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The Unsuitability of English (2015)

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Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#191

Post by yompers888 »

My interesting language anecdote is that I find it much easier to hear syllables in Chinese than in English; I have very sensitive hearing, but I can't distinguish consonants very well. My first language is Enlish, and I'm a mediocre Chinese speaker, so it's not easier for me to understand whole sentences in Chinese, but I'm much less likely to lose a word. I've always assumed this is because more of the information is conveyed in long, tonal vowel sounds, rather than the comparatively short high-pass consonants, which is the reverse of English.

Does anyone else have experience with this?

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#192

Post by NolF »

jeena wrote: post #115
ktRolster wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody learns to speak any language as an adult without an accent. Nobody speaks any language without an accent. However, I've managed to convince native Spanish speakers that I was from Spain (later I had trouble convincing them that Spanish was my second language). Most people don't get rid of their foreign sounding accent because they don't work on improving their accent.

I find it super difficult to find the tools to do that. There are no courses for it no books, and people don't tell you that you're pronouncing something wrong because they think it would be unpolite. I'd love to hear some tips on how to work on improving my accent. I moved to Sweden 10 years ago and Swedish is my 4th language.

In Spanish culture correcting someone miss-pronunciation is quite common. It's one of the reasons why it can be quicker to master the language by immersion that in an ultra-polite society found in English speaking languages.

The best way to work on your accent is to record yourself and listen to it. Ideally you would have a native say it in a native manner. Movies, TV shows, and particularly audiobooks (with the printed copy) can be a great sources to work on it.

I have encouraged my co-workers to correct my English lately (12 years in Australia). They've been teaching me some of the local sayings, and correcting my pronunciation etc... Things that in Spain would have been picked up and addressed much sooner.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#193

Post by gkya »

sdegutis wrote: post #142
crazygringo wrote: post #136

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…

English suffers from the same problem as UNIX: they're both good enough .

No they both are so widely used that its easier to deal with them instead of trying to change the status quo.

The other languages look harder because a) you don't know how to acquire languages easily and b) you don't speak them yet.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#194

Post by Turing_Machine »

vacri wrote: post #166
wolfgke wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least the UN considers the British spelling as the official one: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_languages_of_the_Unit...

British spelling is not the British accent. One estimate had the English accent changing about every 25 miles as you travel through Britain. Have you seen Hot Fuzz ? In it, the police visit a farmer with a strong West Country accent, and take an interpreter with them. All parties are speaking English in the scene, but the farmer's words are so strongly accented, the interpreter has to translate. That scene was based…

I would expect that to have gone away to some degree with the rise of movies, radio, and television. Certainly it did in the United States. We still do have regional accents, of course, but I remember seeing a farmer from Appalachia on television getting subtitles when I was a kid. I doubt that ever happens today.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#195

Post by gkya »

fennecfoxen wrote: post #177
purpled_haze wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So true. And since you've gone the intellectual route, I'll choose the emotional one: I propose the Dutch don't like English because their language is also bastardization of different languages. As a defensive mechanism, they're picking on English to distract everyone from their soddy language. :) Sure, the writer's English, but he had to pander to the locals.

> I propose the Dutch don't like English because their language is also bastardization of different languages. You're calling out Dutch as a bastard? Seems a little backwards, seeing how it's basically English without the French-ification from the Normans. If anyone bastardized the Germanic language group, it was English.

Yes, one needs to know four languages in order to be able to coin a word in English.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#196

Post by Turing_Machine »

fennecfoxen wrote: post #177
purpled_haze wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So true. And since you've gone the intellectual route, I'll choose the emotional one: I propose the Dutch don't like English because their language is also bastardization of different languages. As a defensive mechanism, they're picking on English to distract everyone from their soddy language. :) Sure, the writer's English, but he had to pander to the locals.

> I propose the Dutch don't like English because their language is also bastardization of different languages. You're calling out Dutch as a bastard? Seems a little backwards, seeing how it's basically English without the French-ification from the Normans. If anyone bastardized the Germanic language group, it was English.

" Seems a little backwards, seeing how it's basically English without the French-ification from the Normans."

Well, except for the Flemish dialect of Dutch. That has quite a lot of French in it.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#197

Post by Turing_Machine »

Maken wrote: post #124
notahacker wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eliminate gender, simplify the conjugations, deprecate usted to avoid the social awkwardness of using the wrong level of formality . Throw in some loan words from English to expand the vocabulary and keep the Anglos happy (with regularised orthography and conjugations, naturally). And encourage people to slow down when they speak Do all this, and you'll have a very user friendly language that half the world's populat…

>deprecate usted to avoid the social awkwardness of using the wrong level of formality I'm Spanish and I think it has been months since I have heard "usted". When you are writing to someone you are not very familiar and you want to sound more formal the way to go is to use a "implicit usted", which means you refer to the other person by name but use the third instead of the second person. Anyway, better avoid using "…

'I'm Spanish and I think it has been months since I have heard "usted".'

This varies a lot between different Spanish-speaking countries. Heck, in Argentina they still use "vos".

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#198

Post by Turing_Machine »

tankenmate wrote: post #46
ktRolster wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English is easier than many languages: it doesn't have gendered nouns or adjectives almost at all (thank goodness), it doesn't have noun declensions, it doesn't have many verb conjugations (hello Russian!). It's biggest pain is tricky spelling and a list of irregular verbs.

English still declines personal pronouns; I, me, mine; he, him, his; she, her, hers; it, it, its; we, us, ours; they, them, theirs.

An example of one that's almost disappeared, other than in the most careful or formal speech: "who" and "whom".

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#199

Post by mapt »

schoen wrote: post #189
netheril96 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are conflating language constructs with words. More words may be fine, but more "features" are not. Frankly, those "features" are more like bugs. What on earth is the usage of masculine or feminine nouns, or irregular past tense/participle, or to/ing difference?

There's a theory that languages have sometimes evolved extra redundancy to help with understanding in noisy environments (in every sense of noisy, but especially if it's physically difficult to hear someone). This could be viewed as akin to a parity bit in telecommunications, where it's deliberately redundant to increase the chance of detecting errors on a noisy channel, or with other ECC methods of correcting them.…

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 multiple occurences of personal pronouns, so you get a combinatorial explosion of ambiguity. None of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-specific_and_gender-neu... have adoption to the point where they would be immediately understood by 1 person in a thousand, so it's really difficult to navigate the taboo.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#200

Post by danieltillett »

tim333 wrote: post #178
danieltillett wrote: post #5

The thing English has going for it (other than it is my native language) is it very easy to speak badly. With a minimal grasp of it you can get across what you are trying to say. I do agree about the insanity of English's spelling. Spelling reform is one of my lost causes that I think could be fixed by technology [1]. 1. http://www.cutspel.com

Just trying cutspel - that's quite a cool idea.

Thanks :)
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