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English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)

antirez.com

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Re: English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)

#191

Post by vorg »

DanBC wrote: post #117
xanderstrike wrote: post #21

As a native English speaker, I can understand pretty much every other native English speaker (though I may struggle a bit with Cockney or Nigerian english, the point gets across). I'm also pretty good at Spanish, and living in Southern California I mostly hear the Mexican accent. When I hear Argentinian or Cuban Spanish, I have no fucking clue what's going on. Does that mean Spanish is phonetically broken? It, like I…

> I'd argue the "phonetically broken" nature of English has more to do with his learning it as a second language than anything intrinsically wrong with English. ough: Bough (ow), Though (oh), through (oo), thorough (uh), rough (uff), cough (off), hiccough (up) That's broken.

"Hiccough" is spelt "hiccup" by nearly everyone nowadays. In comic books, "though" is often spelt "tho", and "through" spelt "thru". The US and UK should get together and create a small language spelling reform group to suggest more such changes to the 20% of words that cause 80% of the problems, e.g. changing "thorough" to "thuruh", "rough" to "ruff", and "cough" to "coff".

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)

#192

Post by adimitrov »

freedryk wrote: post #60
metafunctor wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English does not have a simple set of rules for pronunciation or dictation. Spelling bees don't exist for most languages, but it's a thing for English. So yes, I'd say English is “phonetically broken”, if that means it's difficult to figure out how to convert from spoken words to text and vice versa. I am not a linguist, but I speak English, Swedish, Finnish, Japanese, and German. English does seem to be an unusually…

This is so true. It's even worse than spelling bees though. Dyslexia is less of a problem for non-english speakers because our writing system is so messed up. We we have letters that not only represent multiple sounds, but redundantly duplicate the sound of other letter combos (c->k,s; x->z,ks; q->kw). We have multiple letter combos for single phonemes (ch, sh, th). "th" actually represents two phonemes--compare "the…

I'm usually the first one to jump on the English-spelling-is-atrocious bandwagon, but you're not presenting very convincing arguments here:

* c being pronounced either /k/ or /s/ is a perfectly common process called assibilation [1]. Compare Italian "centro" /ch/ as in change, vs. "casa", /k/, as in can't. The general rule is /s/ before e, i, /k/ otherwise. English is relatively regular here.

* x as /z/ is probably some sort of assimilation process when the /s/ in /ks/ would be +voiced. Another reason to pronounce it that way is that anglophones dislike complex onsets (try pronouncing "Dvorak." It's very difficult for English natives not to insert a Schwa /ə/ between /d/ and /v/.

* q as /kw/ is from Latin and most languages using the Latin alphabet retain it in some form.

Letter combos for single phonemes are common as hell. Compare German 'sch', or 'st', Italian 'sci' etc.

"th" representing both voiced and unvoiced interdental fricatives is what's called an "allophone" [2]. Again, this is super duper common, and, off the top of my head, I can't come up with a language without allophones, and I'd require serious proof for the claim that there exists one.

English spelling is a mess, though. But mostly because it's terribly inconsistent. There are several poems about it, which illustrate the point nicely, for example, the Chaos Poem [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assibilation

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allophone

[3] http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)

#193

Post by vorg »

skuhn wrote: post #182
ajmurmann wrote: post #175

One interesting thing to me I the comments to the original article was the mentioning of the weird "have got" instead of just "have" you learn in European schools. I hadn't thought about it since I started learning English I school in Germany many, many years ago. I think even the teachers dropped that in later classes. But I remember always having to say stuff like "I have got an apple" instead of just "I have an ap…

No one would ever say "have got", it's the sort of redundancy that naturally gets distilled down to the minimum required in everyday language. I imagine this sort of focus on technically correct but functionally useless things is pretty common when studying languages. I took a few years of German in school, and literally 25% of our time was spent memorizing the various forms of der and matching nouns to them. I haven…

I never say "I have got an apple", but also hardly ever say "I have an apple". I virtually always say "I've got an apple", or even "I got an apple" if talking really quickly and informally. I'm from New Zealand.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)

#194

Post by gotchange »

freedryk wrote: post #60
metafunctor wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English does not have a simple set of rules for pronunciation or dictation. Spelling bees don't exist for most languages, but it's a thing for English. So yes, I'd say English is “phonetically broken”, if that means it's difficult to figure out how to convert from spoken words to text and vice versa. I am not a linguist, but I speak English, Swedish, Finnish, Japanese, and German. English does seem to be an unusually…

This is so true. It's even worse than spelling bees though. Dyslexia is less of a problem for non-english speakers because our writing system is so messed up. We we have letters that not only represent multiple sounds, but redundantly duplicate the sound of other letter combos (c->k,s; x->z,ks; q->kw). We have multiple letter combos for single phonemes (ch, sh, th). "th" actually represents two phonemes--compare "the…

The letter overloading trait is not exclusive to the English language as it's featured in numerous other languages but the problem with English is there's no clear rules governing the pronunciation of these letters. It's totally arbitrary.

Take for example, "charity" and "charisma", the /ch/ combo here would fool any beginner in pronouncing the latter as the regular sound and not as a /k/ and there's no solution for this problem but to memorize the words as you encounter making the whole experience of learning a new foreign language tedious and horrible.

