h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

*sits with knitting awaiting the basket case*

Isn't Caniculas problem related to the literal translation of German into English?

>>I am reading English books since my early childhood. My English is doubtfree American with a heavy German icing on top of it.<< should be - I have read English books since [my] early childhood. My English is [undoubtedly] or [definitely] American with German icing on top.

*steps back to join plaguesville in the 'Wait here for derision' queue*

turvy

>> 'when I am making a mistake' instead of 'when I make a mistake' <<

Yes this most obvious non-American syntax is one of the hardest for several European-language thinkers to master. North American speakers of English will spot a 'forriner' with this one right away.

And while I cannot explain it clearly it is because the present participle form of most verbs, the x-ing bit, demands 'presence'. You have to be in that moment to say I am x-ing anything.

When referring to other occassions of the same activity, either past or future, you are not 'presently' x-ing, and must use the straight present tense x (with no -ing) qualified by 'if', 'when', 'whenever' or whatever, etc.

Sorry I can't be clearer, it really is an intuitive cultural structure. More than an idiom or colloquialism. So the only way a forrin speaker can learn the idiom is to listen to native speakers and imitate. Simply putting your thoughts into words is not good enough if you are still thinking in German. Or Polish. Or Gaelic.

I am told that breaking out of thought patterns controlled by the subconscious mental syntax that is imposed by one's native tongue is one of the greater joys discovered by those who are lucky enough to learn another language. Some claim it is a better high than growing up, or even, shrugging off religious indoctrination.

Canicula's use of 'since' is another dead give-away of forrin thinking. Again it is a question of time and timing and the way we think about time. Because our concepts of 'time' are instilled at an early age they are harder to de-condition from reflexive thinking in our primary language.

There is also a notable cultural and psychological distinction between the American and European sense of time. The European concept is an ancient social imprint based on medieval installations of church towers and the ringing of bells as an efficient way to summon all persons simultaneously (at the same Time) for morning and evening prayers. This established the beginning and end of the 'work day' for the entire community.

Albeit some of the older tidewater areas (especially the originally Gaelic speakers of places like Cape Breton and Newfoundland and even some places in the South of the US - the Confederate flag is the cross of Saint Andrew BTW) still use 'since' in the medieval way.
But the majority of modern North Americans can only use it as a 'start marker', the point in time at which an ongoing and present condition or situation first occured. (IE: I have been here since December.) Some can also use it as a synonym for as, as in, since you ask, but not many.

It is possible that two months in a leaky boat was enough to disavow most early immigrants of their medieval notions of time and allowed their new bosses to work them round the clock with no time off for prayer or any other good behaviours. With all clocks reset to faster and more often, 'presence' is now required to be truly a present paticipant and since is more an excuse, justification or reason.


~jwf~

And I thought the Yankees were the South.

I could never take people calling Canada the "True North" seriously. Perhaps this was due to the knowledge that in Hamilton we were at the same lattitude as the south of France.

I don't think it's a confusing concept, though. I mean, mostly if someone talks about the north in the UK, they mean the north of England, ignoring the large amount of Scotland that lies still further north.

"Hoser" is a great term and really deserves a wider usage.

Concerning 'when I make a mistake / when I am making a mistake', as well as the different tense, with a much vaguer sense of time in the first case, there seems to me to be a different sense of plurality.

There isn't much difference between 'when I make mistakes...' and 'when I make a mistake...'
Both are effectively plural, the first explicitly, and the second at least partly from context rather than grammar, because it is a general statement about mistakes, and we assume that people make multiple mistakes.
Of course, if someone said 'when I die...', we'd know they were talking about a single future event, unless maybe they were a comedian describing the lows of their performing career.

I must say, I did like the term 'doubtfree American'

>>..the "True North" seriously..<<

The expression comes from the Age of Victoria, a time when Jules Verne and HGWells and Thomas Edison were fascinating the world with gadgets and science and gentlemen's clubs sent adventurers out to find lost continents. Scientific inquiry and scientific jargon was all the rage and words like 'progress' took on whole new meanings.

It was in this age of achievement and discovery that precursors to the likes of Perry and Scott figured out that the magnetic north pole and the geographic north pole are not the same thing.

Any old sailor worth his salt will tell you that 'true' north is actually somewhere in northwestern Canada and not at the arbitrary Canadian/Russian border of 0 degrees latitude. It moves slowly but regularly over a period of years thru an arc of more than twenty degrees south.


