Okay, Just Humor Me...


Off-Topic Discussions

51 to 92 of 92 << first < prev | 1 | 2 | next > last >>
The Exchange RPG Superstar 2009 Top 8

bugleyman wrote:

OP: Here's the thing...languages aren't designed, they evolve. No individual or organization controls spelling, or inclusion/exclusion of words, etc. So influencing those factors can be horribly difficult, with not guarantee of success. I don't see how to empower an organization with that authority, because no one *has* that authority to begin with.

BTW there is a great book on the evolution of English called "The Mother Tongue." It sounds like you might enjoy picking it up...

I agree with Bugleyman that it is horribly difficult to effect change in linguistic practices. Still, language planning is interesting.

The difficulty hasn't stopped people from trying. These days 'language planning' is becoming a growing field. There are some purposes to which language planning is put that have wider appeal than simplifying English for international communication (although that is one). Language planners are involved in language revitalization, language preservation, language standardization, language extension, language promotion, language policy, and language education. I can't think of any others. Much of the research has looked at promotion of French in Canada, expansion of Hebrew in Israel, revitalization of Welsh in Wales, the status of Singaporean English as a distinct and legitimate variety, and the preservation of aboriginal languages.


Mairkurion {tm} wrote:
Ooo...I'm suppressing snarky statements in response to Kirth....ouch!

Do tell! Now you've got me all curious. My skin is pretty thick, too.


Kirth Gersen wrote:
Crimson Jester wrote:
Molech wrote:
By the way, Icelandic is considered the hardest language to learn.
I thought that was Navajo.
Hardest to learn and hardest to master are two different things, though. The U.S. Army has a scale for difficulty of languages to master; English is the only real-world langauge that rates a "5" out of 5.

Release!

Having listened to officers giving public speeches on academic occasions to the students at TX A&M, I can see why the army would rate English at the highest level of difficulty...PAINFUL.


Mairkurion {tm} wrote:
Having listened to officers giving public speeches on academic occasions to the students at TX A&M, I can see why the army would rate English at the highest level of difficulty...PAINFUL.

Heh. I listened to General Petraeus testify; someone asked if he was intentionally being obfuscating and/or evasive, and I had to reply, "No; he's speaking with perfect clarity and directness. But he's speaking Military English, not American English!" As P.J. O'Rourke pointed out in Parliament of Whores, the term for "stairway" in Military English is "Foot-Impelled Bi-Directional Vertical Transport Asset."

And even that's a lot better than some of the graduation speeches I had to endure from non-military academics, by the way... in one speech, one of the members of the Board of Education talked a lot about needing better science education. Then he tried for some Pop Culture references, and added: "Because, as we learned from Star Wars: Episode 1, having a higher chromosome count makes you a Jedi."


That wasn't what made it painful. It was the ongoing series of blatant language errors of all kinds. For a place of higher education, it really was shockingly bad and from more than one speaker. I wish I had recorded them in some fashion. The only one I can remember off of the top of my head: the guest giving the benediction was introduced as being from "Princeton Theological Cemetery"...


Mairkurion {tm} wrote:
That wasn't what made it painful. It was the ongoing series of blatant language errors of all kinds. For a place of higher education, it really was shockingly bad and from more than one speaker. I wish I had recorded them in some fashion. The only one I can remember off of the top of my head: the guest giving the benediction was introduced as being from "Princeton Theological Cemetery"...

My boundless optimism makes me prefer to think the smart officers were all off directing troops, so they left the dumb ones behind to give speeches...


Mairkurion {tm} wrote:
TX A&M

When I first moved to Texas, some guy asked me "Are you a Longhorn or an Aggie?" When I asked him if there was a third option, he looked at me as if I were speaking in tongues.


HAHAHA! Which, as you know, is also easy to find in Texas...

Dark Archive

Kirth Gersen wrote:
Mairkurion {tm} wrote:
TX A&M
When I first moved to Texas, some guy asked me "Are you a Longhorn or an Aggie?" When I asked him if there was a third option, he looked at me as if I were speaking in tongues.

Around here, the rivalry between BYU and Utah is called the Holy War.


David Fryer wrote:
Around here, the rivalry between BYU and Utah is called the Holy War.

Love it!