A reform of English orthography is long overdue esp. if it's going to stay as a lingua franca for quite some time to come.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)

#195

Post by ams6110 »

vorg wrote: post #191
DanBC wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd argue the "phonetically broken" nature of English has more to do with his learning it as a second language than anything intrinsically wrong with English. ough: Bough (ow), Though (oh), through (oo), thorough (uh), rough (uff), cough (off), hiccough (up) That's broken.

"Hiccough" is spelt "hiccup" by nearly everyone nowadays. In comic books, "though" is often spelt "tho", and "through" spelt "thru". The US and UK should get together and create a small language spelling reform group to suggest more such changes to the 20% of words that cause 80% of the problems, e.g. changing "thorough" to "thuruh", "rough" to "ruff", and "cough" to "coff".

It's happening by default anyway. Schools now encourage "inventive spelling" rather than correct spelling, so you have kids in 8th grade who can't spell basic words correctly but rather they write them how they sound.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)

#196

Post by vorg »

shockzzz wrote: post #41

> One of the things that shocked me the most with my experience with the English language is how not mastering a language can switch you into an introvert. Too real. I've spent some time in Italy where, due to my broken Italian, I was very much so an introvert. People noticed it too when Americans would come by and I'd talk to them - they said I "became a different person."

When I studied on a Chinese language course last year, they encourage you to "speak Chinese only" and most of my classmates spoke better Chinese than me, so I ended up not speaking much to them so as not to burden them.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)

#197

Post by kansface »

toyg wrote: post #125

Another Italian checking in, agreeing with everything Antirez says. I've been living in England for 13 years, but talking to inner-city-ghetto youth to order a mcburger can still be a hellish experience. English is the QWERTY of languages: historically messed up for reasons that don't matter anymore, but an imprescindible standard enjoying unmatched global popularity. It's simple enough to allow non-natives to achiev…

imprescindible is not a word (in english at least) :P

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)

#198

Post by duaneb »

wvh wrote: post #183
Vomzor wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're wrong. Dubbing or subtitles make a big difference. In Flanders (Dutch-speaking part of Belgium) we have 8 years of French in school and only 5 years of English. Even though France is our neighbor and 40 % of Belgium's speaks French, most young people their English is still much better than their French. It's because we grew up surrounded by English; English songs, English tv shows and movies with subti…

English is a lot closer to Dutch though. We learn Dutch, French, English, German and even Latin in school, so we are culturally habituated to the importance of languages. I coincidentally also speak Finnish and Swedish (which feels almost like a Dutch-Limburg dialect), and like the other poster said, it's not a surprise to me the Swedish speaking population in Finland thinks English is easier to learn. As to Antirez:…

> English is a lot closer to Dutch though

I suspect this doesn't as much role in Europe. Sure, there are difficulties unique to learning any language, but English has a lot of shared ancestry with any germanic or romance language. It's not like, say, Mandarin or Punjabi.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)

#199

Post by petke »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #164
petke wrote: post #16

Ever noticed how people from small countries in Europe often tend to speak English well, while people from big European countries dont? Think Sweden vs Italy. Its mostly just a happy accident. You see, in small countries they usually dont dub movies or tv shows, simply because the market isn't big enough. They simply put subtitles on. Subtitles fly past way too quick for young kids to read though. So young kids dont…

Sounds plausible unless you happen to know that children's programmes are dubbed, at least they are in Norway and as far as I know in the rest of the Nordic area. As an adult subtitled programmes are very useful for locals learning English and foreigners, like me, learning Norwegian. English spelling is often a problem because people are told that it is simply irregular when the truth is that if you know a little ety…

Im not sure how it is today but when I grew up in Finland in the 80s all the most popular tv-series for kids where in English only. Of the top of my head: The Transformers, Inspector Gadget, M.A.S.K., He-Man, G.I. Joe, My Little Pony, Care bears, Smurfs, Postman pat, DJ Kat show, and then non-cartoon shows like like MacGyver, Knight Rider, Airwolf, Quantum Leap, Rescue 911, etc.

We also watched some some non-English tv shows like the Swedish "Bjornes magasin" and the Finnish "Pikku Kakkonen". But these shows where not as cool and not as plentiful as those English tv shows.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)

#200

Post by jagger27 »

lovboat wrote: post #127
cheshire137 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Native English speaker here with some corrections, if you like! :) police are 50-year-old lives of those people are sharp sounds long-term

Thanks. police are (ok they are more than one). 50-year-old (why not 50-years-old ?). It seems that nouns are created with "-" (merriam-webster agree with you). a long-term solution is like a never-ending story. Now, my question why neverending story (film) and not never-ending?

I'll try to answer your "50-year-old" question:

You'll find that you describe a quality that has a quantity attached to it, you'll drop the 's'. The reason is mostly to keep things brief by omitting a verb.

A few examples:

- We walked a ten kilometer-long trail. (The trail we walked is ten kilometers long)

- They are building a 500 seat auditorium. (The auditorium they are building has 500 seats.)

- We'll put a 10,000 piece order in on Monday. (Compare to: the puzzle has 10,000 pieces.)

Hyphenation is tricky and I still don't know all the rules.

Another correction I'll make on

> (merriam-webster agree with you)

It should be "Merriam-Webster agrees with you" because in this case it refers to the dictionary itself (singular) and not the people the dictionary is named after. "Merriam and Webster agree with you" refers to the people themselves.

It's occurring to me now that being a native English speaker is probably my best trait for hiring.

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