![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2gnXvVQ:
I have a lot of headcanons about this! I actually think Poe’s primary language is English. His parents both spoke both, his father slightly preferring Spanish, but his peers mostly were monolingual-English, especially once he was in school, and once he left home he only ever used Spanish in phone calls to home and very occasional conversations with other mostly-bilingual people. I have this headcanon both in this AU and in the main SW verse I write in!
So it makes sense that he’d have the habit of speaking to the cats in English, I think.
dotsandfoxes replied:
My comfortably trilingual friend always talks to puppies in her first language, Portuguese. I suppose I would feel self-conscious speaking to a cat in German or French, but I can’t tell if that has more to do with the cat or with me. It definitely feels weird to imagine saying “Bonjour” or “Grüezi” to a cat like I’d greet a colleague, when I should be saying “Hiiiiii you’re so pretty, what a lovely kitty you are.”
wyomingnot replied:
I adopted one of my cats as an adult, the other was a kitten. They’d both been in exclusively Chinese-language environments before they came to my home. I (obviously) have only ever spoken to them in English. They seemed to understand as much as any cat acts like they know/care what you’re saying. but i don’t know if tht’s what you were looking at in the first place.
ineptshieldmaid replied:
I have always been convinced that all cats speak French…
Ha ha, excellent perspectives!
The sister whose cats are actually featured in this AU is monolingual, like me– she took French in high school instead of Spanish like me, and actually picked up a lot of Spanish over the years working in places with high Spanish-speaking minorities (most recently, Colorado), so she actually calls her cats “Gatos!” sometimes, it’s one of the things she yells when she comes into the apartment if they’re not waiting for her. And we both have a few phrases in other languages that we use to be funny.
She probably started calling them “gatos” because in elementary school we both learned a song called “Señor Don Gato” and she, because of her freakish memory, actually retained all the words– it was in English and was very fakey-ethnic, but the kind of thing you learn in elementary school music class– anyway, I had assumed I’d invented the memory of that song, but she sings it to our niece all the time, it’s weird as hell.
It’s possible my cat speaks French, that could explain why I attempt to speak fake French to her so often. I don’t actually speak a word of French, I’ve never even begun to master the concept of how they pronounce things, so I couldn’t say. (As a child I considered myself gifted at linguistics, but I learned otherwise when I tried to study WWI history and encountered the place names of all the battles. Ypres? you have to be fucking kidding me.)
I have a lot of headcanons about this! I actually think Poe’s primary language is English. His parents both spoke both, his father slightly preferring Spanish, but his peers mostly were monolingual-English, especially once he was in school, and once he left home he only ever used Spanish in phone calls to home and very occasional conversations with other mostly-bilingual people. I have this headcanon both in this AU and in the main SW verse I write in!
So it makes sense that he’d have the habit of speaking to the cats in English, I think.
dotsandfoxes replied:
My comfortably trilingual friend always talks to puppies in her first language, Portuguese. I suppose I would feel self-conscious speaking to a cat in German or French, but I can’t tell if that has more to do with the cat or with me. It definitely feels weird to imagine saying “Bonjour” or “Grüezi” to a cat like I’d greet a colleague, when I should be saying “Hiiiiii you’re so pretty, what a lovely kitty you are.”
wyomingnot replied:
I adopted one of my cats as an adult, the other was a kitten. They’d both been in exclusively Chinese-language environments before they came to my home. I (obviously) have only ever spoken to them in English. They seemed to understand as much as any cat acts like they know/care what you’re saying. but i don’t know if tht’s what you were looking at in the first place.
ineptshieldmaid replied:
I have always been convinced that all cats speak French…
Ha ha, excellent perspectives!
The sister whose cats are actually featured in this AU is monolingual, like me– she took French in high school instead of Spanish like me, and actually picked up a lot of Spanish over the years working in places with high Spanish-speaking minorities (most recently, Colorado), so she actually calls her cats “Gatos!” sometimes, it’s one of the things she yells when she comes into the apartment if they’re not waiting for her. And we both have a few phrases in other languages that we use to be funny.
She probably started calling them “gatos” because in elementary school we both learned a song called “Señor Don Gato” and she, because of her freakish memory, actually retained all the words– it was in English and was very fakey-ethnic, but the kind of thing you learn in elementary school music class– anyway, I had assumed I’d invented the memory of that song, but she sings it to our niece all the time, it’s weird as hell.
It’s possible my cat speaks French, that could explain why I attempt to speak fake French to her so often. I don’t actually speak a word of French, I’ve never even begun to master the concept of how they pronounce things, so I couldn’t say. (As a child I considered myself gifted at linguistics, but I learned otherwise when I tried to study WWI history and encountered the place names of all the battles. Ypres? you have to be fucking kidding me.)
