[HN Gopher] Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about ...
___________________________________________________________________
Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking
English
Author : andersonvom
Score : 195 points
Date : 2021-05-20 12:50 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.npr.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.npr.org)
| awillen wrote:
| I can understand why it would be annoying to constantly be asked
| about your accent, but on the other hand, it's someone taking a
| bit of information they have and using that as a starting point
| to learn more about you. That's a good thing! Obviously it
| shouldn't be asked in a way that derails an existing
| conversation, but we could use more people trying to learn about
| each other these days, not fewer.
| goatcode wrote:
| 1. English is made up of several languages;
|
| 2. "Language changes" pretty much equates to people making
| mistakes, and those mistakes becoming part of the language. Since
| English has spread over so much of the world, in addition to it
| not having a central authority that is looked to for its
| structure (as does French), many mistakes have come in, and made
| the language weird. This overlaps a bit with (1).
| anbende wrote:
| Regarding (2), now that there are on the order of a billion
| non-native speakers of English who often talk to each other, we
| will see more and more changes to the language from THEIR
| mistakes. English will belong less and less to native speakers
| as time goes on. Wild!
| goatcode wrote:
| Or new languages will spawn from it combined with whatever of
| the numerous other-language-speakers use it. Steven Fry
| talked a bit about "Panglish" on QI, was interesting.
|
| The question becomes: Will we call English English, or will
| some other language per above be called English? I for one
| don't use "nother" nor place periods before consequents, so I
| might be speaking my own language right now, based on what
| people online seem to have done with English :)
| WalterBright wrote:
| The author complains about being discriminated against because of
| his accent. Of course it's unfair, but there is a practical
| reason behind it.
|
| The more someone's accent differs from what I'm used to, the more
| difficult it is for me to understand. I notice that on the phone,
| I can understand an accent like mine over a bad connection. The
| further one's accent is from mine, the better quality connection
| I need.
|
| It's also significantly more work to understand a presentation
| the more distant the speaker's accent is. That means the less
| interesting the presentation is, the more likely I am to not make
| the effort.
|
| It's not fair, but it's a fact of life.
| bluetomcat wrote:
| As a non-native speaker living in a non-English speaking country
| who has started learning English decades ago at school in my
| teenage years, the sheer richness of the English vocabulary never
| ceases to fascinate me. There are so many words with subtle and
| nuanced meanings (primarily of Latin and French origin) you can
| almost never hear in an American movie or a reality show. I have
| encountered them primarily in British news articles and
| documentaries. Using them among other non-native speakers even
| seems snobbish and counter-productive. I mean stuff like
| "subjugate", "rejuvenate", "reverberate", etc.
| ZoomZoomZoom wrote:
| > Using them among other non-native speakers even seems
| snobbish and counter-productive.
|
| Non-native here, but I have an opinion on your choice of
| examples. They aren't posh or counter-productive, on the
| contrary, they are just specific to fields under-represented in
| popular culture (political history, fantasy/longevity research,
| music/acoustics). I don't see any obvious ways to convey the
| same meaning using more common words.
| D-Coder wrote:
| This makes me lugubrious.
| tasogare wrote:
| > The whole concept of "mother tongue" is a political construct
| to keep certain people out, says Madani.
|
| I'm starting to be very tired of reading this kind of statement
| everywhere. No, not every existing concept is a conspiracy to
| discriminate against some people. Not everything is a social
| construct (few things are). You [article author] are not a victim
| of a grand linguistic scheme established by men/White/English
| speakers/whatever to make you feel bad about your English level.
| The concept is valid and useful in language education.
| ape4 wrote:
| I prepend() things to arrays sometimes.
| JackFr wrote:
| And yet you probably never 'postpend'.
|
| And why do we computer people have prefixes and postfixes, when
| the world was just getting by fine with prefixes and and
| suffixes. (I realize we did have to invent 'infix'.)
|
| And why is it antebellum and pre-war, but postbellum and post
| post-war. Why does no one ever use postdeluvian and only
| antediluvian?
|
| _sigh_
| traceroute66 wrote:
| Non-native English vs Native English is nothing compared to
| European French vs Canadian French.
|
| To a EU French ear, Canadian French is a horrible butchery of the
| beautiful language that is French. The Canadians don't roll their
| R's properly and all sorts of other unspeakable things. ;-)
|
| Meanwhile, an EU French person visiting the French speaking parts
| of Canada will often have a significant amount of difficulty
| being understood. This is not because of their lack of mastery of
| the French language, but because their true pronunciation of
| French is not what the Canadian ear expects.
| pdpi wrote:
| As a non-native speaker, one fascinating phenomenon for me is the
| flip side to Uncleftish Beholding[1]. Many latinate words are
| considered more sophisticated, or fancier in general, than
| germanic words.
|
| Because I'm a native speaker of a Romance language, those are
| precisely the words that I reach for naturally, because they're
| familiar. What follows is that, past a certain threshold where
| your English is good enough, there is a very sudden phase change
| where people around you go from "you speak pretty good English"
| to "you speak amazing English" with nothing in between -- all of
| a sudden you're perceived as a peer, and you choice of vocabulary
| then sets you apart. Ever since I've noticed this I've been
| trying to make my vocabulary "worse" by incorporating more
| mundane words into it.
|
| 1.
| https://msburkeenglish.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/uncleftis...
| Bancakes wrote:
| That looks fantastic, wish Anglish was more widespread.
| kwoff wrote:
| When I was learning/using French, kinda the inverse of what you
| said, I'd try to think of a sophisticated English word to use.
| It could even bleed back into English speaking, for example I
| would "recount" (raconter) something rather than "tell" it.
| [deleted]
| jan_Inkepa wrote:
| Yeah, it's much better compared to other languages pairs, where
| the diminishing returns set in hard after a certain point...can
| be rough for morale!
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Word choice is vital. I was once outed as a non-native english
| speaker because of a single word.
|
| There's an old MMORPG that I used to play with friends as a
| kid. It has an item called copper shield. My friends and I
| didn't speak english at the time so we'd misspell and
| mispronounce the item as _cooper_ shield. We had no idea what
| copper even meant, to us it was just the name of the shield. We
| all know what copper means now, but that didn 't change our
| understanding of the shield.
|
| A few years ago I decided to create a new account and play
| again for old time's sake. I joined a party and started talking
| to people. The second I said "cooper shield" I got a private
| message in my native language _from a guy who learned it by
| playing the game with us_. Because of that highly specific
| misspelling, he could tell not only that I was a foreigner but
| also which country I was from.
| the_rectifier wrote:
| On various occasions I've been asked by native speakers to use
| shorter sentences and simpler words. Sigh.
| mattkrause wrote:
| This goes the other way too.
|
| I've definitely gone with `consecuentemente` in Spanish because
| it's an English cognate and I couldn't remember whether I
| should have used `porque` (=because), or one of the annoyingly
| similar `por que`(=so that), `por que` (=why), or `porque` (=a
| reason).
| xwolfi wrote:
| It's very obvious, you're right. I'm French and I sometimes I
| have to prove people the words are in an English dictionary
| while they're absolute basic 6-yo level in French.
|
| I remember "ameliorate" that an american friend (an adult)
| didn't even know (but again this guy mixed Portugal and Porto
| Rico so maybe not the best sample lol), while for me it was
| clearly an easy cheat because I had more trouble reaching for
| "enhance".
|
| Ofc since I'm also an ass, I like to claim English "stole" all
| those French word then proceeded to misspell and massacre them.
| Oreb wrote:
| > I like to claim English "stole" all those French word then
| proceeded to misspell and massacre them.
|
| Fair enough, but then French is nothing more than horribly
| misspelled, massacred and ungrammatical Latin.
|
| Of course the same could be said about any other current
| language, after replacing Latin with whatever our ancestors
| spoke a couple of thousand years ago.
| owenversteeg wrote:
| Funny enough, a similar thing (using obscure, ten-dollar words
| instead of simple ones) happens with many Russians learning
| English. It happens for a totally different reason - obviously
| Russian is a Slavic, not Romance language. Turns out that most
| high quality translated material for Russian is old literature
| and scientific papers. So that's what the translators are
| trained on, and that's what many Russians speaking English
| sound like. As an example, a friend of mine was just learning
| English and didn't yet know words as simple as "stairs", but
| would use ten-dollar words like "prurient", "strumpet" and
| "veritable".
| e17 wrote:
| I have witnessed this phenomenon living in London as a native
| of the city. A new-to-London Russian colleague of mine used
| ornate phraseology and what I would consider as 'posh' words
| quite regularly. A major phrase for her was "It seems to me"
| as a precursor to saying virtually any opinion. I never knew
| the reason for it though, so TIL.
| n4bz0r wrote:
| In case you are curious what the exact reason might be:
|
| "It seems to me" is most likely coming from the much less
| fancy sounding, and more casual "mne kazhetsia" (mnye
| kazhetsya).
|
| "Mnye" would be "to me", and "kazhetsya" could be
| represented as "it seems". I say "could be" because there
| is no direct translation for "kazhetsya" as far as I'm
| aware.
|
| The closest (and most direct) translation of "kazhetsya"
| that I can think of, and retains the meaning would be "it
| seems likely that <...>".
|
| What she was trying to communicate was "I think", I think.
| (pun intended)
| cpursley wrote:
| Coming from English, I struggle with when to use ia vs
| Mne.
| n4bz0r wrote:
| Not sure if you'd like an advice or merely sharing your
| experience, but after reading your comment I spent an
| hour or so trying to provide a simple rule of thumb. To
| my surprise, I failed miserably. But I scraped some info
| together in the process, so I'll post it in a hope that
| it might give you a better perspective. Mind you, I'm not
| a linguist or a teacher.
|
| First of all, I made a list of Russian ia/mne lines with
| English translations next to them just to see if there is
| _consistent_ presence of a hint in English lines that can
| point to the right Russian translation. There is none. So
| if you are trying to figure out the proper pronoun this
| way, you are doing it wrong.
|
| To make an educated choice between ia/mne you'll have to
| familiarise yourself with nominative and dative cases.
|
| Here is some basic info on the cases in "question" and
| even more basic examples:
|
| Nominative case of "I" is "ia". Nominative case answers
| questions such as "who?" or "what?".
|
| Kto prishiol? (Who came?) _Ia_ prishiol. (I came.)
|
| Dative case of "I" is "mne". Dative case answers
| questions such as "to whom?" or "to what?".
|
| Dat' komu? (Give to whom?) Mne. (To me.)
|
| As you might've noticed, native English speakers won't
| normally construct questions in a way they are
| constructed in most Russian cases, so I'd suggest to get
| familiar with cases and their respective questions first,
| and try to construct sentences later.
|
| Or, depending on your goal, you can simply memorize
| common sentences/lines altogether and figure out why they
| work later.
| ncpa-cpl wrote:
| Like "Me parece" in Spanish.
| cogman10 wrote:
| I had an Austrian friend that learned all his English from
| star trek TNG and DS9... it was amazing :D
|
| He'd watched the series in German and then in English and
| knew it well enough to pick things up.
|
| To my ear, his English was pretty good.
|
| That said, the 2 groups of non-native speakers that have
| impressed me the most are people from Sweden and Norway.
| I've mistaken more than one of them for native speakers (to
| their delight) :D
| dnautics wrote:
| I desperately want to do this in the other direction, but
| I can't figure out how to stream foreign dubbed trek in
| the states and I don't have a DVD player anymore... It
| may take a bit more effort.
| torstenvl wrote:
| Yep! The reverse is somewhat true as well. When I had to get a
| photo ID in France I couldn't remember whether <<noir et
| blanc>> was idiomatic and in that order, so I said
| <<monochrome>> instead. The photographer was impressed that I
| knew such a "technical" photography term.
| hob_code wrote:
| Richard Feynman noted something similar in his story about
| traveling to Brazil and learning Portuguese[1]. People would
| compliment him for using larger elegant sounding words, when
| really he just couldn't remember simpler words.
|
| 1. https://southerncrossreview.org/81/feynman-brazil.html
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| Oh thank you, I just commented about that elsewhere and you
| provided the link :)
| teddyh wrote:
| _At one standards meeting, Pete went out to dinner with the
| Italians, to discover that only one of them spoke a little
| English. In an attempt to be polite, he told them, "Machina
| ipsam culturam non habet" (Latin for "the computer has no
| culture of its own"). The English-speaker replied, "Pete,
| there's nothing wrong with your Italian, except that you use
| all those archaic words."_
|
| -- Jacques Vallee, _The Network Revolution: Confessions of a
| Computer Scientist_ (1982)
| https://books.google.com/books?id=6f8VqnZaPQwC
| TomK32 wrote:
| One take I remember from The Adventure of English[0]: When it's
| in the kitchen it's germanic/anglo-saxon, when it's in the
| lord's dining room it's a French (vulgar Latin). Romanized
| languages are an important part of English, though not that
| much in those most common words[1]. English is the product of
| quite a few invaders introducing new elements to a language
| that was itself invasive.
|
| In regards to "amazing English", how about picking one obscure
| dialect like Scotish and perfecting that so that the other 95%
| of English speaker take you as a Scots/Welsh/Californian and
| don't ask any more questions?
|
| [0]
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1XQx9pGGd0&list=PLbBvyau8q9...
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_language_influences_in...
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| An interesting corollary is that I can sort of "channel" French
| more easily by thinking about it as "fancy" English with
| respect to grammar and vocabulary (and of course, a French
| accent). I similarly experienced French people praising my
| mastery of the language even though I can only understand like
| 40-60% of what a French speaker is saying to me (although I'm
| not sure if this is because of my "fancy English" approach or
| if I'm just inordinately good at the French accent or if the
| French are just pitying me by telling me my French is very
| good).
| not2b wrote:
| I think some of this was because of the Norman conquest. For a
| few hundred years the nobility spoke Norman French and the
| peasants spoke old English. So our words for animals are
| Germanic and our words for meat come from French. Beef is
| boeuf, but that word is only for the meat. The refined words
| were from French and Latin. If there was another word it was
| lower class.
| FabHK wrote:
| > Because I'm a native speaker of a Romance language, those are
| precisely the words that I reach for naturally, because they're
| familiar.
|
| My Spanish girl friend at the time was among the first batches
| to take the computer-adaptive version of the GRE (which
| increases difficulty as you get questions right, and vice
| versa). While preparing for the verbal part, she noted that the
| "difficult" words being explained were often words she knew (to
| lament, intransigent), while the "simple" explanation involved
| words she had to learn (to mourn, unyielding).
|
| This could then lead to a positive feedback cycle for native
| Spanish speakers taking the test - get the first few questions
| right, get "harder" questions with long Latin words (easy!), or
| get the first few questions wrong, and get "easier" questions
| with short Germanic words (oh no).
|
| Her test score was indeed many standard deviations away from
| the paper based practice tests she had taken - but only on the
| verbal part.
| ncpa-cpl wrote:
| I can relate to this as a Spanish speaker that used English
| text books in high school. Many of the advanced words in
| vocabulary and spelling were easy to understand and spell for
| us.
| biztos wrote:
| If you can do that in a British accent, no matter how bad it
| is, you will immediately be pundit material in the USA. And
| also more attractive!
| Daub wrote:
| Moving from a British university to an American one, I
| noticed this. People listened to me more. Scary.
| trashtester wrote:
| I wonder if that also applies to someone from the Hebrides. I
| used to have a supervisor from there, and even his English
| coleagues often had problem to understand his dialect....
|
| Or is "British" still an euphemism for "English"?
| kadoban wrote:
| I think in this exact usage it's a euphemism for some kind
| of specific London accent that I don't actually know the
| name for.
| dsr_ wrote:
| RP, Received Pronounciation.
| asimpletune wrote:
| I think the reciprocal is also true. I'm a native speaker, who
| speaks Spanish as A second language. It's sort of amazing how
| using "fancy"English words often results in correctly guessing
| correct Spanish cognates. I guess one downside though is that
| people don't perceive me as having said anything remarkable
| because it's all quite normal to them.
| karaterobot wrote:
| There's a really fascinating guide for English writing which is
| all about this: how the best writers in English have used the
| cultural connotations of Germanic and Latinate words for
| effect. When to using one or the other, but also playing them
| off each other, or using the tension between them, and so on.
|
| Ahh, here's the book: Classical English Style, by Ward
| Farnsworth [1].
|
| 1: https://www.librarything.com/work/24739629
| javierga wrote:
| As a non-native English speaker, Farnsworth as a last name
| sounds very fancy.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Funnily, I think of it as more of a hillbilly name :D.
| Maybe because I think of Philo Farnsworth who was raised in
| rural western America.
| werber wrote:
| I just think of Futurama
| wirrbel wrote:
| I (native German) realised a similar thing happening because I
| tend to use some syntactical features that lend itself
| naturally to Germans, like use of "whom" (corresponds to German
| 'wem', but 'wem' is pretty standard German and 'whom' is hardly
| used in colloquial English).
| fidesomnes wrote:
| It is very important to know your audience in English. Speaking
| at the right level of the socio-economic audience will allow
| you to mingle freely with people in all walks of life as a peer
| instead of an outsider. Also if you think Latinate words are
| received more favorably the reaction you get from people when
| speaking restored classical Latin pronunciation is incredible.
| mathieuh wrote:
| Yep, I'm a native English and French speaker and when I speak
| in English to someone whose first language is a Romance
| language I make an effort to use more Latin-origin words, which
| does make the English sound very formal to native speakers.
|
| Haven't had a chance to try it with folk whose first tongue is
| a Germanic tongue because they all speak really good English,
| but if I came across someone who didn't have great English I'd
| probably use more Germanic words.
|
| I find this subconscious perception of speech with more Latin-
| origin words interesting though. Something about Germanic words
| just feels more earthy and real, Latin-origin words feel quite
| flowery and sort of hard to pin down.
| joeberon wrote:
| Recently I've been learning German and one of the examples was
| "Hier darf man nicht rauchen" (Here one may not smoke) and it
| has a note after "NB: Not pretentious in German". I found that
| quite interesting
| chris_j wrote:
| I (native English speaker) have noticed this a lot. The example
| that I remember most vividly is receiving advice while trying
| to cook food on a barbecue: A Portuguese speaking friend
| suggested that I "move the burgers to the periphery of the
| barbecue". It make perfect sense but sounded incredibly fancy
| to me. A native English speaker would never have said that...
| unless they had received a really expensive education.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > A native English speaker would never have said that
|
| English has its barbarian roots overlaid with French words
| from the Norman conquest of England. The French aristocracy
| moved in and took over. The modern result of that is the
| "English" words of French origin are tells of upper class
| origins. Americans use that, consciously or unconsciously.
| Sometimes it's referred to as "coded speech".
|
| For example, someone from upper class America will "purchase"
| something while a lower class person will "buy" it.
|
| It's not just slight accent changes that distinguish class in
| America.
| hervature wrote:
| Very interesting. The connection to French is not
| immediately obvious as both "purchase" and "buy" would
| translate to "achat". However, "por chase" in French is
| "for the chase/hunt" which begins to resemble some
| definition of "purchase".
