[DreadVile]

Subject: The English Language

We'll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes;
but the plural of ox became oxen not oxes.
One fowl is a goose, but two are called geese,
yet the plural of moose should never be meese.

You may find a lone mouse or a nest full of mice;
yet the plural of house is houses, not hice.
If the plural of man is always called men,
why shouldn't the plural of pan be called pen?

If I spoke of my foot and show you my feet,
and I give you a boot, would a pair be called beet?
If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth,
why shouldn't the plural of booth be called beeth?

Then one may be that, and three would be those,
yet hat in the plural would never be hose,
and the plural of cat is cats, not cose.

We speak of a brother and also of brethren,
but though we say mother we never say methren.
Then the masculine pronouns are he, his and him,
but imagine the feminine, she, shis and shim.

Some reasons to be grateful if you grew up speaking English;
1) The bandage was wound around the wound.
2) The farm was used to produce produce.
3) The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse.
4) We must polish the Polish furniture.
5) He could lead if he would get the lead out.
6) The soldier decided to desert his dessert in the desert.
7) Since there is no time like the present, he thought it was time to
present the present.
8) At the Army base, a bass was painted on the head of a bass drum.
9) When shot at, the dove dove into the bushes.
10) I did not object to the object.
11) The insurance was invalid for the invalid.
12) There was a row among the oarsmen about how to row.
13) They were too close to the door to close it.
14) The buck does funny things when the does are present.
15) A seamstress and a sewer fell down into a sewer line.
16) To help with planting, the farmer taught his sow to sow.
17) The wind was too strong to wind the sail.
18) After a number of Novocain injections, my jaw got number.
19) Upon seeing the tear in the painting I shed a tear.
20) I had to subject the subject to a series of tests.
21) How can I intimate this to my most intimate friend?
22) I spent last evening evening out a pile of dirt.
>
Screwy pronunciations can mess up your mind! For example... If you have a rough cough, climbing can be tough when going through the bough on a tree!

Let's face it - English is a crazy language.

There is no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor
pine in pineapple. English muffins weren't invented in England

We take English for granted. But if we explore its paradoxes, we
find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square and a guinea
pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig. And why is it that writers
write but fingers don't fing, grocers don't groce and hammers don't ham?

Doesn't it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend?

If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but one of
them, What do you call it?

If teachers taught, why didn't preachers praught?
If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?

Sometimes I think all the folks who grew up speaking
English should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane.

In what language do people recite at a play and play at a recital?
Ship by truck and send cargo by ship?
Have noses that run and feet that smell?
How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same,
while a wise man and a wiseguy are opposites?
You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language in
which your house can burn up as it burns down, in which
you fill in a form by filling it out and in which an alarm
goes off by going on.

If Dad is Pop, how come! Mom isn't Mop?
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Clatto Verata N... Necktie... Nickel... It's an "N" word, it's definitely an "N" word!

[sgt stutter]

Good stuff I love the english language
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click--><eVa>SuperGreg

R.I.P Trigger Happy

[Violent Pacifist]

I don't think that any language is an exception to that. Study one long enough, or even for a few days, and you'll start wondering what idiot put it together. Noses still run in French, and feet still smell in Spanish. The fact that they may use seperate words for the seperate meanings just makes them the more complicated.

English, sad to say, is probably the easiest language to learn, though it may not seem like it at first. We do have odd words here and there, but so do other languages. Who came up with the idea for reflexive verbs in the Spanish language? What moron decided to split languages into masculine and feminine, and who decided what gender everything is? English doesn't have that. Instead, we have an incredibly simple sentence structure. Do we ever have to worry about saying 2 different phrases that both conjugate irregularly, just to say the same thing? Do we have to worry about saying me, mi, mis, te, le, lo, se, and some other Spanish pronouns, depending on what we are talking about? Our adjectives come before the nouns, and our verbs hardly change. We add -ed for past tense, and -ing for present tense, assuming there isn't an e at the end of the word. We don't have seperate ways for saying a past tense word, and writing it as German does. We only have one way of saying THE. Some languages have about 50 million. Our words and sentences are generally shorter than other languages.

