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On January 31 2011 00:42 tofucake wrote:
Indians are native English speakers. Put one of them in a room with someone from Boston, and I promise you nobody will know what the fuck is happening. And if you want to restrict the dialects to just North America, put someone from Boston and someone from New Orleans in a room; same thing will happen.
I don't believe your promise.
Based solely on what everyone seems to be saying, people with heavy accents are slightly stupider than everyone who has a more even accent. This has to be the case, given that me and "average american accent" people have no problem understanding either, but because they have a distinct accent, suddenly, they become unintelligible to each other, but not to others.
Will someone please, finally, see how stupid this is sounding? Even in Britain, where there are mutually unintelligible accents, those accents leagues more different from one another than a Boston or a creole. Plus, I think you're letting slang words determine what you consider a difficult accent.
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English is incredibly uniform compared to alot of languages. I don't understand this topic. It just seems to have a subtle tone of American bashing without any real substance. Yes, people who use a language in one country, will often, even if they speak the same language - develope different norms for its use, both in spelling and pronunciation than another country.
Chill out.
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On January 30 2011 00:04 pfods wrote:Show nested quote +On January 29 2011 19:48 ggrrg wrote:On January 29 2011 13:51 pfods wrote:On January 29 2011 08:27 ggrrg wrote:On January 29 2011 03:41 pfods wrote:On January 29 2011 03:36 ggrrg wrote:I don't see any particular reason why British English should be adopted all over the world. You haven't given one either. On the other hand, a worldwide readjustment to BE would cause complications in all countries involved. On January 29 2011 00:35 HardCorey wrote:
I think that Grammar is considerably more important than spelling. English grammar is very complicated and most people don't even understand the basics and just assume that they are grammatically correct because it, "just sounds right." The words of a man that hasn't studied any other languages. English grammar is kind of easy in comparison to Romance languages, a piece of cake in comparison to Slavic and Scandinavian languages, and not even comparable to something like Finnish. Mark Twain: "My philological studies have satisfied me that a gifted person ought to learn English (barring spelling and pronouncing) in thirty hours, French in thirty days, and German in thirty years." I'm sorry but english grammar is pretty much the #1 reason why so much of the world has trouble learning english This is not supposed to sound rude, but I'm absolutely certain that you have never learned any foreign language. Grammar rules in English are not only very few but also very simple. First of all there is basically no conjugations in English with "be" being the only exception I can think of of the top of my head and of course the added "s" in 3rd person simple present: simple past: I/you/he/she/it/we/you/they went/played/sang/etc. simple future I: I/you/he/she/it/we/you/they will go/play/sing/etc. And it's the same in all other tenses. In languages like French or German (and many more as a matter of fact) you conjugate differently for every person and for all tenses. There are of course some rules but there are also many irregular verbs, which increases the difficulty by a lot. In English it's also pretty clear cut when to use every tense (past and future progressive tenses are somewhat tricky but neither are they a necessity to speak fluently nor are they that difficult). In French for example it's a total pain in the ass to figure out, how to utilize tenses properly (especially past tenses and subjonctif). Another thing that makes English significantly easier than any language in Europe that I'm aware of is the lack of genders. In other languages you have to learn the gender for every single word you know (In French/Spanish/Italian only 2 genders, German/Bulgarian/Russian amongst others even 3 genders). In the end, the main reason (at least in my eyes, but I'm certain that many people will agree with me) that makes English grammar look like a joke in comparison to a multitude of other languages is the lack of declensions. That's tables upon tables of grammatic rules that you have to learn for all cases in a given language. For example, in German you have 4 cases, in Latin - 5, in Russian - 6, in Finnish - 15. For somebody who's never had to deal with declensions, I guess, it's not even possible to imagine how hard it is to learn all the rules and irregularities related to them. A little anecdote that I believe could help you at least get a glimpse on this problem: I know dozens of people who come from different European countries and have intensely studied German for years in high school. Those people have come to Germany and have been living here for years (many of them study in the same university I do) and not a single one can speak without making any mistakes with declensions because of the insane difficulty they bear. In my opinion, the main difficulty in the English language is the spelling and the pronunciation, because both lack rules (or at least have too many exceptions). Unlike German or Bulgarian, in English you rarely spell a word the way you pronounce it. The lack of rules for pronunciation also complicates things (e.g. "ea": cleave vs meadow). Another difficulty in English is the extensive use of prepositions after verbs (e.g. come in, come out, come off, come on, come about, come along, come by, etc). This is one of the most difficult things in the English language, and rarely seen in any