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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

#81

Post by pdpi »

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.

Languages evolve. With something as big as the commonwealth, different groups will see their own local use of the language evolve in different directions. The "mother version" itself has evolved plenty over time, and I don't think it's reasonable to say that the way that particular version has evolved over time is the "definitive" version of the language.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#82

Post by milliams »

> I found out that "prepone" was not an actual word in English, based on the dogma that all legitimate words in a language must be found in a dictionary.

I disagree. In this case, it was based on the fact that no one you were talking to knew the meaning of the word you'd made up. This is descriptivism at work.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#83

Post by bryanrasmussen »

mwcampbell wrote: post #77
meheleventyone wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People’s writing ability is really variable as well though. Here in Iceland you get some comically translated written stuff in English purely because everyone thinks they know it well because they on the whole have a very high level of spoken English. That naturally holds true for native English speakers as well but probably with smaller variance.

Fair point. But, and I might be wrong here, I figure people can much more easily control their writing than their speech, especially if they're not expected to send an immediate written response (e.g. in chat). Perhaps my mental model of foreign accents is wrong, and forgive me if I'm being an ugly American here, but I've often thought of a foreign accent as a disability, as if the person had a stutter or other speec…

do you feel the same about a regional accent - I mean southerners in the US often feel discriminated against as their accent is used as a shorthand for many negative stereotypes. What regional accent do you have?

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#84

Post by Bancakes »

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,…

That looks fantastic, wish Anglish was more widespread.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#85

Post by TulliusCicero »

kbutler wrote: post #19
TulliusCicero wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Moving up a date is like moving up toward the front in a line (or queue) vs moving back.

Right, but then why is isn't it "moving front" instead of moving up? Languages are weird.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#86

Post by [deleted] »

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,…

[deleted]

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#87

Post by JackFr »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #56
sandworm101 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Americ…

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) looked at me like I had two heads. "You mean the [BOSUN]?" "Well, no it says 'boatswain'" "Yes, it's spelled like that, but it's pronounced BOSUN. It's like 'colonel'. Don't think about the letters."

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#88

Post by bluetomcat »

As a non-native speaker living in a non-English speaking country who has started learning English decades ago at school in my teenage years, the sheer richness of the English vocabulary never ceases to fascinate me. There are so many words with subtle and nuanced meanings (primarily of Latin and French origin) you can almost never hear in an American movie or a reality show. I have encountered them primarily in British news articles and documentaries. Using them among other non-native speakers even seems snobbish and counter-productive. I mean stuff like "subjugate", "rejuvenate", "reverberate", etc.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#89

Post by biztos »

heurisko wrote: post #49
biztos wrote: post #29

I'm a native English speaker who's lived in other countries a lot and speaks three languages, now trying to learn a fourth. The weirdness of "English" is something I think about often. For starters, you have to live in it before you can really speak it. And our spelling is the least rational, least consistent thing I've ever seen. In addition to the weird way we spell a lot of things, many of the sounds are not prono…

> And there are dialects that are pretty much incomprehensible to people who grew up in the mainstream dialect (true of many other languages as well) I think there are differences in accent, but I don't recognise anywhere as being "pretty much incomprehensible". I speak "standard" German as a foreigner, and have definitely found dialects that are "pretty much incomprehensible". I haven't found differences to such a d…

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 tutorials on TikTok for that as it's apparently endangered.)

If you mean German, haha that's easy, just go to Switzerland with a short stop in Swabia on the way, though in both places you'll have to practically beg people to speak their native tongue in front of a foreigner. The Swiss Germans especially will reflexively speak one of the major foreign tongues, namely Hochdeutsch or English, though in my experience the Swabians will still say stuff like schaffe gell and assume you can grok it since Germans know that much from TV.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#90

Post by fsniper »

heurisko wrote: post #49
biztos wrote: post #29

I'm a native English speaker who's lived in other countries a lot and speaks three languages, now trying to learn a fourth. The weirdness of "English" is something I think about often. For starters, you have to live in it before you can really speak it. And our spelling is the least rational, least consistent thing I've ever seen. In addition to the weird way we spell a lot of things, many of the sounds are not prono…

> And there are dialects that are pretty much incomprehensible to people who grew up in the mainstream dialect (true of many other languages as well) I think there are differences in accent, but I don't recognise anywhere as being "pretty much incomprehensible". I speak "standard" German as a foreigner, and have definitely found dialects that are "pretty much incomprehensible". I haven't found differences to such a d…

I moved to Ireland 4 years ago. And for at least 2 years, I could not understand ( or hear ) a word my - not direct - Irish manager said. It was alien to me.
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