Dear Bilingual people

What language do you think in?

I asked my mom because her first language is in Spanish and her answer was “I don’t even know. I don’t even know if I think”

I spoke to a neurologist about this, and he told me that bilingual people have a drastically different thought process than monolinguals. 

The way he explained it, monolinguals think in patterns that represent the words they’re thinking of, whereas bilinguals think in a completely different language (an internal ‘third’ language if you will) and then translate from that third language to either one of their native languages.

Sounds about right.

Filtering the thought language into one of your fluent languages has its own tricks and hurdles to overcome. I’ve got a good vocabulary, so the words that are closest to the concepts I’m thinking in are the less-used ones. Explaining what I’m thinking in the smaller words people are used to takes a very long time, with a lot of repetition before someone finally understands.

I swear to God, I’m gonna kick the ass of the person who started #ExpoGate.

Not that I’m against the message, the Honey Badgers pretty much got robbed at the end of the day when you think about it; its just I’m really fucking tired of people putting -gate at the end of every controversy.

MetalGate DeflateGate ShirtGate EVEN FUCKING PIZZAGATE AND THAT WASN’T EVEN A CONTROVERSY!

I’m a GamerGater, and even I’m against putting -gate at every controversy. I really don’t like that above all else, THIS is what our legacy is gonna be.

Thanks, GamerGate…

At least the -gate suffix is serving as an easy shorthand for controversies.

Hearing a new keyword that’s floating around in the news is a bit confusing, since otherwise you wouldn’t be able to automatically know what the newsthread or event is about.

It has a valid linguistic purpose. The only limitation I’m seeing is the apparent necessity of needing a single word to prefix the -gate with.

Koko the gorilla, is a female gorilla who is able to understand more than 1000 signs on the the American Sign Language system and over 2000 words of spoken English. 

Koko had a pet kitten, which she received on her birthday on July 1984. It was noted that Koko cared for that kitten as if it were a little baby gorilla. The kitten one day escaped from Koko’s cage and was hit by a car.

When she was told of what happened, this is how she responded.

It was also noted that afterwards she made weeping sounds like a human.

You can watch the full video here

And for anyone whose interested in animal language, here’s an interesting article on researchers translating chimp language