Is it weird to hear english in other languages?

[wilson_ty]

I'm learning Japanese, and it's kinda weird whenever I hear them say something in English. Anyway, English has tons of loanwords, but at this point I'm probably just repeating what LiberalSquirrel said. Although you have to pronounce English words a certain way in Japanese, I think...

 

[Xaio30]

I almost shat my pants of laughter the first time I heard an english person say Smörgåsbord.

 

[Aardvark Soup]

To me it sounds really odd when you hear people from India mixing in a lot of English phrases (sometimes even full and correct English sentences) within their Hindi, a language that is completely incomprehensible to me.

 

[docsax]

You can blame the Normans and the French language for that. English rules are so convoluted because the language is the bastard child of Germanic and Romance languages, with years of arbitrary rules attempting to make it act like Latin. For example, the whole "thou shalt not end a sentence with a preposition" thing has no real bearing in the language, as evidenced by how incredibly awkward any sentence is that follows the rule.

As an interesting tangent, English pretty much sounds like Simlish to non-English speakers.
Check this out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZXcRqFmFa8 for it is awesome.

 

[Ashcrexl]

It really give me a heart attack whenever I hear Chinese teenagers in China saying "Fuck you" to each other in a heavy accent. and it took me a while to get used to "OK."

 

[Asti]

Oh, just listen to people on the train or other public places. It's all *turkish turkish turkish Autobahn turkish turkish SMS-Klingelton turkish turkish scheiße*

I think it's so funny. And I almost burst with laughter I heard "Gesundheit" said by an American the first time. They are really bad at pronouncing other languages.

 

[k-ossuburb]

It's not weird to me either. As others have said since English is basically rooted in the same places there are a lot of words that just became embedded in the public consciousness and are now part of that language.English basically borrows a lot from German, Italian, Latin and French; deja vu and arachnophobia, for example.

 

[Korolev]

Oh no. It's perfectly understandable. Languages often exchange words. English has a TON of French words - they were useful, so we grabbed em'. In my opinion, it made English better. We use the word Rendezvous instead of "Meet-up-time" - you can't deny that's an improvement!

It doesn't sound weird to me when I hear some French and German people say "weekend" or "jumbo" (yes, I heard a German student refer to the size of a burger as "Jumbo-Burger!" in between German words).

I like the German Language and I respect the French language as well (although I don't like to speak French very much). We borrowed a lot of words from you guys, so there's no problem if you borrow words from us!

 

[wooty]

Having just come back from Japan, I'd have to say that it is weird hearing english words over there. Most of the words are for products, but its still slightly off putting when trying to listen to someone say them.

 

[Hugga_Bear]

Yeah it is, when I was in India the language was completely foreign to me (my base is in Romantic languages, especially Spanish and Italian) but some words were distinctly English, they even pronounced them in a similar way. It always threw me a little.

I've heard it in some other languages, German was one iirc where it's quite common. It's weirder to hear exact words in otherwise foreign sounding languages. The similarities between Spanish/French/Italian/English are pretty obvious and a lot of words can be worked out without any prior knowledge if you speak just one but for some reason that's not as strange as hearing something completely foreign interspersed with recognizable words.

 

[Zhukov]

Weird? Nah. It's just kinda funny the way it jumps out at you.

I still remember hearing a greek person say "supermarket" when I was a kid.

 

[gertmenkel]

Not only English exchanges words with other languages. You have no idea how much English words there are in Dutch. For example, "coffeeshop" is a Dutch word, meaning "a store where you can by legal drugs".

Captcha: 102, owslos

 

[Hawkmoon269]

Well England, being the home of the Anglo-Saxons, means that it has a historical connection to the region that was made of the Germanic states, and is now modern day Germany. This shows in the language, because after the "end" of the Roman Empire in western europe, Latin usage was reduced in the Germanic region and their traditional dialects persevered.

Similarly, regions like Spain, France and Italy have lingual similarities because they retained the use of Latin more heavily, for some reason. Thats why their languages are called the "romance languages", while English and German are not.

Plus, in the medieval period French was the linga franca of Europe, so thats why we have words like rendezvous in English.

And seeing as all the people of these countries have just grown up using a variety of words of different historical and cultural background, i don't suppose they ever really find it out of the ordinary.

That said, i do find it a bit humorous when a person speaking welsh suddenly says something like "cafe" heh

 

[White_Lama]

I talk alot of english (daily infact) on ventrilo with my guildmates, so I don't think it sounds weird at all.

Giving them the challenge of saying my name and adress and hear them writhing in agony trying to do it, is on the other hand extremely funny.

If you wonder why my name and such would be hard for an english-speaking country, it is the following:

Name: Alexander Röjerås
Street: Täljknivsvägen
Town: Östervåla

(feel free to visit btw)

Now, reading that as an englishman is extremely funny to listen to. Or when you use the Swedish words ombudsman or smörgåsbord, because you say them entirely different than us.

 

[Thyunda]

It was quite weird hearing the words 'digital' and 'DVD' coming out of Slavic mouths as they spoke in their native languages. I believe she was speaking in Lithuanian, and they seemingly had no word for 'digital', so it came out in heavily-accented English.

 

[Staskala]

It doesn't sound weird to me when I hear some French and German people say "weekend" or "jumbo" (yes, I heard a German student refer to the size of a burger as "Jumbo-Burger!" in between German words).

Jumbo the elephant received international fame, so many languages adapted his name as a word for "very large". The name Jumbo was originally derived from the Swahili word "jambo" meaning Hello.
Burger is short for Hamburger, another short form for "Hamburg Steak", meat prepared in the style of the German city Hamburg that was brought to the US by German immigrants. Hamburger was later re-adapted into German as a word for American style beef patties.

Kinda funny how even simple words like "Jumbo-Burger" have an etymological background that can fill pages; an eternal back and forth from one language to another.

 

[Thaluikhain]

It does seem a bit weird, but really shouldn't. Even excluding the amount of loan words and cultural blending over the centuries, English is one of a large number of languages with old Indo-European roots.

Also, it makes sense for words for new things to be adopted worldwide, rather than each language adopt a new word for a new concept.

 

[emeraldrafael]

No, not particularly. Each one is just a variation of the other, and each has a large rooting in latin (what doesnt [dont answer, dont care]).

not that I know latin, just, when you look at how Europe is set up (a large country, all at relatively the same latitudinal lines), so information is easy to pass and travel, thus, language is easy and influences other languages. Its not like countries like the US, where there wasnt a universal like native American language, cause it was a similar sized country, but longitudinal lines, making different climates and environments.

 

[funguy2121]

Today I've read this [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_German_expressions_in_English] article and I was surprised how many german words also exist in the english language. For me it's kinda weird to hear german words when talking to somebody english. Then I noticed that I also use many english words when talking german. And I use many of them. My question is is it strange for you to hear english words in other languages, f.e. german?

Nope. Not since the first time I heard a Latino utter the words "los bluejeans."