Your intrepid correspondent, being presently in the land of Heine and Heino, thought he would ask a couple of friends who have read plenty of English literature in German translation, and the answer is exactly as Herr Jetzt suggests: that a good rule of thumb is to place the transition where in the English text the relationship switches to first-name terms, if it does. It doesn't always work exactly like that of course, but you'd know that already.

Sorry, I said it all wrong.
Russian past starts right after I saw something.
For example: if the car just passed by it is in the past already.
I saw you today. I wrote my last post already.

English present lasts longer.

There has been much controversy on that point and it isn't going to stop any time soon. Early on in the development of linguistics as a science, Benjamin Lee Whorf and Edward Sapir, studying Native American languages, developed what came to be known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis which, to put it simply, holds that patterns of language determine patterns of thought.

George Steiner, himself multilingual, in his After Babel - aspects of language and translation (which is a very thought-provoking but non-technical book and was my introduction to the whole subject), attacks this idea head-on; Chomsky on the other hand doesn't, although it's clear that his theory of linguistic universals would imply that Sapir and Whorf had things the wrong way around. As a non-specialist but interested party I tend to go with Chomsky on this question. His ideas have been criticised on the grounds that they emerge from study of a restricted range of languages and prinicipally English, but that situation is in the process of being filled out, even if some of the results seem to contradict the "strong" version of generative grammar. It may be a too intractably complex situation for science to deal with.

As for Wittgenstein, I don't know his work so well though I suspect he has something of Heidegger's (explicitly stated!) belief that German is a better language than others for doing philosophy in.

My daughter has been "bilingual from birth" and I am pretty sure she doesn't think of herself as having two personalities determined by the two languages she speaks. In fact every stage in her acquisition of language has tended to convince me that there's a deep truth in Chomsky's theory, even if the details are still confused.

It is, though, still just about in use in Yorkshire and a couple of other places, and among Quakers (how true is that? I've never heard it myself).

I did not want to say baby language. I meant underdeveloped language that is very childish and not rich in idioms. Children pick a lot of these things from school.
Also some prononciation could be with an accent after the child is five years old.

They also make many mistakes and are corrected.

When we lived in the USA there was no possibility to visit Russia, so the children of immigrants spoke with different degree of accent and wrong intonation.
After the fall of the USSR many immigrants started to go back to Russia to visit. There were some opportunities for children to go to study or even work in Russia. (or visit the family if they were little).
They had advantage of knowing English and were very usefu for companies.

If they studied they would have initial difficult period, they were usually behind academically, but after some period they would adjust. Because they interacted with other students they would pick up a lot of new expressions.

They could adjust and blend easily because they had the basics, prononciation would improve, vocabulary grow etc.




In Russia aristocrats spoke French mostly.
They were not Russians to a various degrees.

There were some that were completely French with a little bit of Russian character and behaviour thrown in.
There were mostly Russian characters with a bit of a French sprinckled for good measure.

One feel completely different characters in Nabokov family who was from English speaking family.

He is equal kind of Russian and English. I don't know how it is possible to be both.

When he was little he had a Russian nanny of course (wet nurse). There were peasants all around them and the family was Russian of course. They had no accent when they spoke. They probably spoke French too.

I can not express or formulate the difference that I feel was there.


There was German influence in among Russian nobility too. Of course many of them spoke several languages.

One cannot generalize, plus contrary to what people may think, I was born after Revolution and never met any of these people.

Perhaps I should stop before I say something completely wrong.

Some American Quakers still use thee/thou - particularly among the older generation.

As an infrequent attnder of Meetings (and as a technical Quaker but not a practising one), I can confirm that they don't. Use 'thee' and 'thou', I mean. But Strina's right about old-school American Quakers - I've heard that - and it applies to other sects too, such as the Shakers.

I attended a Quaker school in the States for 14 years (although relatively few of the students or faculty were actual practicing Quakers, and I was not among them) and never heard thee/thou at all except in some old-fashioned ceremonial contexts.