~jwf~

>> I did like the term 'doubtfree American' <<

That was to be my next question.
What is a doubtfree American?

The context of the whole sentence:
"My English is doubtfree American with a heavy German (accent)."

Perhaps 'undoubtedly' was meant.
Or not, which raises the question of irony either intended or otherwise. One can never be sure with Germans whose keeness and reputation for 'dry' humour is memorialised in their drinking slogan, "'einz, why dry?"

~jwf~

~jwf~

In your otherwise admirable list of categories, you did not include "stake-holders". These are not fencing contractors (well some of them will be) but people with an interest in whatever it is that is under consideration for "improving" or "updating".

If our government didn't acquire the term from your side of the pond, it will probably come to a government near you soon.
Watch out.

phew!

mark

I want to go back and re-read most of yesterday's posts but in the meantime:

The imperfect tenses (I am waiting for the bus, I was waiting for the bus) have a sense of ongoingness about them.

"I was waiting for the bus when my mother drove up and offered me a lift".

(The waiting went on for some time, the driving up and offering the lift was but the work of a moment).

"I flirt with the customers while serving their coffee".

It is a matter of ear, unfortunately, and it is one of those subtle subtle foreigner-traps.

Ben

I was waiting for the bus. My mother drove up.

The waiting went on for some time, while the mother driving up was the work of an instant.

But in the present tense, it is different:

I am waiting for the bus. My mother drives up.

The waiting is happening at the instant I describe. The second is more complicated - it could be a colloquial way of saying "my mother drove up", describing something in the past: "what happens, next? my mother drives up! who'd have believed it"

Equally, it could describe something that happens regularly: "my mother drives up every day at 2:15". So it denotes something quick in duration but regular in occurrance.

I am eating my dinner. I eat my dinner.

I am thinking I haven't covered every possibility. It should be "I think I haven't covered every possibility" even though the thought has just occurred to me and probably won't be repeated.

What the * has the wonderful DJ got to do with this? I don't think he can tell you the difference between perfect and imperfect verbs unless his recent Irish classes have got deeper.(Do the differences happen in Irish?)
Opening a can of worms but I don't think is just Johnny foreigner that confuses/is confusing the tenses (or is confused by them). I think there are native English dialects that use only the continuous, isn't it?
[Please start thinking about differences between formal and informal registers - I'm preparing a teaching unit on them and my American colleagues disagree fundamentally]

"I flirt with the customers while serving their coffee."
"I flirt with the customers while serving them coffee."
two completely different meanings of serving. interesting. Sorry, just caught my eye that one since I would go for the second form. Perhaps just familiarity with one form but my immediate parsing of the first form leaves me with the impression that you are waiting on the coffee and delivering the requested order of the coffee. Strange are the ways of english!

The discussions above are very interesting, and I think I shall have to re-read them several times to fully understand. echo the 'phew' of a phew posts above.

As for Yankees, I was watching a WW2 programme the other day about the Japanese war (from their point of view) and was interested to note that the veteren they were talking to actually used the word 'Yankee' to refer to the USAians (in deference to our canadian researchers). I thought it was just us Brits (or more specifically the English) who refered to USAians en mass as Yankees, or was this perhaps just a one off?

W mk2,

"Please start thinking about differences between formal and informal registers - I'm preparing a teaching unit on them and my American colleagues disagree fundamentally"

They are wrong.
Now, what are formal and informal registers, please, so I can start thinking about the differences?

And thanks to Homer Simpson of Springfield, USA, for giving us yet another example of a negative prefix attached to a non-existent root.

Homer got himself quite confused on a recent show trying to excuse his usual incompetence by saying he had been 'distracted'.

His 'inner mind' began to wonder aloud at how he could possibly have been 'dis'-tracted when, as he suddenly realised, he had not been 'tracted' in the first place.

He then got quite agitated about the fact and began to analyse the logic of it all. People are easily distracted but no one is ever really 'tracted'. He was genuinely upset by this insight and I felt myself sympathising with him greatly.

My sympathies are always with Homer, especially when he tries to wrestle with deeper intellectual issues not of his own making.


~jwf~

>> What the * has the wonderful DJ got to do with this? <<

I really did try to change the subject and the subject line.
See post 7242.
And of course now the whole reference to deejays is lost because I've since changed the wording of my ID slugline.

