@Bhrodhnos - do you have a degree in linguistics or something? How many languages do you speak? I'm just getting curious now Thanks for the linguistic introduction, what I'd love though is some audio so I can compare the sounds, as I can't really imagine it in my head. What's a lexical stress? And which other languages have shapes to their tones? I think Vietnamese is meant to have something like 14 or 15 tones? (I could be exaggerating, it was a long time ago)
I do, yes. I have a BA in linguistics, and am currently a PhD fellow in a linguistics program Let's see. Depending on how much fluency you're willing to count as "speaking a language"; English, Russian, German (maybe?), Italian, a very little bit of Mandarin, Latin, Ancient Greek, Sanskrit (Classical and Vedic) and I have a completely amateur interest in and a little knowledge of Quechua. Lexical stress refers to a system of stress placement in a language in which the position of the stressed syllable must be memorized as part of the shape of the word Compare English "present" which is a noun with "present" which is a verb The placement of the stress on the first or second syllable cannot be predicted by rules of any kind and much be a feature of the word itself (of the lexeme). In a language like Finnish or Czech on the other hand, the syllable which will be stressed is entirely predictable because they have rules of stress placement. This means that stress is not a feature which can distinguish two words in Finnish the way it can in English. Japanese, has neither lexical nor rule placed stress, and has no stressed syllables at all, but rather, has lexical placement of a high pitch syllable, the "pitch accent" I mentioned. Tone contours are characteristic of most of the tonal systems of East Asia, such as Chinese, or Vietnamese, whose standard dialect has 5/6 tone contours (level, falling, rising, falling-rising, rising-breaking, and possibly falling-short, which is a falling tone which abruptly ends and may be considered a subset of the other falling tone). By contrast, register tone systems are characteristic of the tonal systems of Bantu languages of Sub-Saharan Africa. The difference between register and contour tones is that register tones differentiated only by absolute pitch. A register tone language with three tones (high, mid, low) has vowels that can be produced at three pitches. The highest is high, the lowest is low, the middle is mid. In a tone contour system with three tones (rising, stable, falling) the rising tone might actually be lower in pitch than the falling one, but it doesn't matter. It's the shape of the tone variation across the syllable which makes them distinct, not their absolute pitch qualities. As long as it rises, it's rising, even if it's highest pitch is lower than the lowest pitch of the falling tone. The stable pitch could be the highest one, but as long as it's non-variant, it's the stable tone.
My first language isn't English, but in order to get critiques over the Internet, like right here, I guess English would be prefered, wouldn't it? Just want to hear your opinions on this
I write in English, but only because no one on this site understands the subtle nuances of Tkling. Despite its considerably smaller vocabulary.
English is my first language, pero, como soy puertorriqueño, también hablo español. I usually write Science Fiction and English lends itself better to this genre - I find - than Spanish. Your mileage may vary.
My mother tongue is Swedish, but I do write in English. There are 3 reasons for this: 1. I love the English language. 2. Fantasy and sci-fi sound so ridiculous in Swedish (probably due to English influences). 3. Way wider audience. If you want to write in English I suggest you do so, but you should write in the language with which you feel the most comfortable.
I'm welsh, and technically we have our own language, and welsh street signs, shops etc. but everyone speaks English so it's my first language. And yes, I write in it. I can barely speak welsh, let alone write it.
You should totally make this a poll! What an interesting topic. (Can you edit a poll into an existing thread? >.>) I write in English, which is my first language. And only language. I'd like to learn German and Russian and it'd be awesome to become fluent enough to be confident in writing in one of them, but I'm not holding my breath on that one.
I'm English, and I write in English. I did learn Spanish at school, but that was over 16 years ago, so any attempt I would make to write in Spanish today would be a complete mess. To those of you who know more than one language well enough to write clearly in each of them - you have my respect!
Aujourd'hui, seulement en Anglais mais un jour tous le monde sauront ma nom est Matthieu. Oui, la langue Francais est parfait pour le parler les mots tres sexy, mots comme chou-fleur, tigre papier et ferme la fenetre, cherie.
