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Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague

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Re: Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague

#41

Post by gerdesj »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #32
BitwiseFool wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The joke I tried to make was an allusion to how the Metric System's units like the meter and the kilogram were all based on reference objects before they were truly modernized. So despite the reference objects losing tiny amounts of mass over the years, they were, by definition, what a kilogram should be. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Prototype_of_the... Admittedly, I now realize that I in no way made t…

It doesn't come off as a joke because that is in fact how a language standard is usually defined. What made Parisian better than Provençal? What made Castilian better than Catalan? What didn't make Parisian better than Catalan?

Is this thread written by contestants in a Turing test? 8)

I'm an expert in English humour. If you say "four candles" in my hearing, I will spontaneously wet myself. It's an unfortunate consequence of being 50 years old and very English.

I've consulted the video referee. We all agree it's a fair riff on the term - "The Queen's English" (formally King) and henceforth it can be safely categorised in section 3.3.2.II.b in the canonical JbMF (Joke book of Monster Fun) version 5 (five.)

I pronounce the joke tendered as valid as formerly described. Judgement in favour of the plaintiff.

Soz 8)

Re: Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague

#42

Post by js2 »

pavlov wrote: post #38
bsder wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What language is more regular? I guess maybe Korean (Hangul is phonetic, no?). All the romance languages are weird. You can't even go from pronunciation to characters in Chinese or Japanese due to Kanji. Most of the Cyrillic languages are just as bad.

Spanish, Italian and German spellings are a lot more regular than English. You can almost always pronounce a word correctly even if you’ve only seen it written. English stumbles even with basic vowels. (After speaking this language for 30 years, I’m still unsure whether “pear” rhymes with “bear” or “fear”! This kind of thing doesn’t happen in any of the other four languages I know.) Even French beats English in this…

Pear (along with pair and pare) rhymes with bear (and bare). Peer rhymes with fear (and beer).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mfz3kFNVopk

(Gallagher and English language; the pronunciation part starts at 1:50.)

So and do don't even rhyme, nor do sew and dew! WTF?

Then there's the words the U.K. and the U.S. don't agree on like route (in the U.K. it rhymes with root, in the U.S. usually, but not always, with out). I pronounce route and router to rhyme with out and outer but my wife pronounces route to rhyme with root and router to rhyme with outer.

Re: Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague

#43

Post by stan_rogers »

jraph wrote: post #33
leephillips wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Spanish they use seguidores : literally followers. Why can’t they do something like that in French?

"suiveur", in French, is connoted pejoratively and means "someone without initiative". So I guess most people would find it uncomfortable to use this term in this context. But there's a word that works great for this in French and that everybody who needs it already understands well: follower. It's borrowed from English, like so many other words. It's only fair, a big part of the English vocabulary directly comes fro…

"Follower" had the same connotation in English before its use in relation to social media.

Re: Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague

#44

Post by [deleted] »

vagrantJin wrote: post #40
jraph wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are being downvoted, but your comment is sadly accurate and not exaggerated. The members of the Académie Française prescribe the language out of there asses instead of observing how people actually speak it and documenting the language according to this observation. Last example is the gender of "Covid". Unlike our Canadian friends, everybody in France started saying "le covid". Only for the Académie Française to…

> Covid is therefore either feminine or masculine". Wifi has both genders in France and nobody died because of this. Im not a native English speaker so I need to clarify my confusion. I take it WIFI is a noun. How is gender prescribed to a noun?

[deleted]

Re: Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague

#45

Post by jraph »

vagrantJin wrote: post #40
jraph wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are being downvoted, but your comment is sadly accurate and not exaggerated. The members of the Académie Française prescribe the language out of there asses instead of observing how people actually speak it and documenting the language according to this observation. Last example is the gender of "Covid". Unlike our Canadian friends, everybody in France started saying "le covid". Only for the Académie Française to…

> Covid is therefore either feminine or masculine". Wifi has both genders in France and nobody died because of this. Im not a native English speaker so I need to clarify my confusion. I take it WIFI is a noun. How is gender prescribed to a noun?

I was speaking about French. In French, most nouns have genders. Usually, the gender is well defined but for some nouns like Wifi, the gender is different depending on the area or even across people. Where I live, wifi is mostly masculine, but you hear the feminine form often enough. Usually from people from the South West of France but not exclusively.

You can notice the gender of the noun from the article: le wifi, un wifi, or from the adjectives qualifying it, if any.

