On Fri, Feb 06, 2009 at 10:00:04PM +0000, Anthony W. Youngman wrote: > In message <20090204160623.ga2...@nagi>, Graham Percival > <[email protected]> writes >> being surrounded by nothing but ESL people now (and >> trying to teach them better English), I have newfound appreciation >> for what a completely stupid language English is. > > English isn't a silly language at all - it's what the Americans have > done to it :-)
Yeah? Let's consider a simple task: make a noun plural. - add an s. - if the word comes from Latin and ends with an "a", add an e. - if the word ends in "oot", add an "s". Unless it also starts with a "f", in which case you delete the "oo" and replace them with "ee". (boots / feet) - totally maoed up cases like "person" -> "people"... unless you actually *do* want to write "persons", which is occasionally appropriate. - ... How can anybody explain the rules for pluralization in any way other than "go away and spend 500 hours reading English books"? (or maybe 5000 or 50,000...) > Seriously, the problem is that (certainly in England), Grammar and > Etymology seem almost to be forbidden subjects. I'm not complaining about native speakers -- I mean, I've never had a grammar or etymology lesson in my life, but I can read and write perfectly fluently by virtue of having read a lot. I'm complaining about the huge task faced by non-native speakers. I mean, in Japanese there's no pluralization of nouns. Given the writing that I see from the graduate students here, I gather that Chinese doesn't pluralize nouns either. Now how can I explain to them how to do something as simple as saying "one foo" and "two foos" ? There's nothing /approacing/ a firm rule for this. I just have tons and tons of special cases (subconsciously) memorized, so I instantly recognize that "In the morning, I pulled my beet onto my foots" is wrong. I'm not as sympathetic when they forget to add a "the" or "an" in front of a noun. English is consistent on that point. I'm sympathetic with their difficulties about adding an "s" to verbs. Those rules aren't at all clear. Besides, why should we care whether a word came from French or German? All these kids want to do is write academic papers in academic conferences (which means English) without looking like total idiots. Which they curently cannot do. I feel really bad for them... I mean, I'd *hate* to be publishing my research in French, and that's my second-best language. If I had to do it, I wouldn't have stopped speaking/listening/reading/writing it ten years ago, of course... but it would still add overhead to the research process. > I was surprised recently to discover how FEW rules it takes to pronounce > English words. Compared to Japanese, which has a "one rule per character" for katakana and hiragana? (I admit that kanji is a bloody mess...) Really, if any HCI (err, that's Human-Computer Interface, a sub-field of Computer Science) guy proposed "hey, let's invent a new language such that the average first-year university student native speaker doesn't know how to pronounce every single word at first glance", he'd be laughed out of the room. IMNSHO, one of the first rules of an (alphabetized) written language should be that every single word should be pronouncable by a complete novice after 10 hours of study. Or maybe 5 or 20... but you get the idea. Cheers, - Graham _______________________________________________ lilypond-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-devel
