You and your native language

General discussion about learning languages
renaissancemedici
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You and your native language

Postby renaissancemedici » Sat Apr 21, 2018 6:43 am

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?
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tarvos
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Re: You and your native language

Postby tarvos » Sat Apr 21, 2018 6:44 am

Nah, I'm not a linguist. But I know enough of the history to teach it well.
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Spoonary
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Re: You and your native language

Postby Spoonary » Sat Apr 21, 2018 7:45 am

I have every intention to dive back into English linguistics (I took various linguistics modules at uni), but I find it so hard to organise my time already that I don't know when I will be able to fit it in!
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Axon
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Re: You and your native language

Postby Axon » Sat Apr 21, 2018 8:35 am

I teach English pretty regularly, and I enjoy thinking about the reasons some things are the way they are. When I minored in Linguistics, most of the courses were about language acquisition but there were a few about English grammar in particular.

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.

I read Language Log all the time and there's often some tidbit about English syntax or phonology that's new to me. They say if you really deeply analyze the phonetics of any ten-second snippet of natural English speech, you'll find something unexpected and novel.

However, I'm not much interested in regional variants of English. Even very divergent things like AAVE and Straits Creole (Singlish) are fun to read about and listen to, but it's not quite the same as reading about variants of other languages.
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mick33
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Re: You and your native language

Postby mick33 » Sat Apr 21, 2018 11:44 pm

I no longer study or formally learn English per se. I took English classes in school and learned a little bit about grammar such as parts of speech and how to diagram sentences, even though I think that diagramming sentences is a waste of time and something only English teachers would ever actually do in real life.

I know very little about the history of the language and what I have learned is from this forum and a YouTube video. I do think that the diversity of accents/dialects in spoken English are fascinating but I doubt I'll ever seriously learn any of them. I guess I could claim to randomly learn English vocabulary as I encounter new words in reading sometimes and look them up in dictionaries (I use online dictionaries and books) so that I can define them.
Last edited by mick33 on Mon Apr 23, 2018 8:12 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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brilliantyears
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Re: You and your native language

Postby brilliantyears » Sun Apr 22, 2018 1:51 pm

I don't study Dutch but I do constantly learn new things (words, constructions, etc). Onze Taal is a personal favourite :)

I also have a fondness for books and articles about language quirks... does that count?
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Re: You and your native language

Postby Iversen » Mon Apr 23, 2018 7:19 pm

I don't do formal studies in Danish, but once you have a language at a certain level you can pick up much from extensive activities or intensive, but primarily non-lingustic activities ... so I'm not terribly worried. What more could I do? Write poems? Work on my pronunciation to alter the sound of it? Read more novels?

The one point where I still think I ought to do some more systematic study is our dialects. I can generally recognize them, partly because I know some salient features in many of them and have heard them spoken by people of known origin, but I would like to have a more complete picture of their differences. I would also like to learn some more dialect words - although those I still don't know often are words from the old farming communities whose habits and tools I don't really NEED to know ... but still, there are some words that are (or was) fairly wellknown somewhere in the country, but have eluded me. I would like to add a few thousand of those word to my wordstock.

The main problem in this is that there are very few modern written sources (apart from 'Æ Blaj' in Synnejysk, which I have mentioned a few times in my log), and that the dictionaries either are expensive scholarly collections of mostly dead words OR tiny collections of words that appeared to be funny enough to quote. And besides our dialects are dying - especially young people seem to have lost interest in the dialects of their own country. So even if I succeeded in learning to speak for instance the dialect of the tiny island Bornholm I would probably not be able to use it outside that island.
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zjones
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Re: You and your native language

Postby zjones » Mon Apr 23, 2018 7:33 pm

I've always been fascinated by language, and that includes my native English, but I've never studied linguistics. I'm not much of a grammar person either, but I think that will change the more I study French.

Learning a second language has caused me to be way more cognizant of the literal translation of English phrases. It's like I can finally see English as just another language, a method for communication that shapes the way we think and converse. Also, I love noticing how many English phrases don't make any sense when taken literally. The other thing that interests me is how language and pronunciation varies from region to region. I'd love to learn more about my Pacific Northwestern English pronunciation.

In the future, I'd love to study English linguistics and history. I think my native language is super cool.
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Lawyer&Mom
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Re: You and your native language

Postby Lawyer&Mom » Mon Apr 23, 2018 8:54 pm

Nah. Old English is awesome and all, but it doesn’t come with streaming TV.

(I dropped Latin for the same reason.)
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Re: You and your native language

Postby IronMike » Mon Apr 23, 2018 10:29 pm

Yes. I love the history of English. My favorite book on it is The Stories of English, by David Crystal. Whenever I get my hands on a book about English, I grab it.
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