Truthfully, English words are a bit strange at time, but it's well worth it when compared to other languages.
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We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.

[Azrael]

Actually, there is a classification system for determining how difficult a language is based upon what language you originally learned as a child. It is a five category system. English is considered a Catagory 5 language, as is Chinese. Arabic is a Cat 4, as is Korean. Russian is a Cat 3, German a Cat 2, and Spanish is a Cat 1. I mention those because those are the ones I am most familiar with. The system is put together like this. If you are a native english speaker, how hard would it be to learn chinese? Well, it's an extremely difficult language for english speakers to learn, in fact, just as hard, or maybe a little harder, than it would be for a chinese person to learn english, therefore it's a 5, just like chinese. Since Arabic is easier for an english speaker to learn than it is for an arab to learn english, it gets a lower rating. This is basically how the system is applied.

Not all languages are created equally. One of the reasons English is considered a very difficult language is due to the fact that our grammer has many rules that do not apply to mainstream verbs, adjectives and nouns, just like dreadvile's poem demonstrated. For the most part, other languages tend to be very structured when it comes to things like plural usage and verb conjugation. In arabic, even the irregular verbs have rules that govern conjugation. On the flipside, the reason english is considered easy to learn is because the global community has been inundated with the english language. It has become the language of business and air travel. If you happened to be listening to a pilot in a foreign country talking to a tower control (which I have done), you will not hear them speaking that country's language, they will use english, it is viewed as the standard, which helps reduce confusion and avoids accidents and catastrophes. In every country I've been in, a big mac is a big mac, and a whooper with cheese is just that. When someone decides to learn english, they normally already have a bit of an idea of what they're getting into, while most americans couldn't even name the writing system used by Russians (Cyrillic), or tell you what direction arabs and persians read their sentences (from right to left).

Another thing that most people don't realize is that many languages in the world are dying right under poeples' noses. Arabic has an active program of refuseing to use new words to describe new technologies and methods, which is counter to what the colloquial speech has become. Arabs will normally call a computer a computer, but the official word in arabic can be described in english of having a meaning closer to "counting machine". This is causing a rift between proper and colloquial speech which could very well lead to the death of the arabic language as a whole. This is similar to the french refusal to use the word email in official correspondence. While all of France may say email, their Franco pride has cause dthem to turn a blind eye to what the common language has chosen for use, and instead deemed a lesser used phrase be put in it's place. Will this save French? No, it will simply cause proper and colloquial speeh to drift farther apart, until one day the official language will be unrecognizeable to the common man.

But if that's the case, how can these languages be saved? They can't. It is an inevitable evolution caused by the ne "global village". The change is taking place in every language, even english. What is spoken in two hundred years will most likely not be recognizeable as english, or french, russian, german, spanish or whatever.


Hmm, a bit of a long one, but I like talking about languages (soon to be linguisitics major here).
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Under construction!!!

[Violent Pacifist]

Actually, I was talking to Chen last week, and he was telling me that most foreign exchange students at his school find English very easy to learn. Saying things like "Chinese is hard to learn for English speaking people and vice versa" doesn't hold with me. I know more than one Chinese person that grew up in China, fluently speaks English, and still attends Chinese school three times a week to learn his own langauge (been going since they were born, and still don't know Chinese as well as English sometimes).

Do I say English is easy to learn? Yes. Do I say Spanish is hard to learn? Sometimes. Do some people think that Spanish is easier to learn than English? Yes. The problem is that most of these people are also native Spanish speakers.

I'll give you some examples as to why Spanish is a strange language, simply to counter why you're saying English is a strange language.

Reflexive Verbs

I still don't understand who came up with reflexive verbs. They act exactly the same as other verbs, but because these verbs are things people do to themselves, they have different rules. Dormirse. I have been activly taught three different ways to say that one verb, not including conjugation. I can say "Me por la noche dormo". I can say "Por la noche me dormo". Or I can say "Por la noche dormome". Granted that is relativly simple, but why can't I simply say "Por la noche dormo"? (The sentence means "At night I go to sleep")

Past tense

In the English language, past tense is very simple, save for a few irregular verbs. Altogether though, it is still simpler than Spanish. In Spanish, they have different ways to say a past tense verb for each of the three verb endings, and the different pronouns that go along with them. While this is more structured, it is also more confusing. I feel that I would much rather say "I ate, you ate, they ate", instead of "Comi, comio, comieron".

Future tense and double meanings

Here's an example of a double meaning in Spanish for you. If you ever say you are going to do something, you say "Voy a (thing)". But "voy" mean "I go", as in "I move", not "I'm going to". "A" also has many meanings in the Spanish langauge. So far, I've seen probably about 1/4 - sometimes more than that - sentences in the Spanish langauge that use 1 or more a's in them, most of the time with different meanings. Tener also has double meanings. If you say you have to do something, you say "Tengo que...". If that phrase was translated exactly, it would come out to something like "I have that...."

Irregular conjugation

Irregular conjugation is another problem. I think we all know what this is, so I'll simply leave a list of words that are irregulary conjugated. As you can imagine, I stole the list of words from a site. If you are nauseated by looking at long lists of words, have longlistofwordsophobia, or have weak constituions, you may want to skip over this link. THIS IS YOUR ONLY WARNING! http://spanish.about.com/library/verbs/blverbsmain.htm

English does have it's irregular verbs, but pretending like it's the only one doesn't fly, even if some of the other languages do have some rules for them.

Pronouns

This is the last subject, so I'll make it short and sweet. Some pronouns in Spanish have double meanings, or are used in a lot of unnesscary situations. Probably the most obvious one I can think of is lo. When I was wondering exactly what lo meant, I consulted a Spanish dictionary, only to find about 2 full pages of definitons and examples in tiny print. English pronouns are not as complicated.

Summary? What summary? English isn't as hard to learn as it's made out to be, me thinks *cough* though a few of our patrons could use a refresher course *cough*.
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We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.

[Azrael]

[Stevo]

Crazy languages...
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The Official TVR Website
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Song of the Week

[ROOFCUTTER]

I'm certainly enjoying this discussion too.

I have noticed in the printed form in magazines and newspapers here in the United States a steady decline in what I would call quality writing.

Is this something that is happening or is there a shift in what is acceptable?
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Only in America......do they have drive-up ATM machines with Braille lettering.

[cobra]

dutch should be made the language to use across the world.
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[Azrael]

I would classify it as a shift in what's acceptable. Magazines are no longer being written for the educated and cultural elite, as they once were. They are trying to get as many people to read as possible, and thus are forced to write their stories and articles in such a manner that your average Joe Blow idiot on the street can understand. I think I read somewhere that your average news source prints their articles at a 4th grade level, with some being higher, or lower, depending on their intended readership. Some might consider it a bad thing, but in all honesty, I don't read the paper for enlightenment, nor do I read Maxim so that I might understand the complexities of the natural world. I want either information in an easily digestible format, or I want a laugh coupled with hot chicks in scanty clothing. If I want enlightenment, I'll read something by a classical author. I think it's fascinating reading something by an author who lived a hundred years ago because it might give you a bit more insight into how people felt about their world, and how they viewed the future. A book I've always thought was a very interesting read, if just a tad bit wordy, was "Crime and Punishment" by Dostoevsky. He can tend to ramble as he describes exactly what is going on in the main character's brain, but it's nice to see the thought processes as the occur.
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Under construction!!!

[bobins]

[cobra]

[Violent Pacifist]

[PondScum007]

english does have some benefits, one of which there arent FOURTEEN forms for every noun, like estonian heh
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