Someone teaching me french told me the french word for "mug" (what you drink tea out of) is "mug".

That made me smile.

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If at first you don't succeed, lower your standards.

What he's saying is that in the word 'queue' there are two phonemes, and so logically there should be two characters. Let's say the character 'õ' represents the 'yoo' sound, the word 'queue' would be transliterated as 'kõ'. Such an alphabet would make a lot more sense.


[This message has been edited by Mort-Hog (edited May 31, 2004).]

Personally, I wouldn't mind learning Italian or Japanese.

Italian because I prefer it over French (which I already know a fair amount of anyways). Besides, isn't Italian considered a romance language also?

Japanese in case I ever want to try working abroad. In such a case, I'd probably go to Japan.

Japanese is a fairly straight-forward language, they don't conjugate and the grammar rules seem to be pretty rigid with the verb always going to the end of the sentence. They do miss out a lot of words in conversational Japanese which confuses me, as I tend to read sentences grammatically and not contextually.

Verbs to the end of the sentence go? Then like Yoda and all of germany you will speak!




(EDIT: Or should that be will you speak...? )
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If at first you don't succeed, lower your standards.

[This message has been edited by Martyn (edited May 31, 2004).]

Around the hostages, a perimeter create!

(man, that was weak)

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WAITER: Here’s your green salad, sir.
ANAKIN: What? You fool, I told you NO CROUTONS! Aaaaaaargh!

I would just like to point out that just because a language lacks a lot of synthetic complexity (e.g. elaborate conjugation schemes, nominal declensions, etc.) does not mean it's a simple language. English is inordinately complex once you get into syntax, especially in terms of verbal aspects and more complicated constructions.

In terms of how difficult it is to learn to speak a language, I think that has a lot more to do with how similar that language is to your own, and not with how 'complex' it is, because every language has its own irregularities and strange rules. As far as writing English goes, it's really no worse than any language like Chinese or Japanese that has thousands of unique characters, each representing a single syllable/word.

About language families: Romance languages are defined as languages derived from Latin. Thus, Spanish, Italian, French, Rumanian, Catalan, Occitan, Romantsch, and Portuguese are all Romance languages. Latin, however, is not derived from itself and is considered an Italic language, along with Umbrian and Oscan. English, despite having borrowed many words from Latin and French, is derived from Germanic ancestry, and will always be classified as a Germanic language. It is the biological child, so to speak, of Proto-German, and no matter how long it lives with its foster parents, that will never change.

And, finally, on the topic of reforming English's spelling: I doubt that it will ever be possible. First of all, you have the difficulty that fluent English speakers will never want to give up fluency in reading and writing their languagee halfway through their lives; we read and write whole words at a time, and going to a more phonetic scheme would require sounding out every word. If you make the change gradually enough, this may not be a problem, but this requires a strict obedience to a plan over at least a hundred years (during which time the language itself will evolve) across many governments all over the world.

If that isn't problem enough, you face the further difficulty that, because there is so much regionalism in the pronunciation of English, there will never be a system that is truly phonetic for everyone. If we were to adapt English spelling to my dialect, both 'caught' and 'cot' would be spelled the same, because I use the same vowel for both. But for many other people, the same letter now might mean either one of two different vowels. The easy solution is to pick one dialect and force everyone to learn that. But which dialect will that be? Would the United States government agree to adopt a British dialect, or vice versa? We can't even agree on whether it's 'color' or 'colour'.

So that's my language rant, which no one read because it got too long.

That would seem logical, but if it were true, then it would be as difficult for someone who speaks french to learn english as it is for someone who speaks english to learn french. No, english is probably not the most basic of languages out there, but in terms of complexity, french (and most other popular languages) have it beat by a long run.



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WAITER: Here’s your green salad, sir.
ANAKIN: What? You fool, I told you NO CROUTONS! Aaaaaaargh!

You pronounce 'cot' and 'caught' the same? Where's that accent from? I can only think of Irish!



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If at first you don't succeed, lower your standards.

How would you not pronounce them the same? At least i've never thought of a difference..

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[Blue Mink Bifocals !] [fsck -Rf /world/usr/] [<!-- kalimonster -->] [Capite Terram]
"If all those usefull inventions that are lyable to abuse, should therefore be concealed, there is not any Art or Science, which might be lawfully profest."
-John Wilkins, Mercury, or the Secret and Swift messenger, shewing how a man may with privacy and speed Communicate his thoughts to a Friend at any distance (London, 1641)
NPC.Interact::PressButton($'Submit');

Like the difference between Dot, spot, lot, and say bought, court, fought. The 'o' is short, rather than the elongated ones in the second set. (I wish my friend Saf was here, she's doing a linguistics degree and could explain it so much better than me!)

