Second Language

Yes it is!

As far as "completely", I'm not certain anyone can claim they've completely learned a language. We're never going to quit learning more about language and semantics.

A good number of those who turn up to online forums use English as their second or third language, and often do better than others who claim it as their first language.

-- RH.

Isnt it intersting that the hebrew language, which has realy only just been reintroduced to the world after two thousand years of near total disuse.Used only by a number of jewish scholars and orthdox rabbis ever since,it wasnt until jews repatrioated back to Isreal in the early 20th century that they adopted it as their first language. So in effect hebrew is an ancient language which was beautifly preserved in its biblical form. Though in fact there there have been new vowels added to the original letters.

But my real point is this, how is it that an anceint language with its complex forms has a complicated mathamatical eliment which in effect performs in an amazing way? For instance the name for man translated into its numerical value then added to the value for woman it forms the value for child! So how is it that this language is so advanced yet so ancient. Im being very vague but the experts would agree. It seems logical that language should evolve and thus be more complex than its predisesor-in this case it appears not to be so!:confused:

That is odd.

I'd thought that their God told them to go forth and multiply.

-- RH.

ha ha,well done. I was wondering am I on the wrong path in this thread. I was thinking, now im getting more formiluar with this forum thing that I have to stick to the main topic(in this case philosophy). I realise I have to think of all the particular issues in this way, rather to go off on a tangent! You are a knowledgable philosopher, what would you suggest?

Take it all with a pinch of salt.

Go forth and child?

No...that's bad math.

It is impossible to "completely" learn one single language,a specific language would change over time,new words are coined and outdated words are eliminated,is there anyone completely learned English?I don't think so.

I'd say that William Shakespeare did more than completely learn English; he invented a good deal of it.

There's a bit more than that to catch up on though, nowadays.

--- RH.

Shakespeare was a demigod in English language,but this could not prove he had learned English completely.
Many scientist also could invent a lot of things without entirely learn the whole science.

Within the field of study an enormous amount of work has been done on this and with modern electronic information systems the estimation is scientifically achieved by counting the instances of particular words that turn up in the works of Shakespere, as compared with the instances of words found in all the recorded works before him:

List of English words invented by Shakespeare - Wikipedia, the ...

--- RH.

Dr. Seuss invented almost as many words as Shakespeare.

Almost.

Is there a complete list of these somewhere?

The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is the way that so many of his words and phrases are now the common currency of everyday speech, but with no usual awareness of their particular origin.

-- RH.

Language is absolutely fascinating. It is a definition of a culture and a reflection at the same time. Word meanings change from 1 area to another. Inflection and body language change meanings. Personal history changes meanings.

One has to tailor one's vocabulary to one's listeners. You have to keep in mind country of origin, profession, and education. I don't believe that one can learn a language perfectly because one's command of a language will always be relative to one's listeners.

I went to a play about Christ in Mexico. All the actors spoke Andalusian Spanish but Christ spoke Castillian. I'm sure that it was supposed to imply something but, it was lost on me. I speak both.

English is comprised of about 23 languages. It is the black sheep of the Germanic family but Londinium was founded by the Romans. We adopt whatever we need. Then, we butcher as needed. We went from gay and carefree to gay pride,,, from the holocaust at the fire-bombing of Tokyo to the holocaust at Dachau.

We decimated the trees until they were all gone. We all know that moot means unimportant. We learned to deplane irregardless of the problem. We invented CB radio jargon and ebonics. We lrnd to txt r frnds. weevenlearnedtoreadwithoutspaces. We tried Esperanto.

What does the future hold for language? Who knows? Josephson at Cambridge proved quantum tunneling in sapient species. Maybe direct mind contact will be augmented to usefullness. Rupert Sheldrake's work shows great possibilities for learning without language.

They've even taught Gorillas to "sign". They in turn have taught their offspring.

I think the next big step will be to straighten out the alphabet. The oriental pictographs are just too cumbersome. Maybe we'll get a fusion of the Greek and Cryllic. I'm sure that the kids will pick it up in a couple of weeks.
Dan

Interesting question and one I've been thinking about for along time. I was exposed to my second language for the first time when I was five. I attended a nursery school run by French nuns ("the sisters of Merci" :sarcastic: Just kidding) Anyway when I got to Paris 15 years later it was like "I know that", it was all very familiar and I became quite fluent in a fairly short time. I married a French woman and we raised two girls who are both bi-lingual. We eventually moved to Italy and the girls and I picked up Italian quickly and the three of us became tri-lingual. In fact, the girls had a linguistic system of their own, they played in Italian, studied in French and used that language for arguments and used English for everything else. The older girl has a slight British accent but it's mostly an affectation.
I still use all three languages frequently and since I am a Chef I think about food and cooking in French but most of the rest of my thought processes are in English. My younger daughter still thinks in English even though she lives in France and is married to a Frenchman but her sister is French dominant. My younger children from a second wife (also French) speak French but not nearly as well as their older half-siblings and they do not know any italian to speak of (or should I say "speak in"?) I have studied a number of languages including Latin, Spanish, Sanskrit, German, Russian, Chinese and Japanese but I can only make myself understood in English, French, Italian and Spanish (und ein bissen deutsche):detective:
The answer to your question is "Yes, if you learn at least one supplementary language before you are nine or ten"