Re: Can't speak his mother tongue.

Skitt wrote:

tony cooper wrote:

"Don Phillipson" wrote:

"The Grammer Genious" wrote:


This article from Haaretz mentions a poor Arab lieutenant general
who "couldn't even say a few coherent sentences in his mother
tongue."

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/917511.html

I myself haven't been in that predicament since about February of
1945. I guess mother tongues aren't what they used to be.


This newspaper probably does not tell us how it
defines mother tongue. In Canada we mean the
"language first learned and still understood."
Because of family migration. plenty of people
first spoke in (say) Serbian, Vietnamese, Galla:
but decades later and in another place may find they
have totally forgotten this first family language.


Isn't this Skitt's situation? I don't think he's totally forgotten
his first family language, but I think he has said that he's no longer
able to speak that language with confidence of being understandable.


Oh, I can be understood, but I can no longer find all the right words at a moment's notice. I understand them when I hear them, though. Except for the recently youth-coined ones.

I can say many things fluently, but then there's that awkward pause in mid-sentence ...

In the years after WW2, I met a number of people from central Europe who spoke half a dozen languages, but none of them properly and all of them with an indefinable accent, including their mother tongue. One old Hungarian that I got quite friendly with used to wander between Russian, German, English and a bit of Hungarian apparently without being aware of which language he was speaking, occasionally switching in mid-sentence.

--
Rob Bannister
.

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