From: Mike Sangrey (msangrey@BlueFeltHat.org)
Date: Wed Aug 15 2001 - 13:10:19 EDT
Ross Purdy <rossjpurdy@hotmail.com> said:
> Do not most speakers of more than one language think primarily in
> one language and then match the words they are thinking of with forms
> in the second language with out ever touching base with a root or
> lexical form?
Not necessarily. I can't remember where I read it but one study
showed that speakers, fluent in two languages, will undergo a
significant pause when shifting between the two languages. I think
of a Magnetic Resonance Imaging photograph of the glow in the brain
needing to undergo a reformulation as the brain shifts from one
fluent language to the other. Kind of a brain blink.
A friend of mine, whose heart language is American English, told me
a story of when he was intensely working at his desk in Hebrew.
A person came into his room and asked him a question--in English.
He couldn't process the language of the question! He, quite
purposefully, had to stop what he was doing, push back from his
desk, turn and ask the person in English (thus shifting
lingual-gears) what they had said.
This, BTW, does not in any way argue against your point that many
times the one language is influenced by the forms of the other. It
takes a lot of effort--conscious effort, I think--to learn to think
in the second language forms (forms, BTW, which are more than
just affixes on words).
I've often wondered whether we could get insight into how both
Hebrew and/or Aramaic on the one hand worked and how on the other
Koine Greek worked by analyzing the GNT from the perspective you
present.
--
Mike Sangrey
msangrey@BlueFeltHat.org
Landisburg, Pa.
"The first one last wins."
"A net of highly cohesive details reveals the truth."
---
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