Undercover cop cars?

Cheap shot - but my name isn't Abdul.

--
Toby
quidquid latine dictum
sit, altum viditur
Warning: All posts to be treated with a grain of salt.
By Order
K.K.

 

It makes them easier to learn for a start. It'd be pretty crap if any
letter could be used to make any sound. Imagine a language where the
word "orange" could be spelt "apple" as well as "orange".

 

Or if people could attempt to communicate in SMS language and you couldn't
tell them to write bloody english you mongrels FFS...

ant

 

Does that mean you read that David Brin novel, too, Paul?

To be honest, every time I've heard the theory that the less structured a
language is, the more it permits and encourages the advancement of
undisciplined, new ideas, and thus stokes progress, the advocate has been an
Aglophone, and the argument has invariably come off as a copout for how
unsophisticated a language English is... kinda like saying
"two-valves-per-cylinder pushrod engines are good because you can work on
them yourself, not these fangledy-dangledy overcomplicated new ones"...

I prefer Orwell's take on it...

The less structured a language is, the more amenable it is to the packaging
of unintelligible bullshit as profound wisdom. In a complicated language,
doubletalk comes back on itself and disappears up its own arse a lot more
readily.

 

In aus.motorcycles on Fri, 28 May 2004 12:39:31 +1000

Hmm.. but English *had* inflections and gender and all that. And lost
them.

It also seems to have done a reasonable job of taking over the world
although French gave it a bit of a run.

I suspect that if Chinese was easier to learn even in a pidgin form it
might do as well from sheer numbers, but this tonal business is to hard
for people not brought up in it.

Zebee

 

....and a key factor in that has been its simplicity, as well as the
prominence of Anglophone nations in global institutions. Further, the
language with which it is most likely to have to share that status in the
future is another easy-to-pick-up, already widely-spoken tongue; Spanish.
Hell, the United States themselves are trending towards becoming a fully
bilingual nation in that regard within as little as a generation...

The other obstacle is the lack of a simple, all-encompassing alphabet. My
head still spins somewhat that the languages with ideogram-based writing
have managed to design workable keyboards to accommodate their script.

The thing with English and Spanish is that they strike a balance between
simple structure and simultaneous relative ease of pronounciation, reading
and writing. Languages like German, Italian and Russian are exceedingly easy
to read and write; barring a few exceptions, every letter has its own
rigidly-attached intonation, meaning you read it exactly the same regardless
of what it's surrounded by, but that makes for some tongue-twister
concatenations, and, further, they are all grammatically very complex,
making them difficult to become proficient in. French is difficult due to
both having complex grammar and highly complex, subtle pronounciation.

How about Arabic?

 

I don't think that makes it much more difficult. Vietnamese is pretty similar
to Chinese when spoken, both are monosyllabic and they share some words,
except it has an alphabet we can read, and 6 different ways of pronouncing
every vowel...

Nev..

 

Which is something which can, for once, justifiably, be blamed on the
French.

 

What really bakes my noodle is that they've come up with two totally
different methods, both of which can be overlayed on a QWERTY
keyboard. One of which apparently uses the phonemes within the
syllable, and then lets you disambiguate that to a specific ideogram.
The other depends on ideograms being composed of multiple strokes,
so you type each stroke and it compiles them into a single ideogram.

I showed a Taiwanese network weenie how to get Linux talking in
ideograms, he was like a kid in a candy store

-----sharks

 

In aus.motorcycles on Fri, 28 May 2004 14:00:52 +1000

I seem to recall some difficulties with the alphabet, something about
vowels, but it's only a fleeting recollection. I think it also has
problems in machine generation, but they have probably got over that.

The kicker will be how easily it can absorb new words I think. And how
easily they can be generated. English managed a lot using mixes of
greek and latin, what's Arabic's method of creating words?

Zebee

 

Most people seem to have adapted ok to their numeral system... that's got to
be a head start at the language compared to others...

Nev..

 

That's because you've lost half the bloody rule!

"I before E" is a specific rule for when the sound it makes is "eee",
as in chief, thief, etc.

English rules are more or less consistant, but it is derived from a
more varied number of base languages than most other languages.
You've got celtic, germanic (both central from the Anglo saxons and
whatever it's called from Danish etc.) all mixed in with Latin (via
French!).

On the up side, it *is* one of the most expressive languages as a
result.

Cheers,
Steve
(IME, most spelling problems are the result of poor pronunciation,
anyway)

 

Umm, nah. My native tongue is a Slavic language, and take my word for it
when I tell you that English is, by comparison, only fit for use in the
composition of instruction manuals.

 

It's hard. The alphabet is very similar to English other than a few letters
that are almost impossible for a non-native to pronounce. Objects have a
gender and for some words you only need to add an 'a' to the end to convert
it from masculine to feminine but this isn't always the case. Another
difficulty is that the quantity of an object requires a new word. You can't
just say 2 apples, you have to say a modified word for apple which means
there's two of them eg. you'd say 'appleen' supposing that meant 2 apples.
Sentences seem to require fewer prepositions and 'little fill in words'
which makes sentences easier to construct if you have a decent vocabulary
and the meaning doesn't get as easily confused by alterting the order of the
words. I think the greatest difficulty is pronounciation for a westerner and
otherwise it's relatively simple.

 

You know, English is very much in the minority in being gender-neutral.

Which is really just a gilded version of the English "-s"/"-es" suffix,
innit?

That's a feature of the Slavic languages, too. Highly symmetric.

As they all are, once you get down to it, really...

 

In aus.motorcycles on Mon, 31 May 2004 19:26:11 +1000

ONly if there's one plural suffix. If, as it seems, there are lots of
'em, it makes counting things interesting.

I presume there aren't an infinite number of words so you can count all
the apples there are, but it sounds like there's more than "one" and
"many".

Zebee

 

"Intact Kneeslider" wrote

Here's me agreeing with IK. English is badly lacking in emotive diminutives
like the Dutch 'kindeke', a word translated to English as 'small child'
totally losing the loving emotive attachment.

A company I worked for wrote all their tech manuals in English. To make it
easier for people who did not speak English as a native, they named their
English "NCR English" and published dictionaries for other languages. Guess
how many English words they needed for all their tech manuals? 1100.

Theo

 

I believe English is the only language where the word 'phonetic' doesn't
start with an 'f' and finish with a 'k'.

Theo

 

We seem to have mastered the Arabic numeral system pretty well.

Theo

 

But there's a finite number of apples.

Theo