English has become my mother tongue, though technically Chinese is the one I actually learnt from birth. But since my parents didn't make me pursue any Chinese education after we emigrated, no, I unfortunately cannot write in Chinese anymore I can write the words, but the grammar's lost on me and my range of active vocab's too limited to actually write with. I can read well enough though, so at least that! But yeah, I write only in English unfortunately! But since several people have contributed some phrase in whatever other language they speak, I might as well write something in Chinese too 自從八歲時移民去英國後, 再也沒有學習中文了. 真有點可憐 (and no, I don't know if it's perfectly grammatically correct lol)
I can only write humorous stuff in my first language. Usually stories about badly dressed small-town people. I'd like to pretend they are written with love, but it's really just about digging into that dark, dank place of shame and impotent horror-rage that is deeply rooted to watching the sun set into the barely rippling lake while surrounded by mosquitoes and empty beer bottles with folk songs about wasted lottery tickets and puking punters at the end of a rainbow playing in the background. That third, horrendously long sentence works much better in my first language. It's made for stories like that. But 'cause I like to write fantasy and sci-fi, English just felt like a more natural choice.
I'm a native German speaker, but I write in English and always have done so as it's much more widely spoken. It's also easier; even as a native speaker, writing in 100% correct German can be tricky, particularly after not one but two official spelling reforms for the language. I sometimes find it unfortunate, as German is a very poetic language and some things sound better in it (or at least can be made to sound better) than in English. On the other hand, there are also things that sound positively awkward.
My father once suggested that Germany lost WWII because everything took longer to say in German than in English, and the resultant inefficiency was, ultimately, the difference. At the time I took it as a dig at the language, rather than a serious theory. Until about a month later, when I read a report that German multi-nationals were insisting that all meetings be held in English...because it takes about 30% longer to say something in German than in English, and they were trying to boost efficiency...
@Shadowfax - that's hilarious @KaTrian @Komposten - when you first started reading, did you read sci-fi and fantasy in English initially? Just wondering how come those genres feel more natural in English cus I would have thought it depends on what you were originally exposed to. Like, I only read manga in Chinese cus English looks and feels awkward to me in the medium, and despite writing exclusively in English prose, I used to write manga exclusively in Chinese and still would now if I ever drew manga again.
My mother tongue is Portuguese, but I've fallen away from the language because of the grammar, and because of a very annoying teacher I had. I consider English my foster language, and I prefer writing in it, simply put because I like it better! (and I can't write 3 sentences in Portuguese without at least a hundred grammar mistakes ) I love speaking in Portuguese though. Alguem ai fala Portugues?
Not sure of the accuracy of that. Some things are more complex, but then there are things that take much longer to say in English. "From the day before yesterday until the day after tomorrow" is "von vorgestern bis übermorgen" in German, after all. I think by natively speaking one language and almost exclusively using the other, I'm noticing a lot of the situations where either one of the languages just seems way too complex compared to the other. Just for fun, I tried translating the above to German (with some bias towards sounding natural over being word-for-word) and counted the syllables, and it had about 117 syllables as opposed to 111 in English, counting the ones that would be swallowed when saying it out loud, so I don't think it's that drastic. My general impression is that German has longer individual words while English requires more complex grammatical structures.
Like most Americans, I was never properly educated with another language, and can only write in English. Oh, I had a few semesters of Spanish, but never got to the point of really being able to follow a newscast, or read a newspaper at normal speed, much less write well, and that was decades ago. (curmudgeonry) Unfortunately, our culture just doesn't make the effort that most countries do to broaden people, for which we should be ashamed. Somehow the rest of the world is learning English and we hardly speak it properly ourselves. (/curmudgeonry)
Except for homework, I have only written substantially in English (my first language), although sometimes I translate my writing into Spanish for fun. Excepto la tarea, solo he escrito cosas sustanciales en inglés (mi lengua materna), pero a veces traduzco mi escritura al español para divertirme.
Speaking of length, it's funny when you put Chinese and English together. We have these bilingual Bibles where the two languages are side by side and so often you'd find half the column on the Chinese side blank, cus the passage is done, but the English version is still going lol. For the phrase 'from the day before yesterday until the day after tomorrow' is 6 or 7 words in Chinese, which means it also has only 6 or 7 syllables.
You just have to remember 40,000 or so characters vs English's 26 yeah? I am English and wish I spoke / understood other languages as I love it. Obviously write in English.
