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They for real does cair!!!
Just pleese puttings the happy screws in the exciting panel,
and you will be very soon jumpings to the happy tunes!!!
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The problem here Glenn is that with your , erm, idiosyncratic approach to English we can't tell whether this is a parody or you're just having a bad day.
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The problem here Glenn is that with your , erm, idiosyncratic approach to English we can't tell whether this is a parody or you're just having a bad day.
And THAT's why I will continue to tell people about the Demi-Gods here who like to judge people from their Ivory Towers!! And you are just a typical BULLY who obviously gets off on putting people down. I'm sure you have an Orgasm at night in bed, dreaming about your self appointed 'wonderfulness'... Too many 'callouses' on your hand mate, for me to give a fuck about!!!
I doubt there is another member here who didn't see/understand what I was saying.
In obvious JEST about fabrication instructions etc. Do you think I'm against Chinese people? (Nope... in my family).
OH!!! I get it!!! You don't like my CARRIAGE RETURNS when I type.... Well the World is really over!!!!!!!
Here's a HINT... Don't READ my posts!!!!!! you arrogant Bozo
People that KNOW me, know I don't have long for this world. In the mean time, with what I have left, I interact
with kind people, and it gives me a little bit of pleasure. I guess I need to find out how to BLOCK you, and 5 other
people like you, so that I can finish my time in peace. I was having a 'moderate' day today. But YOU ruined it... -
The problem here Glenn is that with your , erm, idiosyncratic approach to English we can't tell whether this is a parody or you're just having a bad day.
And THAT's why I will continue to tell people about the Demi-Gods here who like to judge people from their Ivory Towers!! And you are just a typical BULLY who obviously gets off on putting people down. I'm sure you have an Orgasm at night in bed, dreaming about your self appointed 'wonderfulness'... Too many 'callouses' on your hand mate, for me to give a fuck about!!!
I doubt there is another member here who didn't see/understand what I was saying.
In obvious JEST about fabrication instructions etc. Do you think I'm against Chinese people? (Nope... in my family).
OH!!! I get it!!! You don't like my CARRIAGE RETURNS when I type.... Well the World is really over!!!!!!!
Here's a HINT... Don't READ my posts!!!!!! you arrogant Bozo
People that KNOW me, know I don't have long for this world. In the mean time, with what I have left, I interact
with kind people, and it gives me a little bit of pleasure. I guess I need to find out how to BLOCK you, and 5 other
people like you, so that I can finish my time in peace. I was having a 'moderate' day today. But YOU ruined it...
It was a joke Glenn, a joke. No insult was intended.
That's what we have the smileys for, to make it clear that it's a joke, not as random visual punctuation. Jezz, I've never, ever, encountered a Aussie who takes themself so seriously before. Given that "ripping the piss" is the Aussie national sport, how do you survive?
Oh, and given the spew of insults you've just thrown at me: Who's being anti-social here?
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Got to remember that for *many* of us in this forum, English is not our mother tongue.
Dealing with idioms or slang or playing around with the grammar......makes us scratch our head trying to determine the tone. Is the person joking, angry, or being sarcastic? -
Got to remember that for *many* of us in this forum, English is not our mother tongue.
Dealing with idioms or slang or playing around with the grammar......makes us scratch our head trying to determine the tone. Is the person joking, angry, or being sarcastic?
That's the reason we have "Is the person joking, angry 
, or being sarcastic?". Note, there's no standard emoji for sarcasm, that's probably because sarcasm is pretty innately obvious (if it isn't you're doing it wrong). Text emojis developed during the days of Usenet precisely to deal with the issue of non-native English speakers in what was essentially an English only environment, and also to compensate for the typically terrible language skills of the (typically) engineering types that used Usenet. They are a hint as to how the writer intended what they have written to be interpreted. That's why sprinkling smileys around as random punctuation is a bad idea, it gives people the impression that they are meaningless when they are not.
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South Africa has 11 but India has 22. So it must be even worse there.
But the bottom line is just that... the Bottom Line! Businesses cannot afford to cater to all the languages for a decent cost. And then someone has to ship manual in the correct language depending on where the buyer is. It will be a logistical nightmare! Having said that, I have seen small leaflets (say like 3-5 pages) accompanying simple devices printed in a few languages like English, German, French etc.