But my accent's wierd anyways. I'm just curious!

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If at first you don't succeed, lower your standards.

All of those except court i pronounce the same....

And court is like cork with a t.

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[Blue Mink Bifocals !] [fsck -Rf /world/usr/] [<!-- kalimonster -->] [Capite Terram]
"If all those usefull inventions that are lyable to abuse, should therefore be concealed, there is not any Art or Science, which might be lawfully profest."
-John Wilkins, Mercury, or the Secret and Swift messenger, shewing how a man may with privacy and speed Communicate his thoughts to a Friend at any distance (London, 1641)
NPC.Interact::PressButton($'Submit');

I would like to learn Japanese or Russian, but I have to stick with Spanish (only went up to level III) since my school only offers that, German, and French.

Hey... SHUT UP!
Babel fish can only do so much.
I might've changed it if I remembered how to conjugate verbs.

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Genesis 22:2-5 - And God said unto Abraham "You must kill your son, Isaac." And Abraham said "What? I can't hear you! You'll have to speak into the microphone." And God said "Check, check, check, check. Jerry, can you pull the high end out. I'm getting some hiss up here."
Valuable Life Lesson: Frog + Potato Gun = Blindness
Catalog of Electronic Components - Complete IC data sheets
National Electrical Code® (NEC®) Online - Legal requirements for wiring projects.

All I can do in Russian is swear.

About the cot/caught issue, I'm from lower Michigan, and I like to think that my dialect is pretty close to standard American. Then again, I've got friends who've also lived here their entire lives and do make the distinction. So maybe I'm just weird.

At least I don't say 'melk' for 'milk' like everyone else in this state.

Yiddish is the language of love. The ladies love words that begin with "sh" and they swoon when you cover them with saliva and mucus with a throaty "kh" sound.

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Superstition brings bad luck.
-Raymond Smullyan, 5000B.C.

Although there is a word for just about every farking thing, it's also a downside; who in the heck uses these words on a regular basis? Most people I know personally use "basic" english and avoid bombastic speech that would make amiable people go bad.

Jeez, it's hard to write a sentence with bloated and sententious language.

therefore,
machine language > *

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for(i = 0; i < 00; i = i + 1) Print("massassi is good");
PrintInt(i); //print the integer value of infinity

Chinese has pictographs, but Japanese has an alphabet. In fact, it has two, one for writing in English and one for writing in Japanese. Japanese does use some Chinese pictographs for proper nouns and things, but mostly they use an alphabet. In Chinese, though, you only use the pictographs, and I think that this concept makes a lot more sense. If you were trying to explain something to a stranger, the easiest way would be to draw them a picture, and it is from the cave-man origins that the Chinese characters come from. A lot of the characters have been developed and changed by the CCP, in order to make them easier and quicker to write, so actually seeing the original pictures is difficult or impossible, but some remain the same.
For example,
This character means 'tree'. If you were called 'Mr. Wood' then you would use this character to mean your name.
This character means 'mountain', with the three peaks.

When these characters are used to represent abstract concepts, they become quite interesting.

This character represents 'love' and is supposed to depict a mother and her child.

Similarly, when depicting modern ideas or concepts, the Chinese have to be inventive, as 'psychology' is made up of three characters, mind+body+logic. Some words, though, become almost like sentences when depicting complicated concepts.



Hmm, to an extent, I guess so. It's certainly a lot easier to remember the words that sound the same as the English ones.
But when it comes to grammar, I think that follows a different thought process.

When speaking Latin (as you do), you have to think about:
Whether the noun is singular or plural;
Whether the verb is referring to a singular or plural subject;
Which case the clause is in;
Whether the verb should go to the end or not;
Whether you should ommit the subject or not;
Which declension the noun follows;
Which declension the verb follows;

The last two are a real pain.

Old English is even worse, in that there are up to nine different cases and five different declensions. and a whole host of different dialects to boot.

Japanese grammar is much easier as I don't have to think about verb conjugation, genders, or declensions.
It does, however, have one peculiarity, in that is has particles that define whether a word is a subject or an object (whereas in English, the word order and/or conjugation does this)

For example,
|watashi wa | Mort | des |
|I | Mort | am |

'wa' has no meaning by itself, but shows that 'watashi' is the subject. I guess this makes it considerably easier when listening to Japanese. I don't really know complicated Japanese so I don't know how things are with adverbs or subjunctives or imperatives. But Japanese does at least have simple foundations, and so there's less to think about at a fundemental level.

