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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   4345 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 4, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Can you, from errors made by an ESL person when communicating in English, deduce their native language?

Sometimes. I grew up close enough to the border to know Mexican ESL habits and work in software enough to know Indian ESL habits but those are the only two.

No, but I have on multiple occasions recognized programmers who started their careers on FORTRAN.

Once, I noticed a person talk about an event which occurred "on the 5th Dezember". I presume they spoke German, the phrase being a literal rendering of "am 5. Dezember".

You mean phonetic errors? Or grammar errors while writing? First one is quite easy if I met people from the same country before. Some languages make similar mistakes though (Slavs most notably) so exactly pinpointing a language can be difficult.

I can recognize text written by Russian (or possibly Ukrainian/Belorussian) and Indian speakers, and by speakers of Romance languages. Maaaaaybe Mandarin. I am not that familiar with typical errors made by speakers of other languages.

If I see a person put a space before a colon, question mark, or exclamation mark, then I assume that that person's native language is French. I don't know whether any languages other than French employ the same practice, though.

According to the Unicode CLDR (assuming the space character in the "localeKeyTypePattern" before the colon is the same as the space before the question mark, I'm too lazy to search around for the real spec location), Occitan and Breton does so too, somewhat unsurprisingly. The only other one that does is Adlam – a script used to write Fulani, a Senegambian language. Now that'd be a hard trivia question!

Swedish and German does a thing where we end questions with "or" ("eller"/"oder"), causing people to write stuff like "Do you want a sandwich, or?" in English.

I can often recognize German and French grammar, phrasings and choices of (sometimes nonexistent) words. The less practiced the speaker is in English, the easier it is.

Spoken or written?

For spoken, IME basically everybody who started with another language and learned English later will have a very noticeable accent with characteristics of their native language. This seems to be very difficult to avoid without years of effort to adjust your accent.

Written tends the other way. Sometimes there are errors or odd ways of phrasing things characteristic to a particular native language, but it's harder to notice and easier to avoid. It tends to come out more in more casual communication.

Yes. I can tell native spanish speakers from native french speakers and native speakers of chinese from native speakers of korean. Native russian or arabic speakers are sort of in categories of their own, but I can reliably distinguish middle easterners trying to come off as hispanic from their accent.

Sometimes, but I used to be an ESL teacher. If the native language is one I am familiar with, I will often recognize the grammatical structures or phrases they are trying to translate into English.

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