When it comes to technical stuff, it is a given that the users will need to have a working knowledge of English. -
"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.)
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Cerebus;
My post was actually directed to Glenn and his unintelligible post:
They for real does cair!!!
Just pleese puttings the happy screws in the exciting panel,
and you will be very soon jumpings to the happy tunes!!!
What is he saying?
On the other hand, his other post was extremely insulting to you. No doubt about it. -
Cerebus;
My post was actually directed to Glenn and his unintelligible post:
I don't think Cerebus were defending Glen. He just doesn't want to be the next target of Glen.
No, I got muddled and though that I was being gently chided about being careless with letting Glenn know I was joking, and thought that schmitt had mistaken Glenn for a non-native speaker. (<sarcasm on> Why that might be I have no idea. <sarcasm off>). So the mistake is all mine.
Next target? Seems I'm his current target. I've found Glenn to be wildly unpredictable. When he first showed up around here several people asked him, quite politely, to try and rein in his rather exuberant style in favour of comprehensibility. He didn't react well and went off, on several occasions at several people, on one of his nasty sociopathic little rants that we have an example of above. I had hoped that he'd calmed down and could be treated like a normal person and friendlily joshed with. Obviously not. If he's determined to be a volatile little man with a nasty little chip on his shoulder, so be it, no loss to me. -
Cerebus;
My post was actually directed to Glenn and his unintelligible post:
They for real does cair!!!
Just pleese puttings the happy screws in the exciting panel,
and you will be very soon jumpings to the happy tunes!!!
What is he saying?
On the other hand, his other post was extremely insulting to you. No doubt about it.
Dear schmitt trigger. I thought I had better respond to this lack of understanding.
That 'nonsensical' block of text I first wrote, was a light-hearted tongue-in-cheek reference to the sort of printed instructions to assemble things, that we often see in 'English', when a Chinese manufacturer etc has someone attempt a translation for us! And those instructions often end up with funny words and phrases like that. Most English, Australian & American/Canadian people would have experienced that, and I assume would understand what I wrote. It was not meant to confuse/upset anyone else, or simply anyone for that matter!
Regarding Cerebus, he has made (in my mind) certain derogatory remarks about me over the last couple of years, although not lately. I'm suffering from certain 'conditions' now, which leave me in not a good physical/emotional space/place. I know about, and use myself, things like 'smilies' to often indicate when/if I'm 'joking' etc., but sometimes even they can be interpreted as being smug at times, especially as such 'text' does not obviously include such 'inflection of tone'. Because of the past, I DID find his "...your , erm, idiosyncratic approach to English..." as a personal attack. And it struck a chord/(cord?)... So I bit back, as I'm not here to dwell on such things when I speak.
So to Cerebus, I'm sorry for my outburst. I just wish that some other people on this forum would stick to understanding, & replying if they wish to what ever comments people make or questions they pose, without comments that may offend or be misinterpreted.
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So to Cerebus, I'm sorry for my outburst. I just wish that some other people on this forum would stick to understanding, & replying if they wish to what ever comments people make or questions they pose, without comments that may offend or be misinterpreted.
Thank you. I try not to be gratuitously offensive but I'm also not going to walk on eggshells to satisfy people who are over-sensitive or just looking to take offence. I have never set out to attack you, you have chosen to take perfectly innocuous remarks or polite criticism as attacks (or are genuinely incapable of perceiving them properly) and have responded in a vituperative fashion out of all proportion to my and other people's remarks, even if they had been properly interpreted as a slight, unreasonable criticism, or attack. How would you feel if others laid into you like you did to me above? vis:I'm sure you have an Orgasm at night in bed, dreaming about your self appointed 'wonderfulness'... Too many 'callouses' on your hand mate, for me to give a fuck about!!!
I've never used language like that against you or, for that matter, anyone else on this forum. If you think someone's having a go at you, respond politely at first, don't launch into full potty-mouth mode as your first response. Would you respond like that down the pub to a near stranger? No, because you'd have more regard for your physical safety or wouldn't want the barman to kick you out and tell you not to come back.
Just for the record, so others can judge objectively quite how mean I've been to Glenn in the past, here's the previous spat that has apparently made Glenn think I've got it in for him:Well if you want a peaceful life, why make a post that dredges up some spat you've had elsewhere with Brumby in an unrelated topic? That does seem to be trolling for a response.
