421–430 of 441 posts
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> The noun gendering alone makes it significantly easier to embarrass yourself speaking French than English. English has more than enough of ways to easily embarrass yourself without the need for arbitrary noun gendering.
Such as? I’m genuinely asking for examples. I’ve embarrassed myself quite often in French, yet haven’t much in English. * neither are my mother tongue
Let me go take a sheet.
I really like that beach.
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Education has been trying to kill the "ge/gij" form for decades by ignoring its existence. In Flanders, they are not really succeeding. Everybody still uses it in spoken form. However, the number of people knowing how to conjugate it properly in written form is decreasing. "Gij hadt" fe, is correct but rarely encountered .
"Gij loopt". Base + t. That's how I learned it. Do you know why education is trying to do this? I find that as it infiltrates business communication that it encourages a language that sounds like we're friends. We're not. I'm a person. You're a company who is overcharging me for basic things like internet. No need for informal cosy language.
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> This felt to me like one of the reasons why English became the dominant language for business over time. I don't think that has much to do with it. I think it has more to do with the dominant political and economic position of the United States. French served a similar role in the past despite having all the features you describe.
America was an economic backwater until the 1900s. France was, and to a greatly diminished extent still is, a global power. French has T-V distinction. French has arbitrary noun gendering. The noun gendering alone makes it significantly easier to embarrass yourself speaking French than English.
This... greatly underestimates the number of ways you can make a mistake while speaking a foreign language.
If you're a non-Francophone trying to speak French, you have a 100% of making obvious mistakes while you try, and some of those mistakes will probably relate to noun gendering.
If you're a non-Anglophone trying to speak English, you have the same - 100% - chance of making obvious mistakes while you try to do that. Depending on what languages you do speak, you may or may not make mistakes in noun gendering. (English noun gendering is a huge problem for Chinese speakers, and boy does it make them sound unnatural.)
But that doesn't matter; that's just one way to make a mistake. Your odds of making no mistakes of any kind are zero. Why worry about one particular subclass? You're foreign and everyone who hears you will recognize that.
As someone coming from a culture with T-V distinction [1], I always wished we dropped one of the branches like English did in the past. The informal T vs formal V causes confusion in conversation with semi-strangers. Eg. At work you never really know which way to speak to someone at a watercooler. If you choose the informal T you make them your equal. Ehich might be perceived as insulting to them, since they might wa…
If tenses are cases are what keeps languages from being global, you should all speak Chinese now, whose words don't change forms at all.
There are some inflectional elements in Chinese.
Speaking for Mandarin:
- Verbs may be inflected into one of three aspects, with the suffixes 着 (progressive), 了 (perfective), or 过 (experiential).
- Certain verbs may be inflected for possibility or impossibility, with the infix 得 (for possibility) or 不 (for impossibility). If the verb is not naturally part of the category that participates in this construction, the dummy particle 了 (which shares spelling, but not pronunciation, with the perfect suffix mentioned above) must be supplied, to convert it into that category.
- Nouns may be inflected for plurality with the suffix 们. As I understand it, this is only really appropriate where the noun refers to a collection of people (broadly defined), but any such noun may receive the suffix.
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The adjective order one is really interesting to explain: the adjectives in "good small old red wooden English book" have to come in that order or it sounds very peculiar. Other European languages may have this to, but explaining it to people who speak unrelated languages usual results in a wail of "but why?!" Many English speakers don't themselves realise it - in the UK, at least, we are not carefully taught English…
> "good small old red wooden English book" have to come in that order or it sounds very peculiar. Interesting. As a native English speaker (from the US), I'd say that "good small old" felt a little awkward for me to say out loud. Personally, I'd probably say "good old small ...", but to your point, there isn't exactly a "right" answer, just one that sounds right. I'm assuming you're also a native English speaker from…
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> Other European languages may have this to, but explaining it to people who speak unrelated languages usual results in a wail of "but why?!" They do, and just like in your other example, they internalize it, they just don't realize they do it automatically because it "sounds good". > Most grammatical understanding comes when (if!) you study a foreign language and then you find out that "find out" is a thing called a…
> Does the average English speaker really not know about the term "phrasal verb"? :-) Yes. Furthermore, I didn't know the English word for it, despite being a native speaker, but do know the German "Verben mit Präpositional-Ergänzung", from having learnt German. Speakers of English as a foreign language will know more about English grammar than English native speakers.
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In Spanish asymmetric conversations have always been a thing, e.g. student-teacher, patient-doctor or younger-older conversations where the former side uses V and the latter T. The V is gradually being dropped in Spain and in the last few decades the process seems to have accelerated, though, definitely it seems faster than in French (although I don't know that much about French). I don't think my 4-year-old son will…
> The V is gradually being dropped in Spain and in the last few decades the process seems to have accelerated I own a Spanish textbook printed (in English) in 1958 that says about «usted»: ‘It is the universal respectful address of society, and the only one the foreigner is ever likely to employ or hear addressed to him, unless he marries a native or forms intimate friendships.’ How times have changed!
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OTOH, the reason those feelings were free to be expressed...
Yeah, we would all be speaking German now if they had won. But to put it another way, German remained the second language after they lost WW1.
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Such as? I’m genuinely asking for examples. I’ve embarrassed myself quite often in French, yet haven’t much in English. * neither are my mother tongue
Such as great classics like: Let me go take a sheet. I really like that beach.
But I don't think English particularly stands out, and I can think of languages that are much worse than it in that regard (especially for an outsider). Mandarin / Cantonese / Japanese / French / Korean are all pretty notorious examples for homophone collisions.
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English was a widespread language of trade long before America was a big deal because of British shipping.
Yes, but so were other contenders like French and German which have not retained such a prominent role.