6 ms·
yes, but the English spoken by most non-natives is actually something like an Esperanto. the pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar is almost normalized and an a
by hans_mueller 9y ago
yes, but the English spoken by most non-natives is actually something like an Esperanto. the pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar is almost normalized and an artificial dialect. i think English is a very good compromise. the only problem are French people and other communities who disdain English for patriotical, historical, or political reasons.
- meigwilym 9y agoI think My Language is a good compromise. The only problem are not My Language speakers and other communities who disdain My Language for patriotic, historic or political reasons.
- hans_mueller 9y agoas my fake username suggests - I'm a German.
- matt4077 9y agoI'm a native speaker of German, and anytime someone wants to try their mediocre German on my, I cringe, and quickly move to English to move the conversation along. For some reason, it's not half has horrible to listen to broken English. Unless it's by Germans, in which case I usually leave the room. Or drop the class, as it happened during my studies.
- cm2187 9y agoAnd it's called "airport english"
- matt4077 9y agoI always thought Wolf Blitzer was "airport english"
- dandare 9y agoEnglish is considered to be very difficult language and I find it to be a historical tragedy that English became the lingua franca of the world. I remember that as a child I could not wrap my head around the "spelling competitions" I saw in English cartoons. What is the deal with spelling words? If you can say it you just spelled it, if you can read it you just pronanceed it. And that is only one of many things that make English difficult. Only Chinese Mandarin with its tonality could be worse (will be worse?).
- jabretti 9y agoSpelling difficulties are are artefact of what makes English so powerful, though -- its ability to simply adopt foreign words any time it feels the need to do so. The base language was formed by crashing two major European language families into each other a thousand years ago, and we've been happily borrowing words from every other language on Earth ever since as we've needed them. If we want to make up a brand new word, as we so often do in science, we'll probably reach for a handful of Greek and Latin prefixes and suffices and stick them together any way we like. After a thousand years of this, English is probably the language with the biggest and most expressive vocabulary of any language in the world.
- ufo 9y agoI think the spelling difficulties have more to do with English not having phonetic spelling than with it having many loanwords, prefixes or suffixes. I speak Portuguese and we have lots of loanwords as well but after a while they are all spelled like the rest of the words are instead of copying the original spelling. And every once in a while there is a spelling reform to replace archaic spellings with more modern forms (this never happened with English because it was politically unpopular)
- pbhjpbhj 9y agoHow words are spelt (!) in en-gb definitely owes a debt to the word origin, or sometimes the imagined origin ... http://mentalfloss.com/article/59320/5-words-are-spelled-weird-because-someone-got-etymology-wrong http://mentalfloss.com/article/59320/5-words-are-spelled-wei... has a couple of nice examples.
- maffydub 9y agoI think the cause of a lot of the bizarre spelling in English is the "Great Vowel Shift" - basically, sometime between 1350 and 1700, most uses of most long vowels changed their pronunciation. Obviously (because this is English), the change didn't apply universally, but it applied widely enough to move our pronunciation out of sync with the European languages it was derived from. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift for more detail.
- marcosdumay 9y agoIf only the native speakers would understand international English is different from the language they use every day.
- baud147258 9y agoAs a French people, I do feel disdain for the England, but I love the English language since it allow me to connect with the rest of the planet :).