Which she must have realized means “we would like to have sex with your wife.” Since this is an infrequently invoked hospitality custom in the Shoshone culture, the chieftain obliged but with reservations.
Lewis and Clark were pleasantly relieved from their long journey, but they still needed those damn horses. Unfortunately, their bargaining power was somewhat deminished the next day.
The rules of a language are the things which a speaker of the language follows. If you can be mistaken for a native speaker 99% of the time, then you’re following the rules, and if folks can tell from your language that you’re not a native speaker, then you’re not following the rules. This is completely independent of what those stodgy old grammar textbooks tell you.
I didn’t think the Shoshone were on a reservation yet.
I saw that in an “I Love Lucy” episode.
On the opposite end of the scale we have Sean Connery, who has been married to Micheline Roquebrune since 1975. Connery recently said that despite being married to a French-speaking wife for over thirty years, he doesn’t speak any French. Roquebrune’s English was described as “limited” and they have no other language in common. Connery attributed the success of their marriage to the fact that they can’t argue.
And by the time the message “Watch out for that rock up ahead” got through, what they actually meant to say was “We’re going to have to build a new boat.”
Several people have asked if there’s a general test for language proficiency. The closest thing is probably the tests given by the U.S. government for their linguists. These are consistently rated for quite a few languages:
Speakers can be ranked from 0 to 5. 5 is native proficiency. 0 (only a little knowledge of the language), 1 (some ability to use the language in a limited way), and 2 (some reasonable ability to use the language) are too low to come across as fluent speakers, I’m told. The threshold for what we’re talking about here is probably either 3 (a pretty good speaker who’s still clearly not at a native level) or 4 (a very good speaker who, as is occasionally clear, isn’t quite at a native level).
On that scale, how would one rate a person who speaks with a (comprehensible) foreign accent but otherwise flawlessly? Such a person is clearly not a native speaker, but nonetheless uses the language as well as a native speaker.
Accent might not mean much. I’ve known of people who spoke English with a Mexican accent but spoke English as a first langauge.
Actually, I studied Spanish in high school, and Chinese in college, and a very annoying thing I’ve noticed is my tendency to get my Spanish and Chinese inter-tangled. Partially this is because there are a few words in both languages that are false cognates (“San” and “Bien” for example, can both be said in either Chinese or Spanish, but tend to have wildly different meanings) and even some gramattical particles that sound similar and have similar uses (“de” in Spanish" and “de” in Mandarin can both be used to attribute ownership, but are used in opposite “directions” in regards to the nouns)
The former-Spanish speakers in our class came up with a theory where our brain keeps languages in two parts of our head: “Real languages” and “Made up languages that foreigners speak”;), basically, when speaking Chinese, if we hit a speed bump and were trying to maintain fluency in our speech, we’d grab for the first foreign word we found for the meaning we wanted, which often would either be Spanish or French in our class (much to the chagrin of the teacher).
Now that I’ve spent a year trying to learn Chinese, I’ve found that when I try to speak Spanish, I’ll have to concentrate very hard not to switch into Chinese in mid sentence “Buenos Dias, me hablo Ragu, donde esta nide mama? Wo xuyao gen ta shuo yi shuo. DAMMIT. Perdoname.”
Chronos writes:
> On that scale, how would one rate a person who speaks with a
> (comprehensible) foreign accent but otherwise flawlessly? Such a person is
> clearly not a native speaker, but nonetheless uses the language as well as a
> native speaker.
I suspect that would be a 4, but I’m not an expert on these tests, so maybe someone who knows more than I do should answer this question.