Hudo
. Sploh tale humanitarna
. Priznam, da sicer angleščino zelo dobro obvladam, se pa nikoli nisem toliko poglabljala vanjo. No pa v razmislek tole (sem ravno danes dobila na mail):
Del intervjuja z angleško govorečim prebivalcem Slovenije (žal ni napisano s kom):
Speaking of which: How is your Slovene?
Catastrophic. Learning Slovene is a long, hard road into Hell. And it’s made worse by the fact that Slovenes rarely appreciate how difficult it is. They’ll tell you things like: “Yeah, it’s hard, huh? Pronouncing the ž and č? and everything. That’s tough.”
No, no, my friend, saying “ch” is the least of my problems. I’ll tell you what’s tough: six cases, endless gender declensions, formal and informal divisions, the dual grammatical form — all of it spoken in 32 dialects that are further divided into 76 sub-groups. That’s my definition of tough.
It can’t be that bad.
Well, let me give you an idea. Imagine that you want to ask someone if they’ve eaten something for lunch. In English, the phrase:
Did you eat anything?
pretty much covers every imaginable scenario. You can say that to a woman, to a man, to your pet hamster, to your boss, to a group of circus clowns, etc…
In a language like German (usually considered difficult to learn) you have three possibilities to express the same idea. You would say:
1. Hast du was gegessen? (informal)
2. Haben Sie was gegessen? (formal)
3. Habt ihr was gegessen? (plural)
In other words, German requires triple the possiblities to express the same idea. But note that the verb “to eat” (gegessen) remains the same in all three cases. Now let’s take a look at Slovene, in which everything changes depending on the number of people you’re asking, as well as their gender AND if you’re using formal or not. Behold the possibilities:
1. Si kaj jedel? (one male, informal)
2. Si kaj jedla? (one female, informal)
3. Si kaj jedlo? (neuter form, informal)
4. Sta kaj jedla? (two males, informal or formal)
5. Sta kaj jedli? (two females, informal or formal)
6. Sta kaj jedla? (one male and one female, informal or formal)
7. Ste kaj jedli? (plural, as long as at least one male is present)
8. Ste kaj jedle? (plural, females only)
9. Ste kaj jedla? (plural, neuter form)
10. Ste kaj jedli? (formal, singular form, gender unimportant)
That’s decuple the possibilities of the original English phrase. To be fair, sometimes things work in favor of Slovene. For example, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Two Towers can be expressed by a single word: Stolpa. But basically, all words (nouns/verbs/adjectives) conjugate in a hellish variety of possibilities, making the language a very tough nut to crack.
No pa še "slovenska" prigodica mojega malčka:
Lani pozimi smo s prijateljico in njeno hčerko skupaj obiskali Atlantis. Po končani mokri zabavi se je seveda treba stuširat, umit lase, jih posušit,... Starejši sin in prijateljičina hči sta se hitro sama oblekla in si tekla sušit lase, jaz pa sem oblekla mlajšega sina. Ko je bil oblečen je tekel za ostalima, ki sta si že pridno sušila laske. Ker pa sam ni dosegel sušilca se naenkrat čez celo garderobo glasno zadere: "Mami jaz bi se tudi fental!!!"
lp
T.