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| In which French did you find "por chase"? (this is not
| aggressive, I am french and this does not mean anything
| but it may be a dialect or some as ancient French?)
| quickthrowman wrote:
| Norman/Saxon meat/animal word pairs are interesting; the
| saxons were the hunters and farmers, and the normans ate
| the meat. This led to a bunch of word pairs:
| Beef/cow Poultry/chicken Pork/pig
| Veal/calf Mutton/sheep
|
| There are other areas of English vocabulary with dual
| Saxon/Norman words as well.
|
| Bill Bryson has a great book that explores how English
| became what it is now:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_Tongue It's an
| easy read with lots of interesting info.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| Please don't recommend Bill Bryson's _The Mother Tongue_.
| Bryson has no actual background in linguistics and there
| is a factual error or urban myth on nearly every page of
| that book. There are loads of pop-sci "history of
| English" books written by people who were actually
| competent in the subject.
| cosmodisk wrote:
| English isn't my mother tongue and my vocabulary is rather
| simplistic but I had some situations where I had to simplify
| it even further,as some native English speakers didn't know
| the meaning of certain words: e.g. acquire, kitsch,etc.
|
| As for the example you mentioned, I mainly noticed similar
| when speaking with my French colleague: when he runs out of
| words he throws in a French word,which in most cases I can
| immediately understand because it's either used
| internationally or at least in my own language,but it's often
| not the most appropriate word for that sentence,so there's
| lots of 'periphery of the barbecue' :)
| angry_octet wrote:
| > A native English speaker would never have said that...
| unless they had received a really expensive education.
|
| A native english speaker would not have said that, unless
| they wanted to sound like the instruction manual, or a BBC
| BBQ Sports commentator. It is overly formal, a common problem
| that non-native speakers face.
| tcgv wrote:
| That's interesting. I'm a portuguese language native, and I
| can relate, but not because we talk like this in portuguese:
|
| > "move the burgers to the periphery of the barbecue"
|
| That would be really formal over here too, the kind of
| wording that I'd expect in a grilling manual explaining how
| to use it, but not at a barbecue.
|
| I can relate because sometimes I find myself speaking like
| that when talking to english counterparts, but mostly because
| when I'm "translating" my thoughts into sentences I have to
| choose between a group of words of similar meaning, and due
| to my inexperience, I often choose a less "popular" one.
|
| EDIT:
|
| After reflecting on this a bit more I also believe I often
| sound formal when speaking english because it's easier to use
| more/fancier words for the sake of not being misunderstood
| than it's to come up with a short, direct sentence that
| transmits my message in a clear way.
|
| It's like adding redundancy to the message for reducing the
| risk of transmitting unintentional errors ;)
| StavrosK wrote:
| I'm Greek, and "periphery" sounds fancy here too :P We'd
| just say "to the edge".
| cosmodisk wrote:
| I'm Lithuanian and the main use case for "periphery" is
| to describe everything else outside the major cities:)
| E.g. : they live in periphery, aka in a small village.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| We also say "Perifereia Attikis" for the municipality (?)
| of Attica. I don't find it fancy, just not often used.
| StavrosK wrote:
| It depends on the context, you wouldn't say "sten
| periphereia tes psestarias", that sounds pretty fancy.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| It does. To be honest, I don't know how I'd phrase "on
| the edge of the barbecue". "Sten apexo meria"?
|
| We also use "periphereia" for the circumference of a
| circle so I could say "sten periphereia tes psestarias"
| to make a nerdy joke... but that supports your point.
| StavrosK wrote:
| "Sten akre" I'd say.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| Ah, right. Dammit. I'm starting to forget my Greek...
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > We also use "periphereia" for the circumference of a
| circle
|
| Blasphemy! (In English, at least, circles have a
| "circumference" while every other shape has a
| "perimeter". Ovals seem to use either word.)
|
| I never actually thought about combining " _peri_ meter"
| with "circum _fer_ ence" to get "periphery".
| StavrosK wrote:
| We don't really use "periphery" for the circumference in
| Greek, we use "perimeter". Periphery refers to something
| outside the object you're describing, whereas perimeter
| is right at the edge of the object, but usually belonging
| to it.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| My sister married a Brazilian guy, and one of the biggest
| things she noticed about his English was that he would
| agree with negative sentences ("I don't like sushi") by
| saying "Me too", which is impossible. (You have to agree
| with a negative sentence by saying "Me neither".)
| asveikau wrote:
| I think the typical word probably has no cognate in
| English.
|
| Eg. I don't speak fluent Portuguese but the closest cognate
| to _o lado_ that I can think of would be to suggest to move
| it _laterally_.
| dsr_ wrote:
| To the side.
| chris_j wrote:
| > That's interesting. I'm a portuguese language native, and
| I can relate, but not because we talk like this in
| portuguese:
|
| The chap in question was from Portugal. If I understand
| correctly from your website, you're from Brazil, right? Is
| there any difference between how that word would be used in
| Brazilian vs European Portuguese?
| ORioN63 wrote:
| I'm from Portugal. I'm not aware of any difference
| regarding that word in particular, but tbh I wouldn't
| know. I'm always surprised with some of the differences I
| find from time to time.
|
| I can tell you though, that using the word "periferia" is
| actually common in some place (although a bit rare in
| most). It's mostly used as a synonym for 'around the
| borders'.
|
| The example you've mentioned: "move the burgers to the
| periphery of the barbecue", actually seems perfectly
| fine. It seems a little bit over-detailed, I guess that a
| bit context-dependent but I wouldn't bat an eye to the
| equivalent of "move them to the periphery".
|
| From what I recall 'periferia' is also commonly used in
| TV news.
| kelnos wrote:
| In case it wasn't clear (I don't think anyone has
| mentioned this, but maybe I missed it), it's not that
| "periphery" is overly-detailed, it's just an overly-
| formal, uncommon word. I think the more common phrase
| would be "move the burgers to the side of the barbecue".
| "Edge" might also be used too, which is probably a little
| clearer.
| tcgv wrote:
| That's right, I'm from Brazil!
|
| The meaning is the same, both in Brazil and in Portugal.
|
| As a curiosity the two countries (along with others) are
| part of the Portuguese Language Orthographic Agreement of
| 1990 [1] whose purpose was to create a unified
| orthography for the Portuguese language, to be used by
| all the countries that have Portuguese as their official
| language.
|
| Nonetheless there is a lot of differences in usage,
| mostly regarding the "popular" vocabulary. Some heavily
| used words in one country are less frequently used in the
| other. There's also a noticeable difference in the
| accent.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_Language_Ort
| hograph...
| myohmy wrote:
| Honestly we need the same for English.
| pessimizer wrote:
| No, our orthography is terrible. We should let it slip
| towards rationality in any of the tiny ways it tries.
| henvic wrote:
| No. Just let the language naturally evolve. This
| "agreement" was an awful thing forced down by political
| forces.
|
| Context: I'm Brazilian and during high school I studied
| Portuguese "one official version behind". It had more
| rules, but the language itself was way nicer, and people
| used to write more close to it, than nowadays.
|
| It's better to have a few mistakes due to some archaic
| rules than to force everything to be sterile and
| complicate how you pronounce things IMHO
|
| Just let people evolve the language naturally instead...
| jozvolskyef wrote:
| I can also relate and my native language, Czech, is in the
| Slavic family. GP's friend probably used the word periphery
| because they knew it's common to the two languages, unlike
| the hypothetical Portuguese synonym. This applies to many
| words of Greek and Latinate origin. Their frequency is low
| in most languages, but they are understood in many
| languages. I find it sad that Brits are peer-pressured into
| giving up this aspect of their language due to perceived
| elitism. These 'elitist' words facilitate understanding
| across the various European languages.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| So I'm assuming there is some cognate to "periphery" in
| portugese -- a portugese word that sounds very similar to
| that, becuase of shared Latin etymology.
|
| so it's not that that word isn't fancy in portugese too.
| It's that that word might come easier to a portugese (or
| other romance language) speaker, since it's a cognate, so
| they use it, and end up sounding fancy in English.
|
| An English speaker could do the same thing in portugese
| with the same words in reverse!
| carlosf wrote:
| Exactly, periferia.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| Only it comes (through Latin) from Greek :)
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > I'm assuming there is some cognate to "periphery" in
| portugese -- a portugese word that sounds very similar to
| that, becuase of shared Latin etymology.
|
| "Periphery" does not have Latin etymology. "Peri" is
| overtly Greek, and so is "ph".
|
| The Latinate version would be "circumference".
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > "Periphery" does not have Latin etymology.
|
| Yes, the English word (and the Portuguese cognate,
| _periferia_ ) does have a Latin etymology, via Late and
| Medieval Latin _peripheria_.
|
| Now, the Latin word _peripheria_ itself has a Greek
| etymology, from Greek _periphereia_. But both Portuguese
| and English get their word via Latin (and, in the English
| case, possibly also French, which also gets it from
| Latin, though sources differ on whether English got it
| from French or directly from Medieval Latin, and its
| plausibly not uniquely one or the other.)
| WalterBright wrote:
| > "move the burgers to the periphery of the barbecue"
|
| To my ear, that sounds like something a non-native English
| speaker would say, rather than what an educated native
| would say. In my head the phrase comes complete with a
| vague foreign accent :-)
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > A native English speaker would never have said that...
| unless they had received a really expensive education.
|
| Education doesn't affect word choice much. The people who
| will say things like this were largely already saying them
| before they received an education.
| mondoshawan wrote:
| I'm a native English speaker, and that sounds like something
| I've said before, and all I've had is public schooling, with
| no college. :)
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Portuguese sometimes has a strangely literary cadence and the
| sentence structure tends to formality.
|
| It's quite an unusual language - a mix of Romance, Arabic,
| and a hint of English, which sounds like Russian when spoken.
| There are also plenty of false friends which confuse native
| speakers of both languages.
|
| That still doesn't explain why someone would say periferia
| when they meant lado or maybe bordo.
| reubenmorais wrote:
| Usually the words that are close to Latin or Greek in
| Portuguese will have English equivalents (<- here's one!)
| that are also close to the Latin/Greek. So in a pinch for a
| word and trying to translate in your head, it's easier to
| remember the words with a smaller transformation from
| Portuguese to English than something very different. Some
| sort of compression coding of a translation dictionary
| inside of the brain :D
| samuel wrote:
| Bear in mind that people tend to use periphrasis for concepts
| don't know or can't remember in the moment, which can end
| sounding fancy.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" A native English speaker would never have said that...
| unless they had received a really expensive education."_
|
| There's the opposite problem, too, where people with poor
| educations will try to use fancy words to impress people (but
| often wind up just sounding pretentious).
|
| One of my pet peeves is hearing people using the word
| "utilize".
|
| Just say "use"! It sounds far less pretentious and means the
| exact same thing.
|
| I intentionally try to simplify my word choice, even though
| my vocabulary is much larger than what I use in writing or
| daily speech, and even when the first word that comes to mind
| is long/fancy word.
|
| I try to use a five cent word when even a five dollar word
| would do. It sounds more natural, and you don't come off
| sounding like you're trying to impress anyone (which is
| usually counterproductive if you're using vocabulary to do
| it).
| mrec wrote:
| > I try to use a five cent word when even a five dollar
| word would do
|
| "Short words are best, and old words when short are best of
| all." -- Winston Churchill
| ithkuil wrote:
| Minuscle locutions are preferable, and superannuated
| locutions are pre-eminent
| oblio wrote:
| In Romanian "a utiliza" is "to use". I imagine it's the
| same in other Latin languages. So, see the original comment
| :-)
| fmihaila wrote:
| I think a better correspondence is "a utiliza" -> "to
| utilize" and "a folosi" -> "to use".
|
| _Edit: Mediterraneo10 explains it better._
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| Romanian is an example of the exact same thing. It did
| not inherit _a utiliza_ from Latin, rather it borrowed it
| in the 19th century from French _utiliser_ , because
| French was viewed as the posh and intellectual language
| then. Before that, for 'to use' Romanians just used the
| (Greek loan)word _a folosi_ , which is generally more
| common than _a utiliza_ even today.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| I'm talking about native English speakers. It's not as
| grating if it comes from a non-native speaker, who you
| know hasn't mastered the language yet. When a native
| speaker says it, it feels like they should know better
| and are intentionally trying to make themselves sound
| smart.
| kilbuz wrote:
| I think a lot of the usage you reference is blindly
| picked up in corporate environments, and has little to do
| with trying to 'sound smart'. My wife laughs at my
| vocabulary on my Zoom calls. After listening to myself, I
| have to agree.
| oblio wrote:
| So what I'm hearing is that your ask for everyone is to
| not leverage obvious linguistic synergies in order to
| enhance the listening experience?
| fenomas wrote:
| > pet peeves is hearing people using the word "utilize"
|
| This battle is lost, but mine is "proceeded to". People
| seem to feel like it makes them sound more official - "He
| proceeded to enter the room, and he then proceeded to sit
| down." Once you start noticing it it's _everywhere_.
| pessimizer wrote:
| It's one of the things people do when they're making fun
| of cop-speak. Cops are the best example of people who are
| trying to make what they say sound official, but instead
| just make it long-winded and bizarre.
| jll29 wrote:
| When I first studied at an English university (having been
| halfway through a linguistics program in Germany) my fellow
| students said I "sound like a book".
|
| As being told that is embarrassing, one quickly adjusts...
|
| (Nice examples here on HN, like "utilize the periphery of
| the barbecue" [to place one more sausage on it].)
|
| But a latter move to the US led to a repeat ("Hey dude, you
| talk like an alien?! Goofball!!") although the British
| accent was well liked.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > Just say "use"! It sounds far less pretentious and means
| the exact same thing.
|
| It's a pet peeve as well, but they don't mean the exact
| same thing; you "use" a doorstop to hold a door open, you
| "utilize" a shoe as a doorstop. "util - ize", to turn
| something into a utility, in a way that it wasn't before.
| Use an umbrella, utilize a leaf as an umbrella. Use email,
| utilize email as file transfer system.
|
| https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/is-utilize-
| a-w...
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" you "use" a doorstop to hold a door open, you
| "utilize" a shoe as a doorstop."_
|
| Really?
|
| Because I'd use a shoe as a doorstop.
|
| I'd never "utilize" anything.
|
| Update: Well, on doing a bit of research in to this
| instead of just using my intuition, I found that you're
| absolutely right about the special meaning of the word
| "utilize", according to a number of sources like [1].
|
| I guess I must have been too hard on those people who
| were properly using the word.
|
| Still, a survey of articles on these terms shows I'm far
| from the only one for whom the word "utilize" sounds
| pretentious, so in ordinary, non-specialist language I'd
| still err on the side of caution and use the word "use",
| which can in fact be used correctly everywhere "utilize"
| is used.
|
| There's a good discussion of various points of view on
| this issue in [2].
|
| [1] - https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/is-
| utilize-a-w...
|
| [2] -
| https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/19811/using-
| util...
| FabHK wrote:
| > Just say "use"! It sounds far less pretentious and means
| the exact same thing.
|
| I shall avail myself of that advice.
| 35fbe7d3d5b9 wrote:
| The concept of "U English" vs. "non-U English" was written
| about in the '50s. Don't say "pardon?", say "what?" or
| you'll be marked as a commoner ;)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_and_non-U_English
| pmoriarty wrote:
| The US has had a long history of anti-intellctualism[1],
| and in the 1950's "egghead" was popularized as a term of
| abuse against intellectuals.[2]
|
| It's possible that the popular disdain towards the use of
| long words in the US is related to this anti-intellectual
| attitude.
|
| [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-
| intellectualism_in_Americ...
|
| [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egghead
| WalterBright wrote:
| > It sounds more natural
|
| Weeeell, there's more to it than that. English has a rich
| vocabulary, why not use it? Just like there is more to a
| palette than primary colors, why restrict yourself?
|
| Me, I enjoy using "five dollar words" where they fit, I
| also enjoy inserting slang, obscure puns, deliberate
| misspellings, foreign words, all to add some texture and
| color. Wakarimasu ka?
|
| My father was felled by Alzheimers. What was interesting is
| his sentences became an incomprehensible jumble of words,
| but the words were from a well educated man's vocabulary.
| He never sounded pretentious, it was just how he talked.
|
| (My family does not hail from English aristocracy as far as
| I can discern. He was the first to attend college.)
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I'm from a lower class background; I learned from early
| on to adapt my language to that of the upper/upper-middle
| class, and it has 1000% earned me more credibility than
| my intellect or experience deserve. This isn't to say
| that this kind of implicit classist gatekeeping is
| merited--it's not--but this is the reality of the world
| we live in.
|
| So the scenario in question is "someone trying to fit in
| with the upper classes" to which your response is
| something like "use the language however you like"--which
| is a fine thing to say, and no doubt especially easy to
| say for those of us who have the ability to speak in the
| upper class dialect/register, but that's not the stated
| goal. I.e., if you're trying to fit in with the upper
| classes, using "utilize" is a tell that you don't fit in
| (IMO the upper class register prefers to use very few
| words to convey a lot of meaning; precise, terse, and
| fashionable vocabulary is the name of the game)--if your
| goal is to use English however you like, and if you like
| "utilize" instead of "use", then go right ahead.
| WalterBright wrote:
| There are a lot more tells than vocabulary. There's
| accent, even tone.
|
| And, of course, there's the style of clothing, haircut,
| makeup, accessories, etc. Pretty much everything :-)
| alienthrowaway wrote:
| I think the idea is not to perfectly blend in, but to get
| closer to that circle by being more relatable.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| One interesting tell that I might have heard in Jamie
| Johnson's documentary _" Born Rich"_ was talk of
| holidays.
|
| If you talk about holidaying with one's family in some
| exotic locale or of having a summer home in the Hamptons,
| the person you're speaking with can surmise that you're
| not poor.
|
| The rich kids in that documentary also regularly go out
| to bars and think nothing of spending hundreds or even
| thousands of dollars on champagne.
|
| It's definitely not just about how one talks that signals
| to others that one is part of the upper class.. but once
| one is established as in the upper class, then things
| such as one's manner of speech might distinguish you.
| alienthrowaway wrote:
| > I'm from a lower class background; I learned from early
| on to adapt my language to that of the upper/upper-middle
| class
|
| I have a similar background, but I can't say I adapt my
| language to that of upper classes. My accent and skin
| color pretty much gives away my background when I utter
| my first word, and unfortunately, just like having a
| southern US accent, people are subconsciously biased to
| thinking I'm probably not too smart. I love using "ten-
| dollar words"[1] - not that I shoe-horn them in, but they
| are the ones that usually pop into my head first and I
| can't be bothered to water them down. Additionally, I
| figure, "dumb" accent + "smart" words cancel each other
| out - more or less - which puts me on equal footing with
| my "normal" sounding colleagues. It's easier to
| change/adapt my vocabulary than it is to change my
| accent.
|
| I love language, I do a lot of reading, and it's a
| _delight_ when you find the right word that precisely
| expresses what you 're thinking. Reading a lot expands
| your vocabulary and improves your adeptness at deploying
| it. When done in moderation, using puns and subtle
| literary references is _fun_ (even when no one picks up
| on it) - as long as it doesn 't detract from the actual
| message I'm communicating.
|
| 1. I do not mean speaking like the Architect from _The
| Matrix_ here. The other week, I was called out by a
| monolingual collegue for using "nomenclature" rather
| than "naming convention" or "naming system" - which feel
| kludgey to me. Also, when I do make the effort to use
| shorter words after thinking of a long one first, that
| adds brief pauses to my speech, which gives the
| appearance of an ineffective communicator.
| leoc wrote:
| Much worse than using high-falutin' vocabulary (I might
| sometimes take advantage of 'utilise' myself) is using
| high-falutin' grammatical constructions AND USING THEM
| WRONGLY. Which takes us back nicely to the OP:
|
| > "Having lived in the U.K., I know many whose first (and
| only) language is English and who make routine errors
| when speaking and many more when writing," says Madani.
|
| The latest horror is people trying to use the 'so
| [adjective] a [noun]' construction but instead saying 'so
| [adjective] of a [noun]'. Folks, when you say 'so
| [adjective] of a [noun]' you don't sound no ways
| educated. There's a reason that Abraham Lincoln wrote of
| "the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so
| costly a sacrifice on the altar of freedom" and not "so
| costly of a sacrifice"; and the reason is that Abraham
| Lincoln was not bloody illiterate. (It may actually have
| been written by John Hay
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bixby_letter, but Lincoln's
| secretaries weren't illiterate, either.) Now you might
| not think it makes much of a difference; but 'much' is a
| determiner, not an adjective, which should be clear if
| you think about it for a much time.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" I enjoy using "five dollar words" where they fit, I
| also enjoy inserting slang, obscure puns, deliberate
| misspellings, foreign words, all to add some texture and
| color. Wakarimasu ka?"_
|
| This reminds me of William Gibson's Sprawl slang, of
| Anthony Burgess' Nadsat slang from _A Clockwork Orange_ ,
| and of Cockney rhyming slang, thieves' cant, etc.
|
| That sort of use can have a certain appealing charm to it
| in small doses (or might be annoying, depending on who
| you talk to and what you say), but unfortunately I don't
| think most users of "utilize" and the like rise to that
| level.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Personally I don't care to utilize "utilize", either. It
| smacks of annoying bureaucratic slang, like "synergy",
| "incentivize", "leverage".
|
| I'm bemused by cop jargon like "vehicle". Even
| journalists, when covering crimes, slip into saying
| "vehicle".
