Author Topic: [rant]why do english/chinese companies don't give a damn about other languages..  (Read 25363 times)

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Online coppice

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English is the current defacto lingua Franca and is horrible from a language student's point of view, too irregular, weird spelling and pronunciation (even in Noah Webster's bastardized form).
There are 3 reasons why English is so widespread today. 1) The British Empire spread it around the world. 2) The dominance of the USA drives it forward.  3) Its a flexible language that is happy to absorb from others. Point 3 makes it messy, but it also means it avoids being exclusionary. Some European languages have tried to exclude pollution by foreign languages, and its making them fossilize and lose relevance. People are generally accepting of English.
 

Offline Cerebus

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English is the current defacto lingua Franca and is horrible from a language student's point of view, too irregular, weird spelling and pronunciation (even in Noah Webster's bastardized form).
There are 3 reasons why English is so widespread today. 1) The British Empire spread it around the world. 2) The dominance of the USA drives it forward.  3) Its a flexible language that is happy to absorb from others. Point 3 makes it messy, but it also means it avoids being exclusionary. Some European languages have tried to exclude pollution by foreign languages, and its making them fossilize and lose relevance. People are generally accepting of English.

All true - almost, I'll come to that in a moment - but if you were making a logical choice for a new lingua Franca it wouldn't be English. As to the point about English "absorbing" from other languages, I can tell you (sitting here in pyjamas on the veranda of a bungalow*) that we don't "absorb", we don't even borrow, we wholesale steal.

*I'm not really doing that, in March, amid a public lockdown, and it is obviously an illustrative literary device to introduce some English words that were stolen from the Indian subcontinent (Urdu, Hindi (borrowed from Portuguese) and Hindi respectively).
Anybody got a syringe I can use to squeeze the magic smoke back into this?
 

Offline CatalinaWOW

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If we're seriously aiming for a new  lingua Franca (literally latin for the French language, but intended to mean a common world language) then it ought to be Spanish. Of all the European languages that have taken hold in the rest of the world it is the most regular and the easiest to learn.

English is the current defacto lingua Franca and is horrible from a language student's point of view, too irregular, weird spelling and pronunciation (even in Noah Webster's bastardized form). French is little better in regard to the same things. German's too much of a minority language to get out of the starting blocks (and putting the verbs at the end of sentences is just evil). Italian would be a good alternative to Spanish (simple spelling, reasonably regular grammar), but Spanish has got a huge head start on it. On headcount alone there's an argument for Chinese, but it's so different from most other languages (tonal pronunciation, ideograms) that it doesn't get out of the starting gate.

Have to agree for the most part, although Spanish is in many ways as bad as English in terms of local variations. 

It would be interesting to see how things develop over the next couple of hundred years.  Will telecommunications and video slow or stop the pronunciation drifts that split Latin into the various Romance languages?  Which languages will grow and which will shrink.  Chinese, English, French and Spanish all seem to be in the running as major tongues, with Arabic a dark horse contender.
 

Offline vk6zgo

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It is also why the best thing we could do is to get the rest of the world to give up on their native languages and make English a universal language.   The trend of the last few decades to teach students in the USA a foreign language has been a huge mistake, a waste of money really.   Instead we should have been raising a armies of English teachers to send around the world.

Hmm, it has its merits, but the thing is we tried this when there was a British empire that spanned the globe and still those pesky foreigners still insisted on sticking with their own languages. The French, Dutch and Germans tried it too before us and also failed. Remember too that before we could get started on the rest of the world, that we'd have the massive uphill task first of teaching you Americans to speak English too.

Having studied a couple of languages other than American I find a lot of merit in learning other languages.  It aids in understanding of how American English came into being and also provides insight into some different world views.  Those world views are only a bit different for European languages, but get much larger for others. 

But I do agree it would be useful if everyone spoke a common language.  And for all of Cerebus comment (which I am sure is somewhat tongue in cheek) if all spoke as close to a common language as Americans and British do it would serve the usefulness criteria.  Even if a speaker of one of the extreme American dialects and one of the extreme British dialects found it totally impossible to communicate.  People on this forum do pretty well and come from all parts of the former British empire.

They would probably get an Australian to translate!

My brother used to relate incidents from when he was in the Occupation Forces in Japan in the late 1940s, where some Brits & Americans couldn't understand each other & called upon him to translate.
Even funnier, some Americans couldn't understand each other, & he needed to do the same thing for them.

Of course, that was many years ago, & differences in dialects have been very much reduced since then.

My Bro had a gift for languages, & taught himself Spanish, initially so he could understand Spanish speakers on Shortwave radio.

It came in handy when he worked at ATN7 in the early days.
The German makers of some important equipment reshuffled their stock to deliver on time, so the gear turned up with Spanish labelling & manuals!
 

Offline vk6zgo

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English is the current defacto lingua Franca and is horrible from a language student's point of view, too irregular, weird spelling and pronunciation (even in Noah Webster's bastardized form).
There are 3 reasons why English is so widespread today. 1) The British Empire spread it around the world. 2) The dominance of the USA drives it forward.  3) Its a flexible language that is happy to absorb from others. Point 3 makes it messy, but it also means it avoids being exclusionary. Some European languages have tried to exclude pollution by foreign languages, and its making them fossilize and lose relevance. People are generally accepting of English.

All true - almost, I'll come to that in a moment - but if you were making a logical choice for a new lingua Franca it wouldn't be English. As to the point about English "absorbing" from other languages, I can tell you (sitting here in pyjamas on the veranda of a bungalow*) that we don't "absorb", we don't even borrow, we wholesale steal.

