Re: [frogs] Discourse on the Consumption of Dog Food

[Graham Percival]

On Fri, Feb 06, 2009 at 10:00:04PM +0000, Anthony W. Youngman wrote:
> In message <address@hidden>, Graham Percival  
> <address@hidden> writes
>> being surrounded by nothing but ESL people now (and
>> trying to teach them better English), I have newfound appreciation
>> for what a completely stupid language English is.
>
> English isn't a silly language at all - it's what the Americans have  
> done to it :-)

Yeah?  Let's consider a simple task: make a noun plural.

- add an s.
- if the word comes from Latin and ends with an "a", add an e.
- if the word ends in "oot", add an "s".  Unless it also starts
  with a "f", in which case you delete the "oo" and replace them
  with "ee".  (boots / feet)
- totally maoed up cases like "person" -> "people"... unless you
  actually *do* want to write "persons", which is occasionally
  appropriate.
- ...

How can anybody explain the rules for pluralization in any way
other than "go away and spend 500 hours reading English books"?
(or maybe 5000 or 50,000...)

> Seriously, the problem is that (certainly in England), Grammar and  
> Etymology seem almost to be forbidden subjects.

I'm not complaining about native speakers -- I mean, I've never
had a grammar or etymology lesson in my life, but I can read and
write perfectly fluently by virtue of having read a lot.  I'm
complaining about the huge task faced by non-native speakers.

I mean, in Japanese there's no pluralization of nouns.  Given the
writing that I see from the graduate students here, I gather that
Chinese doesn't pluralize nouns either.  Now how can I explain to
them how to do something as simple as saying "one foo" and "two
foos" ?  There's nothing /approacing/ a firm rule for this.  I
just have tons and tons of special cases (subconsciously)
memorized, so I instantly recognize that "In the morning, I pulled
my beet onto my foots" is wrong.

I'm not as sympathetic when they forget to add a "the" or "an" in
front of a noun.  English is consistent on that point.

I'm sympathetic with their difficulties about adding an "s" to
verbs.  Those rules aren't at all clear.


Besides, why should we care whether a word came from French or
German?  All these kids want to do is write academic papers in
academic conferences (which means English) without looking like
total idiots.  Which they curently cannot do.

I feel really bad for them... I mean, I'd *hate* to be publishing
my research in French, and that's my second-best language.  If I
had to do it, I wouldn't have stopped
speaking/listening/reading/writing it ten years ago, of course...
but it would still add overhead to the research process.

> I was surprised recently to discover how FEW rules it takes to pronounce  
> English words.

Compared to Japanese, which has a "one rule per character" for
katakana and hiragana?  (I admit that kanji is a bloody mess...)

Really, if any HCI (err, that's Human-Computer Interface, a
sub-field of Computer Science) guy proposed "hey, let's invent a
new language such that the average first-year university student
native speaker doesn't know how to pronounce every single word at
first glance", he'd be laughed out of the room.


IMNSHO, one of the first rules of an (alphabetized) written
language should be that every single word should be pronouncable
by a complete novice after 10 hours of study.  Or maybe 5 or 20...
but you get the idea.

Cheers,
- Graham