221–230 of 319 posts
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no it isn't and no it doesn't. All natural languages carry a large portion of ambiguity, to the extend that Steven Pinker even count ambiguity as a defining factor of natural language!
One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I’ll never know. Try saying that in Japanese or Chinese. Not the same effect.
This is utter rubbish. Nobody learns to speak any language as an adult without an accent. That has nothing to do with phonological complexity, that's just how we're wired. Spanish may be easy to describe on a blackboard, but don't tell me that people who learn Spanish as a second language later on don't have accents. And languages don't succeed because of linguistics, they succeed because of politics. As someone whos…
Edit: By "no accent" I of course mean "indistinguishable from a native French speaker". Everyone has an accent so technically "no accent" is meaningless.
Yes, English has irregular spelling. And phrasal verbs, the whole "to/-ing" thing[1], and "th" is hard for some people to pronounce. On the other hand, it doesn't have nouns that need to be remembered as masculine or feminine. Or a hundred+ unique regular verb conjugation endings. There are no subjunctive tenses (with one tiny exception). There are no tones. I could go on... Every language has its annoyances. And hon…
At school, kids would generally like English classes, and not like French classes not so much (both foreign languages). I learned both and I think I can draw from experience in what is easy and what is difficult with the both of them (french nowadays with lesser success, but both languages of diplomacy and striving to be world languages). To us (germans) learning english was easier in the beginning. Not necessarily b…
I'm also German and had French in upper school for five years, and that was certainly not true for me. In fact, I've yet to encounter a language that you can "complete" within three years of a normal school curriculum.
(I'm not talking about living abroad or specialized language learning curriculums, where you can get proficient in well less than three years.)
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That is because there is no official English.
At least the UN considers the British spelling as the official one: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_languages_of_the_Unit...
The UN has no real authority on anything.
The central axiom of linguistics is that no language is inherently more expressive than another. Yes, that means that conjugation and declension is no more complicated than strict word order. Grammatical gender provides redundancy, and conjugation allows for subject pro-drop. Orthography has nothing to do with the actual spoken language and things like "phonetic" pronunciation are not really an intrinsic feature of a…
Let's say we pick a random person and make them learn a completely unrelated language. Sometimes they will learn faster than others, like Spanish or Swahili vs English or Mandarin. Why would we expect them all to be the same difficulty?
So I totally believe that it's easier to learn English than Mandarin (and maybe easier to learn Spanish than English) because the writing system gives you more hints, but that doesn't have anything to do with the (spoken) language, strictly speaking.
On another note, it's not clear to me that "as phonetic as possible" makes a (written) language easier to read, since our brains process words/morphemes as chunks, rather than sounding them out letter-by-letter (this is how reading Chinese is even possible). So semantic vs. phonetic writing should be thought of as a tradeoff. As an easy example: spaces between words are not phonetically justifiable (there is no pause between words in natural speech), but they sure help reading comprehension a lot.
Perhaps the time has come to start using phonetic spellings (e.g. An English specific subset of the International Phonetic Alphabet) in at least some contexts, such as signage. Wales would be a good place to start. If someone here has the patience to translate, "Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch" into IPA phonetic English I'd sure appreciate it. On second thought, maybe we should leave the We…
If not, why not? They give a semantic hint to the interpretation of the sentence outside of pronunciation, allowing you to read/process it faster. I don't have any hard evidence to back it up, but I suspect making words look distinctive by spelling them in non-phonetic ways accomplishes the same thing.
English is bad, but not as bad as, say, French with its diphthongs and half letters silent. Or Hungarian with its 18 cases (lucky English speakers don't even know what a case is). Or Danish, which is totally and utterly unpronounceable. The best European language is, of course, Italian.
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There are communities that aspire to degender their terminology because of pseudonyms and sensitivity to problems of the transgender community. They revert to 'They' as singular agendered personal pronoun. As this is also the word we use for multiple people, conversations about Alice and Bob fork meanings at every usage; Are we talking about Alice, about Bob, or about Alice and Bob? Even a simple sentence often has m…
Singular "they" is incredibly widely adopted and would be and is easily understood by 1000 of 1000 native English speakers, and would be and has been understood by them for centuries: as the Wikipedia article (directly linked to by yours) says, "the singular they had emerged by the mid-14th century and is common in everyday spoken English". If we've been able to deal with this supposed combinatorial ambiguity for ~70…
And as with "you", I suspect that if "they"'s use as a gender-neutral pronoun expands, "they all" will soon emerge as an (unofficial?) replacement for the plural.
Yes, English has irregular spelling. And phrasal verbs, the whole "to/-ing" thing[1], and "th" is hard for some people to pronounce. On the other hand, it doesn't have nouns that need to be remembered as masculine or feminine. Or a hundred+ unique regular verb conjugation endings. There are no subjunctive tenses (with one tiny exception). There are no tones. I could go on... Every language has its annoyances. And hon…
At school, kids would generally like English classes, and not like French classes not so much (both foreign languages). I learned both and I think I can draw from experience in what is easy and what is difficult with the both of them (french nowadays with lesser success, but both languages of diplomacy and striving to be world languages). To us (germans) learning english was easier in the beginning. Not necessarily b…
There's no "one, official pronunciation" in French. Far from it. There are several ones, within France, and across French-speaking countries.
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This is true, but given human nature it unlikely that people will both to go to the effort of learning a second or third language once there is an easier approach.
Which is a shame, since the value of learning a second (or third, fourth, fifth, etc) language isn't limited to being able to converse with the people who speak it. Learning a new language can help you understand the world and yourself to a greater degree than is possible when you're forced to think inside the confines of a single language. It's a trippy feeling the first time you realize that you're unable to transl…