary/theatrical aspects. There was no meaningful or informative discussion about the characteristics of Early Modern English apart from off-the-cuff remarks by the teacher about semantic differences in some words and what we'd currently think of as archaicisms.

As I've said before, I've become convinced that anyone employed as a language teacher ought to have completed at least one introductory course in historical linguistics (or just Linguistics 101) and/or one in the history of the language taught. It's more as a way to give oneself a chance to encourage students to think a bit more intelligently about language (or languages in general) without resorting to folk-etymologies or to pass on that a language exists as a way to describe the speech community's environment, with the ways this is done usually varying from what's used in the students' native language. The new(ish) crop of English teachers over here is even more linguistically ignorant overall than the ones I had since they're the product of an education system that has talked big about "creativity", "diversity", "inclusion" or "critical analysis/thinking" all the while ignoring the work needed to provide a useful stock of boring but important details/facts - not all of which lead to coming to politically correct conclusions.

The first real instance of sustained instruction to grammar in school happened with French. Not only did I need to (re)learn the parts of speech, but also names of the tenses and moods, and their significance (e.g. imparfait vs. passé composé, or impératif vs. indicatif). I also learned the significance of (in)direct objects (COD & COI). That kind of thinking helped me a fair bit to organize my thinking about English not to mention Latin and German. By the time I got to Hungarian, I was intimidated by what was new (e.g. (in)definite conjugation, topic vs. focus as marked in syntax) rather than what was actually broadly common (conjugation, nominative-accusative alignment). I also must credit my linguist-professor who taught our course in the history of German. He was a solid communicator who turned me into a heavy descriptivist, and showed us the value of being aware of (and continously learning about) historical linguistics when learning or teaching a language. It wasn't always going to be about learning German according to the latest edition of Duden.

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It's irritating that native speakers of English often cannot look to English teachers to learn anything deep about grammar or the characteristics of the language. Instead we got/get to learn the art of padding essays, sound intelligent when (over)thinking about some literary tract, and occasionally giggle over elements of Early Modern English. Our English teachers with their backgrounds in English literature rather than linguistics left us none the wiser.