Yes, Sue, the beauty of learning languages is just that "time
consuming" which from an optimistic point of view is like a mental
jigsaw that let you find out new and different images as you finish
putting pieces together.

Pronunciation is another kind of game. I found that, to my ears, the
Scots speak a very similar English to no native speakers and that the
so much promoted RP is spoken by no more than 3% of England and almost
by nobody else outside the Island except for the teaching institutions
where, as least in Argentina, have a kind of fancy for those "posh"
sounds.

There is a theory that states that the language shapes the vocal
cavity, hard and soft palates are affected by the sounds we pronounce
daily. If this is true, all Germanic languages tend to set a kind of
stiffness due to the different vowel sounds and plosive and guttural
consonants, meanwhile Romance languages with their scarce number of
vowels and soft, almost bland consonants do not change the inner mouth
too much. The result is that Romance languages speaking people can
learn to pronounce Germanic sounds easily while the Germanic languages
speakers find very difficult to "exhale" the broad vowels and soft
consonants. I cannot vouch this theory as truthful but it has a lot of
followers.

I am not sure German is a difficult language, maybe the structure,
being very old, may seems "odd" but it is one of the more "logical"
idioms I have ever tried to learn.

You never know what a person is saying until the last word of the
sentence is said and then, as the morning sun rising over the
mountains shedding light over the glen, you find the verb that gives
sense to all other words. Spanish used to be like that many years ago.
This is the reason they say German people are so courteous and never
interrupt their interlocutors. B-)

French, on the other hand, being a language of Franks, Germanic people
originally, and from the Langue d'Oc (Tongue of the Oc, a place from
the south of France)), a Romance source, has been complicated by this
mixture and you get double negatives, sometimes triple negatives and a
somewhat difficult arrangement of verbs and other parts of the sentence.

For us, Spanish speakers, Italian is somehow easy to understand but it
is not an easy language. Personally I speak a "cocoliche" that
resemble Italian but is closer to Spanish. B-)

Oh yes, I have seen the "script" letters you mention. They are called
"Gothic Letters", they come from far away in time and Capital letters
were profusely used by copyists in the Middle Age to decorate their
books. If you look at a handwritten page it is very difficult to make
any sense at the beginning because some of the letters are different
from the Latin alphabet, especially vowels and some consonants, but
once you learn to recognize these differences, which can be done
easily, and get used to them, you can read the language without
problem. I had (and have) the same difficulty when try to read
Cyrillic letters.


No, Sue, I am not a scientist, not in computers nor in any other
discipline.

Nowadays I am only a translator that love languages and their stories.
The wonderful way humankind changed the world starting the spoken
communication and the even stranger way it has complicated everything
"inventing" different ways of express the same ideas through the Babel
Tower, or through any other explanation we may try to find for this
unexplainable phenomenon of languages.

I see my mails tend to grow as a gum bubble, something I share with
Stephen King's stories, he said he started with a short story and ends
up with a two volumes novel!. Alas!, this is the only thing I share
with him, not a bit of his talent. B-)

Hope not to bore you nor anybody else to tears with all this ranting.

Ramón.

_-----------------------------------_



--- En Espanol-Ingles@..., "sarah25208"
<SGaviota77@c...> escribió:
> Yes, Ramón, we must take care of the "poor words" and shield them from
> poverty. Actually, I enjoy using the subjunctive form in English.
> Many, however, never use it.
>
> Using the subjunctive just takes much practice, so that is comes
> naturally and without thought. Learning a language is very time
> comsuming. I have tried to work on Spanish every day. But I have also
> an interest in Italian and French, which I am teaching my self VERY
> slowly. Teaching yourself pronunciation is not easy. I checked out
> Italian tapes from the library, but the tapes are very bad. I will
> have to see if someone turns in some better ones. Then there is that
> German language which I also studied in college. But German has more
> complicated grammar. It is a more difficult language to learn. In
> college I helped our German teacher defend the language. The class
> was mostly science majors who "had" to take it and were complaining.
> At that time, I actually liked German so I helped him fight the battle
> of why we should study German.
>
> Ramón, I know you earned a Master's from MIT. When my uncle David
> went to MIT, he had to take German. It was required because as you
> know, sciencific information was written in the German language. At
> that time, Germany used "script" letters. Have you ever seen this?
> At some point before the l960's, Germany changed and began using
> letters like we use in Spanish and English, with an exception or two.
> The current style is easily read. The "script" letters for a
> foreigner were not easily read. My uncle did not pass German, so he
> left MIT and went to the University of Pennsylvania. I think that is
> so sad. He eventually became an attorney and served the United States
> Marine Corp. He loved to teach, and would teach everywhere he lived.
>
> Ramón, are you a computer scientist? Your English is excellent.
>
> Sue