[OFF TOPIC] Language Thread

[heywoodu 13,552]

2 hours ago, thiago_simoes said:

The most interesting aspect of studying a different language is how I learned to deal with time in a different way. For example, the concept of Present Perfect is wildly different in Portuguese than it is in English. Portuguese usually expresses past actions as finished events; there's a form of Past Continuous, but this works like it does in English, for ongoing events in the past. It usually takes a lot of time and effort to teach students about the very concept of Present Perfect. This is something that Spanish speakers will never know because there's a form of Present Perfect in Spanish. Even Japanese has it. But not Portuguese -- at least, not exactly like it works in English.
 

Any chance you could give a small example or two of this?

[thiago_simoes 1,359]

6 hours ago, heywoodu said:

Any chance you could give a small example or two of this?

In English one can say:

1) She has broken the window.
2) She broke the window.

In the first sentence, we know that the window is still broken, while in the second sentence it might have been fixed.

In Portuguese we can only say "Ela quebrou a janela". This literally means "she broke the window", so the whole concept of something like "she has broken the window" is impossible to be carried over to Portuguese only using a verb form. We need to explain that it's still broken if we want to make sure that someone knows it needs fixing. To be honest, I believe that most people would immediately ask "tem que consertar?" or "does it need fixing?", but the thing is that in English, when we use the Present Perfect, it's very clear that the window is still broken, while in Portuguese we need to ask another question to make sure that it's still broken. Most people would assume by the context that it is broken anyway, but in order to make sure we need a second question, while in English this is not necessary.

Now, there is an equivalent structure in Portuguese with the verb ter (have) + past participle of another verb, but it only works for specific situations. For example:

 

Tem feito tempo bom.

Literally: (It) has been weather good. As you might have guessed, this means "The weather has been nice", so it kind of works in Portuguese. But if you try to apply this to the first example, it makes absolutely no sense in Portuguese. 

"Ela tem quebrado a janela" (literally: she has broken the window) would raise many eyebrows as people would have no clue about what you want to say. I'd probably guess something like "she has been breaking the window again and again", but even so I'd use a completely different arrangement of words if I wanted to say something like this in Portuguese, like, for example, "toda vez que a gente coloca uma janela nova, ela quebra" (every time we set up a new window, she breaks it). 

There's also a form with andar (walk) + gerund. For example:

Ele anda fazendo coisas erradas.

 

Literally: He walks doing things bad. This means "he has been doing bad things". Of course, anda doesn't mean here that the person is walking, but instead it has the same meaning of Present Perfect in English, but it's not something that we can easily apply to "ela quebrou a janela" or "tem feito tempo bom", for example. It's like we're dealing with three completely different notions of time (even though "tem feito" and "anda fazendo" are not that different) in Portuguese, instead of a single notion of time in English like the Present Perfect.

In short, often the meaning of sentences in the Present Perfect cannot be entirely replicated in Portuguese. I know these were not the best examples in the world, but I hope I was able to help, somehow.

[dcro 10,179]

3 hours ago, Grassmarket said:

When I worked at the University, I noticed that International students would often speak English to each other when discussing particular subject.  So Indian students would be chatting in Hindi, but when they started talking about cricket, or business, or economics or whatever subject they were studying, they would switch to English. Presumably because the vocabulary of these subjects just did not exist in the native language.

You hit the nail with one. It reminded me that I do think in English (to a certain extent) when watching dressage, since their terminology here either sounds like a dumb translation or is just non-existent.

[Bohemia 1,259]

15 hours ago, Olympian1010 said:

Okay, I’ve got a question that I’ve wanted to ask for a while. For those of who speak two or more language (for example: English + Native language), do you only think in your native language, or do you also sometimes think in English, even outside of a conversation or communication with others?

I sometimes think in English because there are certain topics that I'm used to reading and talking about in English so it stays that way in my head. Also sometimes I just like to talk to myself in English because I don't really have anyone I can talk with in that language here, it's sad

 

I also often forget a word in French and can only remember it in English, I'm sure it happens to a lot of you too!

[hckošice 13,246]

1 hour ago, Bohemia said:

I also often forget a word in French and can only remember it in English, I'm sure it happens to a lot of you too!

Yep, it happened to me sometimes as well

[Vojthas 947]

6 hours ago, Grassmarket said:

Presumably because the vocabulary of these subjects just did not exist in the native language.

Hard to imagine there is no cricket vocabulary in Hindi.
While I can totally imagine how dumb the word "dressage" and anything connected to it might sound in Croatian @dcro

About what @thiago_simoes wrote on Perfect - I simply ignore its existence, don't I @Olympian1010?

[Grassmarket 2,757]

3 minutes ago, Vojthas said:

Hard to imagine there is no cricket vocabulary in Hindi.

Yeah, but it is all the same English words!  I read an article about baseball in Montreal, which is obviously a French-speaking city, and very touchy about it. When MLB started there in the 70s, the French-language commentators were give specially-prepared-by-University-Professors French equivalents for all the English baseball terms.  After about a week they just ripped them up & threw them away, because it was just easier to use the English terms.  

[heywoodu 13,552]

3 hours ago, thiago_simoes said:

In Portuguese we can only say "Ela quebrou a janela". This literally means "she broke the window", so the whole concept of something like "she has broken the window" is impossible to be carried over to Portuguese only using a verb form. We need to explain that it's still broken if we want to make sure that someone knows it needs fixing. To be honest, I believe that most people would immediately ask "tem que consertar?" or "does it need fixing?", but the thing is that in English, when we use the Present Perfect, it's very clear that the window is still broken, while in Portuguese we need to ask another question to make sure that it's still broken. Most people would assume by the context that it is broken anyway, but in order to make sure we need a second question, while in English this is not necessary.

Interestingly enough this might have taught me more about English than about Portuguese, which I find just as valuable, so thank you  

 

The examples did definitely help in understanding what you meant, it was an interesting read and I'll surely keep it in mind  

[Laraja 1,369]

4 hours ago, Bohemia said:

I sometimes think in English because there are certain topics that I'm used to reading and talking about in English so it stays that way in my head. Also sometimes I just like to talk to myself in English because I don't really have anyone I can talk with in that language here, it's sad 

 

I also often forget a word in French and can only remember it in English, I'm sure it happens to a lot of you too!

This also happens with me 

 

@thiago_simoes is right. Present Perfect is like an invention to make english harder for us. 

[thiago_simoes 1,359]

@heywoodu and @Laraja, if you are interested in how Portuguese and English differ when it comes to the Present Perfect, this article provides many examples about how crazy it is for speakers of Portuguese (especially Brazilian Portuguese) to grasp the notion of time behind the Present Perfect. The article is in Portuguese, but it provides a lot of sentences comparing Portuguese and English, so it might help clarify how different the languages are.

This is also probably the biggest difference in grammar between Spanish and Portuguese, since Spanish has an equivalent structure to English. I know it works a little bit differently, but the notion of time behind it is roughly the same in Spanish and English. Not in Portuguese, though.