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My name is PW 37 and I'm addicted to Sex and the City. I don't think I'll be able to shake it off before I've watched all of it, but there's a chance that, when the series ends, the addiction might become manageable.
I know I'm about 7 years behind, but feel justified by the fact that it was only ever available to me on German or Austrian TV, i.e. in a horrible, dubbed version. I did like it back then, but never enough to watch more than maybe one episode per series, because the wooden, convoluted dialogue was grating on my nerves. If I were younger, I'd certainly contemplate a career as professional script translator.
If, however, watching SatC continues to give me dreams of hot period drama sex, I know what I'll be doing every night before bedtime from now on. I have to admit blushingly that I stayed up till 4 a.m. -- I wasn't tired even then but sternly ordered myself to go to bed. Discipline was rewarded by dreaming of hot sex in a pool with Tavington (not exactly period, but I was wearing a Jane Austen gown), which proved surprisingly satisfying in spite of both of us being (almost) fully dressed. Ah, dreams...
Has any of you clever guys out there on my flist ever come across a (readable, at least a little) linguistic study dealing with the phenomenon of things sounding so much "better" in a foreign language? I've never been a great fan of linguistics, but this intrigues me to no end.
English is my second language, acquired at a relatively late age, because when I started going to school (1970) they hadn't yet begun teaching it in grades 1 - 4 or Kindergarten. So I started at age ten, and it's a language acquired in an "artificial" setting (as opposed to the setting in which most of us learn to speak in the first place).
What I think makes all the difference -- and I'd love to know what other people think about that -- is the fact that the meaning, the semantic baggage carried by each word or syntactic construction, is far more limited in this second language than in the first, because it was acquired in a more limited setting. 50 minute lessons, even if they take place every day, as opposed to 24 hours of constant bombardment from very different sources of language have to lead to very different results, and I'm not quite sure whether even long term immersion in a "natural" linguistic environment, i.e. staying in England for a few years after I'd finished school, would have closed the gap completely.
Of course matters get a lot more complicated when it comes to words or concepts that don't have an exact counterpart in the other language, like the much-quoted German "Heimat" (homeland or home country doesn't really express Heimat) or "Bundespräsident", which can be accurately translated to "federal president" but won't have the kind of in-depth meaning it has for an Austrian, because the institution of a Federal President actually exists here, whereas it doesn't (to the best of my knowledge) in English-speaking countries.
But even a simple sentence like "Ich liebe Dich", which translates into English with 100% accuracy as "I love you" carries a completely different set of meanings, connotations and emotional impact when I hear or read it in English. It's significantly less heavy, so to speak, and doesn't trigger the trillion subconscious associations that come with it when I read or hear it in German. The associations seem to be compartmentalized, and hearing or reading without having to consciously *translate* does not automatically open both compartments.
OK, that was put in rather unscientific, everyday terms, which is exactly why I'd like to read some scientific work on the topic.
Thoughts or recommendations, anybody?
I know I'm about 7 years behind, but feel justified by the fact that it was only ever available to me on German or Austrian TV, i.e. in a horrible, dubbed version. I did like it back then, but never enough to watch more than maybe one episode per series, because the wooden, convoluted dialogue was grating on my nerves. If I were younger, I'd certainly contemplate a career as professional script translator.
If, however, watching SatC continues to give me dreams of hot period drama sex, I know what I'll be doing every night before bedtime from now on. I have to admit blushingly that I stayed up till 4 a.m. -- I wasn't tired even then but sternly ordered myself to go to bed. Discipline was rewarded by dreaming of hot sex in a pool with Tavington (not exactly period, but I was wearing a Jane Austen gown), which proved surprisingly satisfying in spite of both of us being (almost) fully dressed. Ah, dreams...
Has any of you clever guys out there on my flist ever come across a (readable, at least a little) linguistic study dealing with the phenomenon of things sounding so much "better" in a foreign language? I've never been a great fan of linguistics, but this intrigues me to no end.
English is my second language, acquired at a relatively late age, because when I started going to school (1970) they hadn't yet begun teaching it in grades 1 - 4 or Kindergarten. So I started at age ten, and it's a language acquired in an "artificial" setting (as opposed to the setting in which most of us learn to speak in the first place).
What I think makes all the difference -- and I'd love to know what other people think about that -- is the fact that the meaning, the semantic baggage carried by each word or syntactic construction, is far more limited in this second language than in the first, because it was acquired in a more limited setting. 50 minute lessons, even if they take place every day, as opposed to 24 hours of constant bombardment from very different sources of language have to lead to very different results, and I'm not quite sure whether even long term immersion in a "natural" linguistic environment, i.e. staying in England for a few years after I'd finished school, would have closed the gap completely.
Of course matters get a lot more complicated when it comes to words or concepts that don't have an exact counterpart in the other language, like the much-quoted German "Heimat" (homeland or home country doesn't really express Heimat) or "Bundespräsident", which can be accurately translated to "federal president" but won't have the kind of in-depth meaning it has for an Austrian, because the institution of a Federal President actually exists here, whereas it doesn't (to the best of my knowledge) in English-speaking countries.
But even a simple sentence like "Ich liebe Dich", which translates into English with 100% accuracy as "I love you" carries a completely different set of meanings, connotations and emotional impact when I hear or read it in English. It's significantly less heavy, so to speak, and doesn't trigger the trillion subconscious associations that come with it when I read or hear it in German. The associations seem to be compartmentalized, and hearing or reading without having to consciously *translate* does not automatically open both compartments.
OK, that was put in rather unscientific, everyday terms, which is exactly why I'd like to read some scientific work on the topic.
Thoughts or recommendations, anybody?
