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Indian white man talk


Rye Miles #13621

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I wonder if the Indians or Native Americans if you wish, really talked English like they did in the movies and TV shows. You know like, "Me want big gun like white eyes" or "We smoke'um pipe now, you sit". 

You get my drift. 

 

Is this just a Hollywood thing?? Me thinks it is!:P

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They always speak English to Matt Dillon, not to themselves so much!

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Exactly. You use the words you know, which aren't necessarily the words that I would use.

 

Friend of mine had a Russian wife. And I noticed that whenever she tried some new food, she would say it was tasty. Not that it was good, or delicious, or even yum yum. "This is tasty." Then it occurred to me one day that tasty was the only term she knew for something tasted good. Because she didn't speak English very well.

 

I also noticed when he would talk to her that he sounded quite a bit like Tonto. "We go store now." Not "we WILL go", or "go TO the store". We go store.

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6 minutes ago, Alpo said:

Exactly. You use the words you know, which aren't necessarily the words that I would use.

 

Friend of mine had a Russian wife. And I noticed that whenever she tried some new food, she would say it was tasty. Not that it was good, or delicious, or even yum yum. "This is tasty." Then it occurred to me one day that tasty was the only term she knew for something tasted good. Because she didn't speak English very well.

 

I also noticed when he would talk to her that he sounded quite a bit like Tonto. "We go store now." Not "we WILL go", or "go TO the store". We go store.

Interesting, my grandmother didn’t speak English very well at all and she would constantly throw in Italian words because she didn’t know certain English words. She never sounded like Tonto though :lol:

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26 minutes ago, Alpo said:

Exactly. You use the words you know, which aren't necessarily the words that I would use.

 

Friend of mine had a Russian wife. And I noticed that whenever she tried some new food, she would say it was tasty. Not that it was good, or delicious, or even yum yum. "This is tasty." Then it occurred to me one day that tasty was the only term she knew for something tasted good. Because she didn't speak English very well.

 

I also noticed when he would talk to her that he sounded quite a bit like Tonto. "We go store now." Not "we WILL go", or "go TO the store". We go store.

Oh yes, vkusna, вкусно, tasty. A very commonly used word in Russian.

 

there are other words that either don’t exist in Russian or are rarely used. The present tense to be verb, I am, you are, etc. it takes a long time before a Russian learns to use it in English or any other language.

 

———-

the official transliteration would be vkusno, but like spasibo, the final o is pronounced a.

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My company used to fly me down to Puerto Rico. They would fly me into San Juan, so I could see my daughter and my grandkids, and then I would take the governor's retirement plan to Aguadilla on the other end of the island.

 

The "governor's retirement plan" was a toll highway. But the tolls did not go to pay for the road. Road was paid for. The tolls just went into the government coffers. And according to the locals it was used to fund the governor's retirement plan.

 

Anyway. First time I was down there, I spent the night with my daughter, then drove down to Aguadilla and spent the week there, then drove back to San Juan and spend another night with my daughter and then flew back to Florida.

 

When filling out my expense report they wanted to know where the receipts for the tolls were. I had gotten receipts for the restaurants and the motel bill in the car rental, but it never occurred to me to get receipts at the toll booth. So every trip after that I made sure I got receipts.

 

If I was asking for a receipt in English, I would say, "May I have a receipt please?" What I said down there, however, was "recibo por favor" - receipt please.

 

It was not that I wanted to talk like Tonto. I simply did not know how to say "may I have a" in Spanish.

 

And I had to look up receipt the first time. :P

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English can be a very difficult language for a non-English speaker to learn. Most of our verbs are somewhere in the middle of a sentence, whereas they may be at the end. Then, even English-speakers can have different terminology than Americans.  My daughter has been in DC accompanying our granddaughter for a student conference. While in the hotel the other day, a lady approached my daughter and asked where the "lift" is. It took my daughter a few seconds to realize the lady was from England and was asking for the elevator!

 

Years ago, I was interning at an aerospace company which had a young Frenchman, who had learned English in France. He was explaining to me that I had to "smoof" the curves that represented test data points.  I said, "You mean we have to finagle the curves?"  He replied, "Fee-nagel? What means 'fee-nagel'?"   For that matter, different regions in the U.S. have different terminology, e.g., the term for carbonated beverages, especially if ice cream is added. You want a soda? Like Coca Cola? Or an ice cream soda? Toe-mA-toe, Toe-Mah-Toe!  Let's call the whole thing off! :P

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From personal experiences, Duffield nailed it. You use the words you know. My friends and relatives who come to visit, still speak the language broken and keep sentences as short as possible when speaking English. But when the wife isn't around we break into our native language, only because the wife understands little and speaks it a little.