*I'm not really doing that, in March, amid a public lockdown, and it is obviously an illustrative literary device to introduce some English words that were stolen from the Indian subcontinent (Urdu, Hindi (borrowed from Portuguese) and Hindi respectively).

Interestingly, in Oz, where the default house is a single storey one, the word "bungalow" doesn't normally immediately bring such dwellings to mind.
It suggests, instead, a somewhat tumble-down place, along the lines of a "beach shack!
 

Offline Cerebus

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Interestingly, in Oz, where the default house is a single storey one, the word "bungalow" doesn't normally immediately bring such dwellings to mind.
It suggests, instead, a somewhat tumble-down place, along the lines of a "beach shack!

Truth be told, I think British ones tend towards that nature from the examples that I've seen. A lot were thrown up comparatively quickly as desperately needed post-WWII housing and time has not been kind to them. Not all of them, I have seen some respectable examples.
Anybody got a syringe I can use to squeeze the magic smoke back into this?
 

Offline vk6zgo

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Interestingly, in Oz, where the default house is a single storey one, the word "bungalow" doesn't normally immediately bring such dwellings to mind.
It suggests, instead, a somewhat tumble-down place, along the lines of a "beach shack!

Truth be told, I think British ones tend towards that nature from the examples that I've seen. A lot were thrown up comparatively quickly as desperately needed post-WWII housing and time has not been kind to them. Not all of them, I have seen some respectable examples.

Some of the multi-storey houses, & blocks of flats in your country were also already looking pretty dire, back in the 1970s---for the latter, even 1960s builds.
I hate to think what 50 years has done to them!
 

Offline GlennSprigg

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Offline TheHolyHorse

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Am I really the only who, really wouldn't want english websites translated? I hate it when I open a program or website and it's not english, it's disgusting.
 

Offline SiliconWizard

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Am I really the only who, really wouldn't want english websites translated? I hate it when I open a program or website and it's not english, it's disgusting.

Uh. Do you find any other language disgusting (  :-// ), or do you just find the translations themselves usually so poor that they are disgusting?
 

Offline Gromitt

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Am I really the only who, really wouldn't want english websites translated? I hate it when I open a program or website and it's not english, it's disgusting.

Yes you are. Websites should be on the local language. It would be VERY boring if everything was in english.
 

Online tooki

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"Africa" and the huge number of African languages is why Caterpillar (of yellow earth diggers and big trucks fame) developed "Caterpillar English", a simple, restricted vocabulary version of English that could be used for documentation where the local language represented too small a chunk of the market to make it economic to make local translations. They worked on the premise that the penetration of English was sufficient that a simplified version was likely to be acceptable where a translation wasn't feasible. (Often Africans that don't share a common tongue speak a 'pigeon' variety of English to each other even though no native English speakers are involved. Substitute 'Pigeon French' for some parts of Africa.)
Safety-critical industries like aviation have long had special simplified language requirements, using restricted (and curated) vocabularies, simplified grammar, etc.

Is Caterpillar’s simplified standard English, or is it actually a pidgin?


"Africa" and the huge number of African languages is why Caterpillar (of yellow earth diggers and big trucks fame) developed "Caterpillar English", a simple, restricted vocabulary version of English that could be used for documentation where the local language represented too small a chunk of the market to make it economic to make local translations. They worked on the premise that the penetration of English was sufficient that a simplified version was likely to be acceptable where a translation wasn't feasible. (Often Africans that don't share a common tongue speak a 'pigeon' variety of English to each other even though no native English speakers are involved. Substitute 'Pigeon French' for some parts of Africa.)
Indeed. I recently stumbled on a BBC website and thought it was a joke - it's all the current BBC news in Pidgin English. It's fucking hilarious, surely some dude translating the regular BBC news into some 419 scammers lingo as a laugh.

But it's actually real and funded by BBC licence payers - check out https://www.bbc.com/pidgin  :scared:
That’s amazing.


I had a look and I found it surprisingly readable. I say that because whenever I've encountered transcribed pidgin English before (it's really just a spoken language) I've found it really difficult, at times impossible, to translate back into full blown English. As an English speaker I've found pidgin more 'foreign' than I find French and German. I had a African friend at university try and teach me the basics and it just would not stick, I got nowhere with it.
It’s the linguistic “uncanny valley”: it’s too close to your native language for it to “register” as separate, so it keeps trying to get parsed as standard English even though it’s not.



Disclaimer for the following comments: I’m not Swiss, but an American living in Switzerland, who studied linguistics, native English speaker who grew up trilingual ultimately, whose mother is a language teacher, and who worked for years as a technical writer and translator. So please no dismissive comments about how I have no right to an opinion as a non-native speaker.

It is also why the best thing we could do is to get the rest of the world to give up on their native languages and make English a universal language.   The trend of the last few decades to teach students in the USA a foreign language has been a huge mistake, a waste of money really.   Instead we should have been raising a armies of English teachers to send around the world.

Hmm, it has its merits, but the thing is we tried this when there was a British empire that spanned the globe and still those pesky foreigners still insisted on sticking with their own languages. The French, Dutch and Germans tried it too before us and also failed. Remember too that before we could get started on the rest of the world, that we'd have the massive uphill task first of teaching you Americans to speak English too.
I reeeeeaaaallllllly hope you’re being sarcastic there, because linguistically speaking, British claims of Americans not speaking English are complete and utter nonsense, both from a modern linguistic perspective and a historical perspective. (British English diverged from our common ancestral English more than American English has. And nearly every characteristic of American English that the British love to criticize is, in fact, found in various dialects of British, Scottish, and Irish English.)