|
| > rhyming slang
|
| I like dazzuble dazzutch, but am not very good at it, fo
| shizzle.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yep. I'm not sure there isn't ever a place for utilize;
| it's not 100% interchangeable with use. But, yes, it's
| part of a list of business and related jargon that is
| usually best avoided. Sometimes there are legitimate
| synergies. And sometimes leverage does actually apply--as
| in getting outsized benefits from using something. But,
| yes, should probably be used a lot less than they are.
| tombert wrote:
| I actually purposefully try not to use sesquipedalian
| language much anymore ( ;) ) because I'm always afraid
| it's going to come off as pompous, and moreover nothing
| is worse than someone who learned a new fancy word but is
| using it incorrectly. Well, one thing is worse: when
| you're that person.
| agogdog wrote:
| I'm disappointed to hear that so many people are
| judgemental of the language we use, because often the
| best way to learn is to make mistakes.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Of course I'll simplify the language I use when talking
| to people who have limited English skills, like kids or
| others learning the language.
|
| Sesquipedalian means use of very long words, not quite
| the same as using a rich vocabulary.
|
| > incorrectly
|
| I sometimes pronounce words incorrectly that I'm very
| familiar with. What happened was I read the word a lot,
| yet had never heard it spoken. My mind would make up a
| pronunciation as I read, and eventually thought that was
| the real pronunciation.
| tombert wrote:
| I wasn't referring to pronunciation, but rather the word
| having a slightly different meaning than how it's being
| used.
| [deleted]
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| It also depends on the kind of education.
|
| I studied physics so moving the burgers to the periphery of
| the bbq is great. Precise, unambiguous and what not. Moving
| them to the side may mean so many things: one side (which
| one), how bug the side is. Heck, is that side still on the
| bbq?
| mwcampbell wrote:
| I don't know if this is quite the same phenomenon, but when I
| attended the 2008 Lua workshop (in Washington, DC), my
| roommate was Brazilian, and when he needed to refer to the
| blanket on my bed, the word he found was "mantle".
| anotherhue wrote:
| An Italian friend of mine, when struggling to find the word
| for a Satellite Dish, called it a parabola. I was very
| impressed.
| ot wrote:
| As an Italian in the US, I initially had trouble in stores
| asking for "sodium bicarbonate" (baking soda) or "talc"
| (baby powder). I would have never thought of those names
| since I didn't need them for either baking or babies.
|
| But maybe it was just my accent.
| ncpa-cpl wrote:
| In Spanish we call them "antenas parabolicas".
|
| I knew what a parabolica was as a child, but learnt the
| root of the word until high school math class.
|
| I had a moment in math class when I thought... "So that's
| why it's called parabolica".
| ftio wrote:
| As an Italian-American who rarely gets to speak Italian, my
| visits to my family in Italy are full of these kinds of
| things, but in the other direction, naturally.
|
| I end up using less common, typically larger words mostly
| because they have direct equivalents in English, including
| a whole bunch that end in -ation, which in Italian
| typically end in -azione.
|
| My relatives joke with me that I'm a weird, overeducated
| dummy who "knows" these big words but doesn't know basic
| idioms.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| No worries, Feynman used such a word in Portuguese when
| he did not know the short, common one and it was a great
| success.
|
| I do not remember the word anymore, it was in You Must Be
| Jocking, Mr Feynman. - in the party where he was teaching
| in Brazil
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| I find that particularly amusing because Parabola is
| exactly how we call satellite dishes here in Italy. It's
| technically called Antenna Parabolica but plenty of people
| simply call it Parabola (at least here up north)
| tengbretson wrote:
| Meanwhile in America, you will often hear a satellite
| dish be shortened (incorrectly) to just being called a
| "satellite."
|
| You'll even hear the word "satellite" mis-applied to
| parabolic antennas that are not directed at an actual
| satellite!
| mumblemumble wrote:
| _Technically_ in English you 'd only use "satellite dish"
| to describe a parabolic antenna that's being used for
| satellite communications.
|
| In practice, though, I don't think I've ever seen that
| happen outside of a technical context.
| jpindar wrote:
| What else does anyone use the term satellite dish to
| refer to?
| mumblemumble wrote:
| Parabolic antennas that are used for terrestrial
| communication.
| kadoban wrote:
| Any antenna that's parabolic in shape that isn't
| designed/used to communicate with a satellite is just
| called a satellite dish is common usage, but technically
| really shouldn't be.
| saltcured wrote:
| It's funny, I can't recall every hearing anybody say
| "satellite dish" for a terrestrial antenna in my years in
| metro and suburban California. I've heard "reflector
| dish", "dish antenna", "microwave dish", or "directional
| antenna" (which could also apply to YAGI and other non-
| dish structures).
|
| I wonder if it is regional or has other socioeconomic
| factors? Actual satellite dishes weren't common
| structures when I was growing up, outside either a sports
| bar with satellite TV feeds or more commonly large dishes
| on industrial, military, or scientific facilities. Other,
| smaller directional antenna were more commonly seen on
| radio towers etc.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Exactly the same in French, for what it's worth.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| I asked my teen children what "parabole" means to them
| and they had no idea that such antennas exist (or rather
| existed... at least for the generak population) :) They
| know about disquettes, though.
| fidelramos wrote:
| We say "parabolica" in Spain.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| That too (like "periferia") comes to Latinate languages
| through Latin from Greek.
|
| Seems all you nice folk think of Greeks as... posh? Must
| be all the philosophers :P
| potta_coffee wrote:
| That sounds like the kind of phrase I would use as a mild
| joke while hanging out with someone. It's my sense of humor
| sometimes to be intentionally fancy because it sounds
| pretentious.
| loxs wrote:
| Someone please tell me what's the correct way of saying
| this
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| "edge of the barbecue"
| loxs wrote:
| Uh, I would never say "edge", as for me the edge is the
| absolute end where it would fall off (also not a native
| speaker). Periphery is very natural and "the side" is
| probably how I would say this (as I realise that
| periphery probably does sound awkward). TIL
| kuang_eleven wrote:
| As is general true in English, there are a lot of
| idiomatic ways to say the same thing.
|
| I would probably say to move them "off to the edge" or
| just "to the edge". Confusingly, "off the edge" would
| _not_ be correct, that would mean pushing them onto the
| ground!
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| Wouldn't you say "on the side"?
| pessimizer wrote:
| Almost never. I wouldn't even assume that a grill had a
| "side", I'd think it was just as likely to be round. I'd
| say "edge." Native speaker.
| amirkdv wrote:
| The dual origin story of the English language is quite
| fascinating!
|
| There's a Wikipedia page dedicated to a list of just what you
| described, synonymous words with Romance vs Germanic origins.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_with_d...
| nkrisc wrote:
| The first section with the foods helps illustrate the class
| difference: the Germanic words we still use in English to
| describe the animal, while the Norman words we still use to
| describe the processed food products from the animal.
| patrickthebold wrote:
| I noticed dove/pigeon on there:
|
| I was taking an Arabic class and the professor was Egyptian.
| At one point she mentioned 'Pigeons of peace', which sounded
| ridiculous to my ears since 'doves' are a peace symbol and
| not pigeons, even though they are the same animal.
| irrational wrote:
| I had no idea doves and pigeons are the same animal.
| Fascinating!
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| I hear you!
|
| A long time ago I was in the US and I used the word "labyrinth"
| because I didn't know "maze" and, well, in french for a maze we
| say "labyrinthe"... I still remember the reaction of my
| american friend, very surprised by my "advanced" english
| vocabulary.
|
| We native romance language speakers have it easy ; )
| cafard wrote:
| Richard Feynman had a similar story about speaking
| Portuguese, coming up with a longish word because he couldn't
| remember the common one, and impressing his hostess.
|
| But is "labyrinth" from a romance language? It appears in
| Liddell & Scott's Greek-English Lexicon with the remark that
| it is a foreign word.
| shakow wrote:
| It's not originating from romance languages, but it's the
| "default" (and virtually only) word in romance languages
| (well, at least French).
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| It's the Greek word that was adopted in Latin and then
| romance languages.
| trashtester wrote:
| The Norwegian word ("labyrint") is also based on the Greek
| word (possibly through Latin, somehow).
|
| Ironically, though, "maze" may come from the Norwegian word
| "mas".
|
| https://www.etymonline.com/word/maze
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| Today, I've learned a new Norwegian word - labyrint. I've
| not stumbled across it.
|
| Thank you.
| routerl wrote:
| Yeah, I've had the same experience, but I've really had to
| resist that instinct, to avoid sounding too pompous.
|
| E.g. "ameliorate" comes more naturally to the tip of my tongue
| than "improve", but it's almost never a better word to use.
| lisper wrote:
| I emigrated to the US at age five from Germany and learned a
| lot of my English from Peanuts comics. One of the words I
| learned from that strip was "incidentally" which I used for
| years before someone told me about "by the way".
|
| I got beat up a lot too.
| benrbray wrote:
| > I got beat up a lot too
|
| As someone born in the 90s I'm always shocked to hear about
| how culturally accepted it was for children to be
| physically abused at school in my parents' generation.
| People talk about getting beaten up at school like it was
| nothing, like they deserved it for talking funny or liking
| comic books.
|
| It's so normal that the children's shows I grew up with on
| Nickelodeon / Cartoon Network / etc all had the main
| characters getting beaten up at school as a regular plot
| point.
|
| I just can't believe it. I'm so glad it is largely seen as
| unacceptable these days.
| joeberon wrote:
| I agree, it's weird how quickly it has changed. I went to
| school almost exactly from 2000 to early 2010s and I saw
| it change before my eyes. Quite literally we were the
| exact school year (grade) where physical abuse became
| much less tolerated. I'm not sure what exactly changed,
| but it a stark contrast between looking at the upper
| years when young vs when I reached that point. The
| teachers verified it too, and our grades were also much
| higher than previous years. I remember when I was in year
| 3 we used to literally fight on the playground and no one
| cared, it was _totally_ normalised.
|
| As you said, most 90s cartoon media portrays it pretty
| clearly, because it really was normal. The idea of
| children having physical boundaries was just not really
| as prominent back then, at least in my experience.
| monkeybutton wrote:
| When I went to high school in the mid 2000s I remember it
| being the dawn of zero-tolerance policies for everything
| major and minor. Parents were also suing schools, and I
| think those policies were a bit of a to reaction that.
| joeberon wrote:
| That wasn't a thing here at all. We didn't have any zero
| tolerance policies and suing a school in the UK was
| unheard of.
| jaywalk wrote:
| Now we have swung so far in the opposite direction that
| college students will suffer an emotional breakdown if
| they hear an opinion that differs from one they hold.
|
| I don't think we're better off.
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| Uh, it's arguably worse than ever today. It just doesn't
| happen on the playground anymore. I contend the situation
| was _better_ when it was out in the open and not on
| handheld devices.
| ghastmaster wrote:
| I much rather would have the regret of mocking and
| ridiculing scrawny Billy in 2nd grade online than the
| regret of physically kicking him while he was on the
| ground crying.
|
| I think he would as well. There are different levels of
| abuse in the physical world and the virtual world.
| Comparing the worst form of online abuse to the least
| physical abuse would likely prove you correct. The
| opposite is true of the worst physical abuse vs. the
| least virtual abuse.
|
| Virtual abuse is a somewhat new phenomenon only in that
| it is much more prolific. Prior to the internet, we had
| telephones, telegraph, pen & paper, and others. Abuse was
| common in these mediums and still is today. Because of
| the cheap, instantaneous, and inherently anonymous nature
| of the internet being quite new, I expect it will take a
| couple generations for society to create customs and
| norms that are more consistent with our physical world
| customs and norms.
| benrbray wrote:
| Verbal and emotional abuse are certainly major problems
| faced by children today, but physical abuse is so so so
| much worse. Physical abuse has strong emotional / social
| repercussions as well.
| lisper wrote:
| My family emigrated in 1969. To Kentucky. Physical and
| mental abuse was, sadly, quite common and accepted,
| especially towards anyone perceived as an outsider (which
| I very obviously was). And unfortunately my parents were
| completely clueless about how to handle it because it was
| new to them too. It took me literally 20 years before I
| finally figured out how to navigate American culture, and
| even today I sometimes feel like a stranger in a strange
| land, especially watching the political trends (which, as
| a native German and ethnic Jew, are absolutely freakin'
| terrifying).
| gadders wrote:
| I heard on a podcast the other day about people joining
| the US Military or Police that have never been in a fist
| fight in their lives. Being nearly 50, that is incredible
| to me.
| hn8788 wrote:
| I'm one of those people. I joined the Marines in 2005 and
| have still never been in a non-sparring fight at 33 years
| old. Given sufficient training, I think it could be
| preferable. When training with rifles/pistols, the people
| who'd never used a gun before usually did the best
| because they didn't have bad habits.
| Oreb wrote:
| I'm 46 and have never been in a fist fight. Neither have
| most of my friends of similar age, as far as I know. I've
| lived in Norway for most of my life. Based on what I read
| in Norwegian news (I no longer live there myself), it
| seems that fist fights and other forms of violence are
| far more common among teenagers now than when I grew up.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| I find it similarly disturbing to hear of kids torturing
| animals, which apparently is/was kind of common?
|
| I've never done it myself and only knew one person who
| (as an adult) admitted to doing it as a kid, but
| apparently it is/was a thing.
|
| When I read that many serial killers tortured animals
| when they were young before moving on to attacking
| humans[1], it somehow didn't surprise me.
|
| The phenomenon reminds me of Hogarth's famous series of
| engravings on _" The Four Stages of Cruelty"_[2], which
| starts by showing children torturing animals in the
| streets of Eighteenth-century London.
|
| It's appalling to me that this sort of behavior was ever
| tolerated.
|
| [1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/magazine/13dogfi
| ghting-t....
|
| [2] -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Four_Stages_of_Cruelty
| aikinai wrote:
| Japanese is similar. Chinese-origin words usually sound more
| sophisticated than pure Japanese words.
| Bayart wrote:
| The dynamic between Chinese and Japanese/Korean/Vietnamese in
| East Asia is very similar to the one between French and
| English, or more broadly Latin/Greek and all European
| languages. It's a good example to use for both sides (whether
| it is Easterners learning European languages or Westerners
| leaning East-Asian ones).
| refactor_master wrote:
| Japanese does take the cake though! If you thought silent
| letters or weird pronunciations were bad, try replacing
| every second word with an emoji and guess the
| pronunciation. Or if everything was spelled according to
| the rules of the English "ghoti" :p
| cecilpl2 wrote:
| My favorite example of one of the difficulties of learning
| English comes from my friend who's an adult ESL teacher.
|
| Multiple adjectives always have to be in the order: opinion,
| size, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose.
|
| You can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver
| whittling knife, or a beautiful big new oval blue nylon sleeping
| bag. Those sound completely natural and intuitive, but any tweak
| to the order just sounds "wrong" to a native speaker. Try it!
|
| If you have a "cardboard brown box", it sounds like the box is
| the color "cardboard-brown"! If you have an old little knife, it
| sounds like "little knife" is the kind of knife it is! Other
| tweaks change the implied meaning in a way that is completely
| opaque to a non-native speaker.
|
| Why can't you have a "green rectangular French old silver little
| whittling lovely knife"?
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| There are relationships that arise when you change the order,
| e.g. nylon blue sounds as if it's a shade of blue, but not a
| nylon that is some shade of blue.
|
| However, I don't believe it is opague to a non-native speaker
| who has sufficient experience with the language.
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| That word order this is not a hard and fast rule doesn't stick
| out at all if it's shifted.
| thethought wrote:
| Thank you for this. I did try a few combinations and it does
| sound funny in my head. Wondering how this ordering evolved for
| a non-native speaker like me. I did not hear or know about this
| rule.
| biztos wrote:
| I'm a native English speaker who's lived in other countries a lot
| and speaks three languages, now trying to learn a fourth. The
| weirdness of "English" is something I think about often.
|
| For starters, you have to live in it before you can really speak
| it. And our spelling is the least rational, least consistent
| thing I've ever seen. In addition to the weird way we spell a lot
| of things, many of the sounds are not pronounced at all, or
| pronounced differently, in different countries.
|
| And there are dialects that are pretty much incomprehensible to
| people who grew up in the mainstream dialect (true of many other
| languages as well) but then we add weird things like Americans
| hearing _race_ in accent and dialect, while the British can hear
| _class_ but for the most part the opposite is not true.
|
| I think simple English is one of the easiest languages to learn,
| because of its ubiquity and in most places the material advantage
| of speaking some; while good English is one of the hardest.
|
| Thanks to the magic of the innernets I have recently discovered a
| Finnish comedian named Ismo who talks about this:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAGcDi0DRtU
|
| (Arguably NSFW if you work in a kindergarten.)
| kkoncevicius wrote:
| The part about spelling being inconsistent with how it sounds
| is likely due to "great vowel shift" [1].
|
| My native language is Lithuanian and I always saw English words
| as sounding weird. However when I learned about the vowel shift
| and listened to some examples - the words from before sounded
| exactly like someone would pronounce them while reading in
| Lithuanian. In fact majority of pupils learning English for the
| first time would mis-pronounce the written words in exact same
| manner as they were supposed to sound before the vowel shift.
| Try listening to some of the soundfiles on that page ("bite",
| "mate", "boot", etc) and see how much more consistent they
| were.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift
| Dumblydorr wrote:
| I'd take our spelling system over Chinese characters or
| hieroglyphics any day. English has weird exceptions but with
| spell check and autocorrect, I think it's manageable. Their
| they're there, where we're were, there are many bad combos that
| unfortunately do need memorization.
| heurisko wrote:
| > And there are dialects that are pretty much incomprehensible
| to people who grew up in the mainstream dialect (true of many
| other languages as well)
|
| I think there are differences in accent, but I don't recognise
| anywhere as being "pretty much incomprehensible".
|
| I speak "standard" German as a foreigner, and have definitely
| found dialects that are "pretty much incomprehensible". I
| haven't found differences to such a degree in English.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| I grew up in an orthodox jewish community pretty near an even
| more, what might be termed "ultra orthodox" jewish community,
| and the dialect of english spoken there would probably be
| incomprehensible to native english speakers, both because of
| all the yiddishisms and also because of the accent.
| angry_octet wrote:
| I'm curious as to whether the practice of ultra orthodox
| men moving to a different community to marry does anything
| to standardise the Hebrew/English/Yiddish dialects between
| different communities/countries.
| biztos wrote:
| If you mean in English, I would say look to the poorer
| corners of blighty, or deep enough into Australia, and you
| may find what you need. Or, if you're in Los Angeles and
| white, ride the bus from Santa Monica to DTLA on any given
| weekend and just listen to people talk: that's English just
| as sure as mine is, but I get maybe half.
|
| (Also, is Scots not a dialect of English? I'm not sure -- a
| mix at the very least. Great tutorials on TikTok for that as
| it's apparently endangered.)
|
| If you mean German, haha that's easy, just go to Switzerland
| with a short stop in Swabia on the way, though in both places
| you'll have to practically beg people to speak their native
| tongue in front of a foreigner. The Swiss Germans especially
| will reflexively speak one of the major foreign tongues,
| namely _Hochdeutsch_ or English, though in my experience the
| Swabians will still say stuff like _schaffe gell_ and assume
| you can grok it since Germans know that much from TV.
| offtop5 wrote:
| >. Or, if you're in Los Angeles and white, ride the bus
| from Santa Monica to DTLA on any given weekend and just
| listen to people talk: that's English just as sure as mine
| is, but I get maybe half.
|
| Eh.
|
| It's nothing more than repetition for the most part, along
| with certain parts of speech being implied. If your trying
| to overhear someone else's conversation you'll miss key
| points of context.
|
| Having been to London , and South Central LA , I can't
| imagine any scenario where people from these places
| couldn't communicate with each other. A few words are
| definitely going to be different.
| ghaff wrote:
| The US mostly doesn't really have true dialects but there
| can be a fair bit of localized slang in some groups. And
| some accents, especially heavy rural Southern accents, can
| be tough especially for a non-native speaker.
| danans wrote:
| > The US mostly doesn't really have true dialects
|
| I think speakers of Cajun, Gullah, or High Tider dialects
| would seriously beg to differ.
|
| And those are just a few of the "true" dialects of the
| American South.
|
| Outside of that there are many dialects that mix Spanish
| and English throughout the southwest.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| Also dialects spoken by yiddish speakers, most frequently
| found in east coast cities like New York.