I'm a total Red State reject, because when people ask me about my undergrad football tailgating days, I tell them that we had hockey instead. Yeah, "instead," not "in addition to."

Liberty's Edge

Mairkurion {tm} wrote:
That wasn't what made it painful. It was the ongoing series of blatant language errors of all kinds. For a place of higher education, it really was shockingly bad and from more than one speaker. I wish I had recorded them in some fashion. The only one I can remember off of the top of my head: the guest giving the benediction was introduced as being from "Princeton Theological Cemetery"...

Four year colleges have "remedial" classes now. Lowest common denominator in action.

Like I said, "Idiocracy" isn't a movie, it's a documentary that came back from the future.

Liberty's Edge

Kirth Gersen wrote:
Mairkurion {tm} wrote:
TX A&M
When I first moved to Texas, some guy asked me "Are you a Longhorn or an Aggie?" When I asked him if there was a third option, he looked at me as if I were speaking in tongues.

Yeah, those Texas Tech Red Raiders get no respect ;)

Longhorn here, btw

HOOK `EM!

The Exchange

Kirth Gersen wrote:
Crimson Jester wrote:
Molech wrote:
By the way, Icelandic is considered the hardest language to learn.
I thought that was Navajo.
Hardest to learn and hardest to master are two different things, though. The U.S. Army has a scale for difficulty of languages to master; English is the only real-world langauge that rates a "5" out of 5.

I would be interested in a link for that if you have one.


I've started saying, "I teach 13th grade."

Scarab Sages

Go LOBOs.

*ducks and runs for cover.*

The Exchange RPG Superstar 2009 Top 8

Crimson Jester wrote:
Kirth Gersen wrote:
Crimson Jester wrote:
Molech wrote:
By the way, Icelandic is considered the hardest language to learn.
I thought that was Navajo.
Hardest to learn and hardest to master are two different things, though. The U.S. Army has a scale for difficulty of languages to master; English is the only real-world langauge that rates a "5" out of 5.
I would be interested in a link for that if you have one.

Me too. I thought Korean and Japanese both rated a 5 out of 5 for English speakers. Really, the difficulty of the language has to be relative to the first language. No way should English be a '5' for a French speaker. Nor should Korean be a '5' for a Japanese speaker.

The Exchange RPG Superstar 2009 Top 8

I feel like a depressed salad.


Really? Maybe you're not cut out to be a greenman. Jollity is a requirement: think Jove, Spirit of Christmas past, etc. Although, I'd say we're mercurial too...winter comes, etc. Yeah, maybe you're just not to spring yet. You're a late bloomer.

The Exchange RPG Superstar 2009 Top 8

Mairkurion {tm} wrote:
Really? Maybe you're not cut out to be a greenman. Jollity is a requirement: think Jove, Spirit of Christmas past, etc. Although, I'd say we're mercurial too...winter comes, etc. Yeah, maybe you're just not to spring yet. You're a late bloomer.

It snowed three times this week. I was just getting ready to let my buds hang out and then it snowed ... three times. My buds just froze and shrunk up when that happened. Meanwhile, Houstonderek is checking out girls in bikinis. * sigh *


There may be a cruel irony...a school has appeared on my horizon that might be looking for somebody after I am done. In Toronto. My tropical Asian wife would probably kill me if I asked her to leave TX and move up there.

Would it make you feel better if I added I miss the snow from NJ/NY? I know it's nothing compared to Toronto, but I did happen to live there in snow heavy years, and I loved it!

Liberty's Edge

Mairkurion {tm} wrote:

There may be a cruel irony...a school has appeared on my horizon that might be looking for somebody after I am done. In Toronto. My tropical Asian wife would probably kill me if I asked her to leave TX and move up there.

Would it make you feel better if I added I miss the snow from NJ/NY? I know it's nothing compared to Toronto, but I did happen to live there in snow heavy years, and I loved it!

I miss the idea of snow (it was cool when we got a night of snow flakes here this winter), the reality (warming up the car, scraping ice of the windows, shoveling the driveway after the plow blocks it with a 4 foot snow/ice berm, black ice) is something I don't miss at all...