Having studied a couple of languages other than American I find a lot of merit in learning other languages.  It aids in understanding of how American English came into being and also provides insight into some different world views.  Those world views are only a bit different for European languages, but get much larger for others. 
”American” isn’t a language. I think you’re thinking of “English”, particularly, the dialect known as “American English”. ;)

But I do agree it would be useful if everyone spoke a common language.  And for all of Cerebus comment (which I am sure is somewhat tongue in cheek) if all spoke as close to a common language as Americans and British do it would serve the usefulness criteria.  Even if a speaker of one of the extreme American dialects and one of the extreme British dialects found it totally impossible to communicate.  People on this forum do pretty well and come from all parts of the former British empire.
Indeed, the high degree of mutual intelligibility is what proves that American English and British English (as well as Australian, Canadian, etc.) are indeed dialects of the same language, and not distinct languages.


There are 3 reasons why English is so widespread today. 1) The British Empire spread it around the world. 2) The dominance of the USA drives it forward.  3) Its a flexible language that is happy to absorb from others. Point 3 makes it messy, but it also means it avoids being exclusionary. Some European languages have tried to exclude pollution by foreign languages, and its making them fossilize and lose relevance. People are generally accepting of English.
Point three is actually nothing but urban legend. English is perfectly happy to borrow from other languages, but so is every other language. The fact that some countries have felt the need to enact laws to stop linguistic borrowing is proof that the languages themselves (and their speakers) are just as happy to borrow. (Such laws are political and cultural instruments, not linguistic ones as such.) Throughout history, whatever language happens to be dominant in a given domain tends to become a donor to other languages. So when Ancient Greece was the powerhouse, Greek words spread. When French was the world language, French words got borrowed a lot (especially in international politics and law). When Germany was the epicenter of development in psychology and mathematics, languages around the world borrowed German words in those fields. Right now, especially in computing and tech, the US was the leader in those fields, and coined the terms, so they’ve spread into other languages.

And in the future, when some seminal development happens somewhere else, that place’s language will mint the world’s language of that field. 

What’s made English spelling messy is that a) unlike most major world languages, English has both its “native” Germanic vocabulary and its Norman French vocabulary, which came with their own spelling traditions, and more importantly b) like many languages, English has had numerous pronunciation shifts, but due to the lack of a centralized language authority, has never gone and updated the spelling of a word. So in English, the spelling of a given word reflects how the word would have been spoken at the time when it was first written down. And then depending on how long ago a word was coined, it has gone through more or fewer pronunciation shifts. (Ultimately, this means English has something like 7 or 8 major “sets” of spelling systems. It’s not random, as people often claim.)

Many other languages have an official language authority that decides and then makes official, binding decrees about how the language shall be used. (It gets extra fun when multiple countries use the same language and then fight over authority, like Portuguese, whose last major language reform adopted tons of Brazilian spellings, much to the consternation of speakers of European Portuguese!) English, in contrast, has two major, but completely unofficial, arbiters: Oxford and Webster’s. (Of those, Oxford is, by far, the more important of the two, and to the likely surprise of many a Brit, it does not take a strong dislike to American English. IMHO, Oxford’s linguists of English are actually very, very fair and take a nuanced, objective approach to English, not the nationalistic, hysterical positions taken by laymen.)


They would probably get an Australian to translate!

My brother used to relate incidents from when he was in the Occupation Forces in Japan in the late 1940s, where some Brits & Americans couldn't understand each other & called upon him to translate.
Even funnier, some Americans couldn't understand each other, & he needed to do the same thing for them.
Cute story, but almost certainly untrue. What’s much more likely is that they didn’t understand each other in terms of the content, not the language, and just needed someone to explain something a different way.


Of course, that was many years ago, & differences in dialects have been very much reduced since then.
Interestingly, this belief is very widespread, but actually completely untrue. It is often claimed that mass media (whose production has been focused in a few places, historically) and travel would lead to a leveling of English dialects, but linguists who have studied this have found that in fact, the polar opposite is happening: the dialects are getting stronger.

It’s long been known in linguistics that socioeconomic identity plays a part in the expression of dialect usage, and so the working theory is that the frequent exposure to the prominent dialects in the media (e.g. New York and Los Angeles dialects) actually causes people who don’t identify with the “prestige” culture to use their regionalisms more. There was a famous (well, in linguistics) study about the local dialect on the island of Martha’s Vineyard. Researchers looked at what percentage of residents used the island dialect vs the mainstream (mainland) dialect. When plotted by age, at age 18 there’s a big jump in island dialect. Why? Because the kids who didn’t identify with the island culturally left the island as soon as they could, when they turned 18! So the people who remained on the island were those who have a stronger island identity, and thus use the dialect.


What I feel (but haven’t looked into in any way) is that the Internet has led to a bit more exchange of vocabulary in English. But only choice of words, not pronunciation or grammar.
 

Offline Cerebus

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Well you took your time to turn up, I was expecting you days, perhaps weeks ago.

Is Caterpillar’s simplified standard English, or is it actually a pidgin?

Simplified English.



It is also why the best thing we could do is to get the rest of the world to give up on their native languages and make English a universal language.   The trend of the last few decades to teach students in the USA a foreign language has been a huge mistake, a waste of money really.   Instead we should have been raising a armies of English teachers to send around the world.