| Bayart wrote:
| >Also, is Scots not a dialect of English? I'm not sure -- a
| mix at the very least.
|
| Scots and English are two dialects of the same language.
| mbg721 wrote:
| For the benefit of confused Americans like myself: English
| as it is spoken in Scotland, Scots, and Scots Gaelic are
| three different things.
| biztos wrote:
| Interesting, I _think_ Wikipedia is saying it 's a
| distinct language that shares a lot of words etc with
| English:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_language
|
| And I admit I have no idea where the line is between a
| dialect, and that.
| meepmorp wrote:
| > And I admit I have no idea where the line is between a
| dialect, and that.
|
| It's usually based around a combination of factor -
| mutual intelligibility, orthographic conventions, etc.
| Also, of course, "a language is a dialect with an army
| and navy."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_wit
| h_a...
| fsniper wrote:
| I moved to Ireland 4 years ago. And for at least 2 years, I
| could not understand ( or hear ) a word my - not direct -
| Irish manager said. It was alien to me.
| anotherhue wrote:
| And you probably got off lightly:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pit0OkNp7s8
| fsniper wrote:
| Ha ha :) That video is priceless. And I experienced this
| first hand. If you get 5 or more kms outside Dublin,
| people start sounding gibberish.
| randompwd wrote:
| > If you get 5 or more kms outside Dublin, people start
| sounding gibberish.
|
| What a dumb and ignorant thing to say.
| hcayless wrote:
| When my father (who had a Midlands-ish English accent) met my
| father-in-law (strong NC Appalachian accent), they could not
| at first understand each other. It was pretty funny.
| nkrisc wrote:
| You can definitely find dialects that are "pretty much
| incomprehensible" in the US just by traveling around
| Appalachia.
| xxpor wrote:
| I'd never had a problem understanding a native English
| speaker from the US until I met a truck driver from eastern
| KY. Couldn't understand a single word he said. He was
| driving with his wife, who translated for him.
| Bayart wrote:
| What English speakers refer to as _dialects_ is milder than
| what other languages do, as English wiped all of its actual
| dialects out pretty early on. On the other hand, what 's
| called in German a _dialect_ might often be considered a
| _language_ by linguists.
| meepmorp wrote:
| > I haven't found such differences in English.
|
| Find yourself a native Glaswegian to chat with, and see if
| you still feel the same way.
| gadders wrote:
| I had it happen to me with a taxi driver in Newcastle.
| mnw21cam wrote:
| My brother's wife is from the Shetland islands. He'd always
| know when she was on the phone to her family, because she
| would drop straight into the dialect without realising it.
| The thing is, the Shetlanders _know_ that their dialect is
| sufficiently different, so they learn TV English as well so
| they can make themselves understood to outsiders.
| StavrosK wrote:
| Obligatory Limmy:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YfRbNipdOg
|
| NSFW language, if you can understand it.
| dmnd wrote:
| also hilarious if you can understand it
| StavrosK wrote:
| I've watched the entire show 4 times and can understand
| everything by now, but I still can't say I get the
| humour.
| sime2009 wrote:
| I was in Glasgow years ago for a conference. Wonderfully
| friendly locals, I didn't understand a word they said.
| heurisko wrote:
| I wouldn't find them "pretty much incomprehensible",
| although there might be one or two variations in accent or
| words that we might trip over once or twice.
|
| It would be much different experience from speaking with
| someone with a different German dialect, so I'd feel the
| same.
| hervature wrote:
| Does Newfinese fit the bill? Particularly the older
| generation. Listen to the first 10 seconds of this video:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvnDy7PXiTc
|
| Part of the imcomprehensibility stems from their wide use of
| sayings that aren't really deductible. "Who knit ya?" is "who
| are your parents?" It makes sense in retrospect, but I don't
| think many people would think that in retrospect.
| walshemj wrote:
| I could see some one who learnt formal English in a school
| setting in another country might struggle with Geordie, a
| strong scots English or full "Yam Yam"
| e17 wrote:
| It's not true that one cannot hear race in British accents, it
| is actually quite overt. I've lived in London and Manchester
| and the vast majority of established Black British and South
| Asian British communities do speak with a noticeably different
| accent to other ethnicities of the same economic class living
| nearby. The type of London accent mostly influenced by
| Caribbeans since the 60s even has a proper name - Multiethnic
| London English
| twic wrote:
| This is heavily tied up with class, though. My middle-class
| professional second-generation Indian and Pakistani
| acquantiances speak in a way that i don't think i could
| distinguish from the way middle-class professional white
| people speak. Meanwhile, if you visit ends where Multiethnic
| London English is widely spoken, you'll meet white people who
| speak it too.
| awillen wrote:
| What languages do you speak? I speak Spanish and have been
| learning Polish for a few years because my wife's family
| immigrated from there, and many are still in Poland, with some
| only speaking Polish... can't have the in-laws talking trash
| without me knowing :)
|
| Spanish is generally straightforward and consistent, though the
| huge number of dialects can be a challenge for practical
| communication.
|
| Polish is a goddamn nightmare. I thought English was bad, but
| hoo-boy, Polish haunts my dreams. To say it is needlessly
| complex is an understatement. You have to change the endings of
| adjectives/nouns to match the context, so you end up with a
| ridiculous number of forms of each word.
|
| "Dog" is pies (pronounced pee-yes, sorta). Unless you use it in
| the sentence "I have a dog," in which case it is psa (puh-sah,
| again, sorta... I don't even know how to type out some of the
| sounds phonetically). If you say "Cooper is my dog" then it's
| psem.
|
| Depending on who you ask, there's somewhere between twelve and
| twenty ways to say the word two in Polish (and just to be
| clear, most of these counts don't include things like both,
| pair, etc. - just literally the word two).
|
| Then there's the specificity of the verbs of movement. Oh my
| dear lord - the verbs of movement.
|
| You see, you can never say that you went somewhere or that
| you're going somewhere. You must specify how. Always. You
| cannot go to Poland, you must fly to Poland. And every verb of
| movement has at least two, usually three forms. To fly is latac
| or leciec or poleciec, depending on whether you flew once, you
| flew regularly, or you were flying when something happened. The
| last one is a situation in English that we'd just handle with a
| form of "to be" and a gerund - "I was flying when..." In
| Polish, you have to memorize a specific version of each verb
| for that form.
|
| Add to that the fact that my Polish teacher's explanation for
| many things is "there's no rule, you just have to learn what
| sounds right." In one case, if you have a masculine noun you
| must either add an a or a u on the end. There is no rule for
| which.
|
| It's like they designed the whole thing just to be a nightmare
| for any non-native speaker trying to learn it.
| biztos wrote:
| I speak German and Hungarian, and I'm trying to learn Thai
| but between lockdown and my age it's going very slowly. I'm
| properly fluent in German but I learned it when I was a
| teenager and studied German literature at university.
| Hungarian took me a while (as in years) and there are still
| bits of it I don't get, but I'm fluent-ish for most practical
| purposes. It's not an Indo-European language and it has
| agglutinative grammar and it never had orthographic reform,
| but it's pretty consistent once you get over the hump, it has
| a lot of loan words and concepts from German and Slavic
| languages, and it's a very fun kind of weird.
|
| Thai has refreshingly simple grammar but pronunciation is
| really hard for Westerners as is comprehension, and the
| writing system is, um, _rich in complexity._ Most Western
| expats simply give up, I hope I will not.
|
| I have heard Polish is pretty difficult. Native Polish
| speakers, much like Hungarians, take great pride in the
| difficulty of their language.
|
| AFAICT from spending a lot of time hanging around with
| natives and learning a few simple sentences, Spanish and
| Serbian are both pretty "easy" at least up front. I have
| plans to spend more time in the Canary Islands so I will have
| to learn some basic Spanish and I do hope it's as easy as it
| seems.
| stephenr wrote:
| > pronunciation is really hard for Westerners as is
| comprehension
|
| Yeah no kidding.
|
| I first ran into this with white/rice/? (I forget the third
| definition of kao). So now whenever my wife/MIL is trying
| to show me the difference in tone between "different" words
| like that my response to them is usually "kao, kao, kao".
|
| For anyone who hasn't tried to learn Thai: a number of
| words are pronounced almost exactly the same (the way there
| and their are in English) but with _slightly_ different
| tone.
|
| The example I give above ("kao") is pronounced basically
| like cow, but the tone means you're saying either white,
| rice (yes white rice technically is kao kao but no one says
| that) or... something else I still can't remember.
|
| I'll freely admit I'm quite bad at languages other than
| English. I didn't do fantastically when they introduced
| Japanese at school, and I struggle with Thai a lot,
| particularly to comprehend native speakers because they
| typically abbreviate _everything_ and speak very quickly
| (even to a foreigner with a confused look on his face).
| Speaking one tiny (and no doubt grammatically imperfect)
| phrase makes that worse because they assume you're fluent
| and speak more /faster.
|
| As an example: "thank you" gets shortened from three
| syllables to one in pretty much every encounter I've
| experienced - even with government officials like police
| and immigration; the syllable that remains is the last one,
| which is just a "word" added to make the sentence polite.
|
| I wish I spoke more and I am learning bit by bit but even
| learning through immersion isn't fast, for me at least.
| me_me_me wrote:
| > Add to that the fact that my Polish teacher's explanation
| for many things is "there's no rule, you just have to learn
| what sounds right." In one case, if you have a masculine noun
| you must either add an a or a u on the end. There is no rule
| for which.
|
| I can only sympathise with you, but that is the thing. As
| native speaker you just know when the words sounds good or
| off.
|
| One good thing is that you can always read Polish words
| phonetically. The notation to sounds is always the same. So
| its something :)
| awillen wrote:
| "One good thing is that you can always read Polish words
| phonetically."
|
| Maybe you can... I can barely get through the first half of
| "skrzyzowanie" :)
| me_me_me wrote:
| I said that phonetically the pronunciation doesn't change
| not that its easy xD
|
| Good luck, you will need it :D
| Metacelsus wrote:
| I'm also learning Polish. If you think declensions are fun,
| just wait until you get to the number system!
| jakub_g wrote:
| There is a famous picture for that:
| https://9gag.com/gag/arOAPm6
|
| Basically in Polish (and other Slavic languages) you take
| several concepts that are separate fixed words / grammar
| orders in English, and you meld them together with prefixes
| and postfixes to form a super-word that contains all
| information:
|
| (I/you/he/she/it/we/you/they) x (future/now/past) x
| (surely/maybe) x (finished/unfished) x (statement/question) x
| ...
|
| "she would have played" -> "zagralaby"
|
| "would you play?" (fem.) -> "zagralabys?"
|
| "he would have played" -> "zagralby"
|
| "she has been playing" -> "grala"
|
| "she played" -> "zagrala"
|
| Indeed if you come from a simple language like English, it
| must be a mindfuck.
|
| OTOH, regarding the past and whether something was happening
| regularly or not, there's some similar concept in Spanish
| that I never mastered. And all the "subjunctive" in
| French/Spanish... Languages are hard. Part of why English got
| so popular is that on grammar level it's really simpler than
| most other languages.
| andersonvom wrote:
| Languages are not inherently easy or hard. It all depends
| on where you're coming from: if you happen to already speak
| languages that are similar, then it can be said English
| will be easy to learn, otherwise, it's a language like any
| other. Just ask any Japanese or Chinese speaker how
| easy/hard it was to learn English.
|
| The reason English got so popular is purely because of the
| power and wealth English speaking nations have amassed in
| the recent history.
| bradrn wrote:
| It always amazes me somewhat when people talk of languages
| like Polish as having complex words, because Indo-European
| languages generally have pretty _simple_ words compared to
| most languages outside Europe. Consider, for example, the
| average word from Yimas:
|
| _planmaawkurampikacakapimpitiprak_
|
| 'he got those two and hid them and lay them down inside'
|
| Or Wichita:
|
| _kiyakiriwac?arasarikita?ahiriks_
|
| 'by making many trips, he carried the large [quantity of]
| meat up into it'
|
| These sorts of words, as far as I can tell, are the norm
| rather than the exception outside Europe. (Well, perhaps
| not that extreme, but certainly words like those Polish
| examples are pretty common.)
| xdennis wrote:
| My favourite word is in Nuxalk: clhp'xwlhtlhplhhskwts' .
| It has no vowels and it's pronounced
| [xlp'khwltklpkl:skwkts']. You can here it here[1]. It
| means "he had had in his possession a bunchberry plant".
|
| [1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/x%C5%82p%CC%93x%CC%A3
| %CA%B7%C...
| xxpor wrote:
| That just sounds like an agglutinative language, which is
| scary just because the words are long. But if you know
| the language, it's easy to figure out since you can see
| the individual words inside the big word.
|
| The cases in Slavic languages are much harder to deal
| with in real-time, IMO, since English speakers aren't
| used to thinking about all of those different aspects of
| the word.
| awillen wrote:
| Spanish is easier because there's just the two - an action
| is either discrete or not. There's some ambiguity as to
| which to apply in some cases, but the fact that there's
| just the two forms means there's basically an order of
| magnitude less to memorize.
|
| But yeah, the challenge is that the prefixes/postfixes
| aren't uniform... if it was always po/przed/za/whatever
| prefix for the same use, that would be one thing, but
| instead it differs across verbs. Conceptually I get it, but
| it's just so difficult to go through the process of
| constructing words while speaking.
|
| Though honestly I don't think that's the worst part - it's
| a ton of information, but there's a useful communicative
| purpose to it. What gets me is changing the endings to
| nouns based on the case - most of the time, doing that adds
| absolutely nothing from a meaning/comprehension standpoint.
| If I say "Cooper jest moj pies," 100% of Polish speakers
| are going to understand me 100% of the time, even though
| grammatically I'm clearly wrong. I swear it's just so my
| in-laws can have a good chuckle while I stumble through
| sentences :)
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| >> Part of why English got so popular is that on grammar
| level it's really simpler than most other languages.
|
| I've heard this said often but I don't believe it. For one
| thing, ancient Greek was once the lingua franca around the
| Mediterranean (e.g. the New Testament was written in Greek
| koine) and it's hard enough to this native Greek speaker,
| so at the very least a language being easy or hard doesn't
| have much to do with whether it becomes a common tongue. I
| think English seems easy because its grammar works a bit
| like a word-stack, you can put words in order and make a
| phrase, whereas for other languages you have to modify
| words with pre- and suf-fixes. So in English you can sort
| of ignore grammar and only keep syntax in mind, whereas in
| other languages you have to manage both at once.
|
| But, and this is just a theory, I suspect that there is no
| human language that is really "hard" to learn. Given that
| most languages must be spoken by at least a few thousand
| people over a few generations, I guess that every language
| is eventually optimised to be learned and used without
| trouble given the average linguistic ability of human
| beings.
| smcl wrote:
| I dunno, as a native-English speaker of (bad) Czech which
| has similar-ish thing to what you listed I am not sure
| these are such a mindfuck after all. If you threw all that
| at person at once they'd definitely lose their mind, but
| realistically they'll learn it in something like this order
| (edit: updated to use similar example "hrat" - to play):
|
| - conjugating verbs, "hraju" = I play, "hraje" = he/she
| plays
|
| - past tense of verbs, "hral jsem" = I was playing, "hral"
| = he was playing, "hrala" = she was playing
|
| - that verbs have a "perfective" form, so "zahraju" = I
| will play, "zahraje" = he/she will play
|
| - naturally the past tense of these follow, "zahral jsem" =
| I played, "zahral" = he played, "zahrala" = she played
|
| - that this can be conditional, "zahral bych" = I would
| play, "zahral by" = he would play, "zahrala by" = she would
| play
|
| It's not a stroll in the park, but the path that leads you
| to constructing those little sentence fragments isn't too
| bad IMO. There are other complications tho (I just showed
| first and 2nd person singular, no plurals, I didn't decline
| any nouns or adjectives, didn't cover positions of words in
| a more complex sentence)
| yosito wrote:
| > For starters, you have to live in it before you can really
| speak it.
|
| I know plenty of people who haven't "lived in English" before
| they're able to speak it. But I don't think English is much
| different than other languages in that the most effective way
| to learn it is to use it.
| biztos wrote:
| Sorry, I should have emphasized _really._
|
| Compared to the other languages I know, the difference
| between "school English" and "English on the street" is
| larger. But of course the other two (German and Hungarian)
| could be exceptions!
|
| I have heard the same thing said of Spanish, at least as
| spoken by the working class in Madrid.
| yosito wrote:
| I just noticed your username is Hungarian for sure. Pun
| intended. :) If you've spoken to a lot of Hungarians, as I
| have, I think some of the distance between "school English"
| and "street English" for Hungarians has to do with the
| distance between English and Hungarian. I haven't noticed
| any school/street difference with Germans speaking English.
| Most of the Germans I've met I could swear speak English as
| a first language. For what it's worth, I speak intermediate
| "school Hungarian", but "street Hungarian" still feels a
| lifetime away for me. When I learned Spanish I feel like I
| went from "school Spanish" to "street Spanish" in 3-5
| months.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > And our spelling is the least rational, least consistent
| thing I've ever seen. In addition to the weird way we spell a
| lot of things, many of the sounds are not pronounced at all, or
| pronounced differently, in different countries.
|
| That's because we use the Latin alphabet for it, but it clearly
| wasn't mean to encode English. Contrast it with Italian, for
| which after learning the basic pronunciation of letters you can
| pretty much read out loud any words and be understood.
| anoncake wrote:
| You could still properly encode English using Latin by using
| more digraphs and trigraphs.
| xwolfi wrote:
| I think English has large advantages over other languages. I'm
| French and live in Hong Kong, and the superiority of English vs
| both French and Cantonese is hard to deny.
|
| You say the spelling is irrational, I challenge you to find
| reason in the Chinese spelling, and the French one is full of
| traps due to our insane obsession with keeping our Latin root
| intact in spelling but not in verbal French.
|
| The genders make little sense in French, serve little purpose
| but constitute an immense barrier to a new learner. My wife
| will never, in her entire life, remember a table is a girl but
| a bridge is a boy. Because of that, she'll always sound like an
| idiot. My daughter might, but she hates French already and is
| incredible in English.
|
| Cantonese, or any Chinese variant, has large issues with
| temporality while English finds the right balance between
| having several tenses but not the idiotic amount French would
| have.
|
| I don't know, coming from a romance and an asian experience,
| English really is a good language you should be proud of. The
| pronunciation, sure, I'll always sound French, but that's a
| small problem compared to the vast advantage learning to read
| it provided me around 16 yo. Learn French at 16 yo and see if
| you move from the countryside of Normandy to an IB in Hong Kong
| thanks to it :D
| kosievdmerwe wrote:
| Japanese takes the Chinese writing system and makes it even
| worse.[1]
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcdYKxHT8kY
| korethr wrote:
| On that first example, "prepone" might not officially be a word,
| yet, but I encourage them to keep at it. Its construction follows
| the same structure as its intended antonym, even back to the
| etymology of "postpone". Unlike some of my English teachers in
| elementary school, the lexicographers at Oxford are not a bunch
| of solely prescriptivist assholes. Get the word into common
| enough usage that there are multiple sources for the editors of
| the OED to cite, and you just might get "prepone" added to the
| next edition. The story about an argument with Tolkien over the
| correct spelling of the plural of "dwarf" notwithstanding, I
| think included-in-the-Oxford is a standard few can argue with for
| an English word being officially real.
| peterburkimsher wrote:
| Funny story while waiting in the Observation Area after getting
| the COVID vaccination:
|
| In the first registration part, I discovered I didn't have an NHI
| number because I haven't been to a doctor. Therefore I was given
| a Post-It note on my consent form saying "Manual Entry".
|
| After the jab, the observation nurses would call out names every
| few minutes: David, Priscilla, Marion, Yi Xin, Manuel, Daniel,
| Kyungbook, Richard... no surnames.
|
| I didn't really think much of it. Besides, it was raining
| outside, I had my laptop, and I wasn't in a hurry to leave. When
| it was almost closing, there were only two of us left.
|
| "Are you Manuel?" they asked. I said my name is Peter, not
| Manuel! But apparently they were calling "Manual". The Kiwi
| accent is hard to understand, even for a native speaker!
| mwcampbell wrote:
| As a midwestern white American, I've certainly had prejudices
| based on people's accents, and I've probably misjudged whether
| someone was a "native" speaker. Having read this article, I will
| renew my efforts to fight those ugly prejudices.