other language. However, you really don't need to know all of those different forms to speak correctly and fluently. I am not a native English speaker. In fact, it's only my third language. My mother tongue is Bulgarian. I learned to speak German and English fluently and have studied French, Spanish and Latin. From my experience, I can assure you that the English grammar is by far the easiest one. French and Spanish grammar rules are probably the next ones that follow in difficulty, but still significantly more complicated than English. As far as German and Bulgarian grammar is concerned, I deem it impossible for most people to learn to use it correctly unless they have moved and lived there at age 10-11 or younger. I've studied arabic and spanish, and a little german and japanese. Prepositions are grammar, by the way. And I really don't believe you've studied english extensively. Being a native speaker, and having had to study my own grammar, I can assure you it is very complicated, and rife with rules and exceptions. Verb conjugation in english is varied in almost every word and there are far more examples than just to be as how conjugation changes. But there is more to grammar than conjugation, and not a lot of it has to do necessarily with how 'complicated' it is, but sometimes just how different it is. Plus. you have the added bonus of being a gamer, which GREATLY increases your learning of basic english. First of all, I believe I did not express myself clearly about what I meant with the use of "prepositions after verbs". I wasn't talking about the general rules of how to use prepositions, which in fact are grammatical rules (those are rather simple). I had phrasal verbs in mind, which obey no grammatical rules whatsoever (I just realized that some of the examples I gave in my previous post are not phrasal verbs...). Phrasal verbs have to be learned like vocabulary. As far as my English knowledge is concerned, I believe that it goes vastly beyong being simply "basic English" and I can guarantee you that games do not deserve any credit for that. In my 13 years of taking English classes, I have gone through numerous schoolbooks, which covered English grammar pretty extensively and I'd say I have a pretty good idea about the simplicity of it. If you really have studied German, there is no way you could possibly claim that its grammar is simpler than the English one. I have absolutely no knowledge about Arabic or Japanese so I cannot comment on them, but in Europe there is no language that has a simpler grammar than English and I have yet to meet a person in my surroundings that has a different opinion. edit: I just have to edit this in... verb conjugations!? really?. This is the main reason why so many people perceive English as extremely easy. There are basically no conjugations (bar "be" and 3rd person "s"). In every tense for every verb, there is only one conjugation for all numbers and persons. I dare you to prove me wrong. Having studied spanish for 5 years, living in a country where many people speak spanish, and having a spanish sister in law, A mother who speaks french, and a neighbor who is italian, that the romance languages have easier grammar. The only exception to that is generally future tense in verbs, which is annoying. I don't know why you think they're so complicated. German is complicated, but only in the sense that there are three genders added, and the rules pertaining to which words applied to which gender vary a lot. I haven't studied german much, but from my experience, that's the only thing that was very convoluted and difficult. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_irregular_verbs Easier to post a list than to type one out. Plus, most of our words come from languages totally unrelated to english, which is why so many words have so many different rules and exceptions.
I don't want to be rude, but you obviously have no idea about german grammar if you say there is nothing convoluted and difficult about it and then go ahead to link to a list of English irregular verbs, a lot of which English and German actually have in common, to show how complicated English grammar is ...
a few examples:
bring -> brought -- bringen -> gebracht
do -> done -- tuen -> getan
freeze -> frozen -- frieren -> gefroren
steal -> stolen -- stehlen -> gestohlen
find -> found -- finden -> gefunden
Don't get me wrong, English is a wonderful language, and it has a huge vocabulary -- a lot of which is redundant, of course -- due to being a conglomerate of romanic and germanic languages.
And what does give you the impression, that a lot of the world has trouble learning english? A lot of the world has trouble learning any foreign language! Native speakers of a romanic language will have an easier time learning another romanic language, of course, but that is hardly any proof that English is harder to learn ...
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On January 31 2011 01:26 Maenander wrote:
I don't want to be rude, but you obviously have no idea about german grammar if you say there is nothing convoluted and difficult about it and then go ahead to link to a list of English irregular verbs, a lot of which English and German actually have in common, to show how complicated English grammar is ...
I said I haven't studied German much. It was the first thing I said about my experience with German. You're being obtuse. And I never said there was nothing convoluted or complicated with German grammar, I said from my experience, genders and verbs were complicated.
On January 31 2011 01:26 Maenander wrote:
And what does give you the impression, that a lot of the world has trouble learning english? A lot of the world has trouble learning any foreign language! Native speakers of a romanic language will have an easier time learning another romanic language, of course, but that is hardly any proof that English is harder to learn ...