Hmm, it has its merits, but the thing is we tried this when there was a British empire that spanned the globe and still those pesky foreigners still insisted on sticking with their own languages. The French, Dutch and Germans tried it too before us and also failed. Remember too that before we could get started on the rest of the world, that we'd have the massive uphill task first of teaching you Americans to speak English too.
I reeeeeaaaallllllly hope you’re being sarcastic there, because linguistically speaking, British claims of Americans not speaking English are complete and utter nonsense, both from a modern linguistic perspective and a historical perspective. (British English diverged from our common ancestral English more than American English has. And nearly every characteristic of American English that the British love to criticize is, in fact, found in various dialects of British, Scottish, and Irish English.)

Well, what do you think? Look at what I'm commenting on.


As to the rest, well. Poor old Tooki gets his knickers in a twist every time this comes up. But he is a linguist, well that's what he calls it. Of course most of us when we hear 'linguist'  think "somebody who studies languages" which seems reasonable. Until you get into things like this whole pronunciation shifts and so on. Then you realise that what's meant is theoretical linguist because that's all they have, a theory. Play me a sound recording of someone speaking Chaucerian English or Elizabethan English and you might have some actual evidence. But it's all based on written works from a time where two equally well educated men couldn't agree on the same spelling of the same word.

Oh look, I can see steam coming out of his ears! I am, of course, ragging you, but there is some merit in pointing out that this is not hard, objective, science but very much a 'soft science' (or 'zaft science' and they would say in the Black Country dialect) and the evidential basis is not one that would make the average empirical scientist particularly happy - I think a hard scientist would be talking "hypothesis" not "fact". Just to take a single instance, where is the cut-off between a dialect and a different language? Is this well defined, or is it a matter of opinion? If the former it's a science, if the latter then best probably move the linguistics school offices over to the faculty of social science. (I'm ragging him again aren't I? Sorry, it's the absence of sociologists to bait - there are some things I really miss about being at university.)

My only genuine grievance in all this is exemplified by the following:

(British English diverged from our common ancestral English more than American English has. And nearly every characteristic of American English that the British love to criticize is, in fact, found in various dialects of British, Scottish, and Irish English.)

Only an American would qualify British English to describe the English spoken in modern Britain. (Yes, I realise that I've picked on the one place where the qualification is justified for clarity, but it's a convenient place to hang my argument.) He wouldn't qualify any language other than English in that way but leave the variant unqualified (e.g. Use "French" for the variant spoken in Algeria and "Frankish French" for the version spoken in France). Even though they hate to admit it, most Americans take a proprietorial attitude to the English language that, if any one has the right to take, it is the English themselves. This is exemplified by language choices in American written software where "English" (meaning the North American version) and "British English" are offered as choices. That is what gets us British riled and thus deriding 'merkin English in retaliation. I am English, and as such claim the same right as the Irish and Welsh are granted, to call my own language after the name of my people.

To bring this full circle, the only thing that really genuinely annoys me, as opposed to merely irking me, is the sheer arrogance of a certain type of Norteamericano towards languages other than their own Inglés norteamericano exemplified by the original message that sparked the whole sub-thread off.

Oh, and for the record, no normal person in England, Scotland, Ireland or Wales calls a kitchen tap a "faucet", curtains "drapes", the boot of a car "the trunk", nor says "gotten". Yes, much of American English does seem to be much closer to Elizabethan era English than modern English. That doesn't lend it any more or less authenticity.
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Offline HobGoblyn

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I made the effort to learn a bit of Danish before I went for a 5 day holiday to Copenhagen a few years ago.

Was a complete waste of time, even if I tried to speak to people in Danish, they replied in English  (must have looked like a tourist)

I sympathise with the OP, but a good proportion of things I buy, don't seem to translate into English properly either.
 

Offline Cerebus

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I made the effort to learn a bit of Danish before I went for a 5 day holiday to Copenhagen a few years ago.

Was a complete waste of time, even if I tried to speak to people in Danish, they replied in English  (must have looked like a tourist)

I can sympathise with that. Did the same thing for my first ever (business) trip to the Netherlands, had the same response. To be fair to the Dutch a non-native speaker is obvious from a 100 miles off and I have literally never met a native Dutch speaker who didn't also speak good English.

Had, and still have, the opposite experience in Germany, there folks are quite happy to let you have a go and will put up with your terrible German even though many people could switch to English from the get-go. I get into trouble there as I learned what little German I do know in Germany from native German speakers so my accent is 100 times better than my comprehension, vocabulary or ability to string together much more than stock phrases. People hear me and think I can actually speak German properly, launch into a "mile a minute" explanation of, say, directions and get an "Entschuldigung! Ich bin ein Ausländer. Noch einmal, bitte langsam." (Sorry! I'm a foreigner. Once again please, slowly) in response - at least I sound properly polite and that seems to go a long way in Germany.
Anybody got a syringe I can use to squeeze the magic smoke back into this?
 

Online coppice

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I can sympathise with that. Did the same thing for my first ever (business) trip to the Netherlands, had the same response. To be fair to the Dutch a non-native speaker is obvious from a 100 miles off and I have literally never met a native Dutch speaker who didn't also speak good English.

