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-   -   The Real Evolution of the English language (http://www.flashflashrevolution.com/vbz/showthread.php?t=40647)

Yanah_God 04-1-2006 02:20 PM

The Real Evolution of the English language
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonolo...glish_language

Now apply those changes to Latin and you start getting an idea of how stupid our language sounds. =)

-Izzy- 04-4-2006 09:25 PM

Re: The Real Evolution of the English language
 
World wide, english seems to be the easiest language to learn. Id rather have been born japanese and just learned english.

stretchypanda 04-4-2006 09:29 PM

Re: The Real Evolution of the English language
 
I'm told English is actually the hardest language to learn, because there are so many homonyms and synonyms. So many people place such emphasis on learning it because it is the primary language of the most powerful nation in the world. If you want to do business with Americans, you learn English.

GuidoHunter 04-4-2006 09:32 PM

Re: The Real Evolution of the English language
 
It's easiest to be able to learn, not the easiest to learn.

--Guido

http://andy.mikee385.com

-Izzy- 04-4-2006 10:30 PM

Re: The Real Evolution of the English language
 
Ok, i guess i would be biased twords that anyways.

banditcom 04-5-2006 12:09 AM

Re: The Real Evolution of the English language
 
Yeah. English is a must in regards to the business of trade.

I think it all depends on the person. I'd say anything that is different from the style of the person's native language is the hardest.

Arabic would be one of the hardest, I believe. Plus reading and writing in Arabic are different from each other.. haha

stretchypanda 04-5-2006 12:17 AM

Re: The Real Evolution of the English language
 
My dad used to speak Arabic very fluently. He went to high school in Iran. His diploma is probably the coolest thing I've ever seen.

Learning a language by immersion is a totally different thing, though.

Omeganitros 04-5-2006 12:22 AM

Re: The Real Evolution of the English language
 
I was wowed when I found out that there's a languages where, in one word, your tone of voice and how you say it can give it, like, 5 completely different meanings.

Squeek 04-5-2006 02:00 AM

Re: The Real Evolution of the English language
 
The sad part is that among all the regulars on this site, someone who has posted on this thread has the least grasp of the language they are currently posting about.

Guess who =o

~Squeek

PS - Japanese people butcher our language because it's annoying to change formats of subject, verb, etc from the Japanese layout to English, and other things as well. Look at a few Japanese people posting in English and you'd see it. English does not come easily. Most people born in America in this day and age still cannot speak / type / write it correctly.

mattyohh 04-5-2006 02:12 AM

Re: The Real Evolution of the English language
 
I was reading a article the other night about the French Prime minister kicking up a stink because at a business meet some one dared to address him in English.

talisman 04-5-2006 02:19 AM

Re: The Real Evolution of the English language
 
Most of the bilinguals I know say English really isn't that hard... it's more of a function of when you start to learn it, the earlier being the better, and whether or not it's immersive.

GuidoHunter 04-5-2006 02:28 AM

Re: The Real Evolution of the English language
 
One German lady I know says it was the easiest for her to learn. Most Europeans know it, both because it's taught all over the place there and it's everywhere else in the culture. English is easy to find for anyone, but I can't find a good Czech-English dictionary to save my life.

--Guido

http://andy.mikee385.com

Yanah_God 04-8-2006 07:56 PM

Re: The Real Evolution of the English language
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by Omeganitros
I was wowed when I found out that there's a languages where, in one word, your tone of voice and how you say it can give it, like, 5 completely different meanings.

rofl, I wouldn't touch Chinese or Vietnamese with a 10 foot stick and a hazmat suit with earplugs and no eyes.

I love the Arabic abjad. It's so much easier to write than the Latin alphabet. Well, maybe it flows more smoothly, but it isn't actually easier to write, since you have to think about whether the letter is going to connect to the next one. But if I was going to learn a language that was written with the Arabic abjad, I would probably choose something like Farsi or Urdu, since they're Indo-European and hence have a similarity, however vague, to English.

msbrunnettemickey 04-9-2006 11:40 AM

Re: The Real Evolution of the English language
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by banditcom
Yeah. English is a must in regards to the business of trade.

I think it all depends on the person. I'd say anything that is different from the style of the person's native language is the hardest.

Arabic would be one of the hardest, I believe. Plus reading and writing in Arabic are different from each other.. haha

True that.
Because Hebrew was my first language it wasn't that hard to grasp, since someone spoke it to me all the time from the moment I was born.
But there are two different Hebrew writings and readings. For example, school in Israel taught you how to actually be able to learn two different languages at once including the "old" Hebrew... The Torah. We learned English through reading and Arabic because it's Israel's second language.

Even though my mom is Iraqi and speaks Arabic it was really hard for me to learn it even though it is the closest thing to Hebrew. I can read a little bit, but my writing is horrible. My mom can't stand it.

I am trying to strengthen my Russian, my father is Ukrainian and he speaks it to me everyday and that's how i learn, but i still cannot read/write well.

I used to do so bad in English class in Israel. I knew how to read and I understood everything the teacher was reading but i had no idea how to spell things or use the right grammar. It even took me awhile to just spell "Carrot".