Ooh, something that I find fantastic about Mandarin grammar is 'ma'.
If I say 'wo he cha' it means 'I drink tea'.
'ni he cha' means 'you drink tea'. 'ni he cha ma' means 'Do you drink tea?'. Just adding that word to end makes it a question! That amazes me, for some reason.


On English...

I think American English has tried to simplify English spelling, and I agree with some of it. The use of 'z' instead of 's' makes sense, I think, in words like 'standardization'. That is a definite 'z' sound, in contrast to, say, 'sensation'. Even in an RP accent, you can't avoid the 'z' sound.
Others, I disagree with, like 'color'. In the word 'colour' the two vowel sounds are not the same. 'cull-eeuh'. You don't say 'coll-orrr'. Getting rid of the 'o' and making it 'colur' would make more sense. 'coleur' makes the most sense, though.

I love language. Just think about the little details you are all discussing. It's beautiful.

For the record, though, I very much dislike the sound of romantic languages. I'm a germanic-type.

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WOOSH|-----@%

You barbarian.

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Superstition brings bad luck.
-Raymond Smullyan, 5000B.C.

It'd be Gallic - pertaining to the (mostly celtic) tribes of France collectively called the Gauls. Not to be confused with Gaelic-pertaining to the Gaels of Ireland which the Romans refered to as Hibernia.

I like the celtic languages, though most tend to sound a little rough.

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Steal my dreams and sell them back to me.....

[This message has been edited by Bounty Hunter 4 hire (edited June 01, 2004).]

Mort, I'll admit I don't know that much about either Japanese or Chinese (I just say Chinese for simplicity, since my cluelessness is equal for Mandarin, Cantonese, and anything else...), but I was under the impression that, in Japanese, kanji are used for just about everything. (I'm assuming that by the two alphabets, you mean hiragana and katakana, and by the pictographs you mean kanji, right?)

About the grammar, what I meant is this:
If you spoke Old English, and were used to declining nouns into nine different cases, it wouldn't be bad at all for you to learn how to do basically the same thing in another language like Latin.

On the other hand, starting with a language like that where almost all the grammatical information is an obvious part of the word, it's more difficult to learn to infer all of that information just from how the words are arranged.

Basically, it's easier to do grammatical tasks that you do in your own language than to train your brain to perform completely new ones.


To get a little closer back to the real topic of the thread, I personally agree with everyone who says German sounds way better than French. Never understood why anyone would like the latter.

I think the reason why it's called the 'language of love' has something to do with how it was the language of many of the medieval Romances, which included stories of courtly love. That's what I've been told before, anyway.

I think if you spoke Old English or Latin, learning any other European language would a lot easier.
Remembering all the declensions and getting used to conjugating is totally harder than remebering that there aren't any declensions and that you don't conjugate. :-)

On Japanese:
Katakana is generally used for foreign names, borrowed words, company names, and new Japanese words

Hiragana is generally used for simple words, conjugations, dictionaries, most books, and for showing how to pronounce kanji.

Both of the above are phonetic alphabets.

Kanji is generally used for place names, names of people, and verb and adjective stems. A lot of the Japanese kanji are simplified versions of the Chinese.

Okay, I may have underestimated the use of Kanji, but Hiragana is more used, I believe.


Also, I think French has a certain... je ne ce pas.

I think you meant 'a certain je ne sais quoi'

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[Blue Mink Bifocals !] [fsck -Rf /world/usr/] [<!-- kalimonster -->] [Capite Terram]
"If all those usefull inventions that are lyable to abuse, should therefore be concealed, there is not any Art or Science, which might be lawfully profest."
-John Wilkins, Mercury, or the Secret and Swift messenger, shewing how a man may with privacy and speed Communicate his thoughts to a Friend at any distance (London, 1641)
NPC.Interact::PressButton($'Submit');

actually, both work

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WAITER: Here’s your green salad, sir.
ANAKIN: What? You fool, I told you NO CROUTONS! Aaaaaaargh!

I meant 'shut up' >:

Also, I read in Mother Tongue that English is the only language that has thesauruses (thesauri?).

nuh-uh.


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WAITER: Here’s your green salad, sir.
ANAKIN: What? You fool, I told you NO CROUTONS! Aaaaaaargh!

Greek is the only language more verbose than English that I know of. And that is because it has dozens of semi-synonyms for certain words, each conveying a slightly different meaning or connotation.

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Steal my dreams and sell them back to me.....

I don't see english as having all that many words. In fact, I can think of several french words that have no equivalent in english.

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WAITER: Here’s your green salad, sir.
ANAKIN: What? You fool, I told you NO CROUTONS! Aaaaaaargh!