141–150 of 308 posts
My wife catches me saying a new one every month or two, and she thinks its hilarious (but she also helps me pronounce it correctly, so I can't complain too much.)
English isn't just the language of IT, it's become the lingua franca of science and commerce. Very little research worth reading is published in a language other than English these days. I wouldn't be surprised if there are obscure, third-rate English-language scientific journals in China that have never been seen, let alone had articles submitted to by native English speakers! Over the years, I've worked with a lot…
Here is a random irony that I like. People today use an Italian phrase describing French, and mean English by it.
1: http://www.futilitycloset.com/2007/08/30/ough/
2: http://www.futilitycloset.com/2009/09/19/o-u-g-h/
Yes, english between non-english speakers works quite well. Listening to UK english (especially accents. The TV series Misfits was funny not only because of the weird story..) is hard, following people from the US is easier but still full of traps.
I'm confident that I have a huge number of 'english' words in my vocabulary that I never pronounced right (only read them, trying to pronounce them by guessing. See the poems..) in my whole life.
English is so horrible because it has no discernable orthography. My favorite example is anti thesis -> antithesis. I mean what the fuck, my mothertongue german is the king of combined nouns but this change of pronounciation on concatenation doesnt happen ever. Or phonetical difference based on grammtic use as in the verb read. Horrible. I think it should be handled like the Finns and Koreans did. Throw all the irreg…
2 remarks: * The Turkish written language has had a similar transformation. There are no dictation exercises beyond the age of 12 because it's too easy. * Dutch is a similar 'power language' you can combine any 2 nouns in any order to create new words. For a native speaker, the meaning then is obvious.
Plus we have ce/ci/ge/gi/che/chi/ghe/ghi as the only exceptions, no doubled consonnants or actually any doubled other letter for no obvious reason, no long or short sounds. If I want a long "e" (we pronounce "e" - "eh"), I write it "ee" (duh!). Idea = idee. You can hear it, you can write it. You can read it, you can say it. EZ!
What we actually learn during school is higher level grammar: syntax, semantics. I'd say that Romanian is like the Python of natural languages :)
(same for other phonetic languages)
This is a great post. Here's a BBC Radio Four programme where Stephen Fry talks about spelling reform, and it includes a little bit about pronunciation. The brokenness of English is a problem we know about! ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b039c5cs ) > The fact that people from different English speaking countries have issues communicating is already a big hint about how odd is English phonetically. It doesn't have…
> BBC used to have the excellent World Service programming. BBC radio programmes were also at the receiving end of a wave of political correctness sweeping through the Blair years. "Classist" Received Pronunciation was out, regional accents were in (mostly so that Scottish cronies could occupy civil-servant jobs and the likes of John Prescott could eventually become plausible Peers of the Realm, but I digress). The r…
hey guys, you are not understanding us, we are not understanding what you say as well, and it is hard to find people that, once your understanding limits are obvious, will try to slow down the peace of the conversation. Often even if I say I did not understood, I'll get the same sentence repeated the same at speed of light. This is an important point. There are a number of things that native speakers of English can d…
The Spanish do that - and it doesn't help them much, either.
Oh, and you've forgotten the "waving your arms about" bit.
Coming from almost the opposite background, I agree very strongly with the assertion that accent is almost beside the point. It's true that if your accent is too thick that will harm communication, but below a certain threshold native speakers will attune pretty quickly. For me, American English is my native language, but I am also half Brazilian and learned Portuguese from childhood trips to Brazil (I didn't properl…
That, in fact, is directly in line with pg's point.
His point was that you have to get to "good enough" and not doing so is a real problem. However he went on to make it clear that if your accent does not impede communication, then it is a non-issue.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember seeing a new segement on BBC about socially deprived areas of Glasgow, and local youths were talking and it was subtitled.
If I remember rightly, this also happened in some regional releases of the film Trainspotting. For the opposite problem, try reading Iain Banks' Feersum Endjinn [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feersum_Endjinn
Maybe, we should have an international language reform to introduce a phonetic spelling system (WYSIWYHear) which would also lead to a somewhat standardized accent. The local ways of pronouncing words, can still continue in each region. There are probably many aesthetic considerations for this. But when two people across different regions speak, they can use this system. This would require linguists to document the p…
The recent frenzy of accent related Hacker News posts seems to reinforce the opinion I saw in a thread discussing the pg controversy: "Dear Paul, It's not what you are, it's what you did. At least, I hope. I suspect this is all coming out of a desire to emphasize that communication is important when you're starting a company. It's never just about solving technical problems. Well, sure, that's true. But as Nitasha ha…
As a founder you need to interact with customers, vendors, employees and investors. If those groups have trouble understanding your speech, then how could you not have a problem?
Really, this is not a debatable point among sensible people. The only part that is debatable is which accents are strong enough to pose a major problem.
Unfortunately most people don't seem to logically process what was said before deciding to argue. They just pattern match. If the pattern looks like something they argue with, then they argue. So people pattern match on his argument, see the word "accent", and argue on the basis of his comment being thinly veiled xenophobia. Which could not be farther from the truth!