|
| For a few years now, I've thought that the ideal work environment
| for encouraging diversity and inclusion would be an all-remote
| team that used only written communication, preferring
| asynchronous communication as much as possible. One advantage of
| such an environment would be that people like me couldn't judge
| others based on their accents. But then, I'm not ready to
| actually go to this extreme in my own work. I'm the cofounder of
| a tiny company, and my cofounder and I have several spoken
| conversations per day. I don't think either of us want to change
| that. Perhaps I could limit myself to written communication with
| any employees that we hire, but that feels like a double
| standard.
| bserge wrote:
| Written communication is getting weirder (in a good way) by the
| day thanks to translation software.
|
| With Deepl (and even Google Translate) I can communicate very
| well with anyone in German, Polish or any of the supported
| languages, while in person it would be impossible, as I don't
| know the language at all.
|
| Google Assistant works, but it gets annoying real fast as it's
| slow and pretty cumbersome to use.
| kthejoker2 wrote:
| We are all Chinese rooms now.
| adolfojp wrote:
| For the uninitiated.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
| ipsi wrote:
| On the other hand, somewhere in the region of 10-15%[1] of the
| UK population is dyslexic (I'd expect that to be similar in any
| English-speaking country), so exclusively-written communication
| will be somewhere between "unpleasant" and "awful" for them.
|
| That, and people will start judging on grammar, ability to
| spell, word choice, etc, etc. I think you'd just be trading one
| set of prejudices for another.
|
| [1]: https://www.cache.org.uk/news-media/dyslexia-the-facts
| xdennis wrote:
| > On the other hand, somewhere in the region of 10-15%[1] of
| the UK population is dyslexic.
|
| As an Brit, at least we live in a country where insulin is
| covered.
| alistairSH wrote:
| "Native" is such a weird construct with language. I'm Scottish,
| and while I've lived in the US since early childhood, I still
| retain a few pronunciation "quirks" inherited from my parents.
| At least in my case, it's mostly to the amusement of friends
| (haha, you say "wheel" funny or "ooh, that rolled 'R' is
| sexy"). But still so strange, since I think my pronunciation is
| closer to "correct" than American's.
| naturalauction wrote:
| Yeah, I really struggle with the concept of "native" as well.
| I grew up in the US but the first language I spoke was Tamil.
| When I went to a nursery, I couldn't communicate with any of
| the other kids. My parents then spoke to me almost
| exclusively in English. As a result I can only
| speak/read/write English but can still understand Tamil at an
| elementary level.
|
| I used to think I spoke perfect American English until
| someone pointed out that I say the th sound weirdly (I think
| it's called dental th-stopping [0]). I also spent some time
| in England as a child and now say some words like "rather"
| with the English pronunciation. I'm living in England again
| now as an adult and am picking up some English
| colloquialisms, though usually pronounced in an American
| accent.
|
| I also unintentionally end up speaking in an Indian accent
| when I talk to speakers of Indian English, but can't put on
| (even intentionally) an English accent to save my life even
| though I had one when I lived in England as a child.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th-stopping
| mwcampbell wrote:
| > "Native" is such a weird construct with language.
|
| The article raised my awareness of that. That's why I put the
| one usage of "native" in the GP comment in quotes, and mostly
| avoided the word.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| People's writing ability is really variable as well though.
| Here in Iceland you get some comically translated written stuff
| in English purely because everyone _thinks_ they know it well
| because they on the whole have a very high level of spoken
| English. That naturally holds true for native English speakers
| as well but probably with smaller variance.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| Fair point. But, and I might be wrong here, I figure people
| can much more easily control their writing than their speech,
| especially if they're not expected to send an immediate
| written response (e.g. in chat). Perhaps my mental model of
| foreign accents is wrong, and forgive me if I'm being an ugly
| American here, but I've often thought of a foreign accent as
| a disability, as if the person had a stutter or other speech
| impediment.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| do you feel the same about a regional accent - I mean
| southerners in the US often feel discriminated against as
| their accent is used as a shorthand for many negative
| stereotypes. What regional accent do you have?
| mwcampbell wrote:
| My regional accent is midwestern (I'm from Kansas). I
| don't think I feel quite the same about regional accents,
| but of course, unconscious bias is a thing.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| I have some sort of accent (I moved to the U.S at 10
| after living in Germany for 4 years, Denmark in 6), but
| when I am in America, most Americans (maybe 99.9999% of
| them) think I'm from the U.S - although generally from
| some other part of the U.S than the one they're from.
|
| I did have the experience of one guy thinking I was from
| Germany after 20 years in the U.S (hence the 99.+
| percentile) but he was quite the outlier.
|
| However when Americans meet me in Europe they immediately
| identify me as having a non-American accent, which really
| messes with all my European friends since they think of
| me as being essentially American.
|
| So this disability thing seems quite context dependent.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| There's plenty of accents amongst native speakers. The way
| you feel about other people's speaking voices is very much
| on you and belies a lack of worldliness. It's a big place
| and I'd recommend checking it out. You do seem conscious of
| that though but it's not something I'd accept personally.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| I think that is common, when someone needs to translate
| something into English you know they just hand it to an
| intern with Word. I see the evidence of it on every public
| sign and document here in Denmark, but also traveling around
| in the rest of Europe.
| golemiprague wrote:
| Why do you think diversity is important in any way? It is more
| of a meme than a proven scientific truth. It is much easier to
| function in an homogenous group of people and there are
| countless of examples for homogenous groups doing things and
| being a huge success.
|
| Silicon valley was mainly straight white males, countless of
| music and dance styles was invented by African Americans,
| Japanese came with Nintedo and Anime and many other good
| things. These were all homogenous groups working together
| without too much friction to bring some good to this world.
|
| So don't try too hard to "diversify" things, there is not much
| benefit in it, it is just a political meme.
| crispyambulance wrote:
| I find this preference hard to fathom. Sure, written
| communication is great for much of the workday but sometimes
| you need nuance and, short of spending hours wordsmithing the
| right tone, it's better to meet face to face (or by video is
| that isn't possible). I say this as an English speaker that is
| completely comfortable with written words.
|
| Maybe part of the problem is AV equipment? Once place I worked
| we had MAJOR communication difficulties with understanding
| Indian and SE Asian folks over the speakerphone. It was a
| perfect storm of unfamiliar inflections, vowels not being
| differentiated from each other strongly enough, consonants
| getting screwed up and rapid speech.
|
| Really good headsets on both ears and repeated exposure seemed
| to resolve the discomfort and dread for many folks. I always
| wondered if there were similar complaints on the Asian side, I
| never heard anything about it. Do they find British/American
| accents hard to understand? I don't know.
| williesleg wrote:
| NPR sucks donkey dong and is controlled by china.
| Arete314159 wrote:
| Shit, I'm a _native_ speaker and I complain about this trash
| language all the time.
| blt wrote:
| A lot of native English speakers think English is a difficult
| language to learn. It's true that English has a lot of spelling
| and pronunciation inconsistencies caused by mixing German, Latin,
| Greek, etc. But English is structurally very simple: few
| subject/verb agreement classes, few tenses, modifications like
| "ask vs. command" or "desire vs. predict" are achieved by adding
| words instead of conjugation. There are no genders to memorize.
| It's probably easier than the average language to construct
| grammatically correct sentences.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| English also has the largest vocabulary. Granted, most of it
| isn't used in everyday speech but I encounter a lot of words in
| writing I don't see used in speech.
|
| (Shout out to anyone who learned a lot of vocabulary from
| Calvin and Hobbes.)
| damagednoob wrote:
| > "I still encounter the situation when a stranger interrupts me
| after a few words I spoke to interrogate me: 'You have a strong
| accent. Where are you from?' It is a continuous reminder that you
| are forever an alien in your own country."
|
| Ugh. When will this victim mentality end? I'm a naturalised
| citizen in a foreign country and get asked this all the time
| because of my accent. It has never come across as anything less
| than interest.
| elric wrote:
| I frequently ask speakers of my native Flemish where they're
| from because they have interesting regional accents or speak
| baffling dialects. And that's a language spoken by barely 6
| million people. Feeling an "alien in your own country" because
| you don't speak a language in the exact same way as the people
| around you ... seems very counterproductive.
| dsr_ wrote:
| In my experience, it's _usually_ interest and friendliness --
| but after the first time you hear it used aggressively, you 'll
| never forget that can happen.
| fortran77 wrote:
| It's the richness of possible sentence construction that gets me.
| Nearly any word order can be made to work.
|
| And I still construct sentences oddly, even though I've been
| speaking some English every day for 50+ years.
| [deleted]
| Causality1 wrote:
| _" I grew up with three languages, as my parents did not share
| the same 'mother tongue' " Madani says. "And, in any case, how
| would this manager know what language I grew up with?_
|
| The careful omission of a statement whether English was one of
| those three languages leads me to believe it was not. The manager
| knew he didn't speak it from infancy because Madani spoke it
| fluently but without the style of a native speaker. Perhaps the
| difference in that position would be irrelevant, such as a STEM
| job. There are positions, however, it would matter, such as sales
| or public relations where that last one percent can mean
| everything.
| dmingod666 wrote:
| STEM is taught in English so kids that aren't taught English
| growing up have a particularly hard time adjusting with both
| language and the content.
| WillSlim95 wrote:
| Uh if parents did not share the same mother tongue in India, it
| is a very good possibilty that English is one of those three
| languages.
| qart wrote:
| "prepone" has been coined independently quite a lot of times in
| the history of English. It just so happens that it stuck around
| when the Indians did it.
| maartenscholl wrote:
| In Google's Book Ngram Viewer, prepone shows up in a higher
| percentage of texts in the early 1800s than in text from the
| past two decades. However, I don't know how accurate the corpus
| is for those old texts.
| JackFr wrote:
| 'antepone' seems to have the advantage for the latter half of
| the 19th century and then around 1965 'prepone' blows it
| away.
|
| https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=prepone%2C+ant.
| ..
| tokai wrote:
| If you look through the documents from that period it looks
| like they are a mix of words split over lines, non-english
| words, and ORC errors. G'Ngrams is very unreliable when it
| comes to the oldest materials. One clue to that is how the
| occurrence goes from max to min and back again in less than a
| decade.
| Telemakhos wrote:
| And yet preposition has long been a word.
| dmingod666 wrote:
| With it's usefulness it's a surprise it's not picked up as an
| actual word.
|
| Pre production post production. Pre release post release.
| Prepone, postpone.
| jll29 wrote:
| Linguists don't distinguish between "proper" and "improper"
| English, or "right" or "wrong", although they are very interested
| what native speakers think of "grammatical" or "ungrammatical"
| sentences.
|
| In (modern) linguistics, you try to be descriptive rather than
| prescriptive, watching language artifacts through the looking
| glass. English exists in many so-called varieties, geographical
| varieties, different varieties used in different social strata of
| one and the same society.
| input_sh wrote:
| Verbs that don't end with -ed in past tense. No rule, you just
| have to memorise all of them.
| D-Coder wrote:
| I think there is a rule (or more likely several rules), but
| knowing them involves learning the _history_ of English, which
| is not what people usually want to do.
| bovermyer wrote:
| "Prepone" makes sense even if it's not a word.
|
| Closest equivalent I can think of is "move up."
| mbg721 wrote:
| If it makes sense and its meaning is widely understood by other
| English speakers, I think it _is_ a word. We don 't have some
| academy with the authority to say it isn't.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| That's a funny example to use, since you can move up a date,
| but nobody talks about moving down a date. Same problem in the
| opposite direction.
|
| "We're moving up the launch" is common, but never heard anyone
| say "we're moving down the launch", even though delays are
| common.
|
| The issue with "prepone" is that "pone" isn't really used as a
| world. A quick googling shows that it is a word, but in regular
| speech it's not used as a standalone.
| Grustaf wrote:
| Pone not being an English word on its own is not really
| relevant.
|
| A lot of, if not most, Greek/Latin neologisms and combined
| words use a root that is never used as is.
|
| Both "neologism" and "combine" above are examples of this...
| ido wrote:
| you can move up a date, but nobody talks about
| moving down a date.
|
| It reminds me of this scene from Stargate SG1:
| https://youtu.be/LxK0ZIk_sSE
| _asummers wrote:
| "Yesterday morning" and "tomorrow morning" is my favorite
| example. Several previous Indian coworkers of mine would say
| "today morning", which always made me smile a bit. It's not
| an unreasonable phrase to exist, given the others do as well.
| bellyfullofbac wrote:
| In German the word for morning and tomorrow is the same,
| "Morgen".
|
| But "tomorrow morning" becomes "Morgen fruh" which is
| "tomorrow early" (or "early tomorrow" in English). "Morgen
| vormittags" ("tomorrow before noon") is also a variation.
| minxomat wrote:
| > moving down a date
|
| I'd consider "(later) down the road" an example of that.
| no_one_ever wrote:
| Rather than 'up and down', I think the visual is supposed to
| be 'up and back' (like forward and backward).
|
| English is fun
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| More usually (in the UK) it's forward and back, which make
| more sense as direct opposites. It's a little confusing
| though because pushing something back means move it later
| and bring it forward means move it earlier, whereas when
| talking directly about time the meanings are usually
| reversed (e.g. "back in time" means earlier).
| kbutler wrote:
| Does "back in time" mean earlier when speaking of future
| events? Or only past events?
|
| A future meeting "moved back" is definitely postponed.
| (US English)
| uryga wrote:
| in this case i'd interpret "forward/backward" as "closer
| towards you / further away from you", with the metaphor
| being that you're standing on a timeline looking "in the
| future direction" and moving stuff closer/further.
|
| when using "back" to talk about the past, it's
| "backwards" as in "behind you". "further back" = "further
| behind you" = "more in the past"
| slver wrote:
| And yet when you "set something back" you move it later in
| time.
| yitchelle wrote:
| I have not heard about move up a date before but I understand
| it to move the date to another future date. I guess the point
| it doesn't matter if it is a word or not as long as it is
| easily understandable, typically within a region, a culture
| or an industry.
| kshacker wrote:
| Pone may not be a word but pre and post should ideally be
| quite obvious and self sufficient qualifiers if standardized.
|
| And then I remembered the word preposterous, enough said.
| kbutler wrote:
| Moving up a date is like moving up toward the front in a line
| (or queue) vs moving back.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Right, but then why is isn't it "moving front" instead of
| moving up? Languages are weird.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| I've read that people learning English have difficulty with
| phrasal verbs like "move up" [1], so I can understand why
| "prepone" might become popular.
|
| [1]: http://esl.fis.edu/vocab/phrasal/phrasal-important.htm
| biztos wrote:
| Not a synonym but a similar trick: "outro."
|
| (From "intro" in case it's not obvious.)
| [deleted]
| FriedrichN wrote:
| There is such a thing as Indian English, maybe not officially but
| it certainly exists and it does differ from British and American
| English.
|
| As a matter of fact, if you look up prepone in Wiktionary
| "prepone" is mentioned as being used in India, so it's not that
| weird that the teacher in the article used it.
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/prepone
| chris_j wrote:
| If Wikipedia is to be believed [0], India ranks third in the
| list of countries ranked by number of English speakers and it's
| only fair to regard Indian English as a form of the language
| that is at least as valid as those from other countries.
|
| Having said that, one of the things that you have to learn when
| you start speaking with English speakers from around the world
| is to recognise which of the words in your vocabulary will be
| understood vs which are particular to your native country. I'd
| put words like "prepone" and "needful" into this category: you
| need to find an alternative when talking to people from places
| where those words aren't understood.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-s...
| [deleted]
| xxpor wrote:
| The difference is that Indian English exists almost entirely
| as a 2nd (or 3rd or 4th) language, so it'll never sound as
| natural. It's not the language of the street or the
| discourse.
| screye wrote:
| That's untrue for the current generation.
|
| I and a lot of my Indian peers consider English to be our
| 1st language.
| qart wrote:
| > The difference is that Indian English exists almost
| entirely as a 2nd (or 3rd or 4th) language
|
| A huge number of kids in India learn English as their first
| and only language. Especially kids born in cities, whose
| parents' linguistic backgrounds differ.
|
| > it'll never sound as natural
|
| It already sounds perfectly natural to everyone here.
|
| > It's not the language of the street or the discourse.
|
| Wrong. India is not homogeneous like that. In Bangalore, an
| Indian walking into a shoe shop on Brigade Road _will_ get
| addressed by the shopkeeper in English. Or an Indian
| visiting a pub in Koramangala, also gets addressed by the
| waiter in English. The consumption numbers of English news
| channels, English newspapers, etc. should give you an idea
| of the prevalence of English here.
| xxpor wrote:
| >A huge number of kids in India learn English as their
| first and only language
|
| "The 2011 Census showed English is the primary language--
| mother tongue--of 256,000 people, the second language of
| 83 million people, and the third language of another 46
| million people, making it the second-most widely spoken
| language after Hindi"
|
| https://www.livemint.com/news/india/in-india-who-speaks-
| in-e...
|
| 256K is not a huge amount. Even if that's up to 1.256
| million in the last 10 years, that's nothing compared to
| the size of India.
|
| >It already sounds perfectly natural to everyone here
|
| It doesn't to anyone outside of the subcontinent. This
| could also possibly be explained by the complete lack of
| English language Indian media outside of India, in the US
| particularly. We get UK, Canadian, and sometimes even
| Australian and NZ programming in the US. Why no Indian?
|
| >Wrong. India is not homogeneous like that. In Bangalore,
| an Indian walking into a shoe shop on Brigade Road will
| get addressed by the shopkeeper in English. Or an Indian
| visiting a pub in Koramangala, also gets addressed by the
| waiter in English.
|
| I'm well aware. However, when a bunch of Kannada speakers
| are hanging out at a cafe, would they be speaking
| English? Of course not. English is a lingua franca, not
| the preferred option if there's a shared mother tongue.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > I'm well aware. However, when a bunch of Kannada
| speakers are hanging out at a cafe, would they be
| speaking English? Of course not. English is a lingua
| franca, not the preferred option if there's a shared
| mother tongue.
|
| That's no different than the US.
| stewx wrote:
| A habit I've noticed among English-speaking Indians is ending
| chat sentences with "...!!!"
|
| For example: "Good morning, Bob...!!!"
|
| I would really like to know where it comes from. In my
| experience, they don't realize that "..." comes across as
| dramatic or passive-aggressive. The "!!!" part I assume is just
| meant to convey enthusiasm, but it comes across as very
| aggressive.
| brk wrote:
| _There is such a thing as Indian English_
|
| If there is one phrase that, to me, defines Indian English, I
| think it would be "do the needful". For American English
| speakers, I think the first time you hear/see that, it is
| totally confusing and jarring in an odd way.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| I've heard "do the needful" used by non-Indians in tech,
| thanks to Indian expats in tech using it.
|
| I hope it goes mainstream some day, at least in tech.
| [deleted]
| Diederich wrote:
| That's funny, because as a half a century long US native
| speaker, I started using that phrase a couple of years ago
| because I thought it sounded neat and everyone understands
| what it means.
| screye wrote:
| Funnily enough, "do the needful" is proper English. It is too
| proper.
|
| It comes from mid-19th century British English, which was
| used to design templates for formal letter writing in India.
|
| These artifacts have remained as part of Indian English, but
| died as part of British and American English.
|
| [1] https://katherinebarber.blogspot.com/2016/09/doing-
| needful.h...
| twic wrote:
| That phrase is so well known, i think some Indian speakers
| now avoid it when speaking to British or American speakers!
|
| The one that sticks in my mind is "club" as a verb meaning
| "group". "We will club these events together into one message
| for efficiency".
| flemhans wrote:
| And sirs. So many sirs.
| jkingsbery wrote:
| The first time I heard/read "prepone" and "do the needful,"
| it was maybe jarring because I had never heard either of
| those before, but in both cases it was pretty obvious what
| they meant.
| anotherhue wrote:
| Heard this phrase growing up in Ireland also so I think you
| may be over generalising. A quick search shows Irish origins
| actually.
| brk wrote:
| Very interesting, thanks. I have some Irish friends and
| we've both commented to each other that it seemed to be
| somewhat unique to Indian English speakers, makes me wonder
| more about it.