I'd like to second plaguesville's motion to learn more about registers, formal and/or informal.


~jwf~

>> "stake-holders" <<

Point taken.




Or as Homer would say,
m-M-m-M, steak holders!


~jwf~

Ah thank you for having taken my message that apart!
or thank you for ...?

I think it is both, the imprint of the German in my unconsciousness plus where you get your sources from to alter or to improve.

It is way more complicated than you might think to speak a foreign language, and it is totally different from just using it on vacation or for reading books or from an academical point of view.

The different time perception from Europeans and Americans for instance: I get dissed often for NOT using the x-ing by British folks, but not that often by Americans. I started working on it recently.

I have mastered the perfect and imperfect tenses very well, usually don't get too many comments for misusing the tenses in the past, nor for those in the future. The present is the trouble. My example is easier to explain that making a mistake is a singular event, that makes the use of 'when i make a mistake' appropriate versus 'I am making progress' refers to a longer in time event.

Would it be correct to say: 'when I am making the same mistakes all over again'?

For me living in the States poses the problem that you start losing your primary language to a certain degree, while never mastering the secondary completely.

For instance I cannot write a typical German letter anymore. It does not sound right, clearly influenced by the English. Writing this up I am not translating, my unconsciouness has taken over, right or wrong.

Leave that up for your analysis!!!

>> "Would it be correct to say: 'when I am making the same mistakes all over again'?"

Possibly, but 'when I am making...' does still normally refer to the precise time (or time period) when you are actually something, whereas 'when I make...' can mean '[soon] after I make...', as in 'When I make mistakes I apologise for them.

You could validly say 'when I am making mistakes I get annoyed', but that does give the impression that the sense of annoyance is simultaneous with the error, rather than following it.
'When I make mistakes I get annoyed' could mean you are annoyed at the time, or shortly afterwards.
In a way, the 'when' in one case means 'at the same time as'. In the other case it could be read as being almost interchangeable with 'if'

Concerning 'I am making progress', there is possibly less difference between saying 'when I am making progress...' and 'when I make progress...'. Because 'making progress' is generally a *process*, rather than an *event*, it is implicitly spread out over time, even in the phrase 'when I am making progress'.
Even in a situation such as a race, where there is rapid feedback and it is possible to tell exactly when you are and aren't making progress relative to an opponent, both 'when I make...' and 'when I am making' basically refer to the spreads of time when you are gaining on a competitor.
Also, in situations where success an ongoing process is less easily measurable (like learning a language), 'when I am making progress' could be taken to cover an entire period over which you are making some repeated efforts, and having some success. possibly extending from the past, and on through the present to some point in the future.

**lurkin**

>> Writing this up I am not translating, my unconsciouness has taken over, right or wrong. <<


Yes, I could hear more of an American accent in all that. Compare that posting to your last one with all the 'sinces' and 'x-ings' which quite honestly sounded like you were putting on an eastern-euro accent or had put the whole posting thru one of those 'dialect translator' programs. Other factors, such as time of day, the seriousness of your intent, or how quickly your write may also influence your overall style, but nothing in the above would strike me as obviously the writing of someone for whom English is not their primary language. And yet the other posting was almost a perfect impression of a comic stereotype of European-American.

Having said that, and not to seem like I'm picking on YOU, but you have incidentally reminded me of another question I have been wanting to ask of everyone here:

Is the phrase "from an academical point of view" correct? I always have trouble with adjectives ending in '-ic' and never know when to add '-al' to '-ic'.

I try to tell myself that 'historic' means 'it really was there in history' while 'historical' means a re-creation, a tribute, a brochure, a costume, an anniversary celebration or any other thing that acknowledges an 'historic' event but which is itself not directly part of the history, only a reflection of it.

It gets confusing with 'theatric' and 'theatrical' and I feel very uncomfortable when I hear 'ironical' and many others which never seem to be used correctly. There are a lot of 'ic' words out there so I'd really like some guidance on this question.

In Canicula's case I think he is correct to use 'academical' if he is not himself an academic and is distancing his 'understanding-how-difficult-it-is-to-learn-a-forrin-language' from an academic study of the language. Nor are any of us engaged in truly academic analysis, merely sounding academical.


~jwf~