Had, and still have, the opposite experience in Germany, there folks are quite happy to let you have a go and will put up with your terrible German even though many people could switch to English from the get-go. I get into trouble there as I learned what little German I do know in Germany from native German speakers so my accent is 100 times better than my comprehension, vocabulary or ability to string together much more than stock phrases. People hear me and think I can actually speak German properly, launch into a "mile a minute" explanation of, say, directions and get an "Entschuldigung! Ich bin ein Ausländer. Noch einmal, bitte langsam." (Sorry! I'm a foreigner. Once again please, slowly) in response - at least I sound properly polite and that seems to go a long way in Germany.

Same story for me. When I visited Japan numerous times before, I always start with talking to people in Japanese, gave up, and resort to English. I can comprehend what they said, but I can't organize my words as fast.

And no, contrary to popular belief, English skill of Japanese is not all that bad. They have bad accent, they may have problems speaking English, but most of the young ones understand English perfectly fine.

Can't say the same for the Koreans. When I visited Seoul, I found most people couldn't understand my English. Some of them include white collar office workers, school kids (middle to high school), and partying college students. I found more people understanding Chinese and Japanese there than English, especially on business streets and in shopping malls where you'd expect tourists.
These days you can get by fairly well in Japan using Mandarin. The last time I went to Japan my family used Mandarin in a few places, and English in others.
 

Offline GlennSprigg

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I made the effort to learn a bit of Danish before I went for a 5 day holiday to Copenhagen a few years ago.

Was a complete waste of time, even if I tried to speak to people in Danish, they replied in English  (must have looked like a tourist)

I sympathise with the OP, but a good proportion of things I buy, don't seem to translate into English properly either.

I too have always tried to at least learn the 'basics' of other languages when speaking to 'foreigners'. However, as you indicate, due to inflection, pronunciation and localized idiosyncrasies, it generally comes off poorly! and one stands out as an outsider!  Then again, I've generally found that a LOT of them actually appreciate you TRYING!, even if stirring you in a totally friendly way.

I had quite a few 'interesting' debates with 'tooki' in the past too, as per others observations about his 'correctness'  (In fun!  :D)
To me, the biggest problem in hearing/speaking in other languages, including others speaking 'English', is the EMPHASIS on Syllables!!  Some don't really matter... like  'ALtimeter' or 'alTIMeter, but others do!  If someone speaking English said... 'capaCITor' instead of 'capACItor' it would not make sense to us.

Talking SPEED is also an obvious problem. (Of course you get more used to it!). If an Aussie quickly said to you, (phonetically)... "whatchadointomora", it is not obvious to a foreigner as slowly meaning... "what-are-you-doing-tomorrow"   8)

All that aside though, that doesn't explain how a lot of Americans pronounce/use many words! The worst being, in the elect field, being 'SODDer' as opposed to 'SOLder'?  (Holder, colder, folder, bolder etc etc).  Who in their past decided that there is a silent 'L' there???? This is an English word. Not their own!  ;D   'Hood'/'Trunk' instead of 'Bonnet/Boot' is ok, but not many others.  Someone there also decided once that the car is called a 'NEEsaan', instead of a 'NISSan', even when the Japanese inventors call it by the correct name.  ::)
I always JOKE! about the first hillbilly seeing the sign... "Yosemite", who tried to pronounce it as 'Yo-SEM-i-tee' instead of 'YOsemite' like 'VEGemite' or 'DYNamite' (Only stirring there.... that's YOUR word!  :-+)
« Last Edit: March 29, 2020, 02:22:46 pm by GlennSprigg »
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Offline Cerebus

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If someone speaking English said... 'capaCITor' instead of 'capACItor' it would not make sense to us.

The problem can often be that people are working from written English and, just looking at the word, can't see the syllable boundaries, just as in your example. I was trying to read and decipher one of those giant German compound words recently. I just couldn't get it because my (English) eye was trying to put the word boundaries in the wrong places and coming up with a different string of actual German words - had to find a real German to get to the bottom of it.

I always JOKE! about the first hillbilly seeing the sign... "Yosemite", who tried to pronounce it as 'Yo-SEM-i-tee' instead of 'YOsemite' like 'VEGemite' or 'DYNamite' (Only stirring there.... that's YOUR word!  :-+)

Except it isn't. Yosemite is the Miwok people's word for "killer", the name of the tribe who lived there before the colonists kicked them out. What's the betting that we're still actually pronouncing is it wrong? (General rule for US place names: if it isn't the name of a town in the colonist's home country (London, Birmingham, Amsterdam), or a simple description in the colonist's language (Baton Rouge, Springfield) then it's probably from an indigenous language.)
Anybody got a syringe I can use to squeeze the magic smoke back into this?
 
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Offline GlennSprigg

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If someone speaking English said... 'capaCITor' instead of 'capACItor' it would not make sense to us.

The problem can often be that people are working from written English and, just looking at the word, can't see the syllable boundaries, just as in your example. I was trying to read and decipher one of those giant German compound words recently. I just couldn't get it because my (English) eye was trying to put the word boundaries in the wrong places and coming up with a different string of actual German words - had to find a real German to get to the bottom of it.

I always JOKE! about the first hillbilly seeing the sign... "Yosemite", who tried to pronounce it as 'Yo-SEM-i-tee' instead of 'YOsemite' like 'VEGemite' or 'DYNamite' (Only stirring there.... that's YOUR word!  :-+)

Except it isn't. Yosemite is the Miwok people's word for "killer", the name of the tribe who lived there before the colonists kicked them out. What's the betting that we're still actually pronouncing is it wrong? (General rule for US place names: if it isn't the name of a town in the colonist's home country (London, Birmingham, Amsterdam), or a simple description in the colonist's language (Baton Rouge, Springfield) then it's probably from an indigenous language.)