Because foreigners I come across learning english, even if they already know/studied another language, consistently talk about how much trouble they're having with english in comparison.
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On January 29 2011 00:28 Hawk wrote:
Extra u's in words be stupid. Plus, American English is part of this country's identity. It reminds the Brits every day that we are so awesome that we needed our own specialized language to convey this awesomeness.
also, there are hardly any kind of issues that arise from this. Mostly Brits or Americans telling one another that they spell like retards, that's about it. Either spelling is understood by either group
Nothing stupid about PLAGUUU
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pfods wrote:
German is complicated, but only in the sense that there are three genders added, and the rules pertaining to which words applied to which gender vary a lot. I haven't studied german much, but from my experience, that's the only thing that was very convoluted and difficult.
Thanks for calling me obtuse and then misquoting your own text. Anyway, I am done arguing with you.
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On January 31 2011 01:31 pfods wrote:
German is complicated, but only in the sense that there are three genders added, and the rules pertaining to which words applied to which gender vary a lot. I haven't studied german much, but from my experience, that's the only thing that was very convoluted and difficult.
Why even make a statement like the first sentence if your experience is very limited?
Your experience seems the complete opposite of mine. Basically everyone I know has little to no problems learning english compared to learning any other language and I come from a school with French as first language (after one year English almost everyone was on the level of three years French).
Could it be that you are only talking to people from Spain trying to learn Italian or something?
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I really don't think any spelling reform is required, the differences between spelling in British and American English are very few and minor and everyone knows what the word means if they see it spelled the way they're not used to anyway.
I find it difficult to believe that people with regional accents from different parts of the US would find it impossible or hard to understand each other, in the UK the accents are incredibly varied and I can understand all from the broadest Scottish accent to RP and I'm pretty sure I could understand any American regardless of where they came from, excluding local slang perhaps.
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Different pronunciations and spellings might seem to be a minor issue for native English speakers, But for everyone learning it as a foreign language that can get very confusing. Obviously that's a problem with every language that is spoken widely enough to have different dialects and such. Here in Switzerland a lot of the people from the French speaking part have a very hard time understanding the Schwiizerdüütsch speaking ones since what they learn is "standard German"...
So being one of the most widely used and required languages and at the same time being one of the least standardized ones is certainly not a minor issue.
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On January 31 2011 02:44 jello_biafra wrote:
I really don't think any spelling reform is required, the differences between spelling in British and American English are very few and minor and everyone knows what the word means if they see it spelled the way they're not used to anyway.
I find it difficult to believe that people with regional accents from different parts of the US would find it impossible or hard to understand each other, in the UK the accents are incredibly varied and I can understand all from the broadest Scottish accent to RP and I'm pretty sure I could understand any American regardless of where they came from, excluding local slang perhaps.
Yeah but, jello, you have to consider that with the U.S. you're dealing with a population about 6x that of the UK, spread over a landmass about, what, 14x the size? The U.S. population is also more diverse (approx. 66% white in US vs. approx. 90% white in UK) and has historically received significant immigration from a greater number of countries. It's a different ballgame over here.
And you also have to understand that your ability to understand dialects is not in question. You, right now, are participating in international discourse and, as a member of this site, you do so regularly (even audio international discourse insofar as you listen to interviews, streams, Day[9], etc.). You're also likely to be university educated and more socially mobile than folk speakers in a lot of non-prestige dialects. So you're exceptional in many ways that a folk speaker from, say, the Black Belt of Alabama would not be. You're already primed to parse strange accents and diction, but not everybody is because not everyone has the sort of social advantages that would allow them world travel, electronic or otherwise.
I don't suppose it's really worth me getting this worked up over, but I honestly do think you might be underestimating the extent to which the English dialect of two American citizens could differ from one another and the difficulty that they would face working through that difference.
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Totally ot question that doesn't warrant it's own topic.
A lot of casters in starcraft 2 use the expression 'being able to' in a strange manner i.e. they'll go "the immortal is able to go down," whereas for me the more natural use would be "The marauders were able to take the immortal down."
I'm not a native english speaker though, can you use the expression the way it's being used in the first example?
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Hyrule19180 Posts
On January 31 2011 03:21 HULKAMANIA wrote:Show nested quote +On January 31 2011 02:44 jello_biafra wrote:
I really don't think any spelling reform is required, the differences between spelling in British and American English are very few and minor and everyone knows what the word means if they see it spelled the way they're not used to anyway.