Okay, let's go through the English alphabet:

Vowels in General: All five are generally fine, except some of the ways we use them. 'Soft sound if single vowel, hard sound if word ends in E'? Gee, that's great, we have to look at every word's end in order to pronounce it's middle! And if a word ends in E and has more than one vowel, we have to guess which ones are hard. That's retarded. I say drop the silent Es and use a simple and clear designation for hard vowels instead. I can't type any neat little accent marks, so I'll simply double-up a vowel to reflect its hard sound. For example, 'obsfucate' is now spelled 'OBSFUUCAAT'.

Also, many written vowels simply don't reflect the spoken vowels. For example 'one' has no O sound, as 'own' and 'on' do. Brilliant, more pronunciations that have to be guessed at!

Consonants in General: Consonants have a tendency to be irritating in English. For example, four of their names don't even contain the sound that they reflect: C, G, H and W. That's confusing BS. I say we rename each consonant as the sound it reflects, followed by the soft A sound. So B is named BA, D is named DA, etc.

And, as with vowels, many spellings don't reflect the spoken words. 'Phone' is just a drop in the ocean. So let's drop the obvious BS and spell the consonants that we hear, and only those. No silent Hs or double Bs as in 'ghost' or 'rabbit.'

Then there are a few consonant sounds that English has no letters for. Namely SH, TH, CH, NG and that rolling J sound in 'barrage' and 'deja vu.' If I were hand writing I could make new letters but for now SH, TH, CH, NG and JJ will have to do.

The Letters

A: AA
B: BA
C: Drop it. It makes the same sound as K, or sometimes S, which is even more confusing. Linguists might insist that K is a hard sound and C is a soft sound until they're blue in the face, but the other 99% of us only need K.
D: DA
E: EE
F: FA
G: GA
H: HA
I: II
J: JA
K: KA
L: LA
M: MA
N: NA
O: OO
P: PA
Q: Drop it. It's just a simple combo of K and W and therefore unecessary.
R: RA
S: SA
T: TA
U: UU
V: VA
W: WA
X: Drop it. It's just a combo of K and S. A waste of space and memory.
Y: YA. None of this 'sometimes a vowel' cr@p. If it's not pronounced like the Y in 'yak', it's a hard E or maybe an I.
Z: ZA
SH: SHA
CH: CHA
TH: THA
NG: NGA
JJ: JJA

That makes 27 letters, easier for all future English learners. We still have creative idioms, expressions and words; they're just easier to read and write now. We can still write elegant poetry and descriptive books...and you guessed it, they're easier to read and write now.

I'm not saying it would be a good idea to enforce all of these changes all at once; a few changes every few years will do. For example, in 2010 we'll start by fixing the obviously horrendous spellings like 'phone' to 'fone.' Then in 2020 when everyone is used to that and a generation has just about gotten through grade school, we'll drop C, Q and X from the alfabet. And so on...


Crimson Jester wrote:
I would be interested in a link for that if you have one.

I would, too -- for the life of me I can't seem to turn one up now. The thing is, languages that are very difficult to learn (Navajo, Basque, Hungarian, Vietnamese) due to structure, alphabet, and/or dissimilarity from others, typically have fewer bizarre contradictions and sheer nonsense than does English. A native Basque speaker writing in Basque, for example, is likely to make far fewer spelling and grammatical errors than a native English speaker writing in English -- even if the Basque learns conversational or even fluent English more easily than an American can learn Basque.


I need to start some sort of militant organization. "English for Historical Continuity" or something.

I was already horrified by my graduate students telling me they had serious trouble reading Hooker. REALLY? Graduate students? I mean, I knew your average community college student couldn't read Shakespeare or King James, but GRADUATE STUDENTS AT A PRIVATE UNIVERSITY!

Liberty's Edge

Mairkurion {tm} wrote:

I need to start some sort of militant organization. "English for Historical Continuity" or something.

I was already horrified by my graduate students telling me they had serious trouble reading Hooker. REALLY? Graduate students? I mean, I knew your average community college student couldn't read Shakespeare or King James, but GRADUATE STUDENTS AT A PRIVATE UNIVERSITY!

Seriously, I'm not kidding.


houstonderek wrote:
Seriously, I'm not kidding.

Derek's telling the truth. It's got what plants crave.

Liberty's Edge

I'm just saying, it's sad that I never finished my degree, yet I use better grammar and have a larger, more robust vocabulary than quite a few college grads I know.