|
| And in a sense, yes, I was intending to over-generalize a
| bit, I think that for various languages that used broadly
| in different geographies, certain words and phrases tend to
| pop up locally that are often not widely used outside of
| that region. This is just from observations I have made
| traveling globally and working with global teams for 20+
| years. I mentioned "do the needful" as it popped into my
| head from the parent comment about Indian English.
| sumedh wrote:
| > A quick search shows Irish origins actually.
|
| I thought the British gave that phrase during colonial
| times.
| rocknor wrote:
| Then you need to learn more about it, Indian English is more
| than just that one phrase. That's like saying, "if there is
| one phrase that, to me, defines American English, I think it
| would be "Howdy".
| MispelledToyota wrote:
| that would be a fine thing to say. Seems like everything is
| fine.
| rocknor wrote:
| No it's not. My point is that "do the needful" is not a
| proper representation of Indian English, as the parent
| comment implied. There are a lot more pecularities that
| makes the dialect what it is, but people are just not
| aware of them (yet). A quick google search will tell you
| that.
| darkhorse13 wrote:
| Yes it is. To the point where there is actually a meme
| about it: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/do-the-needful
|
| I'm South Asian by the way, so this meme is also
| associated with my own culture.
| MispelledToyota wrote:
| "Howdy" seems like a successful synechdoche for American
| dialect to me. Seems like what makes something a proper
| representation is somewhat personal.
| andrewzah wrote:
| Not to derail the conversation more, but "howdy" is more
| of a southern American thing than just American. I never
| used that in the midwest/north until I moved to the
| south.
| MispelledToyota wrote:
| Yeah, I'm from the midwest and only would use it somewhat
| tongue in cheek or to mix things up. But most short-hands
| for American culture internationally seem to be focused
| on Southern/Western.
| eralps wrote:
| I am a non-native English speaker. "Even I" would come to my
| mind first and then that.
|
| For some reason it means "I also" in Indian English and it
| sounds weird to non Indian dialect.
|
| Like "Even I don't understand this" sounds obnoxious to me
| because in my mind it means "Even I, an almighty being, don't
| understand this, who are you to think you can understand it"
| but it means "I also don't understand" in Indian English.
|
| According to google "Even" as adverb: used to emphasize
| something surprising or extreme. So I assume what I think at
| first is what native English speakers also think.
|
| I hear this daily and I know what it meant to mean now, I had
| a friend who did not know this and thought her Indian
| colleague was talking down to her.
| qw3rty01 wrote:
| "Even I" is pretty common for native speakers, although
| it's normally used to break an assumption rather than being
| a full replacement for "I also".
|
| For example: you are in a class and someone asked a
| question about a topic. The person next to you turns and
| says "I can't believe they don't understand this topic."
| Your neighbor is making the assumption that you also
| understand it. So if you didn't understand the topic, a
| response could be "Nah, even I had some questions about
| it."
|
| Although someone could definitely use it to be
| condescending, or just trying to be cheeky.
| InfiniteRand wrote:
| It's interesting when a phrase has slightly different meanings
| between cultures. For instance, I have seen several Indians use
| "too many" to mean "a lot", Americans use "too many" to mean a
| lot sometimes but there is a negative connotation for Americans
| where "too many" means "a lot and there should be less."
|
| Usually this difference is small enough that it doesn't matter
| but there are cases like an Indian saying, "there are too many
| Mexicans in this neighborhood" and meaning "This neighborhood has
| a lot of Mexicans" in a neutral sense, but an American hearing
| that might interpret it as "The number of Mexicans in this
| neighborhood is a bad thing"
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| > American hearing that might interpret it
|
| I think most Americans would interpret it this way given it
| plays directly into the stereotype of "All Indians/Asians Are
| Incredibly Racist/Sexist."
| anotherevan wrote:
| "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is
| that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just
| borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages
| down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets
| for new vocabulary."
|
| -- James Nicoll
|
| I think this aspect of English is what makes it so complicated.
| For instance, words are spelt with an "f" or a "ph" depending on
| what language we originally stole it from.
| not2b wrote:
| The word "prepone" is commonly used in Indian English, with the
| obvious meaning. On my last trip to Noida (near Delhi) the
| manager I was visiting saw how jet lagged I was and asked if they
| should "prepone my cab" (act the driver to come early to take me
| back to my hotel).
| andrewzah wrote:
| There -is- a difference of natively learning a language and
| learning it later on as EFL/ESL. It has nothing to do with
| politics, or being perfect. In fact, many ESL/EFL speakers have
| better grammar and vocabulary than the average native speaker
| because they have to focus on those things in order to learn the
| language.
|
| However, a native speaker won't struggle in speech, and they'll
| know the various idioms used all the time in colloquial speech.
| Of course native speakers don't have to take the TEFL/TOEFL! They
| don't consciously think about grammar rules, they just employ
| them nearly always perfectly in speech. Of course not every
| native speaker is good at writing at an academic level and we
| should be aware of that.
|
| This phenomenon is also not unique to English! This article and
| the one linked are basically following the trend of bashing one's
| own English; how dare native speakers speak their language like
| they have been their entire life? Part of learning any language
| is learning the cultural idiosyncrasies and idioms. Of course,
| native speakers should strive to make sure they're not overusing
| idioms with a EFL/ESL audience, but knowing "grammar" and
| "complex technical terms" doesn't actually mean you can speak
| [American/UK/Indian/Black American/etc] English.
|
| Humans are just curious when someone has a different accent than
| the local area. There are various American accents. I've had that
| question asked a lot when I was living in Korea. Getting upset
| about it is entirely a personal choice.
| jdlyga wrote:
| I've heard from multiple people that learning what words should
| be singular and plural in sentences is confusing. For example,
| "garbage" vs "garbages"
| silicon2401 wrote:
| This article seems to take an angle that any of this is unique to
| English. Are things any different for non-native speakers growing
| up in India, China, Korea, Saudi Arabia, etc?
| Clewza313 wrote:
| English is unusual for being polycentric. For the vast majority
| of the world's languages, there's exactly one prestige dialect
| (Parisian French, Mandarin Chinese, Tokyo Japanese, etc) and a
| bunch of "inferior" dialects, and the first scenario (highly
| educated professor goes to a different country and is tripped
| up by using the "wrong" word) would not be possible.
|
| As it happens, though, Arabic is also a notably polycentric
| language, although it has a single prestige dialect too (MSA).
| And English is the closest thing India has to a prestige
| dialect, since all other languages are regional.
| [deleted]
| andrewzah wrote:
| No. I had similar experiences when learning Korean in Korea.
|
| There is a trend by native English speakers to bash english,
| and treat it like no other language can have any of these
| issues.
|
| The only major difference is noted in the other response;
| English has a lot of different dialects. Korean has Standard
| Korean that everyone learns now, and unofficial regional
| dialects. With English you have people randomly learning
| American English, UK English, Indian English, etc, which all
| have various differences in vocabulary, idioms, grammar, etc.
| tbenst wrote:
| There is a notion of General or Standard American English [1].
| Similarly, in Britain there's Received Pronunciation [2].
|
| Of course these are a social construct, but it's not unfair to
| characterize that:
|
| "General American English or General American (abbreviated GA or
| GenAm) is the umbrella accent of American English spoken by a
| majority of Americans and widely perceived, among Americans, as
| lacking any distinctly regional, ethnic, or socioeconomic
| characteristics."
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_American_English [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Received_Pronunciation
| mariodiana wrote:
| I can't fault Indians for "prepone" when so many of my fellow
| programmers say "performant."
| sudosteph wrote:
| I'm just a fan of all forms of linguistic innovation. Language
| is a tool - so long as you're being understood, you're doing it
| right.
| biztos wrote:
| Maybe we can productionalize it.
| pta2002 wrote:
| What's wrong with performant? (Non-native speaker here)
| mariodiana wrote:
| It's a neologism. Some people love it. (Actually, it seems
| like a lot of people do.) To others however, it strikes the
| ear as awkward sounding. I wouldn't say there's anything
| "wrong" about it. It's a matter of taste. It's a bit of a pet
| peeve for some of us.
|
| I bought a book a couple of years ago: _iOS and macOS
| Performance Tuning._ I took note that the author had not used
| the word "performant" even once in the book's 400 pages.
| Maybe I'm a snob, but it made the author seem the more
| credible to me.
| blt wrote:
| The main argument against "performant" isn't linguistic,
| it's technical. "Performant" is vague. It can always be
| replaced by something more descriptive like "fast", "uses
| little memory", "asymptotically optimal", "parallelizable",
| and so on.
| mariodiana wrote:
| Thank you. In light of the fact that George Orwell's
| "Politics and the English Language" essay was just
| recently posted here, I want to acknowledge that you make
| a better case than I do. One should aim to make one's
| meaning plain, as opposed to resorting to inflated (and
| often vague) language.
| etripe wrote:
| Additionally, it might be cross-pollination from Germanic
| languages, which I think all have the word.
| notdang wrote:
| Thank you for telling me. Having been using it for ages and
| never realized that it can be interpreted in this way.
|
| In my native Romance language it is written the same and
| it's an usual word. I never thought that it's a neologism
| in English and perceived as pretentious.
| mariodiana wrote:
| You're welcome. But I have to say that I think one of the
| other replies to my post makes a better case than I.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27223555
| Izkata wrote:
| > "In one instance," he said, "while working at a large Swiss
| firm, an American manager quibbled at my CV asserting that
| English was my native language.
|
| > " 'Why not?,' I asked."
|
| > " 'Because 'native' refers to the language you spoke as a
| child,' she answered with a tender, patient look."
|
| Most people think of it like that because it's accurate in like
| 99.999% of cases, but that's not what "native speaker" means.
| It's more like, "is fluent and only learned through immersion,
| not from a class or relating words to another language" - which
| is how all children learn their first language, but is far less
| common as adults.
|
| So native speakers mostly learn through memorization and
| internalizing grammar over a long period, instead of explicitly
| learning the rules of a language. That's why "prepone" is
| confusing - native speakers don't learn "postpone" as "post +
| pone", but as a single unit, so in an area where it's not a
| normal word, "prepone" is far less likely to be interpreted as
| "pre + pone", and more likely to be a new word entirely.
|
| (Aside, reading the comic before the article, I paused on it and
| tried to figure out what it meant. I was thinking some odd local
| version of "prepare")
| katsura wrote:
| > So native speakers mostly learn through memorization and
| internalizing grammar over a long period, instead of explicitly
| learning the rules of a language.
|
| Based on this, I could be considered native English speaker
| even though I've been speaking English only for the past 1/3 of
| my life. But that's exactly what I did. There were times when I
| sat down and read about the grammar in books, but to this day,
| I have no idea what a second or third conditional is, I just
| use them "naturally". It was two years ago that I realized what
| the difference was between an adjective and an adverb.
|
| So, I don't really think this is a good explanation of what a
| native speaker is.
| anbende wrote:
| So a cursory google search shows this definition of "native
| speaker" in several places:
|
| "a person who has spoken the language in question from earliest
| childhood"
|
| And this makes sense, because "native" as an adjective means:
|
| "associated with the place or circumstances of a person's
| birth"
|
| So native speaker literally means a speaker by birth. Where are
| you getting the "fluent only by immersion" definition?
|
| Are you instead talking about "native fluency," which is
| typically used to mean fluency at the level of a native
| speaker, which is technically achievable by anyone (though
| realistically impossible after a certain age)?
| Izkata wrote:
| The speed you replied, I think you might have missed the
| second paragraph I edited in (a habit I have of posting the
| comment, rereading it outside the edit box, then adding
| clarification). The edit should make it clear I'm not talking
| about native fluency.
| twic wrote:
| I don't think your second paragraph ("So native speakers
| ...") changes the meaning. And, FWIW, i also disagree - i
| think that a native speaker is someone who grew up speaking
| that language with everyone around them.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| It is great that this is being addressed. I think English is a
| language which has been evolving over time. Especially in the
| colonial era, the language spread and a different branch of
| English emerged. A lot of words from English became mainstream in
| local languages and a lot of words from local languages made it
| back to English.
|
| However, the dark underbelly of this phenomenon is that there are
| some serious racist undertones that come with this. Some words
| are "proper English" because it came from specific parts of the
| world, meanwhile similar words from other places are "Wrong
| English".
|
| Certain speakers have accents that are "beautiful" and rewarded
| even if they completely butcher the language, it is completely
| understandable and held in high regard. Meanwhile others are
| considered "funny" or "stupid" and the speaker's intelligence
| gets questioned because of the accent.
|
| As a non native speaker, I've had so many experiences where my
| intelligence is insulted and get shut down, because of my accent.
| Meanwhile the French guy next door gets applauded for saying the
| same thing again and gets a promotion. Language politics is real
| and it has severe consequences.
| the_lonely_road wrote:
| I will chime in with a slight anecdote. I have a direct report
| that speaks fine English but his written communications are just
| south of ideal. He asked me to help him by explicitly pointing
| out issues with his writing. I have been happy to do so but the
| process has really highlighted for him how refined my
| understanding of WHAT is right is contrasted to how poor my
| understanding of WHY it's right is. More than half the time I'm
| forced to say " that isn't right, this is how it should be worded
| instead but I don't really understand why".
|
| Language is a crazy thing.
| andrewzah wrote:
| That's the difference of EFL/ESL and a native speaker. If you
| live in the US/UK you're probably aware of how pitiful the
| average person is at grammar. However, they can always tell if
| a sentence is right or wrong for their variant of English.
|
| When I taught English abroad, I would get asked questions all
| the time on things I hadn't researched yet so often the answer
| was "just because".
| dcminter wrote:
| I think the royal order of adjectives is the coolest example of
| this. Native speakers of English know it intuitively without
| (usually) even knowing it exists!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjective#Order
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _But this scenario doesn 't fit with Serrano's experiences of
| English, where nonnative English speakers who learned the
| language in a classroom are often more educated on grammar rules
| and complex technical terms than American native speakers._
|
| In my experience as an EFL teacher living abroad in multiple
| countries... this is not even remotely accurate.
|
| English students across the world are often "taught" a ton of
| nonsense grammatical rules that simply don't exist, or that are
| simplifications which don't always apply.
|
| I remember one interview at a school where the (non-native
| English speaker) director criticized me for ending a sentence
| with a preposition -- a classic "fake" rule.
|
| I once reviewed an English test used for Citibank interviews,
| which I would have failed because a majority of the multiple-
| choice questions had more than one perfectly valid answer, but I
| guess not according to the overly simple grammar "rules" that
| were taught.
|
| It actually can become a serious source of tension between
| foreign learners who are proud of the 10 years they spent in
| English classes and insist they therefore speak "correctly",
| while you the native speaker are making "mistakes".
|
| I remember one memorable conversation where a work colleague
| tried to insist that something at the store was "costly", and
| wouldn't accept that the correct term was "expensive" (or just
| "costs too much"). The dictionary we had wasn't of much help
| either, since definitions often don't capture the actual
| subtleties of usage and connotation.
|
| I also can't count the number of times actual (again, non-native)
| English teachers insisted it was correct to say "I have a doubt"
| rather than "I have a question" when you don't understand
| something... and often there's literally no convincing them,
| because how could their 10 years in the classroom and 20 years of
| teaching be wrong...?
| FabHK wrote:
| It is not so much about English and Americans, but about
| learning a first language as a child versus learning a second
| language later in life. Learning a second language usually
| involves learning the grammar, and explicitly learning the
| rules that native speakers "just know".
|
| I think it is quite plausible that, for any language, speakers
| that learned it as a second language will know the grammar and
| grammatical terms better than most native speakers
| (particularly monoglot ones).
|
| Since you provided many examples, I will also give a few:
|
| An astounding number of people overcorrect to "It was a present
| for my wife and I" or so, having trouble with the few remnants
| of cases (nominative, accusative, genitive) English still has.
| Similarly, many native speaker seem incapable to identify the
| much maligned "passive voice". Or, ask a native speaker under
| what circumstances you'd use the past perfect continuous.
| NoSorryCannot wrote:
| Why do you think being able to classify the parts of speech
| would make someone more authoritative on correct usage than
| native speakers? Imagine documenting a language you don't
| know, identifying the tenses and the verb order, and finding
| something surprising so you decide it's the speakers who are
| wrong and not your model!
| hazemotes wrote:
| I have noticed Indians using that phrase quite a lot: "I have a
| doubt." I think it may just be a quirk of Indian English and
| should probably not be considered incorrect, the same way
| British English quirks are not incorrect.
| res0nat0r wrote:
| Likely in the same vein as "please do the needful", just a
| common translation / usage quirk.
| angry_octet wrote:
| Not incorrect when the speaker or millieu is Indian, but it
| would grate a little to claim it is more correct than "I have
| a question." Saying "I have a doubt" is almost le Carre, a
| spymaster weighing fragments of deception.
|
| Regional dialects and quaint idioms are absolutely English
| though. How else to add tone and shading to our
| communication? It's the sand the forces the oyster to make
| pearls.
| angry_octet wrote:
| Serrano also seems completely off-kilter with his analysis of
| mixed competency group communication: "On the
| contrary, communication ends because [the foreign researchers]
| cannot explain to the American, in simple language, the
| advanced topics they were discussing. Yet, the American *takes
| over the conversation*."
|
| Having been in engineering discussions where the language was
| not English, it is very noticeable to me that it takes longer
| for me to formulate a comment or reply. Native speakers are
| simply far faster to express themselves. When there are
| multiple native speakers the pace quickens.
|
| Speaking simply, to the point and without jargon, is actually
| an advanced skill. When you don't know the word _circle_ you
| say _square_ and then hack at the corners with other words
| until the other person nods. Part of the reason why Zoom
| classes suck.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| Isn't "I have a doubt" a way to say that you are not sure? Not
| that you do not understand it know, but that, well, you doubt.
|
| Like in "homeopathy is backed by science" to what someone would
| understandably say "I have a doubt" (in a mocking way in that
| case)
| jumelles wrote:
| American English: "I doubt that" or "I have doubts" is much
| more natural. "Doubt" is almost never singular.
| shkkmo wrote:
| Singular "doubt" is pretty common, but almost exclusively
| used when indicating a lack of doubt.
| fernandotakai wrote:
| yeah "i have a doubt about this particular issue" doesn't
| seem wrong.
| projektfu wrote:
| I had the impression the phrase was being used to interrupt a
| speaker to ask a question. In that case, it would sound odd
| to the average American, and insinuate that you thought they
| were wrong.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > English students across the world are often "taught" a ton of
| nonsense grammatical rules that simply don't exist, or that are
| simplifications which don't always apply.
|
| Hard disagree - I don't think your experience as an EFL teacher
| is relevant to places where english is an official language and
| is taught from their equivalent of K-12, like India (and many
| former colonies). EFL courses are far shorter, and not taught
| to similar depth - some former colonies use the same
| examination boards as UK students, so it's a far-cry from EFL.
|
| English speakers in those places do not make mistakes that
| "native" speakers make, like writing "I should _of_ done that "
| or say " _on_ accident " because it's the opposite of "on
| purpose" - they simply accept that the rules don't make any
| sense. I'm not sayin they are better or perfect: they have
| their own class of mistakes they are prone to.
| uhmgyu wrote:
| Memorizing grammar rules and technical vocabulary is not
| particularly difficult. I do believe nonnative speakers are
| better at textbook grammar than natives. That, however, doesn't
| mean they can pass for a native speaker in writing or speech.
| Get someone who knows all the ins and outs of English grammar,
| but never been to an English speaking country and have them
| write an essay. Just about every native speaker will be able to
| tell the text is not written by a native speaker. Grammar is
| trivial, but language is hard.
| dmingod666 wrote:
| 'loot', 'dacoit', 'blighty', 'juggernaut', 'punch', 'chappals',
| 'verandah', 'bunglow' and too many to count all have Indian
| origins.
|
| 'blighty' is a misheard vilaiti(foreigner). It's a tango, that's
| how the sausage is made and there are no wrong answers.
|
| You make a mess of yoga and Indian cuisine. We add liberal
| modifications to english. It's all good.
|
| Interesting thing is, if there is a time when are a lot more
| Indians speaking English and all making the same 'mistakes' than
| other people, how long till the mistakes are part of the
| language.
| user05202021 wrote:
| >I happen to grow up in a corner of India where languages and
| dialects differ every quarter-mile. So, English happened to be
| the common thread.
|
| Hindi should be that common thread instead.
| WillSlim95 wrote:
| If in North India that is the common thread, not the case for
| rest of India.
| shayanbahal wrote:
| As a non-native speaker, and coming from "genderless
| languages"[1], Persian, it took me quite some time to get used to
| gender based pronouns. With the new pronoun restructure in the
| English language in north America, I'm having hard time to
| understand how to talk amongst strangers (people whom I'm not
| familiar with their preferred pronouns) .
|
| [1] :
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_neutrality_in_genderles...