I find it difficult to believe that people with regional accents from different parts of the US would find it impossible or hard to understand each other, in the UK the accents are incredibly varied and I can understand all from the broadest Scottish accent to RP and I'm pretty sure I could understand any American regardless of where they came from, excluding local slang perhaps. Yeah but, jello, you have to consider that with the U.S. you're dealing with a population about 6x that of the UK, spread over a landmass about, what, 14x the size? The U.S. population is also more diverse (approx. 66% white in US vs. approx. 90% white in UK) and has historically received significant immigration from a greater number of countries. It's a different ballgame over here. And you also have to understand that your ability to understand dialects is not in question. You, right now, are participating in international discourse and, as a member of this site, you do so regularly (even audio international discourse insofar as you listen to interviews, streams, Day[9], etc.). You're also likely to be university educated and more socially mobile than folk speakers in a lot of non-prestige dialects. So you're exceptional in many ways that a folk speaker from, say, the Black Belt of Alabama would not be. You're already primed to parse strange accents and diction, but not everybody is because not everyone has the sort of social advantages that would allow them world travel, electronic or otherwise. I don't suppose it's really worth me getting this worked up over, but I honestly do think you might be underestimating the extent to which the English dialect of two American citizens could differ from one another and the difficulty that they would face working through that difference.
I'd just like to expand a bit: the US has approximately 40 times more area than the UK, with 5 times the population.
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On January 31 2011 08:48 tofucake wrote:Show nested quote +On January 31 2011 03:21 HULKAMANIA wrote:On January 31 2011 02:44 jello_biafra wrote:
I really don't think any spelling reform is required, the differences between spelling in British and American English are very few and minor and everyone knows what the word means if they see it spelled the way they're not used to anyway.
I find it difficult to believe that people with regional accents from different parts of the US would find it impossible or hard to understand each other, in the UK the accents are incredibly varied and I can understand all from the broadest Scottish accent to RP and I'm pretty sure I could understand any American regardless of where they came from, excluding local slang perhaps. Yeah but, jello, you have to consider that with the U.S. you're dealing with a population about 6x that of the UK, spread over a landmass about, what, 14x the size? The U.S. population is also more diverse (approx. 66% white in US vs. approx. 90% white in UK) and has historically received significant immigration from a greater number of countries. It's a different ballgame over here. And you also have to understand that your ability to understand dialects is not in question. You, right now, are participating in international discourse and, as a member of this site, you do so regularly (even audio international discourse insofar as you listen to interviews, streams, Day[9], etc.). You're also likely to be university educated and more socially mobile than folk speakers in a lot of non-prestige dialects. So you're exceptional in many ways that a folk speaker from, say, the Black Belt of Alabama would not be. You're already primed to parse strange accents and diction, but not everybody is because not everyone has the sort of social advantages that would allow them world travel, electronic or otherwise. I don't suppose it's really worth me getting this worked up over, but I honestly do think you might be underestimating the extent to which the English dialect of two American citizens could differ from one another and the difficulty that they would face working through that difference. I'd just like to expand a bit: the US has approximately 40 times more area than the UK, with 5 times the population.
Hahahaha... God I wasn't even close on the landmass estimate. From now on I'll just stick to words and delegate the crunching of numbers.
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On January 31 2011 09:59 stormtemplar wrote:Show nested quote +On January 31 2011 01:15 pfods wrote:On January 31 2011 00:42 tofucake wrote:
Indians are native English speakers. Put one of them in a room with someone from Boston, and I promise you nobody will know what the fuck is happening. And if you want to restrict the dialects to just North America, put someone from Boston and someone from New Orleans in a room; same thing will happen.
I don't believe your promise. Based solely on what everyone seems to be saying, people with heavy accents are slightly stupider than everyone who has a more even accent. This has to be the case, given that me and "average american accent" people have no problem understanding either, but because they have a distinct accent, suddenly, they become unintelligible to each other, but not to others. Will someone please, finally, see how stupid this is sounding? Even in Britain, where there are mutually unintelligible accents, those accents leagues more different from one another than a Boston or a creole. Plus, I think you're letting slang words determine what you consider a difficult accent. I dunno what you people are talking about. Indian accents can be a bit tough (I'm an american), but southern, boston, new york, and all varieties of UK accents I've heard have been perfectly understandable.
I think I'll try to re-explain myself again here. Let me just try to collect what I'm saying into a sentence, then I'll elaborate.