Thank you for your reply 'Cerebus'. Yes you are right!  German is my '2nd' language, and I still struggle with it!  As you said, they have 'words/phrases' that are joined together, and is often hard to find the 'boundaries' within. This seems to happen as their 'old' German is very 'descriptive', in place of a specialized 'word.  For example... a "quecksilberschalter" is put together from 'quecksilber' translated from "Quick Silver", (rapid movement on a table top!!), and 'shalter' meaning switch. In other words, a Mercury Tilt Switch!. Or 'Überstromrelais' meaning "Over Current Relay". Their descriptive terms get joined together to make a 'single' word.

And yes, (I was joking about the 'yosemite' thing). Here in Australia, a hell of a lot of our 'words' have indigenous origins too!!
Diagonal of 1x1 square = Root-2. Ok.
Diagonal of 1x1x1 cube = Root-3 !!!  Beautiful !!
 

Offline GlennSprigg

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Just for fun, Cerebus, the longest current 'word' in German is...
"Donaudampfschifffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft", meaning...
"Association for Subordinate Officials of the Head Office Management of the Danube Steamboat Electrical Services"
Clear as mud!!   :-+
Diagonal of 1x1 square = Root-2. Ok.
Diagonal of 1x1x1 cube = Root-3 !!!  Beautiful !!
 

Offline Tepe

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Just for fun, Cerebus, the longest current 'word' in German is...
"Donaudampfschifffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft", meaning...
"Association for Subordinate Officials of the Head Office Management of the Danube Steamboat Electrical Services"
Clear as mud!!   :-+

German does not stand alone:

"speciallægepraksisplanlægningsstabiliseringsperiode"


Og Skorsteensfeiren talte fornuftig for hende, talte om gamle Chineser og om Gjedebukkebeens-Overogundergeneralkrigscommandeersergeanten, men hun hulkede saa gruelig, og kyssede sin lille Skorsteensfeier, saa han kunde ikke andet end føie hende, skjøndt det var galt.
    -- Hans Christian Andersen, 1845
« Last Edit: March 29, 2020, 09:20:14 pm by Tepe »
 

Online tooki

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Well you took your time to turn up, I was expecting you days, perhaps weeks ago.
But honey child, I did show up long ago! My first reply in this thread was from 2016!  ;D

I reeeeeaaaallllllly hope you’re being sarcastic there, because linguistically speaking, British claims of Americans not speaking English are complete and utter nonsense, both from a modern linguistic perspective and a historical perspective. (British English diverged from our common ancestral English more than American English has. And nearly every characteristic of American English that the British love to criticize is, in fact, found in various dialects of British, Scottish, and Irish English.)

Well, what do you think? Look at what I'm commenting on.
But I have an only minimally functional sarcasm detector. Hence the disclaimer!

As to the rest, well. Poor old Tooki gets his knickers in a twist every time this comes up.
And with good reason, since some snooty Brits just can't let it go.


But he is a linguist, well that's what he calls it.
Of course that's what I call it, because that's what it's called!


Of course most of us when we hear 'linguist'  think "somebody who studies languages" which seems reasonable.
Most people, frankly, have ZERO clue what linguists do. They mostly think it means "learning a language", which is absolutely incorrect.


Until you get into things like this whole pronunciation shifts and so on. Then you realise that what's meant is theoretical linguist because that's all they have, a theory.
Theoretical linguistics is actually a distinct subfield having nothing to do with what you are talking about.

Like any reconstructive science, historical linguistics has to propose hypotheses and theories.(Remember, in the sciences, a "theory" does NOT mean what "theory" means in everyday usage.) But like any real science, it's not pulled out of thin air. There are rigorous methods used to attempt to reverse-engineer older versions of a language. And of course, the farther back you go, the larger the margin of error becomes. No controversy there.

Play me a sound recording of someone speaking Chaucerian English or Elizabethan English and you might have some actual evidence.

But it's all based on written works from a time where two equally well educated men couldn't agree on the same spelling of the same word.
Yep, which is why it's no easy task.

I didn't get a chance to delve into historical linguistics as much as I'd have liked, so to be honest, I don't actually know how they do it exactly.


Oh look, I can see steam coming out of his ears!
It's not steam, and those aren't my ears! :P


I am, of course, ragging you, but there is some merit in pointing out that this is not hard, objective, science
Nobody ever said it was. My point wasn't a claim of absolutism in linguistics, but rather that the common British arrogance about English, is absolutist, while being based on nothing but national pride and disdain for the US, not evidence.


but very much a 'soft science' (or 'zaft science' and they would say in the Black Country dialect) and the evidential basis is not one that would make the average empirical scientist particularly happy - I think a hard scientist would be talking "hypothesis" not "fact". Just to take a single instance, where is the cut-off between a dialect and a different language?
"A language is a dialect with an army and navy.;D

Is this well defined, or is it a matter of opinion?
Yes. ;)

Actually, it's a matter up to significant debate, because it's so sociopolitical, too. (For example, how Serbo-Croatian was split into Serbian and Croatian following the Balkan conflict.)

