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

[Anthony W. Youngman]

In message <address@hidden>, Graham Percival 
<address@hidden> writes
> 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...)

Okay, let's compare English as opposed to other (European) languages. 
English has only ONE declension for nouns, and no gender to speak of. 
With typically only three cases to worry about - plural, genitive, and 
"the rest".

French doesn't have neuter, so any object without gender is assigned one 
"randomly". German is even worse - despite having neuter, the only 
guarantee you have is "if the object is male, then so is the gender". 
All other words are assigned semi-randomly - even the word for "girl" 
(they have two of them) are BOTH assigned the "neuter" gender!

Then I think they both have several declensions, so you need to know 
which set of rules applies to which words.

Latin - well I've forgotten most of it, but three genders, six cases 
singular and plural, and four declensions (which CAN depend on gender 
...) I hope the romance (Spanish, Italian and Portuguese languages have 
simplified things a bit).

English isn't bad ...
> > 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.
Same here. But I'm interested in etymology, and I learnt grammar in 
Latin lessons. It makes SO much difference if you understand WHY "this 
is weird". Very often it makes perfect sense when you look a bit deeper.

I've been to Cambodia. All those houses on stilts look weird. Until you 
realise that, in the wet season, the water can easily be a foot or two 
deep. It's not so stupid then, but go in the dry season and you might 
ask yourself "what a stupid design!"

> 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.

And here you show that you don't understand! If they have no concept of 
"the" or "a" in their language then they have TWO problems. Firstly, 
remembering to add it. Secondly, which one to add.

When they talk about "kitten", how do you know whether they mean one or 
a litter? There are a lot of subtle clues in there, and it's the same 
with "the" and "a" (I'm not even using the same example as you! Is it 
"a" or "an"!)
> I'm sympathetic with their difficulties about adding an "s" to
> verbs.  Those rules aren't at all clear.
We have ONE conjugation. I can't remember how many French, German or 
Latin have. And the basic rule is "add an 's' in the third person 
singular".

Okay, like with nouns, all languages have exceptions.
> 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.
Didn't they try that? I think they called it Esperanto. By your 
criteria, it's a big failure. Oh - and there's a VERY big problem there, 
that you should be well aware of out in the Far East. It's called "can 
you hear the difference?"

I learnt Russian, and one of my biggest difficulties was I couldn't hear 
the difference between b, bb, d, db, t and tb (here the second 'b' is a 
'soft' sign - a modfier character). They have six consonants, we have 
three, and I just COULDN'T HEAR any difference. That's why Orientals 
can't separate 'l' and 'r' - to them there is NO AUDIBLE DIFFERENCE. 
Their ears are programmed differently.

Anyway, we're drifting wildly off topic :-) And staying off topic - the 
6-nations England v Italy final score was 36-11 :-)

Cheers,
Wol
--
Anthony W. Youngman - address@hidden