Shadow Lodge

I gradjiated the 2nd grade and I talk real good.


houstonderek wrote:
I'm just saying, it's sad that I never finished my degree, yet I use better grammar and have a larger, more robust vocabulary than quite a few college grads I know.

It's because of all that Brawndo.

Liberty's Edge

So, what you're REALLY saying is that my cat, Puff, and Steve the houseplant are smarter than college grads? Brawndo is all they get, you know...


Hey, doods, I talk gud engrish. You betcha.

The Exchange

houstonderek wrote:
So, what you're REALLY saying is that my cat, Puff, and Steve the houseplant are smarter than college grads? Brawndo is all they get, you know...

Well at least in Arkansas.

The Exchange RPG Superstar 2009 Top 8

Tequila Sunrise wrote:

Okay, let's go through the English alphabet:

Vowels in General: All five are generally fine, except some of the ways we use them. 'Soft sound if single vowel, hard sound if word ends in E'? Gee, that's great, we have to look at every word's end in order to pronounce it's middle! And if a word ends in E and has more than one vowel, we have to guess which ones are hard. That's retarded. I say drop the silent Es and use a simple and clear designation for hard vowels instead. I can't type any neat little accent marks, so I'll simply double-up a vowel to reflect its hard sound. For example, 'obsfucate' is now spelled 'OBSFUUCAAT'.

Also, many written vowels simply don't reflect the spoken vowels. For example 'one' has no O sound, as 'own' and 'on' do. Brilliant, more pronunciations that have to be guessed at!

Consonants in General: Consonants have a tendency to be irritating in English. For example, four of their names don't even contain the sound that they reflect: C, G, H and W. That's confusing BS. I say we rename each consonant as the sound it reflects, followed by the soft A sound. So B is named BA, D is named DA, etc.

And, as with vowels, many spellings don't reflect the spoken words. 'Phone' is just a drop in the ocean. So let's drop the obvious BS and spell the consonants that we hear, and only those. No silent Hs or double Bs as in 'ghost' or 'rabbit.'

Then there are a few consonant sounds that English has no letters for. Namely SH, TH, CH, NG and that rolling J sound in 'barrage' and 'deja vu.' If I were hand writing I could make new letters but for now SH, TH, CH, NG and JJ will have to do.

The Letters

A: AA
B: BA
C: Drop it. It makes the same sound as K, or sometimes S, which is even more confusing. Linguists might insist that K is a hard sound and C is a soft sound until they're blue in the face, but the other 99% of us only need K.
D: DA
E: EE
F: FA
G: GA
H: HA
I: II
J: JA
K: KA
L: LA
M: MA
N: NA
O: OO
P: PA
Q: Drop it. It's just a simple combo of...

I think you're on to something Tequila Sunrise. In fact, I think the European Comission is ahead of you. I found this on another http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/1606website

Spoiler:

The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility.

As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5-year phase-in plan that would become known as “Euro-English.”

In the first year, “s” will replace the soft “c.” Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy.

The hard “c” will be dropped in favour of “k.” This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter.

There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome “ph” will be replaced with “f.” This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter.

In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible.

Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling.

Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent “e” in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away.

By the 4th yer people wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing “th” with “z” and “w” with “v.”

During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary “o” kan be dropd from vords kontaining “ou” and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensi bl riten styl.

Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis & evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru.

Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas.


Other than being a joke, your post actually made sense until you hit year four.

Another thought accured to me this morning: if enough authors, editors and media wrote in 'Plain English', the simplifications would be accepted by America via common usage pretty quickly. America's love of popularity has already been proven.

Is there already some sort of legally recognized English dictionary in the USA? Someone mentioned Congress rejecting some of Webster's ideas, but how much authority does anyone actually have over language? I mean, nobody's going to get arrested for writing newspapers or even legal documents in Plain English.


Tarren Dei wrote:
<snipped for brevity>

And in 4 years we can go from English to LoLspeak! :-P

The Exchange RPG Superstar 2009 Top 8

Disenchanter wrote:
Tarren Dei wrote:
<snipped for brevity>
And in 4 years we can go from English to LoLspeak! :-P

How dare you snip me for brevity. I've never been brev.

Also, you're as much behind the times as Tequila. This young woman has already proven that LoLspeak is a fully functioning language able to be employed towards complex academic arguments.