But it's also something where it's categorically impossible to create a single definition. One of the most common criteria is mutual intelligibility: if fluent speakers of one dialect are able to readily communicate with fluent speakers of another, then they're likely just dialects of the same language. If they can't (even just being able to communicate, but with difficulty), then they're likely to be considered distinct languages. But it gets muddied by dialects of different languages which, in turn, are similar to each other. (For example, while standard German and Swiss German are only mutually intelligible with difficulty if one has no exposure to the other — it typically takes a German immigrant about 3 months to become proficient at just understanding Swiss German — the dialect of (standard) German spoken in Baden-Württemberg is much, much closer to Swiss German, such that they have a much higher degree of intelligibility.) This is why linguists also group languages and dialects into families.

Nonetheless, there are various criteria used in linguistics to try and answer this question. The aforementioned mutual intelligibility is probably the biggest one. But this is something where the line is broad and very blurry.

(As an interesting side note, referring back to a very old reply of yours in this thread where you mention Indian English, IMHO, Indian English is almost straddling the line at times, insofar as it is sometimes no longer readily mutually intelligible by native speakers of other dialects of English, especially when spoken. Then again, I suppose one could make the same argument about the most extreme dialects in the UK and US!!!)


If the former it's a science, if the latter then best probably move the linguistics school offices over to the faculty of social science.
Hah, linguistics is usually such an underfunded, misunderstood discipline that it's often a miracle they have offices at all! Usually they're housed within the language department (as in, lumped together with language instruction). At my university, I think there were a grand total of a dozen linguistics majors, versus several dozen students per language of numerous languages.

(I actually only minored in linguistics, because though I had about 90% of the classes needed for the linguistics major, the remaining classes were offered so infrequently that taking them would have delayed my graduation by 1 year at minimum, possibly longer. So I settled for having it as a minor alongside my IT major.)


(I'm ragging him again aren't I? Sorry, it's the absence of sociologists to bait - there are some things I really miss about being at university.)
It's sorta somewhere in between. There are areas of linguistics that are much "softer" than others. Ultimately, since language intersects with all areas of the human experience, including the hardest of hard sciences and the softest of phoney-baloney soft "sciences", linguistics has areas covering everything.

I'll admit to the guilty pleasure of hating on social sciences. Like… I'm gay, but holy baloney, don't get me started on "queer studies" and its ilk. Those departments should just be honest and rename themselves "colleges of professional victimhood". :::ducks:::


My only genuine grievance in all this is exemplified by the following:

(British English diverged from our common ancestral English more than American English has. And nearly every characteristic of American English that the British love to criticize is, in fact, found in various dialects of British, Scottish, and Irish English.)

Only an American would qualify British English to describe the English spoken in modern Britain. (Yes, I realise that I've picked on the one place where the qualification is justified for clarity, but it's a convenient place to hang my argument.)
Well, it really is in no way arrogant or uniquely American to refer to British English as British English when referring to a specific dialect to the exclusion of the others. That is how language teachers, scholars, etc. refer to the dialect of English spoken in Britain. (This is not controversial.) "English" refers to all dialects, and a demonym prefix specifies a specific dialect. So if you ask me "what language is spoken in England", the answer is simply "English". But if we need to distinguish it from, say, American English or Australian English, then we add the specifier.

What is arrogant is for Brits to insist that only their dialect may be called "English", and that all the others must be prefixed. The fact that we can understand each other with perfect clarity is proof that we speak (well, in this case, write) the same exact language.


(Food for thought: some people, both American and British, refer to American English as simply "American" (without the "English"). Now, factually this is wrong, since clearly it is a dialect of English, but whatever. The puzzle is this: some think it's arrogant for Americans to call their language "English". But at the same time, Americans also get ragged on — almost exclusively by people who are not from the Americas, both North and South (and Central) — for having the demonym "American", since Canadians, Mexicans, and South Americans are also from the Americas. So it's arrogant for Americans to not call their language "American", but also arrogant for them to call themselves "American". :P (Some languages refer to Americans by names that translate to "United Statesian", but this also collides with Mexico, which is officially the United Mexican States!) )


He wouldn't qualify any language other than English in that way but leave the variant unqualified (e.g. Use "French" for the variant spoken in Algeria and "Frankish French" for the version spoken in France).
Balderdash!

"French" is the name of the language spoken in all French-speaking countries. If I need to refer to one specifically, then I prefix it.

I speak Spanish, too. Specifically, I speak Latin American Spanish (Guatemalan, specifically). Linguists routinely refer to the kind spoken in Spain as Iberian Spanish or European Spanish, and "Spanish" unqualified to mean all dialects of it.


Even though they hate to admit it, most Americans take a proprietorial attitude to the English language that, if any one has the right to take, it is the English themselves.
Except you don't actually have the right to "take" it. English is the native language of hundreds of millions of people outside of England, far outnumbering you. There is absolutely no question that English originated in England, but since it is the native language of people outside, you can no longer claim it as exclusively yours, not even just the name — but nor does any other country!


This is exemplified by language choices in American written software where "English" (meaning the North American version) and "British English" are offered as choices. That is what gets us British riled and thus deriding 'merkin English in retaliation. I am English, and as such claim the same right as the Irish and Welsh are granted, to call my own language after the name of my people.
The prior reply notwithstanding, I agree with you for the most part. If a program's user interface offers both British and American dialects, then the American one should be "American English" and the British one "British English". (Or, as is most common these days in software, "English (US)" and "English (UK)".)

But that's mostly in the past now, as it's become more common to have hierarchies of languages, e.g. "English" as the overall language, and within it, the various dialects. (For example, in Apple and Microsoft products, "English" is the main language, and all the dialects exist, too. Moreover, the software understands the relationship, so if you set "English (US)" as your preferred language, it will use that if available, but will use a generic "English" if not.)

