So, I was talking to griffen.

[conuly]

He's apparently started to internalize ASL, which is just *so cool*, and I said it must be his "natural language". I just invented that to mean that this was easier for him to think in than many other languages, but it started me thinking - is it normal to have an internal cue towards a certain type of language structure - even when it's not your own?

Ages back, I started (but never finished, or even did very much with) a conlang that formed verbs from everything. Even though this never went anywhere, and I was done with it within a few days, since then I think things in terms of "bed-going" or "door-closing". It's just easier to say "I door-closed" than "I closed the door". Clearly, this isn't normal English structure. I'm a monolingual speaker (more's the pity...). So why do I find it easier to use this foreign construction? I shouldn't, should I? But I definitely do.

Comments

[farraige.livejournal.com]

I think the main reason is economy and whether you believe in thinking in mentalese or in English (I'm strictly a mentalese advocate). Also, I wouldn't forget about the semantic-pragmatic issues common amidst our kind and what it entails: whether your language is speaker-first or cognition-first. I suspect it's speaker-first, as in my case. Fluent speakers though we may be, we frequently incorporate cross-linguistic parsing and output (hence case studies of autistics speaking with an accent not associated with their geographical location or even their parents' accents). You may be reaching out for a parser that allows you to bring a minimal structure, like, ultimately a morpheme, and a semantic unit together -- which is what Oriental languages do. Oh they're very, very economical from that point of view.