xkcd #2942: Fluid Speech
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Thank you to linguist Gretchen McCulloch for teaching me about phonetic assimilation, and for teaching me that if you stand around in public reading texts from a linguist and murmuring example phrases to yourself, people will eventually ask if you’re okay.
I once met a girl in a bar who spoke such absolutely perfect and grammatically correct German she did sound like an alien impersonating a human.
Or someone who very much wants to show that she’s better than you.
Turns out she wasn’t from Germany at all. She was an immigrant from Slovakia, who had learnt German at such a high level that it sounded weird.
I’ve had Americans ask me the meaning of words I’ve used in a sentence. Like “what’s tranquil?” (I’m non-native.)
I blame reading.
I once did an English language vocabulary test that yielded that I’m amongst the top 0.01% in terms of amount of English-language vocabulary.
English is not my mother tongue and I still and often make mistakes in the use of “in”-vs-“on” or even in certain forms of past tense.
However I read a lot in English, in various areas of knowledge, plus it turns out lots of really obscure words in English are pretty much the same as a the word in some other language I know or even pretty much the Latin word, so when I didn’t know that was the English word for that, I can often guess the meaning.
All this to say that I absolutelly agree with you that it’s a reading thing, plus at more specialized language level, the “knowledge of foreign languages” also has some impact.
Got called a rich kid for knowing the word “carafe.” Pretty sure I learned it from a book, my parents didn’t have carafe with mountain spring water or some shit around the house.
I learned it trying to fix a coffee maker. It’s news to me that it ain’t a coffee specific word.
I learned that word from my dad when I was a child. we kept a carafe in the refrigerator designated for water. It’s a wine carafe but can put anything in it. My dad was an alcoholic so he had a wine carafe and a lot of other alcohol-related accoutrements like beer steins.