What I would not agree is that if a program is written in (American) English, and offers only one dialect of English, that it must be called "American English". If only one dialect of English user interface is provided, then calling it "English" is absolutely fine, regardless of which dialect it uses.

On the other hand, when it comes to the names of spell check dictionaries, I'm entirely in favor of being explicit about which dialect is intended, since this is the largest area of difference between the dialects, and one where it is typically mandatory to use one or the other consistently.



To bring this full circle, the only thing that really genuinely annoys me, as opposed to merely irking me, is the sheer arrogance of a certain type of Norteamericano towards languages other than their own Inglés norteamericano exemplified by the original message that sparked the whole sub-thread off.
I'm not even sure which message that is at this point! :P

Oh, and for the record, no normal person in England, Scotland, Ireland or Wales calls a kitchen tap a "faucet", curtains "drapes", the boot of a car "the trunk", nor says "gotten".
That's OK, nobody's perfect! :P

Actually, what's weird to me is that the British think we don't use words that we do, in fact, use. Some are true (like the boot of a car), but sooooo many of the words the British believe Americans don't use, we actually do use as well! Tap vs. faucet vs. spigot is a largely regional thing in USA, but anyone will understand both. (And we universally say "tap water" — the terms "faucet water" and "spigot water" don't exist). We mostly call curtains curtains, and we are happy to refer to the season following summer as either "fall" or "autumn" interchangeably. In other words, just because the UK uses only one word for something doesn't necessarily mean that the US only uses the other word.

Faucet vs. tap reminds me of a contrived tale I tell to illustrate the hardcore Baltimore accent: Suppose you were in an accident. The ambalanz picked you up and took you to the hospital. So she goes to the florist and picks up a bowkay of flahers with money she took out of her pockeybook. When she gets to your room, she takes the flahers and puts them in a vase, then goes to the zink and fills it up with wooder. While visiting, you agree that once you're well again, you'll pack up the car and drive downy ayshin to enjoy the beach.

(Translation: Suppose you were in an accident. The ambulance picked you up and took you to the hospital. So she goes to the florist and picks up a bouquet of flowers with money she took out of her purse. When she gets to your room, she takes the flowers and puts them in a vase, then goes to the sink and fills it up with water. While visiting, you agree that once you're well again, you'll pack up the car and drive [down] to [the] ocean to enjoy the beach.)

Also:   :-DD

Yes, much of American English does seem to be much closer to Elizabethan era English than modern English. That doesn't lend it any more or less authenticity.
Of course. It's just a very real response to the common, but totally incorrect, belief that contemporary British English is somehow more authentic to the "original" English and that American English is a corruption of (modern) British English. American English is, frankly, a very obvious mix of all the different Englishes that it evolved from, with the later arrival of Irish English having a significant influence on modern pronunciation, but with Scottish and Welsh English also coming into play in addition to old British English. Meanwhile, British English actually evolved away from the common ancestor English more than American English did. So none of them are "authentic", since they all evolved since the point of separation.
 

Online tooki

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Just for fun, Cerebus, the longest current 'word' in German is...
"Donaudampfschifffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft", meaning...
"Association for Subordinate Officials of the Head Office Management of the Danube Steamboat Electrical Services"
Clear as mud!!   :-+
Well, that's one of many contrived fake long German words. ;)

The current longest word in actual use is Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften, meaning "prepaid legal insurance companies", and the longest dictionary entry is the somewhat shorter Kraftfahrzeug-Haftpflichtversicherung (motor vehicle liability insurance).

One former longest real word was part of the name of a since-rescinded law, the Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz, meaning the "beef labeling supervision duties delegation law", itself merely a single word of the short form (!) title, the Rinderkennzeichnungs- und Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz, meaning "cattle marking and beef labeling supervision duties delegation law". The long-form title was Gesetz zur Übertragung der Aufgaben für die Überwachung der Rinderkennzeichnung und Rindfleischetikettierung ("law on delegation of duties for supervision of cattle marking and beef labeling"). It is not lost on me that the "short" form is only about 10% shorter than the long form! But the initialism just rolls off the tongue: RkReÜAÜG

And people say the Germans don't have a way with words! :P
« Last Edit: March 29, 2020, 10:33:01 pm by tooki »
 

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Also:


 ;D
 

Offline Cerebus

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I'm not even sure which message that is at this point! :P

The fellow who thought the whole world ought to be made to speak English for the benefit of lazy Americans.

So she goes to the florist and picks up a bowkay of flahers with money she took out of her pockeybook.

So wot's wrong wiv dat? Dat's aah ya say 'bowkay' and 'flahers', only aah reckon ere's anuver aay in flaahrs. I fort you was a Linguist, but it saands like ya ain't got a clue wot proper English saands like, and by 'at nacherly aah means Lunun English a caus. Aah naa 'at ere's em oo'll claim that air's uvver sorts ov English, but they ayn't propa if ya gets me drift. U av naa idea ow 'ard it is to write like wot aah talks like.

Bloody 'ell, I'm naa officially exausted! Sod is fa a game ov soljers.

Or "Sod this for a game of soldiers". It's struck me more than once that if you could pull just the layer of generic American accent off the top of a Baltimore accent you'd get something very like the London accent. A lot of the words whose pronunciation appears to seem atypical to an American would seem normal to a gor-blimey Londoner like me, like flaahrs, pretty flaahrs.
Anybody got a syringe I can use to squeeze the magic smoke back into this?
 


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