Your personal experience does not matter.
In general, extrapolating global (or country-wide) conclusions from your own personal experience is good way to extrapolate incorrect conclusions. In linguistics, this is especially true. There is a sub-field of linguistics called "perceptual dialectology." It's an entire discipline elaborated around the practically infinite ways in which we bias, misunderstand, misinterpret, and generally mangle the kind of linguistic data that we receive from other speakers. The take home point is typically that accurate conclusions about language can only be drawn from carefully collected survey data, recorded interviews, text corpora, etc. etc.
It's not different from any other science (or any other academic discipline, really). I don't trust my own theories on how germs get me sick. Do you? Or would you defer to an immunologist? In order to make accurate conclusions about dialects, you need to employ large-scale, empirical methods. You can't just shoot from the hip.
Another reason why you can't trust your own experience is that you haven't heard every dialect in your city, much less in your state, much less in your country, much less in your language. Different social strata, occupations, locations, communities of practice, ethnicities, different everything generate different dialects. You, as an individual, can't possibly observe or characterize a substantial portion of the dialects at play across the United States (And even if you could observe them, you would be necessarily altering them by observation: the observer's paradox).
Which leads me to my final point that linguistic reality is a whole lot messier than you realize. You could take a look, if you were so inclined, at the Linguistic Atlas Project. You could even take a more specific look at the Middle and South Atlantic states. You would find that, whatever feature you query the database for (pronunciation, word-choice, whatever) it varies wildy throughout the surveyed area (and not along the contours of what we traditionally conceive of as dialect "regions").
Linguistic production is local. Local spatially, temporally, socially, textually--just totally. Totally local. And unless you've personally gone to those locations and carefully collected data on them (or if you've availed yourself of the modern, scientific/statistical methods available for approximating just that activity), you're really not qualified to characterize the language produced in those localities.
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That was a good final statement on this thread, HULKAMANIA.
I'm enraged again, because my favourite online dictionary (PONS) doesn't know 'to maximise'. Apparently even the professionals are confused.
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Personally, I couldn't give a rats ass about the spelling differences. I'm a Brit, so to me it's colour. If someone writes color I don't find myself scrambling for the dictionary, and I doubt very much whether anyone else is either. The bigger, or at least potentially more embarrasing, issues are word related.
For example, what does one immediately think when confronted by the following statements?
"Excuse me. Please could you tell me where the fag machine is?"
"Jenny always wears a skirt. She never wears pants."
"Susan has a fantastic fanny"
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On February 04 2011 20:35 TFB wrote:
Personally, I couldn't give a rats ass about the spelling differences. I'm a Brit, so to me it's colour. If someone writes color I don't find myself scrambling for the dictionary, and I doubt very much whether anyone else is either. The bigger, or at least potentially more embarrasing, issues are word related.
For example, what does one immediately think when confronted by the following statements?
"Excuse me. Please could you tell me where the fag machine is?"
"Jenny always wears a skirt. She never wears pants."
"Susan has a fantastic fanny"
Well the first one in the US would refer to homosexuality in a confusing + crude way (although I know in other areas it would be cigarettes)
the second in the US would refer to Jenny's clothing choices...what would it be elewhere?
And the last in the US would be a slightly outdated reference to Susan's backside... what would that mean elsewhere?
And I believe in the UK, children use rubbers in school? (to avoid mistakes)... In the US adults use rubbers to avoid mistakes too. (children mistakes)
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Hyrule19180 Posts
On February 05 2011 00:51 Krikkitone wrote:Show nested quote +On February 04 2011 20:35 TFB wrote:
Personally, I couldn't give a rats ass about the spelling differences. I'm a Brit, so to me it's colour. If someone writes color I don't find myself scrambling for the dictionary, and I doubt very much whether anyone else is either. The bigger, or at least potentially more embarrasing, issues are word related.
For example, what does one immediately think when confronted by the following statements?
"Excuse me. Please could you tell me where the fag machine is?"
"Jenny always wears a skirt. She never wears pants."
"Susan has a fantastic fanny"
Well the first one in the US would refer to homosexuality in a confusing + crude way (although I know in other areas it would be cigarettes) the second in the US would refer to Jenny's clothing choices...what would it be elewhere? And the last in the US would be a slightly outdated reference to Susan's backside... what would that mean elsewhere? And I believe in the UK, children use rubbers in school? (to avoid mistakes)... In the US adults use rubbers to avoid mistakes too. (children mistakes)
"Pants" in British means underwear I believe.
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