Tarren Dei wrote:
Disenchanter wrote:
Tarren Dei wrote:
<snipped for brevity>
And in 4 years we can go from English to LoLspeak! :-P

How dare you snip me for brevity. I've never been brev.

Also, you're as much behind the times as Tequila. This young woman has already proven that LoLspeak is a fully functioning language able to be employed towards complex academic arguments.

It wasn't you I was snipping. The fact is, the reply cut off in the middle of the post you quoted, and I didn't feel like leaving the reply to copy and paste your part of the post. At the same time, I wanted to signal I was responding to your post.

When I saw that your young woman link was going to Fail Blog, I thought you were linking to this one.


I am sooo not a fan of laz...I mean, lolspeak.

The Exchange RPG Superstar 2009 Top 8

Disenchanter wrote:
Tarren Dei wrote:
Disenchanter wrote:
Tarren Dei wrote:
<snipped for brevity>
And in 4 years we can go from English to LoLspeak! :-P

How dare you snip me for brevity. I've never been brev.

Also, you're as much behind the times as Tequila. This young woman has already proven that LoLspeak is a fully functioning language able to be employed towards complex academic arguments.

It wasn't you I was snipping. The fact is, the reply cut off in the middle of the post you quoted, and I didn't feel like leaving the reply to copy and paste your part of the post. At the same time, I wanted to signal I was responding to your post.

I know. I was joking. ;-)

Disenchanter wrote:
When I saw that your young woman link was going to Fail Blog, I thought you were linking to this one.

I love failblog.


Tarren Dei wrote:
Me too. I thought Korean and Japanese both rated a 5 out of 5 for English speakers. Really, the difficulty of the language has to be relative to the first language. No way should English be a '5' for a French speaker. Nor should Korean be a '5' for a Japanese speaker.

Definitely (except that both Korean and Japanese are isolate languages and not related to each other). Some claim Finnish to be really difficult to learn but there the problem is mainly that it is just so much different from most other European languages.

On the other hand, it is almost completely phonetic and uses smaller alphabet than Latin or Germanic languages, so pronounciation is easy once you know the rules, and while lots of words common in most European languages are changed or nonrecognizable, again once you get the logic the vocabulary is rather sensible (and if one is looking for languages with very good capability of making new words, strongly agglutinative languages like Finnish, Hungarian or Turkish are really good at it...)

I have to agree that English has horrible pronounciation system which I guess is evident from numerous "how do you pronounce these names" discussions also in these boards or spelling bees in schools (which would be completely ridiculous in most other languages, as the words and names are pronounced like they are written). English also does not score well on vocabulary, it being ridiculously unwieldy and often having little logic, so if you come across a new word you have little way of figuring out what does it mean...
Basic grammar is easy, Bad English is indeed one of the easiest languages to learn which should explain its status as popular second language...and while English is widespread language now, I would guess that eventually it will share the fate of Latin and splits to several local languages...


Tequila Sunrise wrote:

THE QUESTION:

Imagine that, like me, you wanted to attain total domination of the written English language in order to dumb it down for all those under-achieving kids and lazy foreigners. How would you create a financially and politically empowered language authority to attain such domination?

I'd start by intently studying the book, 1984. :)

The Exchange RPG Superstar 2009 Top 8

magdalena thiriet wrote:
Tarren Dei wrote:
Me too. I thought Korean and Japanese both rated a 5 out of 5 for English speakers. Really, the difficulty of the language has to be relative to the first language. No way should English be a '5' for a French speaker. Nor should Korean be a '5' for a Japanese speaker.
Definitely (except that both Korean and Japanese are isolate languages and not related to each other).

Of course, that's been debated for quite some time. The consensus these days is that they are unrelated but I have trouble buying that. In any case, a large chunk of their vocabularies (60% for both) came from Chinese so, even if their syntax was unrelated, the lexicon would still be easier for a speaker of the other language to learn.

Anyhow, my question is where can I find these rankings of languages?

51 to 92 of 92 << first < prev | 1 | 2 | next > last >>
Community / Forums / Gamer Life / Off-Topic Discussions / Okay, Just Humor Me... All Messageboards

Want to post a reply? Sign in.
Recent threads in Off-Topic Discussions