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Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

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Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#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, preferring asynchronous communication as much as possible. One advantage of such an environment would be that people like me couldn't judge others based on their accents. But then, I'm not ready to actually go to this extreme in my own work. I'm the cofounder of a tiny company, and my cofounder and I have several spoken conversations per day. I don't think either of us want to change that. Perhaps I could limit myself to written communication with any employees that we hire, but that feels like a double standard.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#32

"Prepone" makes sense even if it's not a word. Closest equivalent I can think of is "move up."

That's a funny example to use, since you can move up a date, but nobody talks about moving down a date. Same problem in the opposite direction. "We're moving up the launch" is common, but never heard anyone say "we're moving down the launch", even though delays are common. The issue with "prepone" is that "pone" isn't really used as a world. A quick googling shows that it is a word, but in regular speech it's not use…

"Yesterday morning" and "tomorrow morning" is my favorite example. Several previous Indian coworkers of mine would say "today morning", which always made me smile a bit. It's not an unreasonable phrase to exist, given the others do as well.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#34
post #2

"prepone" has been coined independently quite a lot of times in the history of English. It just so happens that it stuck around when the Indians did it.

In Google's Book Ngram Viewer, prepone shows up in a higher percentage of texts in the early 1800s than in text from the past two decades. However, I don't know how accurate the corpus is for those old texts.

'antepone' seems to have the advantage for the latter half of the 19th century and then around 1965 'prepone' blows it away.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=prepone%2C+ant...

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#36
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.

Like when I committed that greatest of Canadian sins: using the work 'labour' in a document read by an American client. The reaction was ridiculous.

Or the hilarious situation I had at a legal conference. I thought one of my right-wing US friends had gone totally racist. He was complaining about all the new "turbins" he was seeing while driving to the conference. I thought he meant turban, but that's just how Americans pronounce "turbine", as in the wind turbines he could see from the highway.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#37
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.

Ah but which "mother version"? American English is closer to the original spelling than British English, but getting the actual English to change their use of their own language because the Americans use it differently seems... odd. Plus there's no intrinsic reason to prefer the original spelling over later versions.

So maybe we should all use English as it is used by the actual English? But that would see a small minority of the number of English-language speakers setting the rules for the huge majority.

So maybe (as others have suggested) we follow the majority of native English speakers and use the Indian version?

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#40
post #23
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.

I think you've missed the point of English, which is a collection of languages that evolved over time. Unlike e.g. French, there is no definitive, latest version of the language decreed from above. The dictionary is post-hoc, and long may it stay that way.

> Unlike e.g. French, there is no definitive, latest version of the language decreed from above.

What do you mean by this? French is spoken differently with different dialects over the world - eg. Quebecois French is not the same as France French. And while French may be one of the roots of English, there are also French words with their roots in English. It's all a mishmash.

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