I recently watched an episode of a US TV
series where one of the characters was a foreign woman. Now, firstly, it is
beyond idiotic to suggest that a person with an obviously Serbocroatian name is
Armenian, but it is forgivable, considering that the Yankers are barely capable
of telling Africa from Australia. What is not forgivable is the constant
depicting of East Europeans as linguistic retards.
That woman understood all the questions posed
to her without difficulty, and answered them in clearly accented but fluent
English. More than that, she was even capable of being sarcastic in English.
Yet, she kept mixing up singular and plural forms of nouns, as well as always
used the present tense of verbs instead of the past tense ("was"
being the only exception).
It was not this one episode. I suddenly
realised that I keep seeing that kind of offending rubbish in one Yanker movie
after another.
Now, it would be believable if East Asians
found it confusing to use the plural and the past tense, as their languages are
even more primitive than English. However, to suggest that an East European
would do that is a fucking insult. Actually, the opposite is true – an East
European would find it confusing that in English one often has to use one and the
same grammatical form for concepts that are clearly different from each other.
There are occasions where singular and plural
can easily be mixed up. For instance:
1. Some languages say "everybody
is..." and some languages say "everybody are...". One can easily
fail to pay attention to that in a foreign language and so say it the wrong
way.
2. In some languages the verb "fell"
in the phrase "Two people fell off the truck" is in singular and in
some languages in the plural. (No distinction in English; the German equivalent
would be "fiel" vs. "fielen".) Again, a person whose
knowledge of a foreign language is insufficient, might get it wrong.
However, a speaker of a language with a
grammar much more complicated than English is very unlikely to say things like
"Is our children learning?" (attributed to one of the recent
presidents of the USA), or use the present tense when talking about the past,
which, judging by movies and novels, is commonplace among the native English speakers.
Now, I have been in a situation where I used
present tense instead of past. I had to explain myself to a person who could
speak only Spanish, and my Spanish is really very basic. I simply haven't
learned the past tense. So I had to use the verbs in the present tense, and my
listener was somewhat confused, but I succeeded in making clear that I was
talking about the past. It goes without saying, though, that by the time I will
have become fluent enough in Spanish to actually hold a conversation, I will
inevitably have learned how to build the past tense. With the kind of English
fluency that woman in that TV series had, it is unimaginable that she would
have been unable to use the past tense (or, for that matter, chosen not to).
Quite on the contrary – when we are speaking a
language that doesn't have the past tense, we feel uncomfortable having to use
the same word for the present and the past. We have been used to using separate
grammatical forms for the present and the past since we were little children,
so in a language where we can't do that we are constantly worried of not being
properly understood. There isn't a snowball's chance in hell that we would
intentionally refrain from using the past tense grammatical forms when talking
about the past.
Neither is it plausible that an East European
would be too stupid to learn something as simple as adding "s" to the
end of a noun for plural and not adding it for singular. It is thinkable that a
native English speaker would make many mistakes with, say, Russian noun plural
endings, but not the other way around.
It is disgusting how the Yanker writers make
their East European characters speak grammarless Pidgin English. There are so
many things they could plausibly get wrong. They might say "Do you listening?"
instead of "Are you listening?" They might find it hard to decide between "He
works" and "He is working". They might confuse "stop to
smell the roses" with "stop smelling the roses". But to make them randomly add "s" to the end of a word when it's
not supposed to be there or omit it when it has to be there is ludicrous.
No comments:
Post a Comment