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| You can ignore preferred pronouns until someone tells but even
| then it doesn't matter. It didn't affect the language at all.
| finnthehuman wrote:
| >I'm having hard time to understand how to talk amongst
| strangers (people whom I'm not familiar with their preferred
| pronouns)
|
| If you're ever worried about how you'll be perceived in these
| kinds of scenarios, just make sure you're speaking with enough
| of an accent to communicates English is not your first
| language. The people who would otherwise be offended will not
| recognize you a target of the current cultural tensions that
| pronouns represent.
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| And then they'll be offended that you are a bigger minority
| than them
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| It totally blows my mind that there are languages without
| gendered pronouns. It's like someone saying "mother" and
| "father" were the same word (just "parent", no specialized
| words by gender) in a language.
|
| Translating from English to Persian must be tough, no? For
| example I did this test in Google Translate and it appeared to
| strip the second sentence of it's meaning, making the person
| that put the chicken in the oven ambiguous:
|
| > Sam and Sally went home. Once there, she put the chicken in
| the oven.
|
| > sm w sly bh khnh khwd rftnd. ps z anj , w mrG r dr jq qrr dd.
| shayanbahal wrote:
| Yes the second part of the sentence is mainly saying "that
| person", and doesn't indicate the gender.
|
| You may be surprised on how this ambiguity can be beneficial,
| specially in teenage years when talking about your "friend"
| will not reveal their gender :)
| katsura wrote:
| You can always say "Once there, the girl put the chicken in
| the oven.".
| twic wrote:
| There's a different, perhaps even worse, pitfall for people
| coming from gendered languages where the gender of a possessive
| pronoun agrees with the thing possessed rather than the person
| possessing. I have heard Spanish people say things like "I saw
| Joe Biden and her wife on television".
| doikor wrote:
| As a Finn I can second this. It took me a while to remember to
| use the correct pronoun and still get it wrong sometimes (by
| defaulting to he/him if I don't pay attention to it)
| joeberon wrote:
| I don't know Mandarin, but my Chinese PhD supervisor does
| this all the time, always accidentally using he/him to refer
| to women. Unfortunately that can be a pretty dangerous
| mistake to make
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| Isn't this selection bias? It's like walking in on a flight to
| US, and seeing how poorly sloppy everyone is dressed. So you
| might assume that the US is some sort of third world country. But
| you would be wrong, because the US is rich enough that even the
| lower class can travel. So if you are talking with some native
| speaker, you just might be speaking with an idiot, because even
| idiots speak English as their first language. Where as English
| speakers from other countries, might be well educated, since it's
| their second language.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| I was in a hostel where I and a Southie were the only native
| English speakers, and the Southie was unfortunately trying to
| explain how to "speak American" to someone from Eastern Europe.
| Cringe-worthy doesn't describe it.
| croh wrote:
| Agree. In my native language, we use tons of slang and ignore
| grammer all the time. In fact lot of talk is based on context,
| you literally don't have to finish sentence, still other person
| understands meaning behind it.
| notdang wrote:
| It's the same in the majority of the languages.
|
| I noticed that the usage of slang, correct grammar is an
| indication of the position on the social ladder and
| education.
| croh wrote:
| It used to be like that but not any more. These days upper
| people mostly speak 'accented' english.
| caymanjim wrote:
| I think you're confused about how Americans dress. Even people
| with money dress casually, and we don't dress up to get on
| airplanes. In fact, most of us dress extra-casual on planes. I
| normally won't wear sweatpants in public, but I will on a
| plane, because it's far too uncomfortable to wear pants and a
| belt while crammed into a tiny seat. People who normally dress
| well will wear pajamas on planes.
| ncpa-cpl wrote:
| I have the impression that I get asked less questions by
| immigration / customs when I dress better.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| As an American who travels, it is incredibly embarrassing to
| be associated with people like this. All I can think of when
| I see someone in pajamas on a plane is "hellooo white trash".
| I also feel bad for the flight attendants who have put so
| much into their appearance, and then have to babysit a
| sleepover party in a metal tube.
| ptudan wrote:
| Dude, I think you should loosen up a bit. When I see
| someone calling people white trash for wearing comfortable
| clothing, all I can think of is "they think they are better
| than other people for no reason".
| fyijbxmuyidudm wrote:
| Even worse, they think they are better than other people
| because of their money.
| cpursley wrote:
| Pretty sure racism is prohibited on hn. This should be
| flagged.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Sorry, I didn't mean to be racist against Americans, I
| know they aren't all horrible. (But, you know, most of
| them....)
| ed312 wrote:
| That's true through an upper middle class level, then you get
| into always traveling business class (aka humanely-sized
| seats, better food). The bump from business/first -> private
| is not _that_ much better.
| yoz-y wrote:
| Honestly, even in business class, sweatpants are just the
| better choice.
| angry_octet wrote:
| You should see how Australians fly. SYD-LAX is 13h, SYD-
| DBX is 14h and another 10h to Europe. There's no
| pretention about dressing to impress, it is calibrated
| for maximum comfort and practicality.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| People who dress smartly on business class flights are
| probably just wearing whatever clothes they Normally wear
| for business, especially if they came straight from the
| office. You might find different dress on e.g. business
| class on a flight from San Francisco to Shenzhen (which is
| likely to contain engineers out to inspect factories).
| soneca wrote:
| I don't think the opposite of _"idiot"_ is _"well-educated"_.
|
| And I also didn't like the quoted person in the article that
| said they had to (my words) "dumb down" their technical
| conversation whenever an American entered the conversation or
| they wouldn't understand the terms they were using. That is
| just arrogance and borderline xenophobism in my opinion.
| Neither the implication that speaking perfect grammar and
| knowing more words is almost equivalent to moral superiority.
|
| Anyway, that represents the diversity in non-native speakers
| perceptions somehow I guess. I enjoyed a lot the insights of
| the professor from New Delhi -- I loved the word prepone - and
| I think the concern about prejudice over not being "native" or
| "mother tongue" very valid.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| I just saw the word prepone for the first time last week. My
| boss, who is from India, used it. I had to look it up.
| sthnblllII wrote:
| That's probably because it was invented by Indians speaking
| English in India. Its not illogical etymologically but
| there is no reason you should be expected to understand it.
|
| https://www.dictionary.com/browse/prepone
|
| >Indian English
| shkkmo wrote:
| I think that the authors ideas about what it means to know a
| language are implicit to the whole article but never directly
| discussed. There is knowing the meaning of a word and then there
| is knowing the contextual usage and conotative meanings. On their
| face, "expensive" and "costly" have the same meaning, but in many
| circumstances they aren't fully interchangeable.
|
| To me, your "mother language" is simply the language that your
| mother, or other primary caregiver, spoke to you as a child. It
| is certainly plausible to have more than one in multilingual
| households.
|
| A native speaker may not have spoken that to language with their
| parents, but they learned it natively from other speakers at a
| young enough age that their phonemes adjust.
|
| In my opinion, native speakers tend to have a much deeper
| understanding of the meanings and connotations of the
| words/phrases they use but may indeed have smaller volcabularies
| than fluent, but non-native, speakers. The difference between
| "costly" and "expensive" is obvious to a native english speaker,
| but might not have been learned by a fluent speaker with a larger
| volcabulary.
|
| If you listen to linguists, grammar is descriptive not
| prescriptive. Grammar is not a fundemental trait of language, but
| a model of language use that helps us think about how language is
| used.
|
| I do think it is important to be aware of how we use language to
| enforce economic and cultural segregation. Language use is often
| used as a proxy for class and education and those who don't fit
| the "standard" are faced with discrimination.
| dqv wrote:
| Postpone, prepone, cornpone
|
| Sounds fine to me. I think I'm going to use prepone from now on.
| saxonww wrote:
| For people who don't understand this: in the US (mostly in the
| South), 'pone' is a type of unleavened quick bread usually made
| with cornmeal. It's almost never used as-is; I've only ever
| seen 'corn pone' (or 'cornpone'). It's not a root word in
| American English that you would naturally want to modify with
| pre- _or_ -post-, unless maybe you were joking about being
| hungry (pre-pone) then eating a lot and needing a nap (post-
| pone).
| tgb wrote:
| Strange choice of interview subjects given the article title: the
| first seems to be a native speaker and the second asserts he is a
| native speaker. They're just not from the US.
| azangru wrote:
| > the first seems to be a native speaker
|
| What makes you think so?
| mirkules wrote:
| It might help to have a strong definition of "native". The
| problem is that the definition changes slightly from person
| to person.
|
| In my opinion, "native speaker" should mean "a person who is
| completely fluent in a language and formulates their thoughts
| in it." But I'm wondering if we should include "social norms"
| in the definition of "native"...
|
| I did not speak English until we moved to America when I was
| 12. Now I hardly have a chance to speak my "native" language
| anymore, and instead am fluent, accent-less and conduct my
| daily activities (and even dream) almost exclusively in
| English. My kids and my wife all speak English only. I have
| become a native speaker, and by my own definition, I have
| become a foreign speaker in the language I learned as a kid.
| I'm still fluent in it, but I struggle sometimes to find the
| right words (translate from English).
|
| Another anecdote, my wife, who is an Australian native -
| speaking what is closer to the "Queen's English" than
| American English - was forced to take an ESL test when she
| first moved here to start college to assess her English
| knowledge. Is she a native speaker? Linguistically, yes. But
| she struggled to understand others in America and, more
| importantly, have others understand her. "Can I have some
| cutlery?" directed at a waiter for met with a blank stare
| (clearly unfamiliar with that term, I interjected with
| "eating utensils"). This is where societal norms and cultural
| lingo comes into play.
| wldcordeiro wrote:
| So would someone have two or more native languages if they
| can change which one they formulate their thoughts in? I
| guess that just emphasizes your point or the article's
| point more that it's a vague term to begin with.
| tgb wrote:
| It might depend upon what you count as native (as the article
| talks about later), but she certainly seems to have had
| constant English exposure since early childhood. Anyone more
| familiar with New Dehli might have a better guess, but to me
| it felt like the article was doing what the second speaker
| complained of:
|
| > "I grew up with three languages, as my parents did not
| share the same 'mother tongue' " Madani says. "And, in any
| case, how would this manager know what language I grew up
| with? I was especially miffed as she spoke but one language."
|
| It's my (possibly mistaken) assumption that anyone from
| India, self-described as a linguistic "have", and majoring in
| English and teaching English now, probably has been speaking
| it since before they started school. It seems strange that
| article doesn't actually clarify anything about her language
| education and the second interviewee specifically shows that
| the authors didn't only select for non-native speakers. I
| assume the editor wrote the title without sufficient thought
| and the author would have chosen something else.
| jxramos wrote:
| I didn't even understand what that sentence meant
|
| > But that day in the classroom, my incomprehensible
| English taught me that being an linguistic "have" is
| unstable and delusional at best.
|
| What does it mean to be a linguistic have? Is this a
| reference to the haves/have-nots. Is she trying to say
| someone with linguistic fluency? Seems like the "an" is
| misapplied there too which mucks up the sentence.
| telesilla wrote:
| Perhaps because they have accents not associated as 'native'
| of that area. I moved away from my home country a long time
| ago: when I get back, people I don't know ask where I'm from
| because my accent has changed. After a few days it comes back
| and I blend back in. I believe this is very common to
| migrants, so not only do they have an accent not from 'here'
| but maybe they have a twinge of the local sound.
| nine_zeros wrote:
| Anyone who's actually been to India (and other British colonies
| with natives, like Singapore, Hongkong) knows that the English
| out there has branched into its own language, with own slang, own
| spelling and own colloquial phrases.
|
| Imagine a world where India is the center of the English speaking
| world (not too far fetched considering the population of English
| speakers), we would all start using prepone because that's just
| the cultural norm of the most common branch of English.
| lambainsaan wrote:
| Wait prepone is not an English word, what!?
|
| I use it all the time.
| krona wrote:
| If you use it, then it is a word. If other people don't
| understand you, then that's your problem.
| bobsmooth wrote:
| It's a perfectly cromulent word.
| rsynnott wrote:
| In English, which lacks the sort of central control that, say,
| French has, if people use it, it's a word. It's just a word
| that isn't commonly used in some dialects.
| charcircuit wrote:
| I have never heard it or even seen it in my life.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| Me neither, but it's a perfectly cromulent construction.
| incrudible wrote:
| My thoughts exactly, it would embiggen our vocabulary.
| yosito wrote:
| > I was especially miffed as she spoke but one language.
|
| I've noticed that it's quite common for monolinguals to be
| judgemental about people's English if it doesn't sound exactly
| like their own dialect of English. But the lack of linguistic
| ability often lies with the monolingual listener in these cases.
| I grew up monolingual, so I understand how easy it is to judge
| someone who speaks in a way that is less comfortably understood.
| But communication is a two way process, both the speaker and the
| listener have to develop the skill and put in the effort for
| successful communication to take place. There are countless
| dialects of English, and a lot of variety even among people who
| speak English as their first language. It seems that many people
| are unaware of this.
| slver wrote:
| I'm not sure why is this here. It's basically a teacher
| complaining that people don't like when she makes up words, and
| has a strong accent.
|
| Language is a living protocol that you can only learn by
| listening people use it and using it yourself constantly. Whether
| a made up word makes sense syntactically and grammatically
| doesn't matter. In fact whether it's in a dictionary also doesn't
| matter. What matters is being understood. So you need to use
| words people know. Sometimes you're in a position to make up a
| new word, when you need to. Talking to students about when their
| exam is... is not one of those situations.
|
| And a heavy accent literally corrupts your communication. On top
| of making it hard to understand what words you say, your
| intonation becomes completely unintelligible, because you're
| speaking English, but intonating in another language. You're
| literally not speaking entirely in English. Strong Indian accent
| is especially infuriating for this, I find it very hard to listen
| to and understand.
|
| And by the way, made-up words and strong accents are ESPECIALLY
| annoying to OTHER non-native English speakers, because we have an
| extra hard time parsing this on top of understanding a non-native
| language already.
|
| I should know, I'm a Bulgarian, so... (I have slight accent).
| notdang wrote:
| > Strong Indian accent is especially infuriating for this, I
| find it very hard to listen to and understand.
|
| This applies to any accent you were not exposed previously. I
| noticed that after some time you get used and understand it
| perfectly fine.
| slver wrote:
| That's true not just about accents, but about any language.
| But whether the parties communicating have enough time to
| actually learn each other's dialects is another question
| entirely (and usually no, there isn't).
|
| Also, you can get used to a teenager saying "like" every
| second word and ending every single sentence by raising their
| pitch, or with excessive vocal fryyyyy. Ar tarnang avary
| vawaaal to aaah. But it doesn't necessarily mean that's
| effective communication style.
|
| There are dialects and accents that are actually less
| articulate than others. So even if you get used to them, it
| helps, but you still get less information content, and more
| dialect-specific ambient ornamentation (like some of the
| teen-speak examples I mentioned above).
| rocknor wrote:
| Ah, nothing like telling people to change the way they have
| been speaking since childhood for _your_ convenience...
|
| Those words and accent is understood by more than a hundred
| million people, and that number is going to increase manifold
| in the coming decades. So if you need to communicate with this
| large group of people, it's better that you learn to understand
| them, or it will be your fault for not understanding.
|
| Take your racism somewhere else.
| slver wrote:
| > Ah, nothing like telling people to change the way they have
| been speaking since childhood for _your_ convenience...
|
| Look this is not a conversation about feelings. It's a
| conversation of what's necessary so we can understand each
| other effectively.
|
| Speaking the language of the people you're trying to talk to
| is a basic requirement for communicating. Being super-
| respecful of someone's origin doesn't make you comprehend the
| sounds coming out of their mouth.
|
| By your logic, I've been speaking Bulgarian since childhood,
| I should talk to you in Bulgarian and be super-offended when
| you don't understand, because millions of people speak
| Bulgarian. Instead, I'm using English, because it's an
| English-speaking board. That's called "common sense".
|
| > Take your racism somewhere else.
|
| My God... that's so ignorant, I just feel bad for you.
|
| You're trying to turn this into a moral debate, and it's not
| about morals. It's about understanding each other, get it?
| BTW, I'll be responding to you in Bulgarian only from now on.
| Because you're clearly not "racist" and you respect my
| culture and heritage, or don't you?
| andrewzah wrote:
| Or both parties can work together since there is no True
| English. Indian English is different than <place> English. It
| is wrong for the author to expect their English to be
| universal, and it's wrong for <place> English's speakers to
| expect -their- English to be universal.
|
| Thick accents are frustrating in any language. I have had to
| work hard on removing my American accent when learning
| Korean; it made understanding what I was saying much easier
| for everyone.
|
| I think what people take issue with is when native speakers
| (who only speak 1 language, and maybe 1 local dialect of it)
| start demanding things from ESL/EFL learners.
| rocknor wrote:
| I'm not advocating making any particular dialect universal.
| I'm simply asking people to look at the big picture instead
| of hating the person that you're talking to because of how
| they talk.
|
| We have the Internet now, IMO it's only a matter of time
| until we naturally converge to a universal dialect. It will
| be a _long_ time, but still.
| slver wrote:
| > I'm simply asking people to look at the big picture
| instead of hating the person that you're talking
|
| I didn't advocate "hating" anyone. On the other hand, you
| showed up and declared me a "racist" for no reason. Maybe
| you should listen to your own advice and not jump the gun
| and hate the person you're talking to.
| prvc wrote:
| As a Commonwealth inhabitant, having to deal with a multitude of
| formalized language variants, each with a small number of
| differences in orthography and vocabulary, strikes me as a
| useless waste of energy. Difference and local particularity for
| its own sake may please the odd local jingoist, but it is simpler
| to simply take the mother version to be definitive.
| gmfawcett wrote:
| Taking your point to its limit, all contemporary languages are
| a useless waste of energy. Let's adopt a terse and efficient
| esperanto so that the billions can easily conduct business.
| rikroots wrote:
| > Let's adopt a terse and efficient esperanto
|
| That made me laugh! If forced to learn an IAL[1] I'd probably
| choose Solresol[2] because what sane person could resist the
| chance to yodel their complaints to Customer Services?
|
| Or, if "terse and efficient" are an immovable part of the
| specification then I'd suggest Ithkuil[3] ... or maybe Rust?
|
| [1] International Auxiliary Language
|
| [2] https://www.ifost.org.au/~gregb/solresol/sorsoeng.htm
|
| [3] http://www.ithkuil.net/
| sumedh wrote:
| Your ancestors came from Africa, why dont you speak your
| ancestor's African language?
|
| Languages keep on evolving, you just have to deal with it.
| krona wrote:
| I think you've missed the point of English, which is a
| collection of languages that evolved over time. Unlike e.g.
| French, there is no definitive, latest version of the language
| decreed from above. The dictionary is post-hoc, and long may it
| stay that way.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| > Unlike e.g. French, there is no definitive, latest version
| of the language decreed from above.
|
| What do you mean by this? French is spoken differently with
| different dialects over the world - eg. Quebecois French is
| not the same as France French. And while French may be one of
| the roots of English, there are also French words with their
| roots in English. It's all a mishmash.
| krona wrote:
| The Academie francaise is France's official authority on
| the usages, vocabulary, and grammar of the French language.
|
| No such institution exists for the English language.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Fair enough, though that's only France, not the language
| itself, but you're right, no equivalent exists in
| English.
| jefft255 wrote:
| I think he's referring to the Academie which pretends to
| control what's correct French or not. Of course as you
| mention, Quebec has its own thing and does not listen to
| them.
| jefft255 wrote:
| Even for French, in practice, that's not how it works... The
| academie is often criticized for being too rigid and not
| following the language that's actually spoken.
| yarky wrote:
| L'academie is a ridiculous concept. How come some elite
| literates tell people how to speak? It's like if there was
| one way only to solve a programming problem, and that's
| rarely the case.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I love the description of English as "three different
| languages dressed in a trenchcoat pretending to be a proper
| language" :)
|
| I'm trying to learn German at the moment, and it's
| fascinating seeing the similarities between the languages,
| and the things we used to have in common but got dropped or
| modified in English.
| yarky wrote:
| You're wrong about french, it's pretty different between
| France and Canada. I first learnt France french, then
| Canadian. happen to find "correct" french extremely boring,
| absolutely no reason to speak in a boring way if you can
| speak cool french ;)
| rsynnott wrote:
| France French is centrally controlled; there's essentially
| a standards body (though you could argue that in practice
| this is irrelevant; if what is actually spoken diverges
| from the standard, then what is actually spoken is the
| language, and the standardisers are just playing at
| constructed languages). No major variant of English works
| like this.
| JackFr wrote:
| And don't forget Africa and the Caribbean.
| prvc wrote:
| I am referring to formalized standards here. There is exactly
| no literature that I care about which has been written in
| some English variant other than British or American. Why
| force students and professionals to buy special dictionaries
| and conform to oddball rules, which really only have a small
| number of differences, just because it tickles the fancy of a
| minority of would-be authorities. For example, Canada should
| just adopt American English. As for the countries mentioned
| in the article, the majority of "English speakers" there are
| not competent as speakers (easily seen by spending a few
| minutes reading Twitter), so the people proposing formalizing
| variants for those regions are not doing so in good faith,
| but to satisfy a political agenda that is only tangentially
| related to interest in language.
| viraptor wrote:
| In what way do you "have to deal with a multitude of formalized
| language variants"? How does that impact you day to day?
