(no subject)
Ow, ow, ow, my back is still not up to driving. Just went to the Weserpark to buy a birthday present for my mum (84 tomorrow), and those five miles were not a comfortable ride. And then, to round it off, on the way back I missed our motorway exit. Because I was thinking about Turkish vocab.
Interestingly, I find thinking about languages not nearly as distracting when I'm driving as thinking about maths. I visualize maths so completely that it takes my brain away from looking at the road. Language processing seems to run somewhere else involving less of my visual cortex. Thinking about maths is dangerous when I drive, thinking about words just makes me get lost.
Learning Turkish is still going surprisingly well. I was actually a bit peeved when I realized that it is so much like Japanese. I mean, why would I have expected that? I thought I was tackling something completely new, only to realize that the structure is so very similar that it all feels kinda familiar. And even the vocab isn't as alien as I expected it to be. Turkish has loads of Arabic, French, Persian, Italian and Greek words in it, and things often ring a bell via some unexpected mental connections.
Take the word 'meydan' = square, open space. I thought, hullo, I've heard that before, and then realized that I knew the word 'maidan' from reading about Kolkata (it's a huge public park with a vast open area). Or the Turkish word for veg (sebze), which instantly brought sabzi curry to mind.
I also like the phonetic spelling of French words, like şoför or aksesuar. Even German gets a look-in with otoban.
Of course, there are some completely new things. Turkish word formation applies something called 'vowel harmony', and I'd never come across that before. It's not all that complicated (the vowels in suffixes are basically adapted to the last vowel in the verb stem/noun/whatever) and does actually make words easier to pronounce.
Interestingly, I find thinking about languages not nearly as distracting when I'm driving as thinking about maths. I visualize maths so completely that it takes my brain away from looking at the road. Language processing seems to run somewhere else involving less of my visual cortex. Thinking about maths is dangerous when I drive, thinking about words just makes me get lost.
Learning Turkish is still going surprisingly well. I was actually a bit peeved when I realized that it is so much like Japanese. I mean, why would I have expected that? I thought I was tackling something completely new, only to realize that the structure is so very similar that it all feels kinda familiar. And even the vocab isn't as alien as I expected it to be. Turkish has loads of Arabic, French, Persian, Italian and Greek words in it, and things often ring a bell via some unexpected mental connections.
Take the word 'meydan' = square, open space. I thought, hullo, I've heard that before, and then realized that I knew the word 'maidan' from reading about Kolkata (it's a huge public park with a vast open area). Or the Turkish word for veg (sebze), which instantly brought sabzi curry to mind.
I also like the phonetic spelling of French words, like şoför or aksesuar. Even German gets a look-in with otoban.
Of course, there are some completely new things. Turkish word formation applies something called 'vowel harmony', and I'd never come across that before. It's not all that complicated (the vowels in suffixes are basically adapted to the last vowel in the verb stem/noun/whatever) and does actually make words easier to pronounce.