Tracing Those Unlabelled Cables I Find In Corners Of My Brain

[dglenn]

My brain frequently tries to "correct" what I'm reading, trying to compensate for the frequent tpyos, mispeellings, and folks who yews a homonym that their spell-checker can't catch; often it fills in the right things, but sometimes it's just trying to race ahead of tired eyes making predictions.

This morning I just caught an interesting quirk:

Comments

[madbodger]

I think about this every time fizzygeek is having her Liberté brand yoghurt.

[leiacat]

Funnily enough, when I got to reading your "Liberty, equality" written here for the first time, my brain auto-completed "fraternity" as the next thing to expect, and while not subsituting French in the same way as yours, I most definitely echoed the phrase in French in the back of my brain before I was done reading it.

I suppose for me it could be a part of my "interpreter-brain" - the piece of my psyche which sometimes when confronted with an expression tries its hand at translating it into my other language just to see if it can, or which randomly maps to a phrase in another language like this does.

[realinterrobang]

the piece of my psyche which sometimes when confronted with an expression tries its hand at translating it into my other language just to see if it can

Wow, someone else has that too. I never quite know which language mine is going to come out with. It seems like certain words in certain languages are closer to hand than others.

Glenn, you're not as bad in French as you think you are.

[leiacat]

I think it's a side effect of being bi(or more)lingual. Things have a slight tendency to pop up in whichever language you use more for those things, but if you're in translator mode, you'll translate whether you like to or not.

[kolraashgadol]

The real question is whether when you see "I think, therefore I am" your brain fills in "Je pense donc je suis."

Veering off into distractions ...

[dglenn]

Actually, for me that one usually gets shunted to Latin, a language I only know a couple of useful phrases in (such as, "Ita, nos habemos non ullas bananas."). Then again, in high school I wrote a play which has a character musing, "Cogito ergo ... sumthing or other; I forget. Ah! Cogito ergo oblivio!" (Hmm. So why is "Cogito ergo sum" repeated more often -- at least where I encounter it -- than Je pense donc je suis"? Did Descartes publish in Latin, or did folks quoting him later decide to apply the quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur principle?)

But every so often I catch "Il-y-a..." about to come out of my mouth just in time to put it back into the same language as the rest of the sentence it's introducing... (Not an issue if I'm standing next to a Francophone, of course.) And there are a few French words and phrases that get sprinkled into English that, if I'm a little tired, will flip my brain into French mode briefly so that the next couple of sentences get dragged along. And when there were television commercials