On 27 Sep 98 at 12:39, Rachel wrote:
> Illias,
> I touch-type in Russian and also (more or less) in Hebrew, and I
> have the same problem, particularly Russian-English and vice versa,
> although going back to English is a lot easier.
interesting, though the switch is never really easy for me.
> When I'm typing
> both in the same document (e.g. a vocabulary list) I can really get
> my fingers tangled up.
:-) I know the feeling...
> The Hebrew is another matter, especially since when I'm typing in
> an
> American program I have to do it backwards, which is letter by
> letter and not word by word.
wow! It seems to be too time consuming. There's no other way?
> The new issue of American Psychologist has an article on reading
> Serbo-Croatian in Cyrillic and Roman. I haven't had a chance to
> really go through it but it looks interesting.
thanx for the tip; will try to have a look at it (if only I knew
when)...
One other thing I remember is that when I started learning Dutch a
couple of years ago I used to type in some short homework essays,
usally a paragraph or two. I touch type pretty fast in English so I
had assumed that it wouldn't be any different in Dutch, but guess
what? Typing a paragraph in Dutch usually took about 5 minutes! At
that point I truly realized what touch-typing was all about: it was
about learning to type fast certain strings of letters (other than
knowing the position of the keys of course). In fact I remember my
touch typing teacher mentioning something like this but I sure wasn't
paying attention, cause I thought that memorizing the position of
letters/keys in the rows was more important. Of course, by the time
I achived this, I had already practiced hundreds of times
certain combinations so I could not realize that
combinations are truly important in touch typing. Dutch has a lot of
vowel-vowel and voewel-consonant combinations which are rather
atypical of English, e.g. aa; ee; ui; ij; vl etc. I remember it
required some conscious practice to get used to them so that I
could type with decent speed.
Ken's mail brought something else to mind as well. Speaking of
computers, most of the terminology is of course English-based
(e.g. boot; drive; directory; hard disk ; floppy; monitor etc) and
this comes as no surprise, since as a cultural tool it was developed
in England and the United States. What is rather interesting and fits
into Jim's discussion of 'resistence', is how different cultures
object to the fact that too many English terms are introduced into
language (introduction of words is called 'invasion'; hence the
expression that English is a culturally imperialistic tool).
Different languages deal with the problem in different ways. For
example to surf the net is 'oanoeUEnu' (literally surf) in Greek while
it is 'interneten' in Dutch; to download a file is 'eaoaaUEeeu'
(literally bring or pull down) in Greek while it is 'downloaden' in
Dutch. Sometimes the stem is preserved and transformed into a verb or
noun; sometimes it is simply translated.
The point is that most of
the time there is no agreed upon definition of how a term is
officially translated into Greek (or Dutch for that matter). [Of
course this type of official translation is effected by a certain
type of authority again which can sanction a specific definition,
sometimes arbitrarily, and this in itself raises a lot of questions].
The funny thing is that all these English terms constitute some sort
of genre and if you want to sound knowledgeable in both Dutch and
Greek chances are that you're gonna use them in their genuine English
form cause this type of behavior exhibits certain knowledge and is
associated with some type of power. The power stems from the use of
a foreign term/word.
Regards,
Ilias
_______________________________________________
Ilias Karasavvidis
Department of Curriculum Technology
Faculty of Educational Science and Technology
University of Twente, P.O. Box 217
7500 AE Enschede, The Netherlands
Voice: +31534894473
Fax: +31534892895
Email: Karasavvidis who-is-at edte.utwente.nl
http://130.89.40.26/www
http://130.89.40.26/ilias
"The ancient Greeks did not know the main thing
about themselves, that they were ancient Greeks"
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin
_______________________________________________