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1 hour ago, Trailrider #896 said:

English can be a very difficult language for a non-English speaker to learn.

Even native born seem to be having a harder and harder time learning English.

 

Reminds me - I was watching something the other night (Mysteries at the museum???) and they were talking about how poor a speller President Theodore Roosevelt was.  Said his wife was constantly teasing him about it.

 

Anyways, seems he signed an executive order in 1906 that directed government offices to use new spellings of specific words that the Simplified Spelling Board had come up with.

 

https://www.history.com/news/theodore-roosevelt-spelling-controversy

 

https://www.thoughtco.com/teddy-roosevelt-simplifies-spelling-1779197

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My Grandfather spoke English - liberally interlaced with "sumnavitch" - depending if it sounded pleasant - it was good, but if it sounded angry - it was bad.  I about cracked up when he spoke to the pastor and said "Gotdm dat's one fine sumnavitch serman."  Pastor was familiar with the population which mostly spoke that way and took the compliment - :-)

 

My neighbor, from Poland, spoke pretty much the same way.  He never used the word "I", it was always "me." Like "Me go store" or "Me say"  He was a good neighbor - I miss him.

 

STL Suomi

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Col. McCormick, owner and publisher of the Chicago Tribune, back in the 40's and 50's, tried to get people to simplify spelling.  For example, the Trib used "nite" instead of night, and others I can't remember.  But, they didn't catch on.

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If you read Tim McCoy remembers the West, he tells of many Indians using sign language, as it was universal. He learned sign language and a new world of stories and friends opened up to him.

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My Grandfather spoke fluent and nearly accent less English.  He became a citizen as quickly as he could.  My Grandmother spoke with a heavy Germán accent to the end of her days and never cared.  There were a variety of Indians who were scholars and leaders as well, and probably spoke better English than most.  I had never read that TR was a poor speller, and I made something of a study of the man, could be.  One of TR's few failures was the introduction of simplified spelling more here.  https://www.history.com/news/theodore-roosevelt-spelling-controversy

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5 hours ago, Sedalia Dave said:

Given that all the "Indians" in the old westerns were mostly Italian immigrants......

Like Iron Eyes Cody

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Eyes_Cody#/media/File:Iron_Eyes_Cody-Roy_Rogers_in_North_of_the_Great_Divide.jpg

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I’m reminded of the scene in Stripes when Harold Ramis was teaching the language class to immigrants and he asked if anyone knew any English. 
One guy raised his hand and said, “Sh**, Fu**, Son of B****”

:lol:

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Joe was driving to California and stopped in an Indian reservation for lunch. There was an old Indian there with a sign, “I remember everything, ask me a question.”

 

Joe asked, “What did you have for breakfast?” The Indian said, “Eggs.” Joe left a tip in the tip jar and continued on his way.

 

Months later Joe was returning home and stopped and figured he would ask a tougher question, walked up to the Indian, raised his hand and said “How.” The Indian said, “Fried.”

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I used to go to northern Quebec province in Canada numerous times on family fishing trips.  Being that French was the official language of the province, I made a concerted effort to go back to school and re-learn French.  Even though my ability with the language was not the best, it seemed to elicit a fair amount of respect from the locals  

 

Part of the fun of learning another language is being able to razz the locals in their own language.  One day in fishing camp I was on a cabin porch with 2 of my uncles.  All of a sudden a young lady came out of the camp office building carrying a mop.  I had met her before and knew she worked at the camp and spoke little, if any, English.  She proceeded to go down to the lake and starting dunking the mop in the lake.  This was too good to pass up, so in my best college French I called out, "Hey, nous boisson cette eau (Hey, we drink that water)!"   She laughed and went back to the office, so I was pretty sure she understood me.

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Many years ago was visiting Canada with a family who were Naturalized French.  The mother was a graduate of the finest Schools in France.  The locals in backwoods Quebec would pretend they couldn't understand her.  To this day grateful, she had the patience to coach me enough to pass HS French and graduate.

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