Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 576 posts

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#161

Post by smhenderson »

ljm wrote: post #105
brk wrote: post #79

I think some of the confusion is that "pone" is not a root word or term. So, the opposite of postpone is not prepone, in the same way that prepartum is the opposite of postpartum.

I like 'sublime' for that. It sounds like an object could have three states: lime, sublime, and superlime. Something that is sublime would somehow be inferior to its lime counterpart. Like everything has an innate limeness.

My favorite is "why is no one ever whelmed?". I've seen this many times in popular culture over the years. People get overwhelmed and underwhelmed but no one ever seems to just get whelmed, even though it's really the same thing as overwhelmed.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#162

Post by mytailorisrich »

cafard wrote: post #152
TacticalCoder wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear you! A long time ago I was in the US and I used the word "labyrinth" because I didn't know "maze" and, well, in french for a maze we say "labyrinthe"... I still remember the reaction of my american friend, very surprised by my "advanced" english vocabulary. We native romance language speakers have it easy ; )

Richard Feynman had a similar story about speaking Portuguese, coming up with a longish word because he couldn't remember the common one, and impressing his hostess. But is "labyrinth" from a romance language? It appears in Liddell & Scott's Greek-English Lexicon with the remark that it is a foreign word.

It's the Greek word that was adopted in Latin and then romance languages.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#163

Post by cafard »

JackFr wrote: post #87
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have met Americans who believe the UK spelling of words with -our instead of -or actually represents a difference in pronunciation. That is, they have the mistaken impression that Brits say /kəlur/ instead of /kələr/.

'gaol' always throws me for a loop when I'm reading something British. I need to remind myself it's pronounced 'jail'. (A quick google tells me that all the major British newspapers switched over to 'jail' by the 1990's - score one for the good guys!) I remember reading 'Mutiny on the Bounty' as a child and talking about it with my father and I said something about the 'boatswain', and he (a former naval officer) loo…

One of my father's college classmates was in Navy ROTC, and deliberately pronounce "boatswain" and "gunwale" as spelled, in order to bug the regular petty officer.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#164

Post by kthejoker2 »

bserge wrote: post #53
mwcampbell wrote: post #31

As a midwestern white American, I've certainly had prejudices based on people's accents, and I've probably misjudged whether someone was a "native" speaker. Having read this article, I will renew my efforts to fight those ugly prejudices. For a few years now, I've thought that the ideal work environment for encouraging diversity and inclusion would be an all-remote team that used only written communication, preferrin…

Written communication is getting weirder (in a good way) by the day thanks to translation software. With Deepl (and even Google Translate) I can communicate very well with anyone in German, Polish or any of the supported languages, while in person it would be impossible, as I don't know the language at all. Google Assistant works, but it gets annoying real fast as it's slow and pretty cumbersome to use.

We are all Chinese rooms now.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#165

Post by danans »

ghaff wrote: post #125
biztos wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you mean in English, I would say look to the poorer corners of blighty, or deep enough into Australia, and you may find what you need. Or, if you're in Los Angeles and white, ride the bus from Santa Monica to DTLA on any given weekend and just listen to people talk: that's English just as sure as mine is, but I get maybe half. (Also, is Scots not a dialect of English? I'm not sure -- a mix at the very least. Great…

The US mostly doesn't really have true dialects but there can be a fair bit of localized slang in some groups. And some accents, especially heavy rural Southern accents, can be tough especially for a non-native speaker.

> The US mostly doesn't really have true dialects

I think speakers of Cajun, Gullah, or High Tider dialects would seriously beg to differ.

And those are just a few of the "true" dialects of the American South.

Outside of that there are many dialects that mix Spanish and English throughout the southwest.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#166

Post by chris_j »

FriedrichN wrote: post #41

There is such a thing as Indian English, maybe not officially but it certainly exists and it does differ from British and American English. As a matter of fact, if you look up prepone in Wiktionary "prepone" is mentioned as being used in India, so it's not that weird that the teacher in the article used it. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/prepone

If Wikipedia is to be believed [0], India ranks third in the list of countries ranked by number of English speakers and it's only fair to regard Indian English as a form of the language that is at least as valid as those from other countries.

Having said that, one of the things that you have to learn when you start speaking with English speakers from around the world is to recognise which of the words in your vocabulary will be understood vs which are particular to your native country. I'd put words like "prepone" and "needful" into this category: you need to find an alternative when talking to people from places where those words aren't understood.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-s...

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#167

Post by sumedh »

prvc wrote: post #12

As a Commonwealth inhabitant, having to deal with a multitude of formalized language variants, each with a small number of differences in orthography and vocabulary, strikes me as a useless waste of energy. Difference and local particularity for its own sake may please the odd local jingoist, but it is simpler to simply take the mother version to be definitive.

Your ancestors came from Africa, why dont you speak your ancestor's African language?

Languages keep on evolving, you just have to deal with it.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#168

Post by jan_Inkepa »

pdpi wrote: post #26

As a non-native speaker, one fascinating phenomenon for me is the flip side to Uncleftish Beholding[1]. Many latinate words are considered more sophisticated, or fancier in general, than germanic words. Because I'm a native speaker of a Romance language, those are precisely the words that I reach for naturally, because they're familiar. What follows is that, past a certain threshold where your English is good enough,…

Yeah, it's much better compared to other languages pairs, where the diminishing returns set in hard after a certain point...can be rough for morale!

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#169

Post by cafard »

phillc73 wrote: post #139
Y_Y wrote: post #15

Can I gripe about the spelling "nonnative" rather than "non-native"? It the former spelling it looks like it's said all at once, like the word "normative". Probably it's in common use and there are other similar cases we've assimilated, but I don't have to like it.

Lack of hyphen use drives me nuts. "Cooperation" is a prime example. Without the hyphen, my internal monologue pronounces the word like "chicken coop"[1]. Whereas, "Co-Operation" makes pronunciation much clearer. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_coop

Doesn't the New Yorker still hold the line, and print it with a dieresis? On the other hand, I knew a women who belonged to a food cooperative, and referred to it as the "coop", pronouncing it as if it were a chicken coop.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#170

Post by cecilpl2 »

My favorite example of one of the difficulties of learning English comes from my friend who's an adult ESL teacher.

Multiple adjectives always have to be in the order: opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose.

You can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife, or a beautiful big new oval blue nylon sleeping bag. Those sound completely natural and intuitive, but any tweak to the order just sounds "wrong" to a native speaker. Try it!

If you have a "cardboard brown box", it sounds like the box is the color "cardboard-brown"! If you have an old little knife, it sounds like "little knife" is the kind of knife it is! Other tweaks change the implied meaning in a way that is completely opaque to a non-native speaker.

Why can't you have a "green rectangular French old silver little whittling lovely knife"?

Post reply on HN