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Like when I committed that greatest of Canadian sins: using the
| work 'labour' in a document read by an American client. The
| reaction was ridiculous.
|
| Or the hilarious situation I had at a legal conference. I
| thought one of my right-wing US friends had gone totally
| racist. He was complaining about all the new "turbins" he was
| seeing while driving to the conference. I thought he meant
| _turban_ , but that's just how Americans pronounce "turbine",
| as in the _wind turbines_ he could see from the highway.
| egypturnash wrote:
| That's how _some_ Americans say "turbine". I've never heard
| it said that way but apparently this is mostly used by
| (older?) people from the Midwest, which certainly fits with
| your friend being right-wing.
| tanjtanjtanj wrote:
| As a person whose spent my entire life in the US, I've never
| heard that pronunciation of turbine. Looking into it, it
| seems like some people do pronounce it that way but typically
| it's tied to a specific region AND industry. It's certainly
| not the widely accepted way to say it here south of the
| border.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| I have met Americans who believe the UK spelling of words
| with -our instead of -or actually represents a difference in
| pronunciation. That is, they have the mistaken impression
| that Brits say /k@lur/ instead of /k@l@r/.
| JackFr wrote:
| 'gaol' always throws me for a loop when I'm reading
| something British. I need to remind myself it's pronounced
| 'jail'. (A quick google tells me that all the major British
| newspapers switched over to 'jail' by the 1990's - score
| one for the good guys!)
|
| I remember reading 'Mutiny on the Bounty' as a child and
| talking about it with my father and I said something about
| the 'boatswain', and he (a former naval officer) looked at
| me like I had two heads. "You mean the [BOSUN]?" "Well, no
| it says 'boatswain'" "Yes, it's spelled like that, but it's
| pronounced BOSUN. It's like 'colonel'. Don't think about
| the letters."
| alickz wrote:
| I've known the word boatswain for decades at this point
| and never knew it was pronounced like that!
|
| Speaking of military terms, lieutenant as "leftenant"
| always threw me. I had just assumed they were different
| words.
| [deleted]
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Even worse: Try being at unit with brit/canadian/american
| exchange officers. Same spelling, different
| pronunciations depending on who you are talking about.
| And they really do care.
| twic wrote:
| And it's only "leftenent" in the army; in the navy it's
| "latenant".
|
| (or at least, was - it is possible navy use has shifted)
| cafard wrote:
| One of my father's college classmates was in Navy ROTC,
| and deliberately pronounce "boatswain" and "gunwale" as
| spelled, in order to bug the regular petty officer.
| JackFr wrote:
| Also forcastle -> foc's'le
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| Ah but which "mother version"? American English is closer to
| the original spelling than British English, but getting the
| actual English to change their use of their own language
| because the Americans use it differently seems... odd. Plus
| there's no intrinsic reason to prefer the original spelling
| over later versions.
|
| So maybe we should all use English as it is used by the actual
| English? But that would see a small minority of the number of
| English-language speakers setting the rules for the huge
| majority.
|
| So maybe (as others have suggested) we follow the majority of
| native English speakers and use the Indian version?
| rsynnott wrote:
| > So maybe we should all use English as it is used by the
| actual English?
|
| Which ones? It's not like English, as actually spoken in
| England, is particularly uniform. It has uniform _spelling_,
| but that's about all; a lot of vocabulary and even grammar is
| quite regional.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| If we get a choice, then Irish English.
|
| There are a few things that got pulled from Gaelic to
| English in Ireland that I love.
|
| Like "him/herself" to mean the object of the sentence
| without naming them "ah would you look at himself, all
| dressed up like that", "I'll have to check with herself if
| I'm allowed out on a school night", etc
|
| And no (or dimished) use of yes or no. Monosyllabic answers
| verboten.
| viraptor wrote:
| Unless you're in Bristol and notice how much the
| "should'ov" spelling becomes a thing.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I really think that "should have" is going to be replaced
| by "should of". It already is in most actual usage, and
| it's only "language snobs" (like me) who care that it
| shouldn't be used like that.
|
| I have the same feeling about "lose", which is
| increasingly spelled "loose". It annoys the living crap
| out of me, but in fairness English is whatever people say
| it is, and if people want to say it's "loose" then so be
| it.
|
| I've already seen "moorish" succumb - from meaning (more
| or less) "spicy" to meaning "something I'd like to have
| more of". Which to be fair we don't have a word for,
| while we have plenty for "spicy" so it seems like a fair
| trade.
| viraptor wrote:
| > It annoys the living crap out of me, but in fairness
| English is whatever people say it is
|
| That's about my position on it. "I'm a descriptivist, but
| this is just stupid, let's not go there."
| finnthehuman wrote:
| >So maybe we should all use English as it is used by the
| actual English?
|
| I'm in. Just imagine stuck up californians suddenly speaking
| Geordie. Howay man.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I'm not sure that Geordie counts as actual English, given
| that 80% of England (never mind the rest of the
| Anglosphere) can't understand it ;)
|
| I once worked as a KP in the Isle of Man alongside cooks
| from Belfast, Glasgow and Sunderland. My Wurzel upbringing
| did not prepare me for this. Took me 3 weeks of repeated
| "what?" to begin to understand them. But I find that 30
| years later, I can still understand them. Weird how that
| works.
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| Language has never worked like that. It's always going to be a
| changing thing, with branches that extend out until what was
| one language becomes two or more distinct languages.
| pdpi wrote:
| Languages evolve. With something as big as the commonwealth,
| different groups will see their own local use of the language
| evolve in different directions. The "mother version" itself has
| evolved plenty over time, and I don't think it's reasonable to
| say that the way that particular version has evolved over time
| is the "definitive" version of the language.
| crvdgc wrote:
| As a "non-native" English speaker, the single most influential
| class I took for learning English is lexicology. Each student is
| required to recite 500 Latin roots and 200 affixes. It's hard,
| but after that, the vocabulary capability grows exponentially.
| [deleted]
| david422 wrote:
| Reminds me of that scene from Die Hard where the non-native
| German speaker says "feels like it's gonna rain like, dogs and
| cats" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0yQbpoQ0hY
|
| Something so subtle that a "native" - or maybe it would just be
| American? - speaker would never say.
| bdefore wrote:
| As a native speaker, I don't remember anyone teaching me the
| rules of adjective order but I have internalized them and
| definitely notice when someone violates my expectations. I
| rarely witness a native speaker do so. https://www.grammar-
| monster.com/lessons/order_of_adjectives....
| lebuffon wrote:
| Or... You think I know f__k nothing, but I know f__k all!
| Y_Y wrote:
| Can I gripe about the spelling "nonnative" rather than "non-
| native"? It the former spelling it looks like it's said all at
| once, like the word "normative". Probably it's in common use and
| there are other similar cases we've assimilated, but I don't have
| to like it.
| [deleted]
| BlameKaneda wrote:
| When I saw the title I pronounced it as "NON-nah-tiv" (like
| "normative"), and didn't realize it was non-native until your
| comment.
| projektfu wrote:
| Usually publishing organizations have house rules and the copy
| hews to these rules. NPR uses the spellings in Webster's New
| World College Dictionary Fifth Edition, and then has a few
| rules of their own.
|
| A more algorithmic rule is found in APA style:
| https://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2016/10/hyphenation-stati...
|
| Edit: NPR also uses the Associated Press Stylebook and related
| resources.
| livre wrote:
| I don't know about "non-native" but words tend to lose the
| hyphen over time when their usage becomes more common. A recent
| example is e-mail, old texts contain the hyphen but more recent
| books and articles will likely omit it. It doesn't stop just
| there though, even the word tomorrow used to be hyphenated, you
| can find it as to-morrow in the book "The adventures of three
| Englishmen and three Russians in Southern Africa." To-day and
| to-night too https://episystechpubs.com/2020/05/19/editors-
| corner-to-day-...
| phillc73 wrote:
| Lack of hyphen use drives me nuts. "Cooperation" is a prime
| example. Without the hyphen, my internal monologue pronounces
| the word like "chicken coop"[1]. Whereas, "Co-Operation" makes
| pronunciation much clearer.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_coop
| cafard wrote:
| Doesn't the New Yorker still hold the line, and print it with
| a dieresis? On the other hand, I knew a women who belonged to
| a food cooperative, and referred to it as the "coop",
| pronouncing it as if it were a chicken coop.
| Y_Y wrote:
| I think I would be satisfied with the New Yorker-style:
| "nonnative".
|
| That's a neat solution, thanks!
|
| (Please address complaints about putting a trema over an
| 'n' to Spinal Tap.)
| daveslash wrote:
| _" So when I realized [preponed] wasn't "proper" English, I was
| dumbfounded, flummoxed, astounded, nonplussed,"_ ~ "nonplussed"
| is a word, but "plussed" isn't. Thought that was interesting
| given the word being discussed is preponed (vs. postponed).
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| My girlfriend recently enrolled in a university and one of the
| requirements was a certificate from one of the official places
| (TOEFL etc., I forget the rest). They exist just to leech money
| off non-native speakers. Anyone can pass an exam as long as they
| go to the right place and pay the fee, and besides, why do you
| need a long written and spoken test to test people's English?
| Someone's level of English is immediately obvious from even a
| brief conversation. If they can't speak it, they'll fail out
| after the first exams or learn it anyway.
|
| I guess it bothers me even more as someone who wasn't born in an
| English speaking country but spoke it nearly exclusively after
| childhood. It's a common sentiment - one of my old history
| teachers lived in England for 20 or so years, and was asked if he
| can provide some proof he can speak English for his citizenship.
| How would someone live in the damn country for 20 years as a
| teacher and not be able to speak the language?
| WalterBright wrote:
| > How would someone live in the damn country for 20 years as a
| teacher and not be able to speak the language?
|
| By lying on their resume. That's why people ask questions like
| that, to uncover frauds.
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| I find it hard to believe one could go through the
| nationalization procedure and not speak English. It's a very
| in-person kind of thing, no way to con your way through it
| really.
| js2 wrote:
| I'm a native English speaker.
|
| I argued for the contraction "amn't" through sixth grade, but my
| teachers kept correcting it.
|
| At work a few years back, a Chinese colleague was speaking with
| an Indian colleague. I had some trouble understanding them with
| their heavy accents, but they were apparently having no trouble
| understanding each other.
|
| At the same workplace, my Italian boss would sometimes converse
| with a Canadian colleague in French.
|
| My dad is one of those people who when speaking to non-native
| English speakers, he speaks (a lot) louder, as if that helps them
| to understand (I don't think it does).
|
| In Italy one time, my daughter was trying to order espresso with
| hot milk but got served a glass of cold milk because she asked
| for a latte. She's currently studying German and is amused by the
| German for "birth control pills": "Anti-Baby-Pillen".
|
| I am reminded of a habit from seven habits of highly effective
| people: seek first to understand, then to be understood.
|
| Shrug.
| vharuck wrote:
| >I argued for the contraction "amn't" through sixth grade, but
| my teachers kept correcting it.
|
| I asked my high school English teacher the proper way to
| contract "should not have" in writing; I was trying my hand at
| short stories, and I wanted it in the dialogue. She said it
| wasn't a thing. Not that there's no standard convention, but
| that it's not a thing.
|
| Despite me saying and hearing "shouldn't've" all the time.
| dmingod666 wrote:
| 'Anti-Baby-Pillen' is the most absurd name of a medicine I've
| come across.
| yumraj wrote:
| And what about _business_ English? :)
|
| Use of words/phrases such as "thought process" (mostly
| incorrectly), "sync up", "paradigm shift", "disrupt", "blue/green
| ocean", "ballpark" and so on and on...
| brk wrote:
| I think some of the confusion is that "pone" is not a root word
| or term. So, the opposite of postpone is not prepone, in the same
| way that prepartum is the opposite of postpartum.
| oytis wrote:
| Why? The stem is from Latin ponere, to put, so could
| theoretically work both ways
| brk wrote:
| I probably should have said "a commonly used or understood
| root word".
| dasyatidprime wrote:
| It shows up rarely in _that_ form in "standard" English, but
| the related morpheme "-ponent" shows up more often: component
| (put+together), exponent (put+out), proponent (put+forth). And
| then the "-pose" variants come from the same Latin root but
| modified via French: compose, expose, propose.
| ljm wrote:
| I like 'sublime' for that. It sounds like an object could have
| three states: lime, sublime, and superlime.
|
| Something that is sublime would somehow be inferior to its lime
| counterpart. Like everything has an innate limeness.
| twic wrote:
| Subb! I suggest you make a backmal undertological antiposal
| about this.
| smhenderson wrote:
| My favorite is "why is no one ever whelmed?". I've seen this
| many times in popular culture over the years. People get
| overwhelmed and underwhelmed but no one ever seems to just
| get whelmed, even though it's really the same thing as
| overwhelmed.
| gota wrote:
| Apparently it could have been like that, as it comes from
| 'sub'+'limen' ("threshold")
|
| Disclaimer: I just googled "sublime etymology"
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| >> Sergio Serrano has participated in many international
| scientific conferences across the globe. "In a typical situation,
| a group of foreign researchers are discussing a complex technical
| issue with very precise and elaborate formal English," Serrano
| says, "until an American joins the group."
|
| I'm not American but I don't like this. If an American author had
| written that everything is fine until "a foreigner joins the
| group" there would be a twitterstorm.
|
| What's more, this is not about Americans, or even native English
| speakers. I'll give you a completely different example of how a
| group with a common language can exclude someone who doesn't
| quite share it.
|
| I knew a couple were the woman was Greek and the man was from
| Chile. They lived in Greece and hung out with Greeks. I witnessed
| first hand, dozens of times, how the Chilean guy was left out of
| conversations. It happened in three phases. In the first phase,
| everyone would speak to him in English. This lasted for a few
| minutes, time enough to exchange greetings and pleasantries and
| so on. In the second phase, the Greeks would revert to speaking
| to each other in Greek. In the third stage, the Chilean man would
| try to join the conversation in Greek. At that point, the Greeks
| would reply _in English_. Then the process looped back to the
| second phase.
|
| The Chilean guy was trying to learn Greek, but he never could -
| because nobody spoke to him in Greek long enough for him to learn
| it. He also failed to make any friends, because everyone spoke to
| him only for a short time, as long as they felt comfortable
| speaking in English.
|
| Obviously I noticed this so I tried to rectify it by speaking to
| him only in Greek. We ended up code-switching a lot but at least
| we could keep going for a longer time than he did with others. I
| realised his frustration when we explicitly discussed how I spoke
| to him in Greek and he said, exasperated "you're the only one!".
|
| Language can be a huge barrier that we raise subconsiously around
| us- but it doesn't help to single out one nationality for it.
| Everyone does it.
| today20201014 wrote:
| I'm an American; I don't like this, too.
|
| My experience mirrors what is described in the article, but
| only with people from Europe. Non-native English speakers from
| Europe look down on Americans, in a sort of "gate-keeping"
| manner where Europeans "own" the language. They have a better
| grasp of the "precise and elaborate formal English" and do not
| hesitate to correct Americans and tell them they don't
| understand grammar and are uneducated. (I'm inclined to agree
| with them.)
|
| My experience speaking with non-native speakers from Asia,
| India, and Central & South America has been different. Maybe we
| are more willing to accept that there is a language barrier,
| but no one "owns" it.
|
| And, like the article says, trying to use a culturally relevant
| idiom is a futile task.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| If your Chilean is having difficulties learning the local
| language to such a degree that people don't tolerate his
| practicing attempts, then he might need to just sign up for a
| course where a teacher, paid to be patient, will work with him.
|
| I love language-learning, and I can usually bootstrap myself to
| a level where the locals don't reply in English when I want to
| practice. However, with Dutch I found it difficult to bootstrap
| and I experienced what your Chilean did. When I complained
| about how locals weren't letting me practice, I was told (the
| famous Dutch directness!) that I needed to simply hire a
| teacher to get to a higher level, instead of being annoying to
| local people. People's time is precious, and a foreigner
| speaking the local language haltingly is arguably disrespectful
| of their time.
| ot wrote:
| > If an American author had written
|
| This is a common pattern of false equivalency, like "reverse
| racism" and the likes.
|
| The analogy is invalid because the harms of discrimination come
| from the power imbalance.
|
| In this case, immigrants in the US are in a position of
| disadvantage, due to linguistic/cultural struggles and the
| perception issues they cause. Perpetuating stereotypes that
| reinforce that perception causes harm.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| I appreciate this of course, but for me any stereotype is
| harmful beause it teaches people to be intellectually lazy.
| From this intellectual laziness many evils are born and
| racism is one of them. If the goal is to eliminate racism,
| we're not going to get there any faster than we will by not
| accepting any stereotype at all, whatsoever, regardless of
| who is at the receiving end.
| milliams wrote:
| > I found out that "prepone" was not an actual word in English,
| based on the dogma that all legitimate words in a language must
| be found in a dictionary.
|
| I disagree. In this case, it was based on the fact that no one
| you were talking to knew the meaning of the word you'd made up.
| This is descriptivism at work.
| andrewzah wrote:
| Prepone is not a word in American Standard English. Or casual
| American English. Nobody uses it, although we should. It's
| totally logical from "postpone", but languages are not rational
| or logical.
|
| If something is to become a word, people need to actually use
| it in the first place. Indian English is different than
| American English is different than Black American English is
| different than UK English.
| MispelledToyota wrote:
| doesn't really hold up. If there was one person left alive on
| Earth they would still speak a language, and there would be
| observable rules about it all the same.
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| English has been adapted by many communities as common medium in
| India, where none are native-speakers. The Indianized English
| that we speak are understood well by other Indians and it can
| vary/struggle a bit as you move across the country (north-south,
| east-west).
|
| Now, we Indians find it hard to understand when others non-native
| speakers speak English just as others for Indians.
|
| I had had my experiences being the "English Translator" for
| Indians and Japanese speaking, well, English. I enunciate, use
| simpler words, and shorter sentences.
|
| I happen to grow up in a corner of India where languages and
| dialects differ every quarter-mile. So, English happened to be
| the common thread. Our schools fined us [?]0.50 in my times if we
| do not speak in English since very early grade.
|
| During early 2000s I started visiting countries outside India,
| such as US, and UK. Then I realized, that my English sucks. I
| have been learning a lot more since. Working mostly with Native
| English Speaking clients did do a whole lot of fast-forward into
| "speaking English" the proper way.
|
| Unfortunately, I feel my own language is limited and very
| complex. My family switch to English if we need to understand
| things faster and better. My daughters are learning our original
| language but they sounded very funny and kinda "language-
| retarted" to their counterparts (cousins, relative back home).
|
| The interesting thing is I can speak and understand a minimum of
| three languages (English, Hindi, and our Language) like most
| Indians. I can also get away with exchanging info with people
| speaking in Marathi, Gujarathi, and a bit of Bengali, Punjabi,
| Haryanbi, etc.
|
| Attempting and preparing to learn Japanese soon.
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