Re: Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague

#46

Post by leephillips »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #39
leephillips wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They already do. The Americans who speak Spanish in Honduras, Colombia, Argentina, etc. recognize the authority of La Real Academia Española (even though their own brands of Spanish differ a bit from the kind spoken in Spain). This is, by the way, not a criticism of your use of “Americans”, which I and all English speakers use the same way.

I really doubt that (many) Americans in any Latin American country recognize any "authority" on the language, other than what the locals speak.

My two Spanish teachers, who live in two different Latin American countries, use the RAE as a fallback authority in cases where it’s not clear what usage is preferred. So it is kind of a weak authority. And, believe it or not, the concept of correctness in language exists in Latin America, regardless of what the “locals” speak, and it matters to a lot of people, who love their language and treat it with respect.

Re: Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague

#47

Post by snakeboy »

pavlov wrote: post #38
bsder wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What language is more regular? I guess maybe Korean (Hangul is phonetic, no?). All the romance languages are weird. You can't even go from pronunciation to characters in Chinese or Japanese due to Kanji. Most of the Cyrillic languages are just as bad.

Spanish, Italian and German spellings are a lot more regular than English. You can almost always pronounce a word correctly even if you’ve only seen it written. English stumbles even with basic vowels. (After speaking this language for 30 years, I’m still unsure whether “pear” rhymes with “bear” or “fear”! This kind of thing doesn’t happen in any of the other four languages I know.) Even French beats English in this…

> Even French beats English in this respect, and that is an absurdly low bar considering the accumulated mess that is French orthography.

Even though there is a good amount of redundancy, once some subtleties like the liaison are understood, French spelling to pronunciation is a many-to-one[ or two] mapping, while English is a many-to-many multifunction mess.

Re: Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague

#48

Post by Jtsummers »

vagrantJin wrote: post #40
jraph wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are being downvoted, but your comment is sadly accurate and not exaggerated. The members of the Académie Française prescribe the language out of there asses instead of observing how people actually speak it and documenting the language according to this observation. Last example is the gender of "Covid". Unlike our Canadian friends, everybody in France started saying "le covid". Only for the Académie Française to…

> Covid is therefore either feminine or masculine". Wifi has both genders in France and nobody died because of this. Im not a native English speaker so I need to clarify my confusion. I take it WIFI is a noun. How is gender prescribed to a noun?

English doesn't have a notion of gendered nouns. In a lot of other European languages, however, they have them. I don't know French so can't draw any examples from it, but in Italian "tavolo" (table) is masculine while "sedia" (chair) is feminine. The reason for that is, at this point in time, by definition of the language. However, when creating novel words or bringing in loanwords the choice is largely arbitrary. GP is pointing out that the Académie Française chose to assign covid the feminine gender despite the popular use of the masculine gender for it in widespread use before their decision.

Re: Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague

#49

Post by jraph »

stan_rogers wrote: post #43
jraph wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"suiveur", in French, is connoted pejoratively and means "someone without initiative". So I guess most people would find it uncomfortable to use this term in this context. But there's a word that works great for this in French and that everybody who needs it already understands well: follower. It's borrowed from English, like so many other words. It's only fair, a big part of the English vocabulary directly comes fro…

"Follower" had the same connotation in English before its use in relation to social media.

I believe you, and I can't explain why it did work for English speakers and not for the French ones. Maybe I'm wrong in my hypothesis by the way, that's just how I feel it. Follower does not bear this pejorative meaning for French people.

Maybe Twitter did push for this word in English and it worked? And then people who translated Twitter's interface in French and decided to leave follower "untranslated" actually sealed the destiny of this word in the French language?

Re: Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague

#50

Post by Jtsummers »

leephillips wrote: post #46
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really doubt that (many) Americans in any Latin American country recognize any "authority" on the language, other than what the locals speak.

My two Spanish teachers, who live in two different Latin American countries, use the RAE as a fallback authority in cases where it’s not clear what usage is preferred. So it is kind of a weak authority. And, believe it or not, the concept of correctness in language exists in Latin America, regardless of what the “locals” speak, and it matters to a lot of people, who love their language and treat it with respect.

My Spanish teachers from Argentina did the same. When coming across words and phrases that they were unfamiliar with (hey, they don't have the dictionary memorized either) they almost always sent me something later (or brought it up in the next session) citing RAE or a source that itself cited RAE.
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