Oh and please, less smilies, less brackets, less ... ellipses, less random punctuation in general and RANDOM changing into ALL CAPS in the middle of run on sentences. It makes it incredibly hard to read what you've written.
Dear 'Cerebus'..... I was not aware that Mathematics was a favorite topic of 'Aardvarks', or why you read this far?
'HE' was mentioned, because he usually makes some Pious remarks when I post something, & here was no exception !
I have ZERO interest in 'your' thoughts beyond that, so please stick to 'licking ants' mate......
OH... and as for your...... "and please, less smilies, less brackets, less ... ellipses, less random punctuation " diatribe,
do you now feel like a 'bigger' 'man' in your personal attack, beyond your apparent need to lick 'someone's' butt (
).
Well, every 'punctuation' mark I use is for a reason, as raw text says/highlights/means nothing..........
Ignoring YOU (from now on), will be easy..... Back to the REAL commenters that the rest of us love here.....
You've got troll written all over you mate, otherwise why would you turn a polite request to adopt a more readable writing style into a "personal attack" and spend so much time crafting such a personalised reply. Well, perhaps crafting is too skilled a word for it, but it's clear the intent was to try and get some intemperate response out of me. As to ignoring me, good, but I bet you don't have the self control to let me have the last word.
And there, I hope, the matter is at a close.
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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.)
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
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That site is amazing!
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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.
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I had a look and I found it surprisingly readable.
I was just about to ask you natives if you find it readable. I can certainly understand it (I think I do), but with some difficulty and it seems easier if I vocalize it in an entirely racist accent.
What's "wey" and "na"?
"Only Lagos alone don record 19 out of di 27 confam Coronavirus cases inside Nigeria. Di Nigeria Centre for Disease Control say na just two pipo don recover, including di Italian wey first carri di disease enta Nigeria." -
I had a look and I found it surprisingly readable.
I was just about to ask you natives if you find it readable. I can certainly understand it (I think I do), but with some difficulty and it seems easier if I vocalize it in an entirely racist accent.
Not racist for once, just appropriate. I can't properly read German unless I mentally hear it in a German accent, I don't see why something mostly African should be any different in principle.QuoteWhat's "wey" and "na"?
"Only Lagos alone don record 19 out of di 27 confam Coronavirus cases inside Nigeria. Di Nigeria Centre for Disease Control say na just two pipo don recover, including di Italian wey first carri di disease enta Nigeria."
"na" => now.
"wey" not too sure. Having at stab at it, I think it might be "what"/"when" - looks like a lot of the irregular what/when/where words from English get translated to "wey". There's a usage of "what" instead of "that" that gets used (strictly, used incorrectly) by native English speakers in certain places: "The car what I own" instead of "the car that I own" and this looks like that, plus use of a single pidgin word to cover several English words that do a similar job, but have complex rules as to which to use when and what to use where. <- See what I mean, easy for a native, complex for everybody else?
"including di Italian wey first carri di disease enta Nigeria" =>
"including the Italian what[that] first carri[ed] the disease into Nigeria"
And from the BBC pidgin home page at the moment:
"We share five tips to epp anybodi wey need to..." -> "We share five tips to help anybody that needs to..." -
I think in Nigerian pidgin wey might translate as who.
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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.
My Mom used to work for a Vietnamese women here in the United States. She was raised in Vietnam, went to university in Japan (aerospace engineering), and immigrated to the USA. So she was an engineer who speaks at least three languages fluently. After working in the aerospace field for many years she was hired by Honda as a translator. They fly her around the world to serve as a translator between different engineering teams because she knows engineering terminology and can communicate that in multiple languages. This is just one example of the lengths and expense that companies go through to work/communicate effectively in just a few languages. Now multiply that by 200 or more languages and it becomes an enormous and expensive problem. When it is not done properly we wind up with things like Chinglish manuals ?
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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.
Glem det, mand - det kommer aldrig til at ske
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Du har så rätt om det, kommer aldrig att hända!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.
Glem det, mand - det kommer aldrig til at ske
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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. -
I think in Nigerian pidgin wey might translate as who.
That as well, I suspect (from examining some examples) that it's doing a lot of work in place of a lot of words. -
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. -
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.