Esperanto confused with other languages
fra eriksangel15,2016 4 26
Meldinger: 16
Språk: English
Altebrilas (Å vise profilen) 2016 5 2 09:25:05
Alkanadi (Å vise profilen) 2016 5 2 09:27:45
Altebrilas:When I have recently used both languages, it happens to me to say "jes, sed" for "yes, but" or vice versa.It happens to me most with common words like but. It took me forever to remember to say sed instead of laakin.
nornen (Å vise profilen) 2016 5 3 00:04:25
When I asked which language this might be, every single one said that it was English.
Maybe when you hear a foreign language which is phonetically and phonotactically similar to your own, you just suppose it is the most common foreign language in your country...
Alkanadi (Å vise profilen) 2016 5 3 14:09:03
nornen:I've shown youtube clips in Esperanto to 11 persons who only speak Spanish and maybe a Mayan language (8 out of 11).That is a cool experiment. I bet English speakers would think it is spanish.
When I asked which language this might be, every single one said that it was English.
Maybe when you hear a foreign language which is phonetically and phonotactically similar to your own, you just suppose it is the most common foreign language in your country...
robbkvasnak (Å vise profilen) 2016 5 3 16:02:36
nornen (Å vise profilen) 2016 5 3 17:07:12
robbkvasnak:I tried a day only speaking Espernato - even in public. Results: everybody seemed to understand me. I have to add that I live in an area where the percentage of Spanish speakers is about 50% and a lot of anglos (our local term for monolingual English speakers) strive to use some level of Spanish. It was funny, but nobody got upset.Now this is really interesting. I can only imagine that this is due to the many Romance roots in Esperanto, Spanish (obviously) and also English, and due to the fact that the grammatical differences between the three are only marginal. Maybe the anglos thought that you were speaking Spanish, while the rest thought that you were trying to speak Spanish anglo-style.
Funny, indeed.