Joe Zeff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> posted [EMAIL PROTECTED], excerpted below, on Tue, 05 Aug 2008 09:35:26 -0700:
> You are right, however, that it's wrong, a sentence to end, a > preposition with. I never groked this particular part (referring to the subthread) of English (or apparently, enough English at all to do well in it), but that particular sentence above reminds me of reading direct interlinear Greek/English (Greek work order) translations. The word order may be somewhat unusual, but it still makes sense, and indeed, tends to place the emphasis (to a native English speaker) on a different aspect of the sentence, which can often be quite insightful in itself. OTOH, Hebrew/English interlinear (Hebrew word order), in addition to being right to left, is foreign enough word ordering that unlike Greek/ English, I often have trouble even parsing it, at least without pausing to think about it a bit. Part of it may be due to reading the line right to left, but still reading the English words left to right, but that doesn't account for all of it. IOW, I can read and parse Greek word order at real-time reading speed, as the phrases may be in a bit different order, thus the turn of emphasis I often find insightful in itself, but the words within the phrase are close enough to native English word order that it still makes sense. Hebrew, OTOH, scrambles up the word order to the point I often have to pause and think a bit before I can make sense of it, even after allowing for right to left or "mixed" reading direction. In general however, while I only speak and read English to any large extent so can't claim to be multilingual or have the benefits thereof, I was exposed to foreign languages and foreign word order even in English (due to ESL (English second language) speakers) early enough (from 4 1/2), that I find I have far less problems parsing sometimes strange ESL or direct translation word ordering (or accents) than those around me that have mostly heard only native English speakers (or even English and a single other language, I've been exposed to many) their entire life. I wasn't aware of the degree to which this was the case until Chariots of Fire (tho that was mostly accents), a few years ago. I found I followed the film far better than most around me, who had a real difficult time due mainly to the accents. After that, I began noticing it. My three years younger sister got lucky, tho. Apparently the exposure to foreign languages that I got from 4 1/2 that lead to my better understanding of accents and foreign word ordering, happened for her at 1 1/2, while she was still in the language-critical development period, and she picked up much more than me. Today, she speaks several languages with ease and reads others, and can pick them up far better than either my folks or I ever could. We're convinced that her brain is able to hear and differentiate sounds that ours simply don't catch, because we weren't exposed to those particular sounds at the right age, and thus our brains basically ignore them and we can't "hear" them. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman _______________________________________________ Pan-users mailing list Pan-users@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pan-users