The more I practice one language the less I know the other language.
Like right now... My spelling in Hebrew is starting to get worse and worse and read slower than usual =(

whorlichan 04-9-2006 11:58 AM

Re: The Real Evolution of the English language
 
Haha, Mickey, I'm the exact opposite--I'm doing an independent study class in Hebrew and so my writing and grammar and spelling, etc. are getting better, yay!

When I first came to the US I was 5--easy enough to stick me in a non-ESL classroom with a 6th-grade helper to translate the important stuff and let me pick up the rest on my own. By 2nd grade I was doing the translating for smaller kids--and then I got shunted into a school where they DID speak Hebrew. Nice timing, huh?

But--and this is the funny part--the Hebrew school didn't do any of the standardized CA tests so when I got to 9th grade and had to go to public school because the Hebrew high schools were too expensive, I was put in an ESL class because they had no record of my ability to speak, read, or write English, despite the fact that I was right in front of them and talking like a native. I spent that semester reading a book in the corner--the teacher realized it was ridiculous for me to be there and they put me into the Honors English class the next semester.

I don't remember learning English all that well--to recall, it seemed hard for a couple of days and then everything seemed to make sense all of a sudden--but that could have been all of kindergarten rather than a few days or weeks.

I do know that learning Spanish was not that hard in high school, and I took it for three years and did really well, and then I never used it again so I forgot all of it.

Hardest to learn: Well, I've never TRIED to learn Arabic, but the writing looks insane. All the letters look the same to my uninformed eyes. I have, however, tried to learn Japanese, and did relatively well (I used to be able to write in hiragana almost as well as a 5-year-old Japanese kid!) That was very difficult, but mostly because the writing is nothing like English OR Hebrew, and the grammar on different lines again. That was closer to the Hebrew though--where in English you say "red car" in Hebrew and Japanese you say "car red."

msbrunnettemickey 04-9-2006 12:09 PM

Re: The Real Evolution of the English language
 
Well Whorli, Arabic IS hard to learn. I had to memorize all of the different styles of writing. I had a whole marking period of it in 9th grade History. The teacher always asked me to come up to the board, write Shalom in Hebrew and then write it in Arabic. Then she would ask me what's so similar between the two?

Writing from left to right, and the accent marks. Mikud, מיקוד right?
Arabic has no capital letters which makes it easy to write. Hebrew has the script letters and the printed letters but you can use which ever you want (i prefer the script style). I wish i could show you the script Hebrew but the printed one only works here-- שלום
It's funny, the N in English looks like the M in script hebrew.

Yanah_God 04-10-2006 10:11 PM

Re: The Real Evolution of the English language
 
Haha, all I really speak is Spanish. Unfornately, I was born in the USA, so language teaching is not high on the priority list (actually, 4 years of phys ed are required, but only 1 of forain[don't mock my spelling, check the etymology] language). I know how to read and write the Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, and Arabic alphabets. I would really love to pick up some more languages, but the internet isn't really as great a tool as one would think for doing that.

One really challenging aspect of learning a language like Arabic or Hebrew online is that the vowels are very rarely marked. I could learn to WRITE it, but I would be hard-pressed to find enough material to know how it's pronounced at all. As far as I know, actually, Maltese is the only Semitic language that uses an alphabet (not an abjad), so it's the only one that always writes the vowels. Although it's hard to find any material on THAT language online, plus it's not a very useful language to know (how many people do you know that speak that language?)

My mind has trailed. I'm done.

GuidoHunter 04-10-2006 10:21 PM

Re: The Real Evolution of the English language
 
http://www.mylanguageexchange.com

--Guido

http://andy.mikee385.com

metsfan001 04-10-2006 10:31 PM

Re: The Real Evolution of the English language
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by Yanah_God
One really challenging aspect of learning a language like Arabic or Hebrew online is that the vowels are very rarely marked. I could learn to WRITE it, but I would be hard-pressed to find enough material to know how it's pronounced at all. As far as I know, actually, Maltese is the only Semitic language that uses an alphabet (not an abjad), so it's the only one that always writes the vowels. Although it's hard to find any material on THAT language online, plus it's not a very useful language to know (how many people do you know that speak that language?)

I don't know about Arabic, but Hebrew without vowels isn't actually quite as bad as it seems. Most Hebrew words are derived from 3-letter roots (occasionally 4), so nouns, verbs, and adjectives with similar meanings could all be spelled using the same 3 base letters, and then an attachment from there that generally indicates which part of speech the word is (occasionally a vowel is needed to differentiate). Along the same line, one could potentially invent a word from the basic form and inserted root and be understood (throughout my Hebrew studies I have done this several times, and my Israeli mother has always understood me).

Suppose I went a bit off-track there, but whatever. . . .

Yanah_God 04-10-2006 10:42 PM

Re: The Real Evolution of the English language
 
Actually, I was talking precisely about the triconsonantal root system. I am saying that it's hard to learn how to say the word when you only know the consonants. To read most things that don't have the vowels I usually just insert a where it would make it pronounceable and leave the rest.

For example, I would pronounce
מיקוד like mayakvad, whereas it's actually mikud, and
שלום like shalvam

Man, it's hard to mix left-to-right and right-to-left fonts.


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