Omnimaga
General Discussion => Other Discussions => Miscellaneous => Topic started by: Zera on April 26, 2010, 02:41:32 am
-
Since I know there are some people here who speak English as a second language, I was curious about their thoughts on how difficult it is to learn English, and whether or not an English language reform would be desirable. (or make English easier / more practical to learn) Basically, a language reform would mean altering the spelling (and maybe pronunciation) of words to make the language more consistent with itself. For instance: We have words like "weight" and "height." In each of these words, the "ei" diphthong is pronounced differently, but there's no indication that these words should be pronounced differently - a person has to remember these pronunciations on a word-per-word basis. In other languages, there are (usually) stricter rules about spelling and pronunciation, so there's generally no misunderstanding about it. Even native speakers of English may not necessarily know how to pronounce a word they've never read before. (or how to spell a word they only recently heard)
What are your thoughts? Do you think there are any improvements that should be made to English?
-
Mhmm, I'M not sure if a reform is a really good idea, because they did it with French a few years ago over here and it caused a lot of hassle in schools, since teachers were so used to the old grammar and students too. They would have an hard time getting rid of their old habits x.x
I did not find english to be that hard to learn to write compared to french, though. In french there are so many pointless exceptions x.x
-
I don't care that much, although people in real life sometimes point out that I'm mispronouncing something, and then I realize I've been doing it wrongly for years. Spelling, strangely, doesn't cause as much trouble.
@DJ: do you mean the reform involving 'jeter>je jète' and such? In my school, the teachers sorta said 'screw it' and they went on using the 'old' grammar. They mentioned the change, but that was about it.
-
yeah full of grammar/spelling change for some words occured in french 2 years ago I think. And ya over here some teachers did the same, except they told us to be careful in ministery of education exams. I wouldn't be surprised if those who correct those exams also said in their head "screw it" while correcting stuff, though.
-
I don't care much, since I live in New York, where everyone speaks bad English X.X
And I'm pretty sure trying to reform English will make government angry. I noticed that American government don't like reforms
-
I like English as it is. I consider it to be one of the most easiest languages. Compared to russian and french, the rules and spelling are very easily understood and remembered.
-
I don't think we could ever succeed in making the English language any easier, mostly because we keep mutilating it with slang, "Gangsta/Rap speak", and other things. As much as I'd love to go about adding in rules to make it much easier to learn properly, I'm afraid the language is decaying faster than we could ever fix it. Furthermore, for some reason, Americans seem to prefer the status quo above all else regardless the situation; people will always complain even if we try to improve things.
I vote that, instead, we all just speak Nethamese! j/k :P
Kidding aside, I think there's actually a silver lining to this ragged coat we call English. If we decay it enough, chances are we'll be able to understand each other no matter how "horribly" someone speaks it.
-
Fix? Languages are dynamic, you can't really "fix" them. The English language is just moving forward, and accumulating trash as it goes.
The spelling inconsistencies were caused by changes in pronunciation, but not spelling.
We can still read Shakespeare in the original, despite the occurrence of the great vowel shift among other things.
If pronunciation were completely phonetic in English, you might end up with something like what happened with Ancient Greek, where different dialects could have some pretty large spelling differences.
I could go on, but I'll stop now.
-
French used to be a lot different from what it is today, in written form. I tried understanding it once and couldn't x.x
-
Furthermore, for some reason, Americans seem to prefer the status quo above all else regardless the situation; people will always complain even if we try to improve things.
System justification bias (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_justification)
Indeed, a common trait among Americans.
-
That seems similar to over here actually (Quebec)
-
I always hated the spelling system. There's pretty much no logic to it, so in a way, it's kind of like writing systems like Chinese where you have to directly memorize thousands of combinations of symbols which are different for every word. The difference is that in English at least they can be built from a relatively small set of characters called letters. :P
A few other things I always wished we had:
* Separate words for “we”—one meaning “we including you” and the other for “we but not necessarily you”. (When I was younger I always hated hearing phrases like “we have to do this” or “we're going somewhere” and trying to figure out whether that meant I had to also or if that was just them.)
* A singular third-person pronoun for “he”, “she”, or “it”! Having to choose between something clumsy like “he or she” or something grammatically incorrect like “they” is really getting tiring.
* Some kind of noun form for singular or plural so computer programs can stop doing stuff like “1 files” or “1 posts” or having to mess with “(s)” or having to add extra code to make the grammar right depending on the number.
But yeah, realistically, none of it is going to happen. :( I'm in the minority of people who don't mind (and even enjoy) learning a new system if we feel it's better. But most people don't want to have to relearn stuff when they already learned an existing system. The fact that English is so widespread nowadays makes it even harder. If the U.S. and Britain can't even agree on how to spell a lot of words already, how are you going to get everyone to agree on the details of a brand new system? ;)
It's still fun to talk about how the language could be improved, though.
-
From what I've compared to with other languages, English is a relatively easy language to learn to speak, but is a hard language when it comes to spelling, proper grammar, ambiguous statements, and other technical details due to how many exceptions there really are. Even native English speakers who see an unfamiliar word often have trouble trying to guess the proper pronunciation.
But despite this, there are a lot less exceptions when it comes to forming sentences than you might think. English only has 4 or 5 different verb conjugations for instance while Spanish for instance has over 50 when you include the fact that you need to use a different verb when referring to different groups of people or objects. Also, English doesn't have masculine or feminine noun conjugations.
Overall, I'd say its on the easier side of the language spectrum.
-
I think the main issue from english to other languages when it comes to speaking it is the pronounciations. The way "R" is pronounced is different than in french and spanish, for example. "E" is pronounced as "ee" instead of "uh", "A" is pronounced as "hey" instead of "ah", "Y" as "hai" instead of "ee", same for "Y". For a french person, this can make it extremly hard to learn to pronounce english words properly and it takes a lot of practice. It even requires some more physical efforts. There are some exceptions, though. For example, I noticed most english people pronounce Omnimaga the exact same way as it is in french.
The same would be true for many english speakers who tries to speak french or spanish for example, I guess.
-
The problem is that there isn't a consistent phonology for English. "A" can take on a ton of different sounds, depending on the origin of the word in question. For example:
- Ate
- Ant
- Ankh
- Pan
- Lack
You have to remember its pronunciation on a strictly word-per-word basis, or you have to be so familiar with foreign phonology that you can identify where each word is borrowed from. That tends to be the case with some words, because English-speakers are subconsciously aware of several different phonological rules from other languages that English words are commonly borrowed from. (like Latin, for instance)
Where other languages have diacritics to indicate phonology, we don't. There are a few exceptions where someone might purposefully spell "cafe" as "café," for instance, but it's not an official standard. We're not even taught what diacritics are in school.
English is such a mongrel language. It's like every other language had an orgy, and English was the bastard offspring. :P
-
Aaaah yeah I noticed so many words are pronounced differently. In french, that happens with the letter "E", but in almost every case, it depends of specific rules. For the letter "U", it happens too, but in many cases, it depends if the word is an english word or a french one.
-
And the french 'nasal' vowels. (-on, -en, -an etc.)
-
I could never make sense of French phonology. I can remember the rules, but none of it seems to make any sense. Why does "beau" sound like "bow"? If I say "e-a-u" really fast, it doesn't naturally produce an "oh" sound. That's supposed to be the purpose of diph-/triphthongs - to produce a natural blending of sounds.
In Japanese, if you say "nai," it sounds like "nigh." "A" and "I" are pronounced "ah" and "ee," respectively. When you put the sounds together and say them quickly, they produce the "eye" sound. That makes sense. The person speaking doesn't have to remember some specific, phonological rule - the sound is produced naturally. With French, it's like you have to remember phonological rules for about ~40 diphthongs, triphthongs and digraphs. ;_;
-
But likewise, English phonology doesn't make sense anymore since the Great Vowel Shift. I don't know for sure